to Woodhatch and the "Old Angel" inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and
where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.
Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, illustrates the ancient times when the
De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the
woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears
only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down
in these levels ending in "wood" recall the dense forests that once
overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood,
Hookwood--vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the
prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of
the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The
scattered "leys"--Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like--allude to the
clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old
bosquets may be traced on the map--Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk's Gate and
Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but
memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either
side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole
sluggishly winding through them--a scene not unbeautiful in its placid
way.
The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862,
marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the
flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the
Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the
"Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the
same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands
to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.
[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]
Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past
the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath,
referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes
at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet,
and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by
enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat,
low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous
error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."
The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at
times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many
tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following
upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless
arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the
nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with
trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to
wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley
churchyard was flooded.
[Illustration: The Floods at Horley.]
A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the
dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be
performed, the roads being four feet under water.
XXI
[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]
The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard
high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the
byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.
Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay,
thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous
sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their
inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian
blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some
unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and
disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.
The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross
and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the
valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen
from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms
forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home
counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh
century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its
interior assorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan
cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of
village church, and presents many features of interest to the
archaeologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the
fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late
brass, now mural, in the chancel, dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and
Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously,
Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early
period those of Purley and Sandersted--Sander's-stead, or dwelling. Sir
Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth's time,
bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in
1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where,
in happier times, they ruled.
[Illustration: Charlwood.]
[Sidenote: NEWDIGATE]
One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on
a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the "Surrey
Oaks," fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the
county, and is worth visiting, if only for a peep into the curious timber
belfry of its little church, which contains a hoary chest, contrived out
of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.
[Illustration: A Corner in Newdigate Church.]
But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and
attractions. Here a primitive pavement or causeway is very noticeable,
formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the grassy margins of
the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even
now) of the time when
Essex full of good housewyfes,
Middlesex full of stryves,
Kentshire hoot as fire,
Sowseks full of dirt and mire
was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the
Wealden clay asserted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for
pedestrians were necessities.
The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from
local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a
yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble,
fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built
of Charlwood stone.
Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies
through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It
has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly
favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county
where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--grass, wheat,
and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish
forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding
the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.
[Sidenote: IFIELD]
In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing
exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from
the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at
Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Sussex meet, and
was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County
Oak."
[Illustration: On the Road to Newdigate.]
For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its
architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this
legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral
curiosities. A brass for two brothers, with a curious metrical
inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry
grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed
up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual
_memento mori_ from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the
chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the recumbent
effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He
is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, "a position," to quote
"Thomas Ingoldsby," "so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in
modern days." The old pews came from St. Margaret's, Westminster. But so
dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and
to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of
day, however dull that day may be.
From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile
to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river
Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley.
The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the
date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much
later date.
[Illustration: IFIELD MILL POND.]
[Sidenote: SUSSEX IRON]
Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most
important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex iron paid for the smelting.
Ironstone had been known to exist here even in the days of the Roman
occupation, when Anderida, extending from the sea to London, was all one
vast forest. Heaps of slag and cinders have been found, containing Roman
coins and implements of contemporary date, proving that iron was smelted
here to some extent even then. But it was not until the latter part of the
Tudor period that the industry attained its greatest height. Then,
according to Camden, "the Weald of Sussex was full of iron-mines, and the
beating of hammers upon the iron filled the neighbourhood round about with
continual noise." The ironstone was smelted with charcoal made from the
forest trees that then covered the land, and it was not until the first
year or two of the last century that the industry finally died out. The
last remaining ironworks in Sussex were situated at Ashburnham, and ceased
working about 1820, owing to the inability of iron-masters to compete with
the coal-smelted ore of South Wales.
By that time the great forest of Anderida had almost entirely disappeared,
which is not at all a wonderful thing to consider when we learn that one
ironworks alone consumed 200,000 cords of wood annually. Even in Drayton's
time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.
Relics of those days are plentiful, even now, in the ancient farmhouses;
relics in the shape of cast-iron chimney-backs and andirons, or
"fire-dogs," many of them very effectively designed; but, of course, in
these days of appreciation of the antique, numbers of them have been sold
and removed.
The water-power required by the ironworks was obtained by embanking small
streams, to form ponds; as here at Ifield, where a fine head of water is
still existing. Very many of these "Hammer Ponds" remain in Sussex and
Surrey, and were long so called by the rustics, whose unlettered and
traditional memories were tenacious, and preserved local history much
better than does the less intimate book-learning of the reading classes.
But now that every ploughboy reads his "penny horrible," and every gaffer
devours his Sunday paper, they have no memories for "such truck," and
local traditions are fading.
