fertile country around Lewes, and falling at last into the
English Channel at Seaford, not as now at Newhaven; the other was the
Cuckmere river, which has cut itself a deep glen in the chalk hills
just beneath the high cliffs of Beachy Head. Beyond the Downs again, to
the north, the country descended abruptly to the deep trough of the
Weald, whose cold and sticky clays or porous sandstones are never of
any use for purposes of tillage. Hence, as its very name tells us, the
Weald has always been a wild and wood-clad region. The Romans knew it
as the Silva Anderida, or forest of Pevensey; the early English as the
Andredesweald. Both names are derived from a Celtic root signifying
'The Uninhabited.' Even in our own day, a large part of this tract is
covered by the woodlands of Tolgate Forest, St. Leonard's Forest, and
Ashdown Forest; while the remainder is only very scantily laid down in
pasture-land or hop-fields, with a considerable sprinkling of copses,
woods, commons, and parks. From its very nature, indeed, the Weald can
never be anything else, in its greater portion, than a wild,
uncultivated, and wooded region.

Let us note, too, how the really habitable strip of Sussex, from the
point of view of an early people, was quite naturally cut off from all
other parts of England by obvious limits. This habitable strip
consists, of course, of the coastwise belt from Brighton to the
Hampshire border (which belt I shall henceforward take the liberty of
designating as Sussex Proper), together with the seaward valleys and
combes of the South Downs. To the west, the great tidal flats and
swamps about Hayling Island cut off Sussex from Hampshire; and before
drainage and reclamation had done their work, these marshy districts
must have formed a most impassable frontier. From this point, the great
woodland region of the Weald, thickly covered with primaeval forest, and
tenanted by wolves, bears, wild boars, and red deer, swept round in a
long curve from the swamps at Bosham and Havant to the corresponding
swamps of the opposite end at Pevensey and Hurstmonceux. The belt of
savage wooded country, thick with the lairs of wild beasts, which thus
ringed round the greater part of the county, shut off the coastwise
strip at once from all possibility of communication with the rest of
England. So Sussex Proper and the combes of the Downs were naturally
predestined to form a single Celtic kingdom, a single Saxon
principality, and a single E