Hilaire Belloc

“ In the West they can form, as it were, islands which stand alone in the midst of a highly resisting environment. They will build you a Haywards Heath which is like a London suburb, or a Ditchling or a Burgess Hill which is another such line of new houses, or those towns on the sea coast of which we have spoken, or the little group of red brick which defaces the landscape of West Horsham, or the lump which is beginning to destroy Barnham. ”

“ Those who best know the Downs and have lived among them all their lives can testify how, for a whole day’s march, one may never meet a man’s face; or if one meets it, it will be the face of some shepherd who may be standing lonely with his dog beside him upon the flank of the green hill and with his flock scattered all around. The isolation of these summits is the more remarkable from the pressure of population which is growing so rapidly to the south of them, and which is beginning to threaten the Weald to their north. ”

“ The long, and often futile, digging for good water, the cost of pumping it when, if ever, it is found, combine to make the new attempts at building on the clay of the Weald grow slacker as time proceeds. There are, however, more grateful opportunities scattered here and there in those outcrops of sand and gravel of which I have spoken. Haywards Heath has grown up in this way, and there are a multitude of villages half-way between the forest ridge and the Downs which owe the greater part of their beauty to the sharp contours of the sandstone. ”

“ SUSSEX PRONUNCIATION the county gets better and better known, and more thoroughly spoiled by the advent of what is called the leisured class. So far those who have been able to watch this peasant for the last thirty years have seen very little change indeed. And even the noble and rich south country accent, which education was to have destroyed, is as perfect in the little children of the last few years as in the mouths of the oldest men. And that peculiar emphasis upon the latter syllable—Amberley, Billingshurst, and the rest—has not disappeared, at least in the western half of the county. ”

“ The reader may perhaps grasp in one glance the Wealden heights running along the northern horizon, the wide rolling belt of the clay weald between those heights and the Downs broken here and there by rocks and sandstone, patched with pines, the Downs themselves running in one vast wall for their fifty or sixty miles of stretch from the Hampshire border to Beachy Head, and the coastal plain to the south of them. ”

“ It is a thing not to be forgotten, that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance the contrast between the ecclesiastical and the civil method of government was a reality. It afforded for men’s minds something of the foil or background which to-day the legal aspect of society gives us as against the commercial, or the conception of a gentleman as against the conception of a rich man. ”

“ It is this, for example, which has led to the astounding conclusion that England at the time of the Norman invasion held less than two million souls, and it is this which makes people misunderstand, if they read modern histories, the nature of a town like Arundel.
So long as the spur above the Arun was protected by marshes and isolated by a narrow neck from the main range of the Downs, so long would it tempt men to form a stronghold there, and the moment that stronghold was held by national forces under the obedience of a national King, it presupposed a county town. ”

“ The great spaces of landscape which Sussex can afford have never changed and never can. No man will ever build largely upon the Downs. No forest will ever gather on so valuable a soil as that of the coastal plain. No mere extension of buildings or further cultivation will destroy the distant aspect of the Weald.
A man looking down from the crest of the Downs to the south and to the north of him sees much of what his ancestry have seen since men first stood upon those hills. The Weald was once a little denser in wood, the coastal plain a little less thick with villages, but that is all. ”

“ But these encampments are tied close to the railway; they do not seem to spread their influence over the landscape or to change the character of the people in any way.
In East Sussex you get, on the contrary, whole belts of country into which the spirit of the great towns has penetrated, perhaps for ever. Thus there is such a belt in the line of Rotherfield, Mayfield, and Heathfield. ”

“ The three Rapes to the west of it and the two Rapes to the east have been somewhat more open from the beginning of history, but not until one has understood Lewes Rape does one understand the growth of the Bramber, Chichester, and Arundel Rapes to the west, nor of those of Pevensey and Hastings to the east. For all, like Lewes, grew up from the sea, from the harbour mouth and a castle at the back of it, on northward through the old British villages under the Downs, till at last they stretched into the Weald and overlapped into what should properly be Surrey. ”

“ Sussex is, perhaps, of all the English counties that one in which it is most difficult to find good{16} water, as we have already seen in speaking of the Weald, and as we shall see further when we come to talk of the Chalk Downs. But these little villages, standing as they do just upon the crack where the chalk (which is permeable and full of water like a sponge) comes sharp on to the impermeable soil of the Weald, are all fed by a multitude of delicious running streams filtered through hundreds of feet of the pure carbon of the hills and bursting out along the old road. ”

“ It is our purpose rather to show how, until quite recent years, Sussex lands ran into the hands of a group of families who perpetually interchanged their holdings, and who yet remained full of the county air, until there came that modern diversion by which so much of the county has fallen to those who have nothing of its spirit, and who only come into it as into a sort of park, for their momentary pleasure. ”

“ Many a track marked as crossing them is, when one comes to pursue it, nothing but a “ride” of grass in no way different from the rest of the grass of the Downs. All these roads have, however, one advantage attached to them, which is the astonishing view of the coastal plain which greets one from their summits, especially the view from Whiteways and the sudden and unexpected panorama at Benges, which is the second and highest summit of the Duncton Hill Road. ”

“ To this list Hastings is a very considerable exception, because its beach and hill made it during the Middle Ages, and for very different reasons to-day, a necessary sea-town. But, with the exception of Hastings, every other town follows a general rule, that the new growth of watering-places along the south coast is extraneous.
This long series of new towns grates upon men who have known and loved the county throughout their lives. There is little of Sussex about them; they have not the Sussex method of building nor any of the Sussex industries. ”

