Those who deal most with the statistics of the early Middle Ages seem most blind to the conclusions of common sense. When they are told that only ten or twenty burgesses are to be discovered in a particular town, according to the evidence of some taxing list, they are willing to jump to the conclusion that only ten or twenty families existed in the place at the time the list was made. Instead of appreciating the very natural attitude of any tax-gatherer to save himself all possible labour, and the certitude that he would put down only those who were assessed in his particular tax, and instead of grasping the fact that, until the later Middle Ages, men paid taxes, not by localities, but by categories (some as King’s men, some as local baron’s men, some as the Church’s men, others according to all manner of local apportionments), they take the very crude way of estimating the particular document they have as an index of total population. It is this, for example, which has led to the astounding conclusion that England at the time of the Norman invasion held less than two million souls, and it is this which makes people misunderstand, if they read modern histories, the nature of a town like Arundel. So long as the spur above the Arun was protected by marshes and isolated by a narrow neck from the main range of the Downs, so long would it tempt men to form a stronghold there, and the moment that stronghold was held by national forces under the obedience of a national King, it presupposed a county town. It presupposed defence for a market (the later _license_ for a market is quite a different thing; the market existed often for centuries before the license which was usually [Illustration: MIDHURST--KNOCK HUNDRED ROW] [Sidenote: ARUNDEL TOWN] only the proof of the King’s growing power); it presupposed butchers under the castle walls, money-changers, men coming to and from the garrison for every sort of purpose, carriers, and--to quote a particular point--barbers; the men of the Dark and early Middle Ages were clean shaven. An Arab fortress does not arise nowadays without a town at its foot, still less would the civilisation of the Dark and Middle Ages produce the stronghold without producing a town as well. And a town means something more than a village.