A History of Sussex, from the Ice Age to 1860

he battle, which was to alter the course of English history, was fought on the hills behind Hastings in 1066. The Saxon army wearied by a long march from Yorkshire where Harold had utterly defeated a Danish invasion from the North Sea had taken up trench positions on ground through which the main street of the town of Battle now runs. For some considerable time the Normans failed to break the Saxon line and it was not until the evening of an October day that victory was secured by two stratagems, one a pretended flight, which encouraged the heavy Saxon troops to break ranks and follow and also the shooting of arrows upwards rendered useless the long Saxon body shields, the victory was absolute. This battle, which probably cost the lives of a few thousand casualties, set England on a new course and changed in particular the character and status of Sussex

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SUSSEX FROM THE ICE AGE TO THE 19TH CENTURY

he first inhabitants of Sussex came in the Neolithic period

(4000 - 2500B.C.) during which, people were forced south by the last Ice Age. In 1994 a discovery was made at Chichester when archaeologists discovered a shinbone which was dated as 500,000 years old. The climate at that time would have been temperate. In 1995 there was a further discovery of a tooth dating to several hundred years earlier than the shinbone. However our earliest ancestors, who can be positively traced, date back to 10,000 years ago and came from the continent across the North Sea and the English Channel, which at that time were dry land.

rior to the Roman invasion, the Celts became the dominant tribe in Britain and were warlike in nature. They opened up new areas in Sussex for settlement particularly in the weald. In the first century B.C. the large defence works at Cissbury were built and various other sites. Cissbury is in fact 60 acres in size. Due to the type of settlements found at this time it is fair to assume that Sussex was a tribal area. Following the Celtic invasion in 75B.C., that is 20 years later, came the first invasion by the troops of Julius Caesar in 55 B.C and the Roman Occupation. It is not possible to be precise about the sequence of events in Sussex during the first years of the Roman occupation, but a 1960's excavation of the remains of the Roman palace at Fishbourne suggests that here was an important Administrative and Supply Base. The Roman walls around Chichester date to the 3rd Century and are one and a half miles long, forming an irregular polygon around the city. There was rapid development and prosperity during the early days of the Roman occupation of Sussex, which is evidenced by villas at Angmering, Arundel, Pulborough and Southwick all built in the second half of the first century A.D. With the Romans came new techniques of building and entirely new house plans both in towns and country villas (word means 'farm') The simplest form being a rectangle containing 3 or more rooms. However in Sussex there is clear evidence that some of the early villas are based on the italian style, Fishbourne and Southwick for instance

etween 400 and 410 A.D. the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain to the continent to defend against Teutonic armies, which had broken through the northern defences, and in 477 is the first recorded landing of the Saxons in Sussex. It seems likely that during the early part of the 4th century successive raids and insecurity led to the abandonment of larger villas and the migration of the Roman dwellers from such places as Chichester, to the West or even back across the channel to Brittany. The actual conquest of Sussex by the Saxons (from Saxony in north Germany) took place over a long period of time. The area between Shoreham and Pevensey seems to be one in which there was a great deal of fighting between the British Romans and the Saxon invaders. In the Hastings area at this time a separate group of Saxons appeared, to colonise that area, and their name was the Haestingas giving their name to the town of Hastings. Until the 7th century Sussex appears to have been isolated from the rest of England largely due to the Wealden forest as a protective barrier. There is little evidence that the Saxons occupied existing Roman towns and villages, preferring small compact communities to the more scattered Celtic type of farm and field. In the year 681 St. Wilfred landed at Selsey and converted the south Saxons to Christianity. St.Wilfred set up a monastery at Selsey and therefore from the end of the 7th century Selsey became one of the most important places in Sussex and culturally the most important.

By the mid 9th century the Danes regularly plundered parts of Kent. This led to a consolidation of the West Saxon monarchy and the integration of Sussex into a larger unit, which we can begin to think of as England.

t was during the Norman period that Sussex gained its greatest importance in relation to other English counties. Not only was it associated with events leading to the conquest, and with the conquest itself. But for 150 years it was the main highway from England to the Continent a bridge connecting the estates of the Norman nobility in England and Normandy itself.

n its growth of population, in the importance of its ports, in the clearing and colonisation of the Weald after centuries of relative neglect, these changes were as great in their way as those of the Neolithic, Celtic, Roman or Saxon invasions. In the early part of the 11th century, Ethelred the Unready had established certain connections with Normandy in marriage and other favours he had given to Norman clerics therefore paving the way for the invasion of William the Conqueror.

