THE VICTORIA COUNTY HISTORIES.*
WE have before us five first volumes of this magnificent series. It would be unreasonable to complain of this publishing by instalments. One reason, and this obviously imperative, probably is that it takes much time to get together the neces- sary matter, and that the public must have something to go on with. But the plan is not satisfactory to the reviewer; he would much prefer to have the whole of one county history before him at a time. Still, to leave these stately volumes without notice till they were complete would be unfair. He can at least fulfil the useful function of giving some idea of what they contain. We select for more detailed notice two of the five volumes, Durham. and Sussex, two counties divided by nearly the whole length of England, and differing in many important respects.
Durham, Vol. ; Sumer, VoL I.; Derby, Vol. L; Worcester, VoL U: Lan- ...caster, Vol. L "Victoria County History," Edited by William Page, P.S.A. London : A. Constable and Co. Pls. 65. each net per vol.' The history of a county begins rightly enough with it; geology. About a quarter, to speak roughly, of the area of Durham (647,332 acres) is occupied by coal measures. Sussex, with its 933,269 acres, lacks these altogether, while it has the greensands, weald-clay, and other formations which the Northern county lacks. The colouring of the two regions has, indeed, scarcely a point of resemblance. And here the physical touches closely upon the industrial history of the counties. Sussex, with the vast woodlands to which its soil is suited, was once the home of the iron-working industry, which has now one of its busiest abodes in Durham. But coal has supplanted wood, and only some forge ponds—the forges themselves have disappeared—remain to testify to the past. As, however, the industrial section is one of the portions for which we have to wait in both histories, we must pass on. Still, it is interesting to observe that efforts have been made to redress the loss. A search was made in South Sussex for the coal which lies under the secondary formations. It failed because of the unexpected thickening of some of the Jurassic clays. Nearly two thousand feet were bored through, and the Oxford clay was still untraversed, and there might be any thickness of other strata yet to be dealt with. After geology comes palaeontology, and here the Southern county has the superiority. Four pages, to take a rough-and-ready measure, suffice for Durham ; Sussex requires nearly three times as much. It is particularly rich in the remains of reptiles and fishes, the former from the Wealden, the latter from the clay. In the remains of the mammoth and kindred species Sussex is superior, Durham showing only one specimen, a fragment of tusk the age of which is somewhat doubtful. Passing on to the present, we find the marine zoology of Sussex occupying between thirty and forty pages, while that of Durham is limited to three. It will be remembered that the coast-line of the Southern county is nearly double that of the Northern. This length, together with the large area of the Sussex woodlands (amounting to something like an eighth of its total area), accounts for its richness in insects, a department of life in which it is equalled by Kent and Hampshire only, and possibly Norfolk. This section covers one hundred and twenty pages; in Durham it extends to somethiug less than half that number. The mammals are much about the same in the two counties, not- withstanding the marked difference in the density of popula- tion, which is not less than three to one in the Northern as compared with the Southern. Practically the fox and the otter alone of the larger animals remain, both of them owing their survival to the cruel kindness of man, who kills them indeed, but only secundunt artem. Seals used to frequent the sands at the mouth of the Tees leas than a century ago, but the traffic has driven them away. They are not unfrequent visitors on the Sussex coast. Coming to man, we find Sussex considerably the richer in prehistoric remains. We are furnished with special maps for each county, and see that, allowing for the difference of area, the finds are twice as frequent in Sussex. In Durham there are no traces of Palaeolithic man, while seven spots in Sussex are marked as affording indications of his presence. Generally the western division of the county is the richer, excepting, indeed, the section which is marked out by drawing a line from Pevensey, through Polegate and Alfriston, to Newhaven. The caves at Lavant, a little to the north-east of Chichester, have yielded a rich harvest of antiquities. Heathery Burn Cave, near Stanhope, on the other hand, was a very remarkable find, but the objects discovered in it belong entirely to the Bronze Age. They have a singular interest because they represent "the entire personal property of a family" at one time. "Everything which was in the dwelling-place when the occupants perished, probably by drowning, remained undis- turbed on the floor under a layer of stalagmite." Among them were two bronze swords, eight spearheads, three knives, a razor, about twenty axes, clinch pins, rings and armlets. There were also ornaments of stone, a bead of amber, and—pathetic record of childish fancy !—a necklace of two periwinkles and a whelk. By a judicious arrangement, adopted for the whole " Victoria " series, the "Earthworks" are classified by shape instead of by dates, which must necessarily be often conjectural. The subject thus acquires a wide extent. Many of the hill camps must go back to prehistoric times—Cissbury, near Worthing, for instance, contains within its enclosure pits from which flints
were dug for the making of implements—while at the other end of the scale we have such a work as the moat of Bodiam Castle. (As a crenellated manor house it belongs to the last decade but one of the fourteenth century, but the moat may have been earlier.) Durham has nothing to show for the earlier part of this long period, nor even as far down as the late Celtic age. Mr. L. Chalkley Gould, who writes this chapter, gives as a reason that the county was the central part of the territory of the Brigantes,—central, and therefore safe. Life in Sussex, with the sea and its freebooting wayfarers so near at hand, was less secure. It is in the latter county that we have also more notable remains of Roman occupation,—the camp at Hardliam, and the walled towns of Pevensey and Chichester.
