Incidentally one may digress to point out how crude and insufficient is the greater part of our hurried modern philology. But for an accident no one would have been able to work out the meaning of this name of Pevensey. It was gradually shortened (after passing through the strangest forms) to “Pemsey,” a comparatively recent change in the spelling, due perhaps to local patriotism, or perhaps to the affectation of some studious landlord who, in reproducing the ancient form, gave us the present spelling of the word, from which we are able to trace its ancient Celtic roots; but how many place-names up and down South England must have been wrongly ascribed to Teutonic origin from our ignorance of the local method of pronunciation! It is doubtful whether anything of Roman structure remains in Pevensey, though much of the material used in the castle is Roman, and though the towers of that fortification are round. It is enough to remark, that after the long night of the Saxon period the town shared in the general renaissance of South England which followed the Norman Conquest. To give but one indication of this: it trebled in population in twenty years. There is little doubt that at this period, that is, throughout the end of the eleventh century, the whole of the twelfth, and beginning of the thirteenth, the harbour lay beneath the mound of the present ruins. The contour lines, slight as they are in elevation, and the nature of the soil are enough to prove this; nor is it difficult, as one stands on the height of Pevensey Castle, to reproduce the scene which must [Illustration: CLIFFS NEAR EASTBOURNE] [Sidenote: PEVENSEY TOWN]