The Weald as it appears to us first, is the secure home of those who first smelted the ironstone in which it abounds, and as such it remained during many ages.  But the two main facts about it which help to explain everything in its history are first that it consisted for the most part of clay, and secondly that it was everywhere ill watered.  Let us consider these things.

The Weald, even as we see it to-day, tilled and cultivated and tended though it be, remains largely a country of scattered woodland, very thickly wooded, indeed, as seen in a glance from any height of the Downs, but revealing itself, as we traverse it, as a country of isolated woods, often of oak, and with here and there the remains of a wild and rough moorland country, of which, as we may think, in the Roman times, it, for the most part, consisted.  It later possessed some six forests properly so called, but itself was never a legal forest nor in any sense of the words an impenetrable wood.  It always possessed homesteads, farms and steadings, but almost nowhere within it was there a great or populous town; men lived there it is true, but always in a sort of isolation.  And this was so not because the Weald was an impassable forest of woodland and undergrowth—­it was never that; but because of its scarcity of water or more accurately its uncertainty of water and its soil, the Wealden clay.  The state of affairs anciently obtaining in the Weald does not fundamentally differ from what obtains to-day, and in a word it was and is this:  in dry weather there is no water, but the going is good; in wet weather there is plenty of water, but the going is impossible.  Of course, these conditions have in modern times been modified by the building of roads and the sinking of wells and the better embankment and preservation of the rivers, but in Roman times, as later, the Weald was an obstacle because it was difficult, though never impossible, to cross on account of the badness of the going or the lack of water.  It was a secure hiding-place for such a fugitive as a Saxon king because he could not be pursued by an army; he himself with a few followers could move from steading to steading and enjoy a certain amount of state, but a pursuing army would have perished.

Evidence in support of this explanation of the secret and character of the Weald is not far to seek.  The Weald lay between the Channel and its ports, that is to say, the entries into England from the continent, and the Thames valley; it was then an obstacle that had to be overcome.  Had it been merely a great woodland forest, it would not have troubled the Romans who would merely have driven a great road through it.  But the Romans had more to face than an impenetrable woodland or the roughness of the country; they had to overcome the lack of water, and therefore in the Weald their day’s march of some twelve miles was pressed to double its normal length.  The French armies, according to Mr Belloc, do exactly the same