vitality of their own, which in the long run
will prove more persistent and strong than the futile excitement of
places noisy with machinery and wretched with the enslaved poor. Such
places as Chichester may indeed stand for England in a way that
Manchester, for instance, with its cosmopolitan population and
egotistical ambition, its greed, its helplessness, and appalling
intellectual mongrelism and parvenu and international society, can
never hope to do. England truly remains herself, the England of my
heart, because of such places as Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury,
Wells, and those dear market towns which still remember and maintain
her great past and renew the ways of our forefathers. All are very old,
co-eval with England, all have sturdy and unforgotten traditions, and
in these, if we but knew it, lies our best hope for the future.

Among these dear places Chichester is no exception, rather is she most
typical; she has an immemorial past, and out of it she will contrive
somehow or other to face and to outface whatever the future may bring.
Like everything that is best in England, that is indeed most typical of
ourselves, her origins are not barbarian, but Roman. Her ancient name
was Regnum, the city, it is said, first of Cogidubnus, King of the
Regni and Legate in Britain of Claudius Caesar. That the Romans built
and maintained an important town here cannot be doubted; the very form
of the city to-day would be enough to establish this, apart from the
notable discoveries of buildings, pavements, urns, inscriptions, and I
know not what else belonging to the whole of the Roman occupation of
Britain. It is obvious that Chichester played a great part in the Roman
administration of South Britain; its port was large, safe and
accessible, while it was the first town upon the east of that great
group of creeks and harbours which run up out of Spithead and
Southampton Water. Throughout the Middle Ages, Bosham, the port of
Chichester, maintained its position, while even in the eighteenth
century Chichester harbour was sufficiently important to warrant the
cutting of the canal which unites the Arun with Chichester Channel.
There is, however, something else which must always place beyond doubt
the importance of Chichester in Roman times. It was from Chichester,
out of the East Gate, that the great Roman road set forth for London,
the road we know as the Stane Street, chiefly, as we may suppose, a
great military way. This wa