paid your sixteen-shilling fare from London to Brighton, or _vice versa_,
trusting (yet with heaviness of heart) in Providence to bring you to a
happy issue from all the many dangers and discomforts of travelling.
Occasionally it was brought home, by storm and flood, to those learned
enough to know it, that "travelling" derived originally from "travail,"
and the discomforts of leaving one's own fireside in the winter are
emphasized and underscored in the particulars of what befell at Stonepound
in the great snowstorm of December 24th, 1836--a storm that paralysed
communications throughout the kingdom.
"The Brighton up-mail of Sunday had travelled about eight miles from that
town, when it fell into a drift of snow, from which it was impossible to
extricate it without assistance. The guard immediately set off to obtain
all necessary aid, but when he returned no trace whatever could be found,
either of the coach, coachman or passengers, three in number. After much
difficulty the coach was found, but could not be extricated from the
hollow into which it had got. The guard did not reach London until seven
o'clock on Tuesday night, having been obliged to travel with the bags on
horseback, and in many instances to leave the main road and proceed
across fields in order to avoid the deep drifts of snow.
"The passengers, coachman, and guard slept at Clayton, seven miles from
Brighton. The road from Hand Cross was quite impassable. The non-arrival
of the mail at Crawley induced the postmaster there to send a man in a gig
to ascertain the cause on Monday afternoon, and no tidings being heard of
man, gig, or horse for several hours, another man was despatched on
horseback. After a long search he found horse and gig completely built up
in the snow. The man was in an exhausted state. After considerable
difficulty the horse and gig were extricated, and the party returned to
Crawley. The man had learned no tidings of the mail, and refused to go out
again on any such exploring mission."
The Brighton mail from London, too, reached Crawley, but was compelled to
return.
[Sidenote: CLAYTON TUNNEL ACCIDENT]
Such were the incidents upon which the Christmas stories, of the type
brought into favour by Dickens, were built, but the stories are better to
read than the incidents to experience. I am retrospectively sorry for
those passengers who thus lost their Christmas dinners; but after all, it
was better to miss the turkey and the Christmas pudding than to be "mashed
into a pummy" in railway accidents, such as the awful heart-shaking series
of collisions which took place on Sunday, August 25th, 1861, in the
railway tunnel through Clayton Hill. On that day, in that gloomy place,
twenty-four persons lost their lives, and one hundred and seventy-five
were injured.
Three trains were timed to leave Brighton station on that fatal morning,
two of them filled to crowding with excursionists; the other, an ordinary
train, well filled and bound for London. Their times for starting were 8,
8.5, and 8.30 respectively, but owing to delays occasioned by press of
traffic, they did not set out until considerably later, at 8.28, 8.31, and
8.35. At such terribly short intervals were they started, in times when
no block system existed to render such close following comparatively safe.
Clayton Tunnel was already considered a dangerous place, and there was
situated at either end (north and south entrances) a signal-cabin
furnished with telegraphic instruments and signal apparatus, by which the
signalman at one end of the tunnel could communicate with his fellow at
the other, and could notify "train in" or "train out" as might happen.
This practically formed a primitive sort of "block system," especially
devised for use in this mile and a quarter's dark burrow.
A "self-acting" signal placed in the cutting some distance from the
southern entrance was supposed, upon the passage of every train, to set
itself at "danger" for any following, until placed at "line clear" from
the nearest cabin, but on this occasion the first train passed in, and the
self-acting signal failed to act.
The second train, following upon the heels of the first, passed all
unsuspecting, and dashed from daylight into the tunnel's mouth, the
signalman, who had not received a message from the other end of the tunnel
being clear, frantically waving his red flag to stop it. This signal
apparently unnoticed by the driver, the train passed in.
At this moment the third train came into view, and at the same time the
signalman was advised of the tunnel being clear of the first. Meanwhile,
the driver of the second train, who _had_ noticed the red flag, was,
unknown to the signalman, backing his train out again. A message was sent
to the north cabin for it, "train in"; but the man there, thinking this to
be a mere repetition of the first, replied, "train out," referring, of
course, to the first train.
