nglish shire.

It will be observed that this description leaves wholly out of
consideration the strip of country about Hastings, Rye, and Winchelsea.
It does so intentionally. That strip of country does not belong to
Sussex in the same intimate and strictly necessary manner as the rest
of the county. It probably once formed the seat of a small independent
community by itself; and though there were good and obvious reasons why
it should become finally united to Sussex rather than to Kent, it may
be regarded as to some extent a debateable island between them. For an
island it practically was in early times. At Pevensey Bay the Weald ran
down into the sea by a series of swamps and bogs still artificially
drained by dykes and sluices. On the other side, the Romney marshes
formed a similar though wider stretch of tidal flats, reclaimed and
drained at a far later period, partly through the agency of the long
shingle bank thrown up round the low modern spit of Dungeness. Between
them, the Hastings cliffs rose high above marsh and sea. In their rear,
the Weald forest covered the ridge; so that the Hastings district
(still a separate rape or division of the county) formed a sort of
smaller Sussex, divided, like the larger one, from all the rest of
England by a semicircular belt of marsh, forest, and marsh once more.
These are the main elements out of which the history of the county is
made up.

How far such conditions may have acted upon the very earliest human
inhabitants of Sussex--the palaeolithic savages of the drift--before the
last Glacial epoch, it is impossible to say, because we know that many
of them did not then exist, and that the present configuration of the
county is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain was then united
to the continent by a broad belt of land, filling up the bed of the
English Channel, and it possessed a climate wholly different from that
of the present day; while the position of the drift and the river
gravels shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in many
respects unlike the existing distribution of hill and valley. We must
confine ourselves, therefore, to the later or recent period (subsequent
to the last glaciation of Britain), during which man has employed
implements of polished stone, of bronze, and of iron.

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain--a dark white race, like
the modern Basques--had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast
district between the Downs