This long series of new towns grates upon men who have known and loved the county throughout their lives. There is little of Sussex about them; they have not the Sussex method of building nor any of the Sussex industries. Even their permanent population is largely drawn from other parts of England, and you do not hear the full warm accent of the south country often enough in their streets. The only consolation which the county can give itself as it watches this increasing line of new buildings is that, a mile or two behind them, their very presence seems to be forgotten.
A closer observer has another consolation, which is that the new methods of communication are perhaps beginning to check the tendency which existed throughout the nineteenth century to over-populate the sea coast. If men, foreign to the place, are trying to spoil the Weald, at least they are applying a counter-irritant to their too great success in spoiling the coastal plain, and in the Weald they have a larger area over which to spread their limited faculties for evil.
It is even possible that the power which the county has shown itself possessed of for so many centuries to digest and to absorb new-comers, will save it altogether from these latter invasions—possible, but doubtful. Then the descendants of those who now own Brighton, Worthing, and the rest, the children of the men who build villas on Crowboro’ top, and the heirs of the new-comers who have purchased, one would think, at least a third of the great old houses under the Downs, will be worthy of the soil which their ancestors certainly did not understand, and the historical development of Sussex will continue.
It is more likely that that development has already come to an unfruitful end.
FITTLEWORTH WATER MILL
PART III
THE INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER OF SUSSEX AND THE WAY TO SEE THE COUNTY
The efforts which many have made to describe a peculiar Sussex dialect and peculiar Sussex methods of architecture, have been somewhat too laborious. The example of other counties, notably of Devonshire, which did possess a strictly defined local dialect and set of customs, has tempted the patriotic historian of Sussex to find in that county something which is not there. There is, indeed, a South country way of speaking as all the world knows. It is to be found in the valley of Meon, and it is to be found in Kent, and it is to be found in the southern parts of Surrey. It occupies a large region, whose boundaries are very vague and ill defined; it lies, roughly speaking, between the North Downs and the sea, and is bounded westward by the New Forest. It is not peculiar to the county of Sussex.
For example: A Sussex man will call a woodpecker a “yaffle,” which is a name taken from its peculiar call—it is for all the world like a mad laugh. Or again, he will talk of “steening a well,” that is, lining it with bricks. Or again, he will call a toad stool a “puck” stool. He will speak of a ploughshare as a “tourn vour,” that is, a “turn furrow”; and so forth. But these phrases are to be heard all up and down the district which I have mentioned. And the termination of place names, the peculiar epithet by which a steep wood is called a “hanger,” or a horseshoe depression in the Downs a “coombe,” though very Sussex, are not only Sussex.