Ifield ironworks became extinct at an early date, but from a very
arbitrary cause. During the conflicts of the Civil War the property of
Royalists was destroyed by the Puritan soldiery wherever possible; and
after the taking of Arundel Castle in 1643, a detachment of troops under
Sir William Waller wantonly wrecked the works then situated here, since
when they do not appear to have been at any time revived.
It is a pretty spot to-day, and extremely quiet.
From here Crawley is reached through Gossop's Green.
XXII
[Sidenote: CRAWLEY]
The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of
Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the "White Lion," and a few
attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the
farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains
to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now
under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the
wayfarers' attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A
mean little house called "Casa querca"--by which I suppose the author
means Oak House--is "refinement," as imagined in the suburbs, and excites
the passing sneer, "Is not the English language good enough?" If the
Italians will only oblige, and call their own "Bella Vistas" "Pretty
View," and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall
effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.
[Illustration: CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.]
At the beginning of Crawley stands the "Sun" inn, and away at the other
end is the "Half Moon"; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and
coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum
when passing through, "Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?"
Every one unfamiliar with the road "gave it up"; when came the answer,
"Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other." It is evident
that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers.
We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early
coaching days, that Crawley was a "poor place," by which we may suppose
that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect--a city?
Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has
grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the
extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a
town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable
thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized
plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built
houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless
originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us;
but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and
those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and
so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like
islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn
tale of grab.
Even Crawley's generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide
for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which
every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards' winding of
their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of
"Sally in our Alley" or "Love's Young Dream." Then the "George" was the
scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the
chink and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when
travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time,
but a real journey, of five hours.
[Illustration: CRAWLEY, 1789.]
Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap.
Occasionally some great cycle "scorch" is in progress, when whirling
enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of
the "George" spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on
which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very
invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen _and_
bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in
cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the
roads are peopled again.
There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey,
embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there
is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered
frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of
that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her
so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.
They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs
that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse
of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk
obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad.
Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as
might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter
and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with
flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very
attractive ruin indeed.
Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789,
when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead,
took notes for his book, "An Excursion to Brighthelmstone." It is a work
of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist's
illustrations. That _they_ should have lived, you who see the reproduction
will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is
otherwise greatly changed.
[Illustration: AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.]
An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that
the greater part of "Crawley" is not in that parish at all, but in the
adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same
side of the street belong to Crawley.
In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally
open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the
nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in
this admonitory fashion:
Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde
He war be for whate comyth be hynde.
When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone,
it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton,
"be hynde," remarking that it is "arnshunt."
[Illustration: THE "GEORGE," CRAWLEY.]
The sturdy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing
Noah's dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were
abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally
or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.
But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation
of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful
figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into
fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme
Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient
symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling
superstition of his remote age, has put his "fear of God," in a very
literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of
the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the
terrified minds of the dark ages, when God, the loving Father, was
non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures
are merely like infantile grotesques.
XXIII
There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity
associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station,
resided Mark Lemon, editor of _Punch_, who died here on May 20th, 1870.
Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be
converted into a grocer's shop.
[Sidenote: PRIZE-FIGHTS]
[Illustration: SCULPTURED EMBLEM OF THE HOLY TRINITY, CRAWLEY CHURCH.]
The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at
large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I
lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after
hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after
pursuing him through the classic pages of "Boxiana" and the voluminous
records of "Pugilistica," after consulting, too, that sprightly work "The
Fancy"; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was
fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley
Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands
upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the
great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the
metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time
to time, when great multitudes--princes, patricians, and plebeians of
every description--hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the
performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so
much a side.
It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several
routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches
and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges
flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else
could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at
the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the
"noble art"?
Many were the merry "mills" which "came off" at Crawley Downs, Copthorne
Common, and Blindley Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men,
conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord
Yarmouth ("Red Herrings"), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of
claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous
sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are
they not set forth with much circumstantial detail in the pages of
"Fistiana" and "Boxiana"? There shall you read how the Prince Regent
witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and
Martin on Crawley Downs. "Boxiana" gives a full account of it, and is even
moved to verse, in this wise:
THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY
BETWEEN
THE NONPAREIL
AND
THE OUT-AND-OUTER.
Come, won't you list unto my lay
About the fight at Crawley, O!...
with the refrain--
With his filaloo trillaloo,
Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!
For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be
referred to the classic pages of "Boxiana" itself.
Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the
"Master of the Rolls," one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades
went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871.
He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the
usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican.
He was landlord successively of the "Crown" at Croydon, and the "Horns"
tavern, Kennington.
As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which
Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man," came off victor, they are not for these
pages. How the combatants "fibbed" and "countered," and did other things
equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the
pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing
of all the blows given and received.
This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but
see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered
those times. What diversions went forward on the roads--such roads as they
were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the
morning following the "battle," the remains of several carriages,
phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where
they had collided in the darkness.
[Sidenote: THE REGENCY]