200 AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 



Country or the Weald, to enslave the captives, the 

 women, and the children, and to secure the Teutonic 

 colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or hill. 

 On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, 

 with a vague and ill-defined internal border, had harder 

 work to fight their way in against a united Welsh 

 resistance ; and it was only very slowly that they pushed 

 across the central watershed, to dismember the uncon- 

 quered remnant of the Britons at last into the three 

 isolated bodies of Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon), 

 Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is probably why 

 the earliest settlements were made in these isolated 

 coast regions, and why the inward progress of the 

 other colonies was so relatively slow. 



The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three 

 fertile bits of the county the coast belt of Sussex 

 Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and the isolated Hastings 

 district because these were the best adapted for their 

 strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of .ZElle, 

 I do not suppose that they were all united from the first 

 under a single principality. It seems far more probable 

 that each little clan settlement was at first wholly inde- 

 pendent ; that afterwards three little chieftainships grew 

 up in the three fertile strips typified, perhaps, by the 

 story of JElle's three sons and that the whole finally 

 coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, 

 which is the state in which we find the county inBaeda's 

 time. As ever, its boundaries were marked out for it by 

 nature, for the Weald remained as yet an almost unbroken 

 forest ; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea, 

 Eomney, and many others, show by their common 



