Sussex, then, has been naturally delimited in its growth by the forest of the Weald all along the north, and by these two groups of marshes at the extreme east and west of the county; and the older our record the greater importance assumed by towns within reach of, or upon, the sea. Thus Midhurst, Petworth, Pulboro, Horsham, Mayfield, Battle, come all of them comparatively late in the history of the development of the county. Chichester, Arundel, Lewes, Hastings, Pevensey, come early in that development, and so does Bramber with its harbour of Old Shoreham. Pevensey and Chichester are associated with a Roman name; Bramber, or rather its neighbour Shoreham, and Pevensey (again) with the first of the Saxon invasions. Arundel with the reign of King Alfred; Hastings and (for the third time) Pevensey with the Norman invasion; whereas the other towns that lie in a belt northward upon the edge of the Weald are not heard of till the Middle Ages. The present boundaries of the county are necessarily somewhat artificial, though they conform fairly closely to the natural features which we have just been considering. Their artificiality is most easily seen along the north. The true line of division should run along the ridge of the forests: St Leonards and Ashdown. As a fact, political and organised Sussex overlaps this ridge and takes in part of what is geographically Surrey upon the north. The reason of this is that during many centuries the Weald was so sparsely inhabited that the Surrey villages under the North Downs, and the Sussex villages under the South Downs, thrust out long extensions into the forest, a custom which gave to those parishes a most peculiar shape. They were drawn into strips, as it were, whose inhabitants dwelt clustered at one end of the elongated band. A phenomenon of much the same kind is to be discovered along the St. Lawrence in Canada, where each village clustered upon the river claims a long strip of hinterland behind it into the forest of the north. The line of division between these Surrey parishes, which stretched out southwards into the forest and these Sussex villages which stretched out northward to meet them, was probably never clearly defined, and was, indeed, of little importance. The [Illustration: MAYFIELD] [Sidenote: PARISHES OF WEALD] farther one got from the village church and the group of houses, the less it mattered under whose jurisdiction one fell, and when, with the growth of civilisation and the necessity for exact boundaries, a line was at last drawn, it was drawn somewhat in favour of the Sussex parishes, whose manorial lords were of greater political importance than those of Surrey: for the reason that they held the great castles which defended the south of England. It was, presumably, in this way that the ribbon of land which lies to the north of the forest ridge came to be included within the political boundaries of the modern county.