lingered on as a batch of islands, flooded at high tide, until comparatively recent times. It is said that even as late as the Tudors the patch now known as “The Park” was really a park, and that the rapid current known as the Looe stream corresponded to a ravine in that royal domain. At any rate the whole place is to-day a mass of tangled rocks and shallows, mixed up with which we may presume are the ruins of the Roman and early Saxon buildings. It is known as the “Owers,” and there stands upon it a lighthouse which is one of the principal marks of the Sussex coast; nor can any ships of considerable burthen go between these rocks and the shore. The great liners on their way to Southampton all pass outside: the fishing-boats and coasting-vessels can take the shorter inner passage, if they have a tide with them, through the Looe stream. The remaining history of Sussex until the advent of the Normans is obscure and meagre. Here, as in the rest of England, the barbarism of the Dark Ages was tempered, of course, by the existence of the historic and organised machinery of the Catholic Church, but they remained barbaric, and nowhere more barbaric than in Britain. The wound of the Saxon invasion was never really healed. There are those who maintain that we feel its effects to this day. From the period of the conversion which may roughly be said to have occupied the last twenty years of the seventh century, right away down to the tenth, with its violent internal convulsions ending in the Danish conquest, Sussex almost disappears from history. It is true to say that in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of this period we hear more of Gaul than we do of the English county. It must have been singularly free from the storm of the Danish invasions until close upon the end of the ninth century, when we get the landing of Hasting and his march up the valley of the Rother. But even that raid failed, for Alfred had already restored peace to the south of England. It is at this period also that we begin to have historical evidence of the existence of the fortified places of Sussex. The opportunities afforded by Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, and the rest must have been recognised from prehistoric times. There also existed from prehistoric times the great entrenchments on the Downs. But it is not until the close of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries that we get documentary proofs of the way in which these [Illustration: MALLING MILL] [Sidenote: THE STRATEGIC POINTS] advantages were seized. Thus we know from Alfred’s will that at the beginning of the tenth century Arundel was already fortified and already a king’s castle.