rowth so thick that no man might cross
it without danger. Such an assertion is merely an attempt on the part
of men, who do not know the Weald, to explain the facts of which I have
spoken, namely, that the Weald appears as an obstacle in our early
history, though not insurmountable, and that it continually offered a
secure hiding-place and refuge to the fugitive.

The Weald as it appears to us first, is the secure home of those who
first smelted the ironstone in which it abounds, and as such it
remained during many ages. But the two main facts about it which help
to explain everything in its history are first that it consisted for
the most part of clay, and secondly that it was everywhere ill
watered. Let us consider these things.

The Weald, even as we see it to-day, tilled and cultivated and tended
though it be, remains largely a country of scattered woodland, very
thickly wooded, indeed, as seen in a glance from any height of the
Downs, but revealing itself, as we traverse it, as a country of
isolated woods, often of oak, and with here and there the remains of
a wild and rough moorland country, of which, as we may think, in the
Roman times, it, for the most part, consisted. It later possessed some
six forests properly so called, but itself was never a legal forest
nor in any sense of the words an impenetrable wood. It always
possessed homesteads, farms and steadings, but almost nowhere within
it was there a great or populous town; men lived there it is true, but
always in a sort of isolation. And this was so not because the Weald
was an impassable forest of woodland and undergrowth--it was never
that; but because of its scarcity of water or more accurately its
uncertainty of water and its soil, the Wealden clay. The state of
affairs anciently obtaining in the Weald does not fundamentally differ
from what obtains to-day, and in a word it was and is this: in dry
weather there is no water, but the going is good; in wet weather there
is plenty of water, but the going is impossible. Of course, these
conditions have in modern times been modified by the building of roads
and the sinking of wells and the better embankment and preservation of
the rivers, but in Roman times, as later, the Weald was an obstacle
because it was difficult, though never impossible, to cross on account
of the badness of the going or the lack of water. It was a secure
hiding-place for such a fugitive as a Saxon king because he could not
be pursued