When we come to Domesday Book, the matter for com- parison fails, for the Survey was not extended to Durham. The Sussex portion of the Book is even more than ordinarily full of interest. The county felt, as one might expect, the effects of the Conquest more than any other part of England. William's action with regard to his monumental foundation of Battle is full of significance. He began by endowing the Abbey which was to commemorate his victory with all the land within a radius of three miles from the church. That must have meant, when we come to consider it, not a little overriding of private rights. Ecclesiastical properties as well as lay, the bides of priests as well as of villeins and cottars, must have been con- fiscated. We know, indeed, that the property of religious foundations did not escape. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself had five of the eighty hides of his South Mailing manor taken from him by the Count of Mortain, the Con- queror's half-brother. Still, whatever rapacity the new owners may have used, the Survey shows that, on the whole, the county had not depreciated in value. Elsewhere we often find that the value Tempore Regis Edvardi is greater than that marked as the value "now." Sometimes this record occurs, but it is commonly the other way. Three times are marked in the Survey : the T.R.E., "afterwards" (i.e., the time of the Conquest) and "now" (the date of the Survey, 1086). The second of these is always the least; but the third is often in excess of the first. Staninger [Steyning] is a characteristic instance. "In the time of King Edward it was worth 86 pounds, and afterwards M) pounds : Now 100 pounds, and yet it is at farm for 122 pounds all but two shillings." The next entry, Berie [Bury] Hundred, gives 12 pounds for King Edward's time and afterwards "Now 24 pounds." As Mr. J. H. Round and his collaborator in writing the introduction put it, "although the immediate affect of the Conquest was disastrous to Sussex, the injury was but temporary, and by 1086 almost all the wasted manors had recovered, and many had surpassed their original values. (Freeman seems to have made a curious mistake in saying that many of the Sussex manors were still " waste " in 1086; the term is applied to the " afterwards " period.) Though Durham is not mentioned in Domesday, it has its Boldon Book. This is indeed a very different thing. It is about a century later, and it was drawn up for a different purpose. It was a statement of the revenues of the bishopric, " omnes reditus Episcopatus, assisas et consuetudines." Of course it is of very great value and interest, but it does not afford the material for anything like a comparison of the two counties.
The specialities of the Durham volume are an interesting account by Dean Kitchin of St. Cuthbert's Shrine. The wanderings of the Saint's remains make a curious story. They began in 875, they ended in 988, their course being marked in many places by the dedication of a church to the Saint who had made there his temporary home. The question of their incorruptibility still, we believe, remains unsettled. Roman archaeologists, though they cannot point to a definite place as containing the imperishable deposit, maintain that wherever it is, it continues untouched by decay, and this is a proposition which it would be difficult to disprove. Another chapter, full of interest of a different kind, is Mr. Leach's chapter on " Schools " ; but we cannot attempt to deal with it at the end of a review, and must be content with expressing a general assent to its conclusions. We must also leave untouched Mr. Saltzmann's article on the "Political History" of the county. It is a region marked out by its position to be the scene of critical events. It has been such in the past, and unless the millennium comes more quickly * The Memoirs of Dr. Thomas than we have any reason to hope, it is likely to be suoh in the
future. It remains only to express our warm admiration of the way in which these volumes have been planned and. executed.
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