“ The resistant quality of which we have just made mention, and which is especially discoverable in the western part of the county, is perhaps the most remarkable and, under modern circumstances, the most pleasing of the characteristics of the people. To those who have not been brought up in the county it becomes but slowly apparent. Those who know Sussex and its people take a somewhat cynical delight in observing that power at work. There is no peasant in the world so rooted in his customs and so determined to maintain them as is the Sussex peasant. ”

“ These four great belts may be traced, not only in the relief of the county, but also in its superficial geology; the sea plain is throughout of a deep, strong, brown loamy soil, among the most fertile in England, and fetching by far the highest rents paid anywhere in the county. In the best of its stretch, between Chichester and Worthing, it is from four to six miles broad, closely inhabited and, though recently marred by the growth of a whole string of watering-places, still preserving a very characteristic life of its own. ”

“ There is, indeed, a South country way of speaking as all the world knows. It is to be found in the valley of Meon, and it is to be found in Kent, and it is to be found in the southern parts of Surrey. It occupies a large region, whose boundaries are very vague and ill defined; it lies, roughly speaking, between the North Downs and the sea, and is bounded westward by the New Forest. It is not peculiar to the county of Sussex.{144}
For example: A Sussex man will call a woodpecker a “yaffle,” which is a name taken from its peculiar call—it is for all the world like a mad laugh. ”

“ This method of learning the county, the entry from the sea, is the most natural, the most historic, and the most germane to the nature of Sussex. Every port one enters is the port of Rape, every river up which one’s dinghy takes one is the river along which the penetration of the county has proceeded in past times, and one upon which its principal market-towns will be found. So Chichester, Arundel, Steyning, Lewes, can be reached, and with more difficulty towns farther up the country. The whole manner in which Sussex has grown up is impressed upon the man who enters it from the Channel. ”

“ In connection with the Norman Conquest it is of some historical importance to ask one’s self what was the remaining function of the Weald, the great forest which ran along the rising swell of clay and sand, and bounded Sussex on the north?
We have seen that in prehistoric times the Weald was undoubtedly the obstacle which delimited Sussex, and made all this district a maritime province with its towns on the sea. The Romans pierced the Weald with one great military road and probably several minor ways. ”

“ There is hardly one without its stream.
Having reviewed these three belts—the coast-plain, the forest ridge, and the southern belt of the Weald—it remains for us to describe that which is by far the most important, namely, the South Downs. It will be necessary to devote to those hills a closer attention than we have given to the rest of the county, for one may call them, without much exaggeration, the county itself. Sussex is Sussex on account of the South Downs. Their peculiar landscape, their soil, their uniformity, give the county all its meaning. ”

“ Nowhere had the remnants of Roman civilisation more thoroughly decayed. The old British stock and the admixture, such as it was, of Teutonic blood had mixed to form a population very much what we see to-day in the villages of Sussex, where most of the people are short, with dark, keen eyes, but a few tall and large, with the light hair, the slow gait, and the heavy bodies of the marsh men from Frisia and the Baltic. ”

“ The afforesting of the range of the Downs is worthy of remark. The woods are of two kinds—those that crown the foot-hills towards the sea and here and there the high slopes of the Downs themselves, and those that have caught on to the slight alluvial drift of the hollows. ”

“ They are not cut for profit, or at least very rarely, because the ground is too steep for haulage. They live their own life and are secluded.
Indeed, all over the broad back of the Downs, for seventy miles and more, these patches of woods, both in the combes and up on the shoulders of the hills, are a necessary part of Sussex. They exhibit{168} the unconquerable nature of the county, its strongholds of silence and of desertion within an hour or two of London, and within a short walk of those flaring new places which have sprung up upon the sea-shore. ”

“ That plain from Brighton to Bosham is perfectly flat; the crossing of the rivers has presented the only obstacle, and that obstacle was insignificant. The railway could run pretty well in a straight line and build up the towns along the sea.
Even to-day the villages are linking up with the towns. Rustington is full of bricks. Rottingdean, for twenty years a sort of suburb, has now long been full of painters and others. A curious collection of bungalows has sprung up on the long pebbly beach which shuts out the Adur from the sea. ”

“ A full north-easterly wind on the starboard quarter as one rounds the head can give one a set-back in the shape of an unexpected gust coming round from right ahead out of Birling Gap. The only rule when the wind is blowing strong off-shore is to keep well out—irritating as it is to have to do so when one is making Newhaven, since every tack towards the outside means another mile to be beaten inwards against the weather. ”

“ Here we have an excellent example of the way in which the overlapping of Sussex into what is geographically Surrey occurred. The Warrens are very powerful nobles, much more powerful than those lordships in the Surrey towns who hold positions of no strategic importance, and whose garrisons were therefore not heavily endowed at the time of the Conquest. Being great lords the Warrens extend their hunting as far north as they can into the Weald. They go right up through the forest, over the ridge, and down on to the Surrey side. ”

“ THE BREAK-DOWN OF ROME despoilers, that the Saxon Chronicle some centuries later records a tradition to the effect that not one of its inhabitants was left alive when the city was stormed. This, of course, is no truer than any other history of the sort; but it is valuable as pointing to the violence of the struggle. Anderida was, moreover, one of the very few cities of Europe where, in the break-down of the Roman Empire, municipal life was actually destroyed. ”