sh population was much more
sparsely scattered, with a relatively great servile population. So, as
late as the time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves mentioned
in the great survey (only a small part, probably, of the total)
numbered only 10 per cent. of the population, while in Devon and
Cornwall they numbered 20 per cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per
cent.

These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the first attacks
must necessarily be made upon the east and south coasts, and that the
inland districts and the west must only slowly be conquered afterward.
Especially was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four isolated
regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, each of which
was cut off from the rest of England in early times by impassable fens,
marshes, forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welsh
fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen Country or the
Weald, to enslave the captives, the women, and the children, and to
secure the Teutonic colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or
hill. On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with a vague
and ill-defined internal border, had harder work to fight their way in
against a united Welsh resistance; and it was only very slowly that
they pushed across the central watershed, to dismember the unconquered
remnant of the Britons at last into the three isolated bodies of
Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon), Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is
probably why the earliest settlements were made in these isolated coast
regions, and why the inward progress of the other colonies was so
relatively slow.

The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three fertile bits of the
county--the coast belt of Sussex Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and
the isolated Hastings district--because these were the best adapted for
their strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of AElle, I do
not suppose that they were all united from the first under a single
principality. It seems far more probable that each little clan
settlement was at first wholly independent; that afterwards three
little chieftainships grew up in the three fertile strips--typified,
perhaps, by the story of AElle's three sons--and that the whole finally
coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, which is the state
in which we find the county in Baeda's time. As ever, its boundaries
were marked out for it by nature, for the Weald rem