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Our favourite walks were away in the country through Willingdon to Polegate, over Beachy Head, returning through East Dean to Litlington and its famed tea-garden, or across Pevensey Levels to Wartling, for we always preferred the more unfrequented ways.
And Pevensey was, of course, the best match imaginable.... No, it would be too heartless to dismiss George Buhner outright. It was unreasonable of him to desert her because a Gascon threatened to go to mass: but, after all, she would probably marry George, in the end. He was really almost unendurably silly, though, about England and freedom and religion and right and wrong and things like that.
This coast was guarded by a fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South Saxons. "Ælle and Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and slew all that were therein, nor was there afterward one Briton left."
If so, there may have been petty Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies or chieftainships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester lowlands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur, the Ouse, and the Cuckmere River, and perhaps, too, in the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey levels and the Romney marsh.
It was in Pevensey Bay, in Sussex, at Bulverhithe, between the castle of Pevensey and Hastings, that the last conquerors of this island landed on the 29th of September, 1066.
Beyond the Downs again, to the north, the country descended abruptly to the deep trough of the Weald, whose cold and sticky clays or porous sandstones are never of any use for purposes of tillage. Hence, as its very name tells us, the Weald has always been a wild and wood-clad region. The Romans knew it as the Silva Anderida, or forest of Pevensey; the early English as the Andredesweald.
A short distance inland from Pevensey is the great Sussex cattle-market at Hailsham, where the old Michelham Priory is used as a farm-house and its crypt as a dairy. Not far away is Hurstmonceux Castle, a relic of the times of Henry VI., and built entirely of brick, being probably the largest English structure of that material constructed since the Roman epoch.
For looking southward over the often steep escarpment, always between three and five hundred feet over the sea plain, we may see Pevensey Castle, the landing, Hastings, the port, and at last come to Battle, the scene of the fight that gave England to the Norman for our enormous good and glory and honour.
The Norman armament, proceeding in great order, arrived without any material loss, at Pevensey, in Sussex; and the army quietly disembarked. The duke himself, as he leaped on shore, happened to stumble and fall; but had the presence of mind, it is said, to turn the omen to his advantage, by calling aloud that he had taken possession of the country.
Now when Pevensey had gone the room seemed darkened by the withdrawal of so much magnificence. Cynthia watched from the window as the tall earl rode away, with three handsomely clad retainers. Yes, George was very fine and admirable, no doubt of it: even so, there was relief in the reflection that for a month or two she was rid of him.
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