The tunnel being to the southern signalman apparently clear, the third
train was allowed to proceed, and met, midway, away from daylight, the
retreating second train. The collision was terrible; the two rearward
carriages of the second train were smashed to pieces, and the engine of
the third, reared upon their wreck, poured fire and steam and scalding
water upon the poor wretches who, wounded but not killed by the impact,
were struggling to free themselves from the splintered and twisted remains
of the two carriages.
The heap of wreckage was piled up to the roof of the tunnel, whose
interior presented a dreadful scene, the engine fire throwing a wild glare
around, but partly obscured by the blinding, scalding clouds of steam;
while this suddenly created Inferno resounded with the prayers, shrieks,
shouts, and curses of injured and scatheless alike, all fearful of the
coming of another train to add to the already sufficiently hideous ruin.
Fortunately no further catastrophe occurred; but nothing of horror was
wanting, neither in the magnitude nor in the circumstances of the
disaster, which long remained in the memories of those who read and was
impossible ever to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.
XXX
[Sidenote: THE SOUTH DOWNS]
From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view,
crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and
the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this
great wall of earth, chalk, and grass--Wolstonbury semicircular in outline
and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small
bushes.
Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb
Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms
with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history,
continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell's mouth.
Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick
ventilating-shafts going in a long perspective above the chalky cutting
in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton,
humbly crouching under the lee of the downs.
"Clayton Hill!" It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year
1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient
spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill
drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road
takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of
the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain
their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick
wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven
have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality
has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision
with a trap.
From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a
pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads
looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah's Ark
stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature
land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen--a pillar of
smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so
near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the
downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe
crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of
the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district.
Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls
worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature
happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence.
[Illustration: CLAYTON TUNNEL.]
But the shepherds have ceased to be vocal with the sheep-shearing songs of
yore; it seems that their modern accomplishment of being able to read has
stricken them dumb. Neither the words nor the airs of the old
shearing-songs will ever again awaken the echoes in the daytime, nor make
the roomy interiors of barns ring o' nights, as they were wont to do
lang-syne, when the convivial shearing supper was held, and the ale hummed
in the cup, and, later in the evening, in the head also.
But the Sussex peasant is by no means altogether bereft of his ancient
ways. He is, in the more secluded districts, still a South Saxon; for the
county, until comparatively recent times remote and difficult, plunged in
its sloughs and isolated by reason of its forests, has no manufactures,
and the rural parts do not attract immigrants from the shires, to leaven
his peculiarities. The Sussex folk are still rooted firmly in what Drayton
calls their "queachy ground." Words of Saxon origin are still the staple
of the country talk; folk-tales, told in times when the South Saxon
kingdom was yet a power of the Heptarchy, exist in remote corners,
currently with the latest ribald song from the London halls; superstitions
linger, as may be proved by he who pursues his inquiries judiciously, and
thought moves slowly still in the bucolic mind.
The Norman Conquest left few traces upon the population, and the peasant
is still the Saxon he ever has been; his occupations, too, tend to
slowness of speech and mind. The Sussex man is by the very rarest chance
engaged in any manufacturing industries. He is by choice and by force of
circumstances ploughman, woodman, shepherd, market-gardener, or carter,
and is become heavy as his soil, and curiously old-world in habit. All
which traits are delightful to the preternaturally sharp Londoner, whose
nerves occupy the most important place in his being. These country folk
are new and interesting creatures for study to him who is weary of that
acute product of civilisation--the London arab.
[Sidenote: OLD SUSSEX WAYS]
Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few
years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen.
[Illustration: CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS.]
Their cottages that, until a few years ago, were the same as ever, have
recently been very largely rebuilt, much to the sorrow of those who love
the picturesque. They were thatched, for the most part, or tiled, or
roofed with stone slabs. A living-room with yawning fireplace and
capacious settle was the chief feature of them. The floor was covered with
red bricks. When the settle was drawn up to the cheerful blaze the
interior was cosy. But many of the most picturesque cottages were damp and
insanitary, and although they pleased the artist to look at, it by no
means followed that they would have contented him to live in.
Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and
perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of
bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be
purchased, but not for silver:
If you wish your bees to thrive,
Gold must be paid for ev'ry hive;
For when they're bought with other money,
There will be neither swarm nor honey.
The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and
it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible
on the surface.
