Before branching out from Hastings into the country proper I might

mention two neighbouring points of pilgrimage. One is Hollington Rural

church, on the hill behind the town, whither sooner or later every one

walks. It is a small church in the midst of a crowded burial ground, and

it is difficult to understand its attraction unless by the poverty of

other objectives. I should not mention it, but that it is probably the

church to which Charles Lamb, bored by Hastings itself, wended his way

one day in 1825. He describes it, in terms more fitting to, say,

Lullington church near Alfriston, or St. Olave's at Chichester, in no

fewer than three of his letters. This is the best passage, revelling in

a kind of inverted exaggeration, as written to John Bates Dibdin, at

Hastings, in 1826:--"Let me hear that you have clamber'd up to Lover's

Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood as Juan Fernandez, as lonely

too, when the Fishing boats are not out; I have sat for hours, staring

upon the shipless sea. The salt sea is never so grand as when it is left

to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea mew or two improves it. And go

to the little church, which is a very protestant Loretto, and seems

dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at once parishioner

and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring it away in

your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been

erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or

three first converts; yet hath it all the appertances of a church of the

first magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral

in a nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. The

minister that divides the word there, must give lumping pennyworths. It

is built to the text of two or three assembled in my name. It reminds me

of the grain of mustard seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may

yield two potatoes. Tythes out of it could be no more split than a hair.

Its First fruits must be its Last, for 'twould never produce a couple.

It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London

visitants) that find it. The still small voice is surely to be found

there, if any where. A sounding board is merely there for ceremony. It

is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than size, for

'twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would.

Go and see, but not without your spectacles."

[Sidenote: THE LOVER'S SEAT]

The Lover's Seat, mentioned in the first sentence of the above passage,

is at Fairlight, about two miles east of Hastings. The seat is very

prettily situated high in a ledge in Fairlight Glen. Horsfield shall

tell the story that gave the spot its fascinating name:--

"A beautiful girl at Rye gained the affections of Captain ----, then in

command of a cutter in that station. Her parents disapproved the

connection and removed her to a farm house near the Lover's Seat, called

the Warren-house. Hence she contrived to absent herself night after

night, when she sought this spot, and by means of a light made known her

presence to her lover, who was cruising off in expectation of her

arrival. The difficulties thus thrown in their way increased the ardour

of their attachment and marriage was determined upon at all hazards.

Hollington Church was and is the place most sought for on these

occasions in this part of the country; it has a romantic air about it

which is doubtless peculiarly impressive. There are, too, some other

reasons why so many matches are solemnized here; and all combined to

make this the place selected by this pair. It was expected that the

lady's flight would be discovered and her object suspected; but in order

to prevent a rescue, the cutter's crew positively volunteered and acted

as guards on the narrow paths leading through the woods to the church.

However, the marriage ceremony was completed before any unwelcome

visitors arrived, and reconciliation soon followed."

[Sidenote: BEXHILL]

Bexhill has now become so exceedingly accessible by conveyance from

Hastings that it might perhaps be mentioned here as a contiguous place

of interest; but of Bexhill, till lately a village, or Bexhill-on-Sea,

watering place, with everything handsome about it, there is little to

say. Both the tide of the Channel and of popularity seem to be receding.

Inland there is some pretty country.

CHAPTER XXXVII

BATTLE ABBEY

Le Souvenir Normande--The Battle of Hastings--Normans and Saxons on

the eve--Taillefer--The battle cries--The death of Harold--Harold's

body: three stories--The field of blood--Building the Abbey--The

Abbot's privileges--Royal visitors--A great feast--The suppression

of the Abbey--Present-day Battle--An incredible

butler--Ashburnham--The last forge--Ninfield--Crowhurst.

The principal excursion from Hastings is of course to Battle, whither a

company of discreetly satisfied Normans--Le Souvenir Normande--recently

travelled, to view with tactfully chastened enthusiasm the scene of the

triumph of 1066; to erect a memorial; and to perplex the old ladies of

Battle who provide tea. Except on one day of the week visitors to Battle

must content themselves with tea (of which there is no stint) and a view

of the gateway, for the rule of showing the Abbey only on Tuesdays is

strictly enforced by the American gentleman who now resides on this

historic site. But the gateway could hardly be finer.

