[Illustration: PULBOROUGH] [Sidenote: OTHER ROMAN WAYS] Some have maintained that one such road ran from the mouth of the Adur up to London, and another from Pevensey through Mayfield also to London. It is absolutely certain that in the Roman time there must have been roads following some such tracks: evidences of one, at least, have been discovered at Haywards Heath and at Reigate, while it is a fair inference that the march of William the Conqueror from Pevensey through Hastings up on to Hastings Plain, where he fought his great battle, was made along an ancient way. But it may be doubted whether any of the other lines of communication in Sussex were of a true military nature, or possessed the permanence of what we usually call a Roman road. At any rate, they have left no evidences which warrant our asserting that they were ever of the same nature as the great Stane Street. We know one or two more things about Roman Sussex. We know that the industry of the Eastern Weald was an iron industry. We may be fairly certain that there must have been a flourishing agriculture along the sea-plain to maintain its great towns; but we know nothing more until we enter with the Saxon invasions, the beginning of the second phase in the history of the county. These invasions are themselves mythical in their details. Though the main fact of their success at the eastern and southern coast-line is historical beyond dispute their story reposes upon legends, which, as the reader need hardly be reminded, are not trustworthy. From the oral traditions of a very barbarous people possessed of hardly any continuous institutions, split up into dozens of little tribes which differed from each other in local patois, and were possessed of no unity or national spirit, the tales of the pirate raids were handed on till at last they were written down hundreds of years after, when civilisation had once more penetrated into the southern and eastern part of the island, and a sort of rude literature could re-arise to give them for what they were worth. A traditional and probably mythical being, called in the legend “Aella,” is reported to have effected the first regular landing upon the Sussex coast towards the beginning of the sixth century, or rather to have turned into a permanent settlement those temporary raids which had been common for a century and more before his time. The feature of this invasion which most powerfully struck the barbaric imagination was the fall of Anderida. So violent was the effect produced upon the victims and their [Illustration: HARTFIELD--THE INN] [Sidenote: THE BREAK-DOWN OF ROME]