so as to form true provinces and thus to intensify the life of the nation. These regrets may or may not be just, but Godwin very nearly succeeded in satisfying that ideal. He was by far the greatest man in Sussex, as he was in England. He held nearly sixty manors, and that not merely in a technical sense and for a merely military reason, as did the great overlords immediately later under the Conqueror hold manors in yet larger numbers, but actually (we may presume) and with a true lordship. Among them are many names to be recognised to-day. There is Beeding which is under the Downs, beyond Bramber, a place called with fine irony Upper Beeding; it lies in a hollow, damp all the year round, while Lower Beeding is set upon a high hill. There is Climping, the seaside village near Little Hampton, of which little now remains. There is Rottingdean, Brighton itself, Fulking, Salescombe, Wiston (which is the master of Chactonbury), and Ashington and Washington close by. Godwin, indeed, for his economic power reposed upon Sussex, and it is curious that his connection with the county has been so little emphasised by historians. With the Norman Conquest, Sussex, like the rest of England, re-enters history. And that in a peculiar manner, for, as has been seen, of all the districts of England, Sussex had suffered the deepest eclipse during the barbaric period, and by the peculiar fact that the invasion of civilisation came from Normandy, was most advantaged in the period immediately following. The contrast was abrupt and striking. Here was a district of which, as we have seen, practically no mention is made between the fall of the Roman power and the last efforts of Godwin. It is cut off from the rest of England by the Andred’s Weald. The only considerable story in connection with it is that of its conversion. It can boast no great monasteries founded in that time, as all the rest of England can boast; it can show no great military leader, nor even the scene of any great military disaster, for Ockley itself was beyond its borders. The advent of the last invaders, but invaders this time who bring with them constructive power and the full European tradition, is from the shore immediately opposing its own. A short day’s sail away there ran the coast of Normandy, where a race of Gallo-Romans, with a slight but transforming admixture of Scandinavian blood, were chafing under their superabundant energy. Already for nearly a century a great intercourse must have [Illustration: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, RYE] [Sidenote: THE NORMAN INVASION]