The Rape of Chichester has this character to differentiate it from the other rapes of the county, that it is not military. Two explanations of this fact concur and supplement each other. The Rape of Chichester led nowhere, and had no gap in its hills, and the Rape of Chichester was dominated by the Church. We have seen that all the Rapes of Sussex, leading as they did from north to south, tended to group themselves round highways from the Channel to the Thames valley, and Chichester, with its large though shallow harbour, certainly did afford an admirable entry into England for early navigation; but, once one had made the town, one’s way to London and the North lay up the Stane Street, and this Roman road went through no populous districts nor through any of those gaps which men (after Roman times) would naturally seek for their advance, but went straight over the bleak and desolate Downs, and by the time it got to the crest of these it was within half an hour’s smart riding of the garrison of Arundel. Westward no man would go. The marshes prevented him. Neither would he advance northward; he would have found in that direction, after crossing the pass at Singleton, a fertile valley indeed to raid, but no good opportunity for further progress. Before him would have lain the large sandy wastes which began at what is now the Sussex border by Fernhurst, and continued right on to the neighbourhood of the Thames. They are to-day filling up with villas, but they were, throughout the centuries in which our history was made, empty deserts yielding no corn and affording no shelter of towns or villages to an army. Supposing that an enemy, as for instance a pirate raid of the Danes, were [Illustration: MERMAID STREET, RYE] [Sidenote: ITS ECCLESIASTICAL CHARACTER] making for the lowlands of the Rother valley, or farther on for the rich pastures of the Wey (where later was to spring up the wealth and magnificence of Waverley), such a sailors’ raid would certainly have proceeded up the Arun and tried to force its way past Amberley Castle. It would never have made the attempt through Chichester.