AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 



190 



tlie soil, and holding in check the native subject popu- 

 lation of Anglicised Celt-Euskarian churls. Now, in 

 Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against 

 13 in Surrey beyond the Weald (where the clan names 

 also sink to 18), and 8 in Hertfordshire. Or, to put it 

 another way, which I borrow from Mr. Isaac Taylor, in 

 Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 square miles ; in 

 Kent to every 24 : in Dorset to every 30 ; in Surrey to 

 every 58 ; in Herts to every 79 ; in Gloucester to every 

 97 ; in Derby to every 162 ; in Warwick to every 179 ; 

 and in Lancashire to every 302. In other words, while 

 in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabit- 

 ants clustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small 

 servile population, in Mercia and the west the English 

 population was much more sparsely scattered, with a 

 relatively great servile population. So, as late as the 

 time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves men- 

 tioned in the great survey (only a small part, probably, 

 of the total) numbered only 10 per cent, of the population, 

 while in Devon and Cornwall they numbered 20 per 

 cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per cent. 



These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the 

 first attacks must necessarily be made upon the east and 

 south coasts, and that the inland districts and the west 

 must only slowly be conquered afterward. Especially 

 was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four 

 isolated regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and 

 Sussex, each of which was cut off from the rest of 

 England in early times by impassable fens, marshes, 

 forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welsh 

 fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen 