t Arundel the Normans created what was virtually a new town protected by a castle on the hills above. The present castle occupies the site of the original moat and Bailey. Arundel and Chichester were under the rule of the Norman baron, Roger of Montgomerie. The social classifications at this time were represented by the "Villagers" who normally had a holding of between 7 and 30 acres and below that were the "Bordars" who between them formed about a quarter of the population. They had smallholdings and owed allegiance, as did the villagers to the feudal barons. Below that came the "Cottars" who owned no land and maintained themselves by working for their neighbours and right at the bottom came the "Serfs". They owned no land or property and were normally the servants of the baronial lords. Baronial Manors in Sussex at this time ran from North to South and each one had a castle, which was the stronghold of the baron. These castles were at Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings.

fter the Norman Conquest, an increasing number of dwellings in Sussex were built of stone and a number have survived in Sussex although in ruins, and date from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Excavation of these sites is extremely difficult today due to urban sprawl but there is one place at Hangleton (Brighton) where excavations have been dug.

y the 13th Century the medieval pattern of settlement, village and town was complete but within this general pattern considerable development and readjustment were to take place in the later medieval period. The early part of the century found Sussex at the height of its prosperity. Hastings, which had been a foundation member of the Confederation of the Five (Cinque Ports) had become its headquarters in the 12th century. Outside the Cinque Ports, other ports such as Shoreham, Arundel and Chichester were thriving commercial centres whilst inland packhorse trade within and through the interior of the county had expanded steadily. The Weald itself had been largely settled and flourishing market towns had been established at East Grinstead, Horsham and Midhurst.

uring the 16th century for instance, 1586, a writer (Camden) was writing about how the ports of Bramber and Steyning were losing their river due to silting up and also similarly at Rye and Old Winchelsea the Rother was silting up and the sea was receding and they were no longer ports. Regarding Old Winchelsea it began to lose houses to the sea in 1250 and 1252 a contemporary writer (Mathew Paris) wrote "at Winchelsea, a place extremely important to the English, especially to Londoners there was a great inundation submerging houses and drowning a large number of the inhabitants" In 1287 a violent storm finally swamped Old Winchelsea out of existence so completely that it is impossible to say exactly where Old Winchelsea actually stood. At Rye the process was much slower. As late as the 18th Century there was still a fairly wide anchorage fairly near to the walls and an 18th century map of Hastings still indicates a small harbour where the main centre of the town stands today. The most important industry in Sussex at that time was undoubtedly shipbuilding

he shipwrights were able to draw from the oak of the Weald, which was generally recognised as providing the finest timber in Europe. The iron industry, which had existed in the Weald in Celtic and Roman times, had been revived, particularly in the area around Battle and in the Worth and Tilgate forest areas around Crawley. In all of this we are witnessing a shift of emphasis from the coast to the Weald and it is not unreasonable to assume that many of those who found employment in the timber, glass or iron industries may have been descended from once prosperous citizens of Shoreham, Hastings or Winchelsea. Some of the changes that took place in the later Middle Ages such as the decay of the Sussex ports or the decline of the monasteries were undoubtedly hastened by the calamity of

the Black Death. This is particularly true of the countryside.

erhaps the most striking evidence of the shift in the social and economic life of Sussex at the close of the Middle Ages, from the coast to the Weald is to be found in the large numbers of country mansions built during the late Tudor and Stuart periods.

These are almost all confined to the area to the north of the Downs. A great deal of this building is in fact linked with the expansion of the iron industry and manor houses were rebuilt or enlarged from the profits derived from the sale of timber or from shares in the new iron foundries. Yet the new class of rich merchants from London who wished to set themselves up as "Country Gentlemen" a process, which has continued ever since, built others. Other mansions were built by the growing body of civil servants, lawyers and placemen, a class, which proliferated during the Tudor period. Substantial transfers of monastic land and buildings had rewarded many of these after the dissolution of the monasteries. Of the two richest prizes In Sussex, Lewes Priory and Battle Abbey, the first was granted to Thomas Cromwell a man of this type, the second to Sir Anthony Browne, standard bearer of England and Lieutenant of the Royal Forests.

n more than one way such country houses replaced the monastic establishments of the previous centuries. Although they were entirely secular in their ideals and organisation and provided few of the services whether in education, in care of the sick or hospitality which had been important functions of the monasteries at their best they nevertheless did become the real cultural centres of life of this country during the next 300 years

he 17th century is not quite so rich in great mansions as the 16th, but a word must be said of two, Slaugham Place built at the beginning of the century and Petworth House at its close. Slaugham Place is now a ruin, the abandonment of a house too large to support, a fate not confined to the present age. It is of particular interest as one of the first fully renaissance mansions both as to plan and much of its detail. Today the remains of the house, except for two arched arcades are overgrown, but the surrounding walled garden with raised terrace on one side and charming gazebos at each corner, and in the middle of the longest side is the most complete surviving example in Sussex of this style of early garden planning.

