Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly Teutonised counties
in England. The proportion of Saxon blood is very marked: light hair
and blue eyes, together with the broad and short English skull, are
common even among the peasantry. The number of English Clan names
noticed by Mr. Kemble in the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 as
against 60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex, 21 in largely
Celtic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Cornwall, and none in Monmouth.
The size and number of the hundreds into which the county is divided
tells us much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a group of one
hundred free English families, settled on the soil, and holding in
check the native subject population 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 inhabitants
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 mentioned
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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