is
probable that small clearings would be made in the most accessible
spots, and that rude ironworks would be established.

The same geographical causes which made Britain part of the Roman world
naturally affected Sussex, as one of its component portions. Even under
the Empire, however, the county remained singularly separate. The
Romans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and Regnum, Pevensey and
Chichester, to guard the two Gwents or lowland plains, where the shore
shelves slowly to seaward; and they ran one of their great roads across
the coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus Magnus (now Porchester),
near Portsmouth; but they left Sussex otherwise very much to its own
devices. We know that the Regni were still permitted to keep their
native chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen somewhat the
same subordinate authority which a Rajput raja now exercises under the
British government. Here, again, we see the natural result of the
isolation of Sussex. The Romans ruled directly in the open plains of
the Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves rule in the Bengal
Delta, the Doab, and the Punjab; but they left a measure of
independence to the native princes of south Wales, of Sussex, and of
Cornwall, as we ourselves do to the native rulers in the deserts of
Rajputana, the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal hill
districts of Central India.

When the Roman power began to decay, the outlying possessions were the
first to be given up. The Romans had enslaved and demoralised the
provincial population; and when they were gone, the great farms tilled
by slave labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprietors lay
open to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians from beyond the
sea. How early the fertile east coasts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and
East Anglia may have fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannot
say. The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas, Baeda, and
the English Chronicle, would have us believe that they were colonised
at a later period; but as they lay directly in the path of the
marauders from Sleswick, as they were certainly Teutonised very
thoroughly, and as no real records survive, we may well take it for
granted that the long-boats of the English, sailing down with the
prevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Denmark, came first to
shore on these fertile coasts. After they had been conquered and
colonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebo