d in civilisation for
such a course. They knew it was better to make them slaves than to
destroy them: for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet got
beyond, the slave-making stage of culture. To this day, people of mixed
Euskarian parentage, and marked by the long skull, dark complexion, and
black eyes of the Euskarian type, form a large proportion of the
English peasantry; and they are found even in Sussex, which
subsequently suffered more than most other parts of Britain from the
destructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism in the fifth century. But
though the Celts did not exterminate the Euskarians, they completely
Celticised them, just as the Teuton is now Teutonising the old
population of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In South Wales and
elsewhere, indeed, the aborigines retained their own language and
institutions, as Silures and so forth; but in the conquered districts
of southern and eastern Britain they learned the tongue of their
masters, and came to be counted as Celtic serfs. Thus, at the time when
Britain comes forth into the full historic glare of Roman civilisation,
we find the country inhabited by a Celtic aristocracy of Aryan
type--round-headed, fair-haired, and blue-eyed; together-with a _plebs_
of Celticised Euskarian or half-caste serfs, retaining, as they still
retain, the long skulls and dark complexions of their aboriginal
ancestors. This was the ethnical composition of the Sussex population
at the date of the first Roman invasions.

Under the bronze-weaponed Celts, a very different type of civilisation
became possible. In the first place a more extended chieftainship
resulted from the improved weapons and consequent military power; and
all Britain (at least, towards the close of the Celtic domination)
became amalgamated into considerable kingdoms, some of which seem to
have spread over several modern shires. Sussex, however, enclosed by
its barrier of forest, would naturally remain a single little
principality of itself, held, at least in later times, by a tribe known
to the Romans as Regni. Traces of Celtic occupation are mainly confined
to the Downs and the seaward slope of Sussex Proper; in the broad
expanse of the Weald, they are few and far between. The Celts occupied
the fertile valleys and alluvial slopes, cut down the woods by the
river sides and on the plains, and built their larger and more regular
camps of refuge upon the Downs, for protection against the kindred
Cantii beyond the W