HASTINGS OF BYGONE DAYS.
References to Pre-Historic, British, Roman, Saxon, and Norman Hastings
ITS EARLY HISTORY.
I have already said in the preface to this work that my object has been to gather together a series of pictorial evidences of Old Hastings, so far as I have been enabled, and to set them side by side with views of the same localities of the present day, rather than to attempt to deal with its ancient history, a subject already covered by learned writers connected by birth or residence with the county of Sussex, whose several works are open to all who wish to consult them. To my local readers, our Reference Library at Claremont and the Hastings Museum will afford abundant and intensely interesting evidences of the antiquity and importance of Hastings, and the part played by its men and ships in the King's service in bygone days. Whether the town was a Roman station or not (upon which chroniclers differ), the contiguity of its hills to the mainland, the flat and marshy lands stretching to Beachy Head on the west, and to the Kentish hills on the east, the Forest Ridge on the north, and the haven formed by its hills and valleys, and other physical causes, have led some historians to the belief that Caesar in his Commentaries referred to the coast and people of our isle, represented by Sussex and Kent, and that he found the aborigines a more superior and intelligent people than those in the interior.
David Hume, in his History of England, briefly refers to this subject as follows : "All ancient writers agree in representing the first inhabitants of Britain as a tribe of the Gauls or Celtae who peopled the island from the neighbouring continent. Their language was the same, their manners, their government, their superstition, varied only by those small differences which time or a communication with the bordering nations must necessarily introduce. The Greek and Roman navigators or merchants (for there were scarcely any other travellers in those days) brought back the most shocking accounts of the ferocity of the people, which they magnified, as usual, in order to excite the admiration of their country -