[Sidenote: BATTLE CRIES]

The battle-field was half a mile south of the Abbey, on Telham hill,

where in Harold's day was a hoary apple tree. We have seen William

landing at Pevensey on September 28, 1066: thence he marched to Hastings

"to steal food," and thence, after a delay of a fortnight (to some

extent spent in fortifying Hastings, and also in burning his boats), he

marched to Telham hill. That was on October 13. On the same day Harold

reached the neighbourhood, with his horde of soldiers and armed

rustics, and both armies encamped that night only a mile apart, waiting

for the light to begin the fray. The Saxons were confident and riotous;

the Normans hopeful and grave. According to Wace, "all night the Saxons

might be seen carousing, gambolling, and dancing and singing: _bublie_

they cried, and _wassail_, and _laticome_ and _drinkheil_ and

_drink-to-me_!"

[Illustration: _Battle Abbey, the Gateway._]

At daybreak in the Norman camp Bishop Odo celebrated High Mass, and

immediately after was hurried into his armour to join the fight. As the

Duke was arming an incident occurred but for which Battle Abbey might

never have been built. His suit of mail was offered him wrong side out.

The superstitious Normans standing by looked sideways at each other with

sinking misgiving. They deemed it a bad omen. But William's face

betrayed no fear. "If we win," he said, "and God send we may, I will

found an Abbey here for the salvation of the souls of all who fall in

the engagement." Before quitting his tent, he was careful that those

relics on which Harold had sworn never to oppose his efforts against

England's throne should be hung around his neck.

[Sidenote: TAILLEFER]

So the two armies were ready--the mounted Normans, with their conical

helmets gleaming in the hazy sunlight, with kite-shaped shields, huge

spears and swords; the English, all on foot, with heavy axes and clubs.

But theirs was a defensive part; the Normans had to begin. It fell to

the lot of a wild troubadour named Taillefer to open the fight. He

galloped from the Norman lines at full speed, singing a song of heroes;

then checked his steed and tossed his lance thrice in the air, thrice

catching it by the point. The opposing lines silently wondered. Then he

flung it at a luckless Saxon with all the energy of a madman, spitting

him as a skewer spits a lark. Taillefer had now only his sword left.

This also he threw thrice into the air, and then seizing it with the

grip of death he rode straight at the Saxon troops, dealing blows from

left to right, and so was lost to view.

Thus the Battle of Hastings began. "On them in God's name," cried

William, "and chastise these English for their misdeeds." "Dieu aide,"

his men screamed, spurring to the attack. "Out, Out!" barked the

English, "Holy Cross! God Almighty!" The carnage was terrific. It seemed

for long that the English were prevailing; and they would, in all

likelihood, have prevailed in the end had they kept their position. But

William feigned a retreat, and the English crossed their vallum in

pursuit. The Normans at once turned their horses and pursued and

butchered the unprepared enemy singly in the open country. A complete

rout followed. The false step was decisive.

[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF HAROLD]

Not till night, however, did Harold fall. He upheld his standard to the

last, hedged about by a valiant bodyguard who resisted the Normans till

every sign of life was battered out of them. The story of the

vertically-discharged arrows is a myth. An eye-witness thus described

Harold's death: "An armed man," said he, "came in the throng of the

battle and struck him on the ventaille of the helmet and beat him to the

ground; and as he sought to recover himself a knight beat him down

again, striking him on the thick of the thigh down to the bone." So died

Harold, on the exact site of the high altar of the Abbey, and so passed

away the Saxon kingdom.

That night, William, who was unharmed, though three horses were killed

under him, had his tent set up in the midst of the dead, and there he

ate and drank. In the morning the Norman corpses were picked out and

buried with due rites; the Saxons were left to rot. According to the

_Carmen_ William I. had Harold's body wrapped in purple linen and

carried to Hastings, where it was buried on the cliff beneath a stone

inscribed with the words: "By the order of the Duke, you rest here, King

Harold, as the guardian of the shore and the sea." Mr. Lower was

convinced of the truth of that story; but William of Malmesbury says

that