In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the
proper time for "worsling," that is "wassailing" the orchards, but more
particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the
trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks:
Stand fast root, bear well top;
Pray, good God, send us a howling crop
Ev'ry twig, apples big;
Ev'ry bough, apples enow';
Hats full, caps full,
Full quarters, sacks full.
These wassailing folk were generally known as "howlers"; "doubtless
rightly," says a Sussex archaeologist, "for real old Sussex music is in a
minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling." This knowledge
enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted
Keynes, when he records: "1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;" a
statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs,
would be altogether incomprehensible.
Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the
cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would
have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not "January butter." and the
harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree?
Saints' days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast
were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of
any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in
doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day:
In April he shows his bill,
In May he sings o' night and day,
In June he'll change his tune,
By July prepare to fly,
By August away he must.
If he stay till September,
'Tis as much as the oldest man
Can ever remember.
If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere
human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex
folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October
10th, the Devil goes round the country, and--dirty devil--spits on the
blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some
one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the
close of the year.
Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that
county's fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful
that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto
been? We have read travellers' tales of woful happenings on the road; hear
now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy
going on the highways: "I saw," says he, "an ancient lady, and a lady of
very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen;
nor was it done in frolic or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way
being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it." All which says
much for the piety of this ancient lady. Only a few years later, in 1729,
died Dame Judith, widow of Sir Henry Hatsell, who in her will, dated
January 10th, 1728, directed that her body should be buried at Preston,
should she happen to die at such a time of year when the roads were
passable; otherwise, at any place her executors might think suitable. It
so happened that she died in the month of June, so compliance with her
wishes was possible.
XXXI
And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that
parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand
Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies
deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from
the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture.
"Slougham-cum-Crole" is the title of the place in ancient records, "Crole"
being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it obtained
its name, pronounced by the natives "Slaffam," and it was certainly due to
them that the magnificent manor-house--almost a palace--of the Coverts,
the old lords of the manor--was deserted and began to fall to pieces so
soon as built.
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most
powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of
Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, "came over with the
Conqueror"; but they are not found settled here until towards the close
of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the
Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter
Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of
that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was
due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their
enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat,
over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the
apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar
of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush
grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble
gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its
massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort
of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater
part to the level of the watery turf.
The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean
build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences
when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few
mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the
mansion remain to confirm the thought.
That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls
should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its
completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed,
and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other
hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of
their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and
defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of
land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so
important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it
is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues
and chills innumerable.
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE: RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on
circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes
to his wife: "The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I
vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of
dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen
miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges
of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient
draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry
summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."
Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so
ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry
apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking
moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all
those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the
havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it
is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park,
where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its
handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the
"Star" Hotel at Lewes.
The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an
architectural frieze of greyhounds' and leopards' heads and skulls of oxen
wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of
their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within
the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically
versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but
the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the
most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land,
who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the
sea on their own manors.
[Illustration: BOLNEY.]
The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated
architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In
the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503;
and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard
Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company
of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a
curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by
armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because
executed all innocent of joke or irreverence.
Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights,
to bear me up.
[Illustration: FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.]
Another Richard, but twice married, who died in 1579, is commemorated in a
large and elaborate monument in the Covert Chapel, whereon are sculptured,
in an attitude of prayer, Richard himself, his two wives, six sons, and
eight daughters.
Last of the Coverts whose name is perpetuated here is Jane, who deceased
in 1586.
[Illustration: HICKSTEAD PLACE.]
Beside these things, Slaugham claims some interest as containing the
mansion of Ashfold, where once resided Mrs. Matcham, a sister of Nelson.
Indeed, it was while staying here that the Admiral received the summons
which sped him on his last and most glorious and fatal voyage. Slaugham,
too, with St. Leonard's Forest, contributes a title to the peerage, Lord
St. Leonards' creation being of "Slaugham, in the county of Sussex."
XXXII
This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly
beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets
trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its
course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the
lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of
the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is
only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the
topmost branches of distant trees. "Bowlney," as the countryfolk pronounce
the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot
that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought
for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new,
the church, and the "Eight Bells" inn, group for effect.