PART I
THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE COUNTY
The English counties differ in two ways from the divisions into which other European countries have fallen: in the first place, they are somewhat smaller than the average division, natural or artificial, of other countries; and in the second place, they have in many cases a more highly-specialised life. Both these features have been of great value in building up the history of England, and, before one sets out to understand any county, it is always worth one’s while to remember them and to appreciate their importance in our national development.
The strong local character of counties is more discoverable in some than in others. Thus Cheshire with its distinctive plain; Cornwall with its peculiar racial and, till recently, linguistic features; Devon, all grouped round one great lump of hills, almost make little nations by themselves. Again, those who are acquainted with the north of England will mark the quite separate character which Durham contrasts against Yorkshire on the south and Northumberland upon the north. There are other districts where several counties group themselves together, and where the whole group differs more from the rest of England than do the separate counties of the group one from another. This is particularly the case with East Anglia, and to some extent it is the case with the Shires.
When (to return to the case of particular counties) some strong local differential is discoverable it can nearly always be traced to a combination of historical and topographical causes. It is our business to examine these first in an appreciation of the county of Sussex.
Sussex was created from the sea. Its inhabitants and its invaders at all periods, save perhaps in the height of the Roman prosperity, and again during the last hundred and fifty years, have had a difficulty in going northward, because there spread north of the most habitable region the long belt of what is called the Weald. Sussex is, in a word, a great range of hills along the south coast inhabited upon either slope and upon either plain
MARKET CROSS, ALFRISTON
at either base, but cut off from the Thames valley by a soil long uncultivated and more suited to forest than to habitation.
THE HARBOURS