names of a Syrian dynasty, and even when an
usurper of another family seized the throne, he
took the names with it.

Vegetable and animal decomposition in the
bed and delta of a mighty river produced, say
the geologists, the iron of the ferruginous clays
and sands of the Wealden. The clay ironstone
was the ore of the Forest Ridge; at the western
extremity of the Iron District the ferruginous
sands were used; and in the Clay Country, a
comparatively recent concretion, or bog iron,
called iron rag, is frequently turned up by the
plough. This pudding stone is composed of clay
and gravel, and about twenty-five or thirty per
cent of oxide of iron. Crowborough is the loftiest
point of this Iron District, being about eight
hundred and four feet above the level of the sea.

Mr. Mark Antony Lower, the authority
followed by all compilers of information on this
subject, is of opinion that the iron of this
district was wrought long before the conquest of
this island by the Romans. The Britons
apprised the invaders that they knew already the
uses of iron for military purposes, by mowing
their ranks with their scythe-armed chariots.
Cæsar says their coins were iron rings of a
certain weight—a description applicable at the
present day to certain coins or moneys used by
the Chinese. Sussex and Kent were, probably,
the maritime regions, which, he says, produced
iron, although only in small quantities. Pliny
alludes to the iron smelted in Britain. Abundant
proofs of the activity of this industry during the
period of the Roman occupation have been
discovered. Scoriæ, or the cinders of the extinct
furnaces, have been extensively used in repairing
roads; and, in a heap of cinders lying ready
for use on the side of the London-road, in 1844,
a small bit of pottery attracted the attention of
the Rev. Edward Turner. On examination, it
proved to be undoubtedly Roman. The cinders,
he learned on inquiry, came from Maresfield,
his own parish, where lay a large heap of them
at a place called Old Land Farm, near Buxted.
When he visited this cinder-bed, six or seven
acres in extent, the labourers were laying bare
the remains of a Roman settlement. In a sort
of grave lay a funeral deposit of pottery.
Scarcely a barrow-load of cinders was driven
out that did not contain fragments of pottery.
Brass coins of Nero, Vespasian, Tetricus, and
Diocletian, were identified. Deeming them old
halfpence, the labourers had "chucked" Roman
coins away because "the letters on 'em was
pretty near rubbed out." Besides coins, there
were found in these acres of cinders fragments
of red or Samian ware, implements, fibulæ,
srmillæ, and mortaria.

Cæsar had recorded the unimportance of the
iron industry of the maritime regions of Albion,
and such was its insignificance in the period
subsequent to the Roman occupation, that
Sussex was not mentioned in Domesday Book
as an iron producing country, although the iron
trade of Somerset, Hereford, Gloucester,
Cheshire, and Lincoln are mentioned. A Bishop of
Chichester, even in the thirteenth century, wrote
to his steward requesting him to buy iron in the
neighbourhood of Gloucester for an hospital at
Winchester. Of the Sussex ironworks, the
earliest record is in a murage grant of Henry
the Third, authorising the town of Lewes to
exact a penny toll on every cart-load of iron from
the neighbouring weald. A Master Henry, of
Lewes, received payments a quarter of a century
later for iron work in this king's chamber, and
for his monument in Westminster Abbey. The
Crown, in the reign of Edward the First, smelted
the iron ores of St. Leonard's Forest. A
complaint was laid before the Lord Mayor by the
ironmongers of London against the smiths of
the Weald, because the irons for wheels were
shorter than they ought to be. The roads, if
roads there were in those days, were so
impassable that Sussex iron was carried to London
by water. On the authority of the Wardrobe
account (Carlton Ride MSS.), Mr. Mark Antony
Lower says:

"In the thirteenth year of Edward the Second,
Peter de Walsham, sheriff of Surrey and Sussex,
by virtue of a precept from the King's Exchequer,
made a provision of horse-shoes and nails of
different sorts for the expedition against the
Scots. The number furnished on the occasion
was 3000 horse-shoes and 29,000 nails, and
the expense of their purchase from various
places within the sheriff's jurisdiction, and their
delivery in London, by the hands of John de
Norton, clerk, was £14. 13s. 10d."

Iron ore paid tithe in Western Sussex in
1342. There is a cast-iron slab, much worn by
being trodden upon, in Durwash church, with
the inscription, in Latin: "Pray for the soul of
John Collins." Until the civil war in the time
of Charles the First, sewing needles were made
in Chichester. In many old farm-houses in
Sussex, brand-irons, brand-dogs or andirons,
such as are still used in countries which burn
wood fires, and supported the merry yule logs
of our forefathers, still retain the places they
have occupied for centuries within the ample
chimneys. The cast-iron chimney-backs were
ornamented with figures in relief of the most
various kinds. Some of the heads appear to be
portraits: one of them reminded me of the
casts of Oliver Cromwell. Among these
ornaments in relief are armorial bearings, the Royal
arms, grapes and vine-leaves, the Tudor badge
of rose and crown. Edward the Third used
hooped cannon against the Scots in 1327,
nineteen years before they were employed at Creçy
against the French, but there is no evidence
bearing on the question whether or not they
were made in Sussex. But two centuries later,
in the reign of Henry the Eighth, Ralph Hogge,
aided by one Peter Baude, a Frenchman, cast
cannon at Buxted. The device of the Hoggs,
Hoggés, or Hoggéts, or Huggets, is the animal,
and the name was, says Mr. Lower, probably of
Norman origin. The traditionary distich is
still devoutly believed in the neighbourhood of
Huget's Furnace, near Buxted and Mayfield—

Master Hugget and his man John,
They did cast the first Can-non.