AMONG the changes that have come upon England with the practice and facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many parts of their own country—Cobbett was one—but they were rare. As the towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men, and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable. So it is with the Weald.All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue lines and naked heights a day’s journey away against the sky—all that is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey (which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald, yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden country lies.

Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it. Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently appreciating the future of one’s own land. Thus the Wealden man, now that he knows so much else in England, can tell the historian that the Weald was never the impenetrable forest which historians would make of it. It lay in a barrier between the ports of the Channel and the Thames Valley. But the barrier was not uninhabited; it was not impassable. Its scattered brushwood was patchy, its soil never permanently marshy nor ever for long distances difficult for a mounted man or a man on foot. The Weald from the very beginning had homesteads in it, but it had not agglomerations of houses, nor had it parishes save in very few places. If you look at the map now you can see how the old parishes stretch northward and southward in long strips from the chalk and loam country up towards the forest ridge which is the centre of the Weald. Those long strips were the hunting rights of the village folk and their lords. Of some parishes carved out of the central Weald we can accurately tell the origin. We know that they were colonised as it were, cleared, and had their church built for them in the great spurt of civilisation which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Men would understand the early history of the Weald better, and with it the early military history of South-Eastern England, if they would take one of the old forest paths—as that from Rusper, for instance, which works its way down, now as a metalled road, now as a green lane, now as a mere footpath with right of way, past the two old “broad” fords on the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in the Weald is exemplified in such a journey—and it is a journey which, though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have formed highways for armies—for instance, all that rotten land in the great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the Solitarium, and which the French called the Sologne. But the Weald differs from most others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence that the Romans, when they built their great military road—perhaps their only purely military road in Britain—across the Weald skipped one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout history—a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue, but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men.

The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then: it is so now.

And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered. It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done. Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons.

Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly spelled as well:

Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis.

She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a watcher of the generations.