We have seen that upon the prehistoric origin of which we know hardly anything came Rome. We have seen that the Italian race laid down the bed upon which all the rest was to rise—a bed, firm, hard, and even, like their own concrete. It was a process occupying in this island some four hundred years.
Upon Britain, as upon every other western province, fell the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. We have seen that they were somewhat more severe here than in other provinces, and that Sussex in particular was swept clean by them, not indeed of her race, but of her religion and her civilisation. The darkness resultant upon this catastrophe lasted for little more than a hundred years, but in that hundred years everything which gives dignity to mankind had disappeared, and the countryside, from Romney Marsh westward away to Chichester Haven, had gone savage. We have seen that it was slowly re-Christianised and recivilised, but that the planting of good stems upon such a devastated soil was for long a difficult and an unfruitful business. The mission of St. Wilfrid coincides with the close of the eighth century. It is not till the middle of the eleventh that Sussex really re-enters the European unity; it is not till the close of it that the influence of that unity begins to be largely felt after the Norman Conquest.
WINCHELSEA MILL
THE RISE OF THE SQUIRES
Two hundred and fifty years pass, during which the social development of England and of Sussex keeps the main lines laid down by the Conquest; the central government is still strong, the conception of tenure still weighs upon the wealthy class, and all men are responsible somewhere to some lord. Briefly, the mediæval system is during that period alive; here, as in northern France. And this island and northern France form, between them, until the close of the thirteenth century, the heart of Christendom. It is in them that arise the great philosophic discussions of the new universities, the Gothic architecture, the feudal scheme, the true co-operative industry of the mediæval manor.
For as long as that society could endure, that society was organised; and in Sussex the organisation, or, to use a better word, the sense of authority, is to be discovered in the great “Rape” overlordships, Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel, and Chichester, whose growth has been already sketched.
It so happened that that mediæval system grew old and failed.
The period of time between its failure and the present day is comparatively short, as the history of mankind goes. Its break-down is only apparent to the historian with the middle of the fourteenth century; it is not suspected by its own victims till the middle of the fifteenth. We are to-day but in the beginning of the twentieth. It may be said, roughly, that four hundred years of change alone separate us from that organic unity which had survived for fifteen hundred years from the civilisation that the Mediterranean brought us. We feel a world away from that organic unity of the Middle Ages, because these last four centuries have been so full of an active intelligence and of an increasing material knowledge, that these take up nearly the whole horizon of our minds; but our detachment is but apparent and illusory. At bottom our morals, in so far as they are permanent, our conception of civic life, our modern appetite for economic justice, are all rooted in the Middle Ages; and the more a modern man learns of them the more he feels that they are his native place.