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Let us note, too, how the really habitable strip of Sussex, from the point of view of an early people, was quite naturally cut off from all other parts of England by obvious limits. This habitable strip consists, of course, of the coastwise belt from Brighton to the Hampshire border (which belt I shall henceforward take the liberty of designating as Sussex Proper), together with the seaward valleys and combes of the South Downs. To the west, the great tidal flats and swamps about Hayling Island cut off Sussex from Hampshire; and before drainage and reclamation had done their work, these marshy districts must have formed a most impassable frontier. From this point, the great woodland region of the Weald, thickly covered with primaeval forest, and tenanted by wolves, bears, wild boars, and red deer, swept round in a long curve from the swamps at Bosham and Havant to the corresponding swamps of the opposite end at Pevensey and Hurstmonceux. The belt of savage wooded country, thick with the lairs of wild beasts, which thus ringed round the greater part of the county, shut off the coastwise strip at once from all possibility of communication with the rest of England. So Sussex Proper and the combes of the Downs were naturally predestined to form a single Celtic kingdom, a single Saxon principality, and a single English shire.

It will be observed that this description leaves wholly out of consideration the strip of country about Hastings, Rye, and Winchelsea. It does so intentionally. That strip of country does not belong to Sussex in the same intimate and strictly necessary manner as the rest of the county. It probably once formed the seat of a small independent community by itself; and though there were good and obvious reasons why it should become finally united to Sussex rather than to Kent, it may be regarded as to some extent a debateable island between them. For an island it practically was in early times. At Pevensey Bay the Weald ran down into the sea by a series of swamps and bogs still artificially drained by dykes and sluices. On the other side, the Romney marshes formed a similar though wider stretch of tidal flats, reclaimed and drained at a far later period, partly through the agency of the long shingle bank thrown up round the low modern spit of Dungeness. Between them, the Hastings cliffs rose high above marsh and sea. In their rear, the Weald forest covered the ridge; so that the Hastings district (still a separate rape or division of the county) formed a sort of smaller Sussex, divided, like the larger one, from all the rest of England by a semicircular belt of marsh, forest, and marsh once more. These are the main elements out of which the history of the county is made up.

How far such conditions may have acted upon the very earliest human inhabitants of Sussex–the palaeolithic savages of the drift–before the last Glacial epoch, it is impossible to say, because we know that many of them did not then exist, and that the present configuration of the county is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain was then united to the continent by a broad belt of land, filling up the bed of the English Channel, and it possessed a climate wholly different from that of the present day; while the position of the drift and the river gravels shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in many respects unlike the existing distribution of hill and valley. We must confine ourselves, therefore, to the later or recent period (subsequent to the last glaciation of Britain), during which man has employed implements of polished stone, of bronze, and of iron.

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain–a dark white race, like the modern Basques–had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs and the sea. Here they could obtain in abundance the flints for the manufacture of their polished stone hatchets; while on the alluvial lowlands of Selsea and Shoreham they could grow those cereals upon which they largely depended for their daily bread. Neolithic monuments, indeed, are common along the range of the South Downs, as they are also on the main mass of the chalk in Salisbury Plain; and at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, we have remains of one of the largest neolithic camp refuges in Britain. The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into the Weald. In fact, it is most probable that at this early period Sussex was divided into several little tribes or chieftainships, each of which had its own clearing in the lowland cut laboriously out of the forest by the aid of its stone axes; while in the centre stood the compact village of wooden huts, surrounded by a stockade, and girt without by the small cultivated plots of the villagers. On the Downs above rose the camp or refuge of the tribe–an earthwork rudely constructed in accordance with the natural lines of the hills–to which the whole body of people, with their women, children, and cattle, retreated in case of hostile invasion from the villagers on either side. It is not likely that any foreigners from beyond the great forest belt of the Weald would ever come on the war-trail across that dangerous and trackless wilderness; and it is probable, therefore, that the camps or refuges were constructed as places of retreat for the tribes against their immediate neighbours, rather than against alien intruders from without. Hence we may reasonably conclude–as indeed is natural at such an early stage of civilisation–that the whole district was not yet consolidated under a single rule, but that each village still remained independent, and liable to be engaged in hostilities with all others. Even if extended chieftainships over several villages had already been set up, as is perhaps implied by the great tumuli of chiefs and the size of the camps in some parts of Britain, we must suppose them to have been confined for the most part to a single river valley. If so, there may have been petty Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies or chieftainships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester lowlands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur, the Ouse, and the Cuckmere River, and perhaps, too, in the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey levels and the Romney marsh. These principalities would then roughly coincide with the modern rapes of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. Each would possess its own group of villages, and tilled lowland, its own boundary of forest, and its own camp of refuge on the hill-tops. Cissbury almost undoubtedly formed such a camp for the fertile valley of the Adur and the coast strip from Worthing to Brighton. On its summit has been discovered an actual manufactory of stone implements from the copious material supplied by the flint veins in the chalk of which it is composed.