he canon foundries of Sussex had an important role to play in the 17th century struggle between King and Parliament (1642 - 1646), but it was not only this which made the control of Sussex of vital importance and led to a series of campaigns, which, although not decisive, played their part in determining the outcome of the civil war. Sussex and Kent lay on the shortest route to France and although the ports were in decline, the kind of assistance which Charles I hoped to receive from France, bullion and arms, could be more easily smuggled across the channel to the shores of Sussex than any other part of the south coast. For these two reasons therefore it was necessary for parliament to prevent the Royalists from gaining control of the county. The leading citizens of the county were riven by artisan's feelings for one side or the other.

n general the countryside and the leading aristocratic families in the rural areas were royalist. The towns such as Chichester were very evenly split in their allegiance. The clergy were almost entirely for Charles and the bulk of the burgesses for parliament.

An army of 6000 was sent by parliament to secure the town of Chichester and also Arundel a task accomplished without major loss of life. With the occupation of Chichester and Arundel, parliament had gained complete control of the county and royalist sympathisers were unable to continue activities without help from the outside.

In Arundel both the castle and the town suffered heavily and that is one of the reasons why modern Arundel dates from the 17th and 18th centuries whilst the castle itself was almost entirely reconstructed in the 19th century.

ussex on the whole and in particular the eastern part of the county suffered less destruction of its day-to-day life than many of the other English counties. As the conflict dragged on, however, there developed a growing resentment among farmers and villagers at the levies of food and the billeting of troops, a resentment not directly necessarily at either side, but against the war itself.

hen the 18th century is considered against the changing landscape of this county, two things are apparent, first the tremendous zest with which the landowners vied with one another in an endeavour to shape the landscape according to preconceived views of natural beauty, second the revolution in agricultural methods and techniques which changed the shape of farms and villages in many parts of England. Sussex had its full share of the first although less of the second.

t the close of the 17th century landscaping was limited to the immediate environs of the great houses artificial mounts, long terraces, avenues and orchards. All this was merely an extension of the Tudor Walled gardens, which separated the house from wild uncontrolled nature stimulated by the park at Versailles and its English reflection in the avenues and canals added to the royal palace at Hampton Court.

he real triumph of the later 18th century was the development of landscaping on principals, which followed, but at the same time organised and controlled nature, but did both on the grand scale. Although all the great parks Arundel, Petworth, Goodwood, Sheffield, Herstmonceaux, were reshaped in the 18th century under the influence of Capability Brown, in fact only four in the entire county were designed by him, personally, Hills Place (near Horsham), Petworth, Ashburnham and Sheffield Park.

he general prosperity of agriculture in Sussex during the 18th Century, reflected in the number of elegant houses built in towns and villages and of farmhouses and labourers cottages in the surrounding countryside. They reveal a feeling for the right use of materials, whether brick, stone or flint and a sense of balance and proportion in the design of window and door space or in the placing of decorative detail. There is hardly a village without one or two good examples, whilst towns such as Lewes, Chichester and Arundel are probably richer for their size than any other towns in Britain.

part from the many new comfortable houses and the obvious general change that would have struck any traveller in Sussex towards the close of the 18th century, if they could have remembered the early or even middle years, would have been the general increase of ploughland, the size of many of the fields, the large areas now growing root crops and the almost complete disappearance of "fallow" made possible by more scientific crop rotation.

t. Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, restored a measure of security for a few decades in the mid 10th century during the reign of King Edgar and the wise administration of the church. The first signs of public administration now emerge with the advent of the "Hundred" which was important not only as a court of justice but also dealt with matters which would now be the responsibility of a department of the County Council such as highways or police. Also emerging at this time was the "Parish" which, was of course an ecclesiastical division and was to become the fundamental unit in the pattern of local government and administration in Tudor times and remained so until the 19th century.

Around the year 1000 the Danish terror returned and there was great burning, plundering and manslaughter in Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. This only ceased with the death of Ethelred the Saxon at which point the Saxon Witan or government chose the Dane Canute as their king and peace was secured.

The earliest record of the game of Flat Green Bowls emerged in the 13th century at Southampton but it was during Tudor times indeed during the reign of Elizabeth 1 that it took hold as a sport. Of course there was the infamous occasion at Plymouth in 1588 when Sir Francis Drake refused to abandon his game when the Spanish armada was sighted in full sail in the English Channel.

Nearer to home, it was recorded that in 1600 the game was played on the Castle Green at Lewes and also it was played on the Steine in Brighton in the year 1665 and for the years following. The honour of being the oldest club in England falls to Old Southampton, which I am advised on good authority has been going since 1288!!!

THE REGENCY PERIOD

his was in arithmetic terms only a decade long from when George III became incureably insane in 1811 to 1820 when the Prince Regent ascended the throne as George IV. However it has become the historic custom to consider the 'regency period' to cover the era of the Napoleonic Wars and the reign of George IV, aproximately 30 years from 1795 to 1825. It was during this period that the Brighton Pavilion, the regency terraces, the squares and crescents of Brighton and Hove were built, and when much of the development, not only in Brighton, but in Worthing and Bognor were also partially completed.

righton was recorded in the Domesday Book as a 'fishing' village. It posessed a harbour of some importance and was presumably where theSteine and the Pool Valley are today. The town was fortified during the 100 Years War and also at the time of the Armada (1588). Its eventual decline was due partly to the silting-up of the harbour and partly to the encroachments of the sea.

uch was the state of the town which Doctor Russell of Lewes, managed, between 1750 and 1780 to popularise as a 'salt-water spa'; advocating sea-bathing and sea-water drinking as a cure for, most ills and establishing a 'Hydro' where the Albion Hotel now stands. In 1783 the Prince of Wales first visited the town, returning again the following year; and in 1786 he purchased the site of the present pavilion. The following year, 1787 the pavilion was built to a design of Henry Holland in the record time of 5 months. Initially it was a simple Georgian villa, which was later to form the nucleus of the building we know today. For the rest of his life, Brighton continued to be the Prince's favourite residence, ensuring its growing popularity as a fashionable resort. In 1780 the population had been 3600, already a sizeable town for the period. But by 1784 it had risen to 5669, by 1801 to 7337, by 1821 to 21429. This remarkable growth paralleled the development of Lancashire and Yorkshire at this time but for entirely different reasons and so has continued ever since. For recreation, retirement and commuting from London.

he first residential terrace 'The Royal Crescent' was built in 1806, the royal stables and the riding school in 18

Plans for extending the pavilion and completely transforming it, were drawn up first by Humphrey Repton and finally by 'John Nash' and the pavilion as we know it was completed in 1821. With the death of George IV, Brighton ceased to be the favoured resort of the monarchy. Much of the furniture of the pavilion was removed to Buckingham Palace and finally the shell of the building which had cost in all a half million pounds was purchased by the citizens of Brighton in 1850 for £50,000.

uring most of this period from 1796 to 1815, England was at war with France under Napoleon and for at least two years, from 1800 to 1802, a threat of invasion hung continuously over the South Coast.

Troops were stationed locally and guns, set up at various points, many on the exact sites used 200 years before as gun emplacements against the expected Spanish Armada. Further east along the flatter part of the coast from Eastbourne to Kent, where an invasion was expected Martello Towers were built and a considerable number of these remain partly ruined or converted to various uses.

ollowing 1815, and for a decade expansion was particularly rapid and grandiose schemes, such as that for Kemp Town in 1825 and East Cliff, also Brunswick Town in Hove were started. Both were only half completed when the tide of popularity turned away from Brighton. Following the opening of the London-Brighton Railway in 1841, the fortunes of Brighton once more began to flourish; but by that time fashion had changed and the dignified squares, terraces and gardens of the Regency period gave place to the individualism and petty pretensiousness of the Victorian era.

t is in this period that the turnpike system of roads and the 'stagecoach'reached the peak of their development . Famous traveller 'Cobbett' wrote in 1823 " Brighton is so situated that a coach which leaves at - not very early in the morning- reaches London by noon, and returning two and a half hours later - reached Brighton not very late in the evening". The perfection of the London-Brighton coaching system led to Brighton becoming, for a few years the main cross-channel port of departure for France. Through the passage of time, the emphasis as an embarcation point for the continent moved eastwards to Kent and Folkstone in particular, since the speed of the railway in relation to the speed of the packet boats made a long land journey and a short sea crossing preferable.

oon after leaving Billingshurst , I crossed the river Arun which has a canal running alongside. At this there are timber and coal yards and kilns for lime. This appears to be a grand receiving and distributing place", so writes Cobbett in 1823. He is refering to the Arun - Wey Canal which had recently been completed, linking the Arun with the Thames. This canal connected places like Chichester, Littlehampton and Midhurst, with the great network of canals which radiated from London, to the industrial north, to east Anglia and even to the west country as far as Welshpool and Bristol.

he burst of canal building which eclipsed that of the turnpikes earlier and even that of the railways later was confined to the years of 1790 to 1815. By 1820 it had come to an end. It is amazing and surprising that most of our canals were built whilst we were at war with Napoleon, in fact the war acted as a stimulus since the canals provided an alternative to the costal shipping trade - subject to constant interference by French raiders. One of the Sussex canals that from Rye to Hythe, skirting the north edge of the Romney Marsh was purely military designed to move men and equipment rapidly within the costal area. It also served as a line of defence against any invasion force. Another canal projected for military purposes but never built was one which would have linked portsmouth and Chatham, two great naval bases.

lthough military considerations played their part, the main function of most of the Sussex canals was the improvement of agriculture by the cheaper movement of agricultural products and requsites. The principal products of Sussex were, (a) corn, (b) timber, bark and charcoal, (C) chalk, lime and marl, (d) iron marble and limestone, (e) cattle and sheep, hides and wool. The barges were drawn by horsesbut also carried sails for use when the wind was favourable.

he first canals in Sussex were strictly speaking 'navigations''. Their purpose was to make nagivable, the lower reaches of the rivers which centuries of neglect had rendered useless as waterways for even small boats. This involved dredging, the removal of sandbars and on occasion the shortening of the winding course of the river, with a cut or "true canal". This did not normally involve the builfing of 'locks'. The rivers of Sussex made navigible in this way were the eastern Rother, the Ouse, the Adur and the Arun.

he 'true canal' was an entirely new waterway often climbing by means of locks, over considerable watersheds or by means of tunnels maintaining a level course between intervening ridges. The canal which linked the Arun navigation to the Wey navigation was one of this kind, havig 14 locks from Stopham near Pulborough to its highest point at Sidney Wood where it just skirts a 150 foot contour. Apart form the two military canals built in Sussex the only other true canal was the last to be built 1817-23. Its construction was due largely to the intiative and financial backing of the 3rd Lord Egremont, which linked the Arun above Ford with Portsmouth. One reason for building it was to provide employment during the depression which followed the end of the war with Napoleon.

he Portsmouth - Arun canal was unlike the Rother navigation never a success. In no year did the tolls produce a reasonable return on the capital invested. By 1855 the canal was virtually abandoned and in 1888 the company was finally wound up . Of the various schemes put forward between 1800 and 1825 for a 'ship canal' linking the Thames to Portsmouth, that of 'Cundy' in 1824 was by far the most ambitious. The line of the canal leaving the Thames at Deptford would have passed through the 'Mole Gap' at Dorking thence across the weald to Arundel. At the highest point 382 feet above sea level, it was designed to run through a cutting 100 feet deep. Although nothing came of this and other schemes they are some measure of the prodigious optimism and confidence of the engineers of that period.

ithin little more than a decade these energies were to be transferred to the railways. The decline of the canals was in fact, almost as sudden and dramatic as that of the turnpikes for the same reason - the coming of the railways. In the 24 years between 1839 and 1863, the main railway lines in Sussex were completed. Of the secondary lines, the Mid-Sussex from Pulborough to Petersfield was opened in 1867; the section from Midhurst to Chichester in 1885, the Chichester to Selsey line in 1887. The "Bluebell Line" as it came to be called which linked the main line at East Grinstead with the main line just north of Lewes was opened in 1882, the little railway that conveyed visitors from Victorian Brighton to the funfairs cable railway and funicular on the Devil's Dyke was completed in 1887. It had a brief life of less than 30 years before being disbanded to serve in France during the First World War.

rain lines such as the London to Brighton carry a weight and frequency of traffic undreamed of by their original promoters. As the nineteenth century drew to a close so did the great era of Railway line building. It is however well to remember that the Victorian engineering skills as well as the labour force which enabled the railway development to be carried through so rapidly were the result of the experience gained during the Regency period. Part of the labour then recruited for the equally difficult and occasionally more spectacular task of building the canals was available for the building of the railways.

n the third millennium B.C. the first true invasion of Sussex took place, when wiry dark haired people from the Mediterranean landed in the South West of England and worked their way along the coast. They were highly organised and erected great temples at Avebury in Wiltshire and later Stonehenge. They built 12 hilltop settlements four of which are in Sussex.

Of the four in Sussex two have been excavated, at Brighton and Chichester. Important burials were made in long mounds or "barrows" and seven of these have been found in Sussex. It is probable that the Neolithic invasion of Britain was stimulated by a rapid improvement in the climate and there is evidence that, for a time, it may have been warmer and wetter than it is today.

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