Between St. John's Common and Ardingly, remains of a paved street have been discovered, which may have connected this camp with a garrison in the neighbourhood of London.

After passing the village of Street, in the neighbourhood of Ditchling Beacon, the road probably avoided the clay soil of the Weald, and followed the foot of the chalk Downs past Firle Beacon, until the important landmark of Beachy Head came into view, and the traveller arrived at Civitas Anderida (Eastbourne), with its marshgirt port in Pevensey Bay. It is not improbable that there was a line of communication across the marshes which lie between Pevensey (Portus Anderida) and Wartling Hill. The line produced would pass through or near to the villages of Boreham Street, Boodle Street, Cade Street, Street End, and Lake Street on the Forest ridge, whose names imply the neighbourhood of a Roman stratum (probably of later construction than that just mentioned), which led northward from the vicinity of Portus Anderida towards London. In Western Sussex another Roman road, called Stone Street, of which traces still remain, ran from London to Chichester, passing Billingshurst and Pulborough in its course through the Weald.

Now, "in days of yore, and in times and tides long gone before," the Weald was covered by a dense forest, whose tangled brakes and thickets harboured the wolf and the wild boar. Its glades and open heaths afforded pasturage to herds of wild deer; while its lowlands were swamps and marshes, the haunt of innumerable water-fowl.

And the bittern beat his drum,
Booming from the sedgy shallow.

Such was its condition when the Venerable Bede wrote.

Although the ruthless and reckless havoc of centuries has removed the splendid timber which once clothed the Weald, yet the passenger who travels at express speed between Three Bridges and Hayward's Heath cannot fail to recognise in the rough woods, heath-clad banks, and brushwood coppices, which he sees on every side, remnants of an ancient forest land. The extensive beds of sandstone, which underlie the forest ridge and other parts of the Weald, are very rich in iron ore; and probably supplied the inhabitants of the country with material for their scythed chariots and weapons of war, long before the coming of the Romans. Roads there were none, and the devious and miry tracks, which threaded the mazes of the forest, must have been utterly impassable to the native waggons. Pack horses were probably the only means of transporting heavy loads then, as they continued to be until recent times.

The Britons called the forest Coit Andred, which signifies the wild wood, or the wood without inhabitants; and Roman mouths softened the Barbarian appellation into Silva Anderida. Names once given to localities take deep root, and survive all revolutions-physical, political, and lingual; and so we find, centuries later, the Saxon conquerors of Britain retaining the ancient designation, when calling the desolate waste Andredeswald. It is described by the "Saxon Chronicle," under the year 893, as measuring 120 miles in length from east to west, and 30 miles in breadth from north to south. Its inhabitants, to whom St. Wilfred, "the apostle of the South Saxons," preached in the seventh century, were, from the nature of things, singularly rude and unpolished in their manners. "A nation, placed in a rocky district, amid uncultivated woods and thick brambles, which rendered it difficult for them to approach even their own lands; a people ignorant of God, and given to vain idols."

A glance at the map of the Weald will reveal the fact that a very large number of the place-names contain the syllable "hurst." There is Hurstpierpoint, Herstmonceux, Hurst Green, Ashurst, Nuthurst, Fernhurst, and a multitude of other hursts. Now herst, or hurst, in old English means a wood, and even if no description of the ancient forest had come down to us, the etymologist would still have been able, by the help of these local names, to ascertain the limits of the South Saxon Wald. Sometimes the prefix "hurst" takes the form of hors, and since Herstmonceux is pronounced "Horsemounses by natives of the place, it is evident that Horsgate, Horseye, Horselunges, and Horsted, belong to the same class of names. Another exceedingly common termination to Wealden village names is field. We find it, for example, in Mayfield and Heathfield, and it is usually explained as signifying an ancient clearing in the forest, where the timber has been felled. But though Mayfield, Heathfield, and Lindfield is the conventional mode of writing those names, yet the local pronunciation is Maövul, Hefful, and Linvul respectively; and it is possible that, in many cases, the termination originally was not "field," but "wald," or "weald." In Domesday Book Westfield appears as Westewelle, and Hartfield as Hertevel.

The name of "forest," still applied to certain districts, also bears witness to the former wild and unenclosed state of the county. Ashdown forest contains 10,000 acres, including a considerable extent of heathy ground, and black game were abundant there at the beginning of the present century. It once formed part of Pevensey forest, which covered all the Rape of Pevensey, and devolved with Pevensey Castle; but it is called "Ashdon" in a grant of lands in Sussex,

made to John of Gaunt. The numerous "gates" and "hatches" of the district, such as Barn's Gate and Prickett's Hatch, indicate the boundaries of an old deer park. The forest of Worth contained, according to a survey made three centuries ago, some 5,000 acres. Tilgate forest and St. Leonard's forest at the western, and Darvel forest and Dallington forest at the eastern, extremity of the Ridge were other wide stretches of wooded country.

Until recently, the woods of the Weald were haunted by monsters and spirits innumerable. Here ran the black headless hare, there a demon, in form of a sable hound, scoured the country, while in Ashdown forest a decapitated corpse sprang into the saddle behind the belated traveller, and so accompanied him on his journey.

Although Sussex cannot boast of any hero of romance such as Robin Hood, yet its thickets sheltered many a ruffianly outlaw and highwayman, who took toll of unprotected wayfarers, and added another terror to the dangers of travelling.

On the forest ridge was fought the great battle between the Normans and Saxons. The Duke of Normandy had disembarked a large force at Pevensey bay, where Julius Cæsar is believed to have. effected a landing eleven centuries previously. The marshes, which intervened between the forest and the sea, formed a natural barrier against invasion, so the enemy were obliged to march along the shore till they reached the high ground near Hastings, and there they encamped. The English king had chosen a very strong position upon the spot where Battle Abbey afterwards stood; and his contingent of Sussex villeins, armed "with clubs and great picks, iron forks and stakes," rendered good service in fortifying the spot with a ditch and bank surmounted by a wattled palisade. Early one autumn morning Harold's scouts kept coming in with the news that the Norman army was at last on the move, and advancing along the forest ridge. A six-mile march brought the enemy to the "heath land," within sight of the English camp, and, with much noise and blowing of trumpets, they began to form up for the attack. The Norman knights could be seen donning their conical helmets and shirts of ring-mail. The enemy's assault was delivered at nine o'clock, and failed in its object; but the ancient ruse of a feigned retreat drew the incautious English from their impregnable position, and with shouts of "Olicrosse!" and "Godemité!" they plunged through the furze bushes in pursuit of the foreigners. Harold's mistake in leaving his first position was not immediately apparent, for though the English king had lost an eye by an arrow wound, yet he still remained in command of his army, and the Normans were getting very much the worst of it. But as the day

wore on the fortune of war changed, and at last a body of Norman knights charged down upon Harold's body-guard, captured the Royal standard, and beat the king down with their battle-axes. There was no quarter, and so long as strength and daylight lasted bands of Normans and Saxons, scattered up and down the forest, continued to fight with deadly hate. The English, it is believed, left upon the field some 20,000 dead and dying--" a prey to the wolves," as the old poem, De bello Hastingensi, tells us.

By

It is difficult now to picture the Weald as having been anything else than an agricultural or pastoral country; nevertheless, it was long the centre of English iron mining and iron manufacture. day the woods echoed with the din of great hammers, driven by water-power; at night the whole district was aglow with the glare of roaring blast furnaces. Drayton's ponderous lines, published in the year 1612, commemorate the period :

When as the anvil's weight, and hammer's dreadful sound,
E'en rent the hollow woods and shook the queachy ground;
So that the trembling nymphs, oppressed through ghastly fear,
Ran madding to the Downs, with loose dishevelled hair.

And William Camden :

Sussex is full of iron mines in sundry places, where, for the making and founding thereof, there be furnaces on every side, and a huge deal of wood is yearly burnt; to which purposes divers brooks in many places are brought to run in one channel, and sundry meadows turned into pools and waters, that they might be of power sufficient to drive hammer-mills, which, beating upon the iron, resound all over the places adjoining.

Charcoal supplied the place of coal for smelting purposes, and an army of "colliers" found employment in converting the lavish stores of wood, which nature had provided, into charcoal. So long as the supply of that useful commodity lasted, not only ironfoundries, but other factories, such as glassworks, and gunpowdermills, which were dependent on a supply of good charcoal, continued to flourish in the Weald. But the annual consumption of timber for fuel was enormous; one furnace at Lamberhurst alone required two hundred thousand cords of wood every year to feed its flames. This waste of timber, continued century after century, began to tell upon the old forest of Anderida. It shrank and dwindled, until there was hardly sufficient wood left to supply the blast furnaces with fuel. Then came competition with other parts of England, where coal was found in close proximity to the iron ore, and the whole process of manufacture could be conducted at less cost than in the wealds, which were destitute of workable coal, and so the Southern iron trade grew less and less, until, in the first quarter of

the present century, Ashburnham forge was the only one out of many scores of Sussex ironworks which continued at work. Indeed, the very existence of ironworks had been forgotten, did not some of the great "hammer-ponds," to which Camden alludes, and some of the immense heaps of slag, locally known as "cinder-beds," remain to attest their former importance. These old cinder-beds are scattered far and wide over the Weald, and sometimes cover many acres of land. The heavy slag, of which they are composed, furnishes excellent material for road-making, and is commonly employed for repairing the highways which cross the iron district. About half a century ago an ardent archæologist happened to observe, in a heap of slag by the roadside, a fragment of Roman pottery. This discovery led him to examine a cinder-bed at Maresfield, from which the heap in question had been obtained, and he then found that it was full of broken pottery, coins of Nero, Vespasian, and Diocletian (which belong to the period ranging from the year 54 to 286 A.D.), and other relics of antiquity, which left no room for doubt that the Romans had, during their occupation of this country, worked iron mines in Ashdown Forest. Similar remains have been discovered at Chiddingly, where there was a foundry in existence comparatively recently, for the bells of old Eastbourne Church were sent there to be re-cast in 1651. A great common in Chiddingly parish, called the Dicker, was denuded of timber by the iron-masters of the neighbourhood.

There are many old references to the iron trade in the county of Sussex. King Henry III. made a grant to the people of Lewes in 1266, empowering them to levy a toll of one penny on every cartload of iron, and one halfpenny on every horseload of the same metal, which passed through the town from the Weald. An inhabitant of Lewes supplied the ironwork for the tomb of the same king in Westminster Abbey. In Edward I.'s reign iron was being smelted in St. Leonard's forest, and complaints were made by the ironmongers of the City of London in regard to certain manufactured articles supplied by the smiths of the Wealds. In the following reign, the sheriff of Surrey and Sussex was ordered to supply 3,000 horseshoes and 29,000 nails for the expedition against Scotland. The ancient banded guns, which were used by the English in the fifteenth century, are believed to have been made in Sussex. A good specimen of this kind of artillery, and, according to tradition, the first gun ever made in England, formerly stood at Eridge Green. On holidays the people fired it at a hill some distance off, dug out the shot, fired it off again, and so on, until their supply of ammunition was VOL. CCLXXIV. NO. 1947.

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