Page:On everything.djvu/192

On Everything land. Thus the Wealden man. now that be 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 176