existed between the harbours to the north and the south of the Channel. It was from Bosham that Harold sailed; the Court of Edward had been full of Normans, and one has but to cross the Channel in a little boat to see how the advance of the arts after the darkness of the ninth century must have increased communication between Normandy and the shores of Sussex. A man will run in a five tonner from Shoreham to Dieppe close hauled into a fresh south-westerly wind between the morning and the evening of a summer’s day; he will run from Dieppe into Rye with such a wind on his quarter during the daylight of almost any day in the year, except perhaps in the mid-winter season. With such a wind William sailed from St. Valery in the autumn of 1066. He landed at Pevensey. He marched along the coast to Hastings, and then struck up north and a little east for four or five miles to where the Saxon force lay on the defensive upon a rounded height above the valley of the Brede, called “Hastings Plain.” A pedantic discussion, into which we need not enter, has waged round the exact name of the spot where the battle was fought. One of the principal authorities for the history of the battle (but not a contemporary authority) calls it several times “Senlac.” It is just possible that he was mis-spelling some local name. Halnacker is similarly mis-spelt “Hanac” in the title deeds of Boxgrove Abbey. But the name as it stands is a Gascon name, and in all probability was given to some portion of the land long after the battle because a Gascon gentleman had acquired manorial rights there. Every other authority alludes to it as Hastings, or Hastings Plain, and every Sussex man can see why, for there is nothing commoner in the country than the calling of one of the uplands by the name of some neighbouring, inhabited, and settled spot in the lowlands, possibly because the inhabitants of that neighbouring and inhabited spot had some sort of territorial rights in the upland place so named. Thus one has on the Downs, between Arundel and Goodwood, “Fittleworth Wood,” six or seven miles away from Fittleworth itself, and the use of the word “plain” for a stretch of the uplands is as common as can be,--for instance Plummers Plain between Lower Beeding and Handcross. We may take it, then, for the purposes of this short description, that among the Saxons of the time, or rather the local Sussex men of the time, “Hastings Plain” was the name given to the hill of stunted trees and grass up which the [Illustration: FITTLEWORTH VILLAGE] [Sidenote: THE NORMAN WEALD] Normans charged late on that October afternoon. By sunset the issue was determined, and the victory gave the crumbling and anarchic Saxon state back again to Europe. The disorders of the Church were reformed, a centralised and efficient government was introduced, the art of building received, as it always does with the coming of fresh vigour, a vast impetus, and the history of the England that we know began.