AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 205 



Essex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht.' When the 

 royal house of the South Saxons died out, Sussex still 

 retained a sort of separate existence within the West 

 Saxon State, as Wales does in the England of our own 

 day. JEthelwulf made his son under-king of Kent, 

 Essex, Surrey, and Sussex ; and so, during the troublous 

 times of the Danish invasion, when all southern England 

 became one in its resistance to the heathen, those old 

 principalities gradually sank into the position of pro- 

 vinces or shires. 



From the period of union with the general West 

 Saxon Kingdom (which grew slowly into the Kingdom 

 of England under Eadgar and Cnut), the markland of 

 the Weald seems to have been gradually encroached 

 upon from the south. Most of the names in that dis- 

 trict are distinctly ' Anglo-Saxon ' in type ; by which 

 I mean that they were imposed before the Norman 

 Conquest, and belong to the stage of the language then 

 in use. Even during the Eoman period, settlements for 

 iron-mining existed in the Weald, and these clearings 

 would of course be occupied by the English colonists at 

 a comparatively early time. Just at the foot of the 

 Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan 

 settlements on the edge of the Weald, which must date 

 from the first period of English colonisation. Such are 

 Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, and Chilting- 

 ton. Farther in, however, the clan names grow rarer; 

 and where we find them they are not hams or tuns, regular 

 communities of Saxon settlers, but they show, by their 

 forestine terminations of hurst, ley, den, and field, that 

 they were mere outlying shelters of hunters or swineherds 



