Sussex, Painted by Wilfrid Ball

by Hilaire Belloc

vessel has to be rolled will be too great to make the effort worth while. In material it must be firm and hard—a quality which gave its pre-eminence to the sand of Deal, for if it be shifty or sinking the difficulty of beaching the boat may be insuperable.

Now all these characters are to be discovered in the shingle at Hastings, and added to these is the presence of a strong and easily fortified eminence.

The importance of this sort of refuge can easily be minimised by the modern historian, but those acquainted with the conditions of an earlier time will appreciate its value. A fortress now serves, as Napoleon well put it, “to save time,” and serves little else in military purpose. In a sense this has always been the chief value of a fortress, but when one was dealing with smaller forces, more passionate and less constant in motive than those of to-day, and far more easily disintegrated than is a thoroughly civilised army, time was of far greater value in a campaign. Again, the defence was easier with a smaller body of men on account of the comparative inefficiency of projectiles, the comparative lack of training of the assaulting infantry, and the pre-dominance of cavalry tactics, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of fire-arms. It may be roughly asserted that the power of the defensive behind properly constructed works grew to a maximum from the fifth to the middle of the twelfth century, remained almost stationary till the close of the thirteenth, and only slowly declined during the sieges of the French wars in the succeeding hundred years.

Now under such conditions the importance of hills such as that of Hastings was very great. Here a garrison could, properly commanded, hold out almost indefinitely; it could, therefore, cover a landing or repel an invasion; it could gather under its protection a large and increasing population. The shape of the hill was precisely that required for fortification in the Dark and Middle Ages. It is, in its best form, an example of what you will find also at Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and, to a lesser degree, at Lewes and Arundel in this same county of Sussex, namely, a sort of peninsula or spur with a crowning summit of its own, united with the hills behind it by a comparatively narrow neck, over which assault should be impossible. In the modern sense and referring to modern artillery, such positions are extremely bad, for they are commanded by the higher range at their back; as Arundel is commanded by the heights of the

HASTINGS—THE SHORE

MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF HASTINGS

Park, Lewes by Mount Harry, and Chateau Gaillard by the woods locally known as “La Ferme”; indeed, in the case of this latter castle the conquest of Philip Augustus was largely due to the fact that missile weapons, even in his age, were just within range of the castle from the heights to the south and east. But though, under modern conditions, such situations are bad, under the conditions of at least the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, they were ideal. When William the Conqueror held Hastings there were no methods by which projectiles of sufficient strength could be thrown at the castle from the hills to the north-east, though a hundred years later, by the time of the Third Crusade, and later still, during the attack on the Norman castle already mentioned, such weapons had been developed. One has but to stand on the platform of the ruined stronghold of Hastings to see that, for at least the first hundred years after the Conquest, the place must have been, under any proper command, impregnable. And indeed we find attached to it in Anglo-Saxon times the epithet “ceaster,” which is never given to any place that has not been properly fortified, whether by the Romans or by their successors.

This fortification of Hastings Hill leads one to mention two other castles which lie within the Rape, and which are illustrative of a feature to be discovered in Sussex alone among the English counties. This feature is the presence of subsidiary castles to strengthen the gates of the county, and to stand behind those principal castles whose primary function it is to defend the entries into the land. These subsidiary castles may be best explained to modern readers by using a modern metaphor, and saying that they act as “half-backs” to the great seaport castles of Sussex.