The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things. Tim Radford

this accidental epic contains another narrative, one from which the history of human science and technology grows. At intervals in the chalk are puzzling inclusions called flints. Chalk is soft, flint is hard; a lump of chalk can be of any size or shape, but flints are knobbly, uneven things usually measured in centimetres or tens of centimetres. The exterior of flint is white: it takes its colouring from the carbonate of lime in which it is found. The interior however is dark: it is a concretion of silicon dioxide, also known as quartz, and also known as silica. There is no satisfactory explanation for the existence of hard nodules of flint in soft chalk, but the long-standing conjecture is that these too begin with submarine biology: they could have been formed from the siliceous remains of Cretaceous sponges that once grew in clumps on the seafloor. Flints are exposed with every ploughing, and they became the raw material for the walls, barns and homesteads of old settlements in the Sussex Downs.

      Flints also provided western Europe’s first systematically exploited cutting-edge technology, its first tool of mass production, the Neolithic equivalent of the Swiss army knife. Bang a flint with something very hard, and you flake a fragment from it. Keep on doing that, and you can turn a nodule of flint into an axe, an adze, an awl, a chisel, a knife, an arrowhead, a spear point, a sickle, a razor, an item of barter or even a tool for mining yet more flints. Five or six thousand years ago, late-Stone-Age humans systematically dug a series of shafts and galleries in the chalk near Spiennes in Belgium, and excavated on an industrial scale huge quantities of flints that could be worked and then traded for goods from other locations. Simply to work the mines, get the product to the surface and then exploit its potential value, these Neolithic entrepreneurs had to be aware of the market pressures of supply and demand, the principles of sustained cooperative endeavour, the basic demands of health and safety management, the logic of shared income and the role of specialist craftsmanship in the wider commonwealth; of the notion of apprenticeship and education; and in addition the proper design and deployment of pit props, the planned removal of spoil and other mining requirements. All modern technology and business theory starts from the silica chip. One property of flint is that if struck with metal it will fire sparks: flint was the first portable, all-purpose firelighter, and thousands of years later would become the basis of the flintlock musket.

      Silica in the form of sand became the basis for glass; it also became a bulk component of ceramic and of concrete. Out of glass, craftsmen ground the first lenses and assembled the first telescopes and microscopes, prepared the first prisms and made the first artificial rainbows from a beam of white light. The sciences of astronomy and navigation, of microbiology and the germ theory of disease, of spectroscopy and atomic theory, all begin with the exploitation of silicon dioxide. So a silica chip, first flaked from flint by an unknown hominid more than a million years ago, was the beginning of all science, and all technology; it was the beginning of the exploration of space and time, and of the tissue of life itself.

      Flint wasn’t the only agent of Palaeolithic cutting-edge technology: the earliest tool users exploited obsidian, and basalt, and bone and antler and shell, and even greenstone. But flint turned out to be the most versatile: so easily worked that tools could be made, used and abandoned; so easily found on or near the surface that hunting parties would make detours to known outcrops of chalk and flint to renew their weaponry again and again; so reliable that the tribesmen who camped in Belgium more than five thousand years ago considered it worth their while to establish a pithead, and a factory site, and to exploit the same resource for generations. And all this potential power was deposited and fashioned by the prevailing conditions deep in the oceans of the Cretaceous period, eighty or a hundred million years ago.

      It seems presumptuous to claim that human ingenuity, technology and cooperation were driven by the discovery of flint; but it might be that without a reliable supply of superior tool-making material early on in the story, without, so to speak, that extra edge, Homo sapiens might not have survived. The first anatomically modern humans are, genetically, so closely related that geneticists suspect that there might have been a population crash 70,000 years ago, leaving only small band of survivors to engender all the billions who now command the planet’s resources. In a touch-and-go world, who can be sure what tipped the balance towards survival? Our species might have disappeared in the way that Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis all did, the last of them around 30,000 years ago. So just as chalk and flint are part of the making of Sussex, chalk and the flint that it preserves are part of the making of human history.

      This history begins, in Sussex, about 4000 BC. There were human settlers in the ancient wildwood long before that, but – I learn from Oliver Rackham’s scholarly work The History of the Countryside – around 4000 BC new people arrived, bringing with them ‘those crops, animals and weeds which constitute agriculture. They immediately set about converting Britain to an imitation of the dry, open steppes of the Near East, in which agriculture had begun.’ Perhaps the innovators were invaders, perhaps some of the existing population simply imported new strategies. The debate continues. But the wildwood they cleared was not primeval – before the ice retreated around 11,000 BC, northern Britain would have been a very large icicle, and southern England a stretch of tundra – but across what would become Sussex and other south-coast counties must have certainly been a wonderful mix of lime, oak and elm, left more or less alone to grow to enormous stature. And the people who cleared the land may never have seen or known about the Near East: it is enough that their ideas, their technology, their management of the countryside began there. By the Iron Age, dated from the sixth century BC, much of the wildwood had gone, and there were secondary woods full of coppiced hazel and other timber grown for special uses.

      The Romans occupied Sussex, but left only one famous road between London and Chichester, famous in its Saxon name of Stane Street. It is not, however, Britain’s only Stane Street: there is another one that runs between St Albans and Colchester. They built a fort at Pevensey, and called it Anderitum, and at some time in the fourth century established a Roman commander called the comes litoris Saxonici, the wonderfully-named Count of the Saxon Shore, which alone suggests that Roman Britain was already under repeated assault. But this commander defended an area far larger than modern Sussex, and the name Sussex itself dates from the Kingdom of Sussex, or South Saxons, that began to form after the sacking of Anderitum or Anderida in ad 491, and Sussex anyway became absorbed into Wessex, and was then attacked and held for a while by the Danes, and Normans, also from across the Channel, had already set up in business in east Sussex many years before the formal invasion by Duke William in 1066.

      Under the Normans, the management of Sussex, uniquely, was divided into rapes: initially Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings, each with a castle, a lord and a waterway. Chichester was added later. The use of an Old English word for a Norman administrative arrangement has provoked the historians and encyclopaedia compilers into wondering if these divisions had already existed when William came. But the act of division, or the formal exploitation of already-existing divisions, also suggested a sensible precaution on the part of William. If he could invade the Sussex coast and seize a kingdom, then so could somebody else, which is perhaps why his half-brother, and a son-in-law, and other reliable men, were awarded military command and control of the fateful shore.

      There are no meaningful maps from the period, but the Sussex described in laconic detail in the Domesday Book of 1086 (Ditchling: ‘King Edward held it. It never paid tax. Before 1066 it answered for 46 hides; when acquired only 42 hides; the others were in the Count of Mortain’s Rape, and 6 woods which belonged to the head of the manor …’) seems to have been in area and boundary much as it is now. Alciston is described (‘The Abbot of St Martins holds Alsistone from the King. Young Alnoth held it from King Edward.’) Rye, which belonged to the Abbot of Fécamp in Normandy even under the reign of Edward the Confessor, had ‘5 churches which pay 64 shillings; 100 salt houses at £8 15s, meadow 7 acres; woodlands, two pigs from pasturage’. The towns, villages and hamlets along the footpaths and bridleways of Sussex that we know well all get a mention: Alfriston and Bexhill, Exceat and East Dean; Bodiam, Jevington and Herstmonceux; Netherfield and Wilmington and Wannock, and Rodmell where Virginia Woolf drowned herself (‘Ramelle/Redmelle: William de Warenne, formerly Earl Harold, 11 salt houses, 4000 herrings’), have all existed for at least a thousand years (because the Domesday Book records ownership, entitlement and yield from before the Conquest