voyagers like myself, all is Saxon to the back-
bone: names of places, names of people, blue
eyes and ruddy cheeks, grey churches with the
moss about their stones, old villages with the
lichens on their roofs. I forget that any alien
Italians ever held rule here, and think only of
Hengist and Horsa at the head of their Norsemen,
or of Rowena weaving the meshes of her
charms round British Vortigern. In Sussex, I
recal the days when the Normans and the
Anglo-Norman Plantagenets, with their mailed
warriors and mitred abbots, kept the Saxon
churls in subjection, and fattened on the heritage
they had won. Here, on the sea-shore, is
Pevensey, where the Conqueror landed on
that memorable September day eight hundred
years ago, and, falling on the sand, filled the
minds of his followers with gloomy omens,
till William Fitz-Osbert, the duke's steward,
exclaimed that the incident was a favourable
token, for that their leader had " embraced
England with both his hands." Here, to
the eastward, is Hastings, where the invader
made his proclamation to the English people,
giving his reasons for claiming the crown;
there, to the north, lies Battle, where the
great struggle took place, and the ruins of
the old abbey which rose in pious recognition
of the victory yet remain in the heart
of their wooded hills. Westward is Lewes,
where the rebellious barons of the reign of
Henry the Third laid the foundations of English
liberty, as was set forth in these columns more
than a year ago; and all about the downs,
and the woodlands, and the long marshes,
and the sweet grassy meadows, and the
hills that are blown by the salt breath of
the sea, are many spots of historic interest,
where the nobles wrangled and the
monks and friars feasted in the far mediaeval
days.

One might learn much of "our rough island
story" by merely travelling from town to town
in this county of Sussex, visiting the ancient
relics, and looking up the traditions. Rye
would tell us of the reign of Stephen, when
William de Ypres, Earl of Kent, built Ypres
Tower, now used as a jail; of Queen Elizabeth,
who gave to the town church its communion
table and its clock, both said to have been
taken from the Spanish Armada; and of the
attacks on the coast made by the French in
1377 and 1448. Winchelsea, with its sand-
choked harbour and its decayed prosperity,
would speak mournfully of the time when the
waves came up to its feet, bringing with them
the commerce of distant lands, after having
engulphed the old city that had been founded
by the Romans. Arundel Castle carries us
back to the age of Alfred, and even into the
core of old English legendary romance, for the
sometime warder was no less a man than the
giant Bevis of Hampton; and yet the very
same stones are eloquent of the great " war of
ideas" in the seventeenth century, when the
fortress was twice taken within two months—
first by the Royalists, and afterwards by the
Parliamentarians. The ruins of Pevensey Castle,
reposing slumberously in their wide tract of
marshland, amidst the flat green meadows, the
long meandering dykes, and the countless herds
of sleepy-eyed cattle, is a very incrustation of
history, from the era of the Romans, who built
the outer walls, to that of the Normans, who
reared the inner towers, and so down the grand
expanse of our later annals to comparatively
recent times, with many a story of war and
festival, and woful imprisonment of kings and
queens and princes. Along the coast, from
Beachey Head to Selsey BilI, and for miles inland,
the soil is thickly strewn with Saxon and
Norman antiquities; and the sight of the coast
guardsmen, lounging about with the inseparable
telescope under the left arm, will remind us of
the period when a guard was needed for something
more than anti-smuggling purposes— viz.
for the protection of the maritime towns and
villages from the ravages of piratical Frenchmen
and Spaniards. Past these coasts, in the
summer of 1588, sailed the Great Armada which
was to make us all vassals of his Most Catholic
Majesty and the Pope; and many an anxious
eye must have looked seaward from the coast
towns and headlands at the slow passage of
that portentous cloud upon the waters. More
than two centuries earlier— in 1350— the
Spaniards were encountered not far from
Winchelsea by an English fleet under the
command of Edward the Third in person,
and were beaten, with the loss of fourteen
ships; during the progress of which action,
gentle Philippa was staying at William de
Echyngham's house at Udimore, trembling for
the safety of her lord and children, the more
so as her attendants, who had watched the
battle from the hills, told her that the Spaniards
had forty large ships. You can scarcely mention
a single town or village along the coast,
but you find traditions of the place having
been sacked and harried several times by
the French and Spaniards. In 1545, a party
of marauders belonging to the former nation
made a descent on Seaford, with a view to
advancing on Lewes, but were repulsed by a
gentleman of that town, named Sir Nicholas
Pelham; concerning whom and his feat of
arms, a punning epitaph-writer composed this
couplet:

What time the French sought to have sack't
Seafoord,
This Pelham did repel 'em back aboord.

A French army landed at Rottingdean in
1377, and marched over the downs towards
Lewes, but were defeated, and obliged to take to
their ships again. Winchelsea, Rye, Hastings,
Brighthelmstone, and Newhaven, have all at
various times felt the fury of these maritime
assaults; and even as late as 1690, a French
squadron caused great alarm all along the Sussex
coast, and fired into Hastings. We who have
inherited the traditions of the times of Rodney