With the Norman Conquest, Sussex, like the rest of England, re-enters history. And that in a peculiar manner, for, as has been seen, of all the districts of England, Sussex had suffered the deepest eclipse during the barbaric period, and by the peculiar fact that the invasion of civilisation came from Normandy, was most advantaged in the period immediately following. The contrast was abrupt and striking. Here was a district of which, as we have seen, practically no mention is made between the fall of the Roman power and the last efforts of Godwin. It is cut off from the rest of England by the Andred’s Weald. The only considerable story in connection with it is that of its conversion. It can boast no great monasteries founded in that time, as all the rest of England can boast; it can show no great military leader, nor even the scene of any great military disaster, for Ockley itself was beyond its borders. The advent of the last invaders, but invaders this time who bring with them constructive power and the full European tradition, is from the shore immediately opposing its own. A short day’s sail away there ran the coast of Normandy, where a race of Gallo-Romans, with a slight but transforming admixture of Scandinavian blood, were chafing under their superabundant energy. Already for nearly a century a great intercourse must have
ST. MARY’S CHURCH, RYE
THE NORMAN INVASION
existed between the harbours to the north and the south of the Channel. It was from Bosham that Harold sailed; the Court of Edward had been full of Normans, and one has but to cross the Channel in a little boat to see how the advance of the arts after the darkness of the ninth century must have increased communication between Normandy and the shores of Sussex. A man will run in a five tonner from Shoreham to Dieppe close hauled into a fresh south-westerly wind between the morning and the evening of a summer’s day; he will run from Dieppe into Rye with such a wind on his quarter during the daylight of almost any day in the year, except perhaps in the mid-winter season.
With such a wind William sailed from St. Valery in the autumn of 1066. He landed at Pevensey. He marched along the coast to Hastings, and then struck up north and a little east for four or five miles to where the Saxon force lay on the defensive upon a rounded height above the valley of the Brede, called “Hastings Plain.”
A pedantic discussion, into which we need not enter, has waged round the exact name of the spot where the battle was fought. One of the principal authorities for the history of the battle (but not a contemporary authority) calls it several times “Senlac.” It is just possible that he was mis-spelling some local name. Halnacker is similarly mis-spelt “Hanac” in the title deeds of Boxgrove Abbey. But the name as it stands is a Gascon name, and in all probability was given to some portion of the land long after the battle because a Gascon gentleman had acquired manorial rights there. Every other authority alludes to it as Hastings, or Hastings Plain, and every Sussex man can see why, for there is nothing commoner in the country than the calling of one of the uplands by the name of some neighbouring, inhabited, and settled spot in the lowlands, possibly because the inhabitants of that neighbouring and inhabited spot had some sort of territorial rights in the upland place so named. Thus one has on the Downs, between Arundel and Goodwood, “Fittleworth Wood,” six or seven miles away from Fittleworth itself, and the use of the word “plain” for a stretch of the uplands is as common as can be,—for instance Plummers Plain between Lower Beeding and Handcross.
We may take it, then, for the purposes of this short description, that among the Saxons of the time, or rather the local Sussex men of the time, “Hastings Plain” was the name given to the hill of stunted trees and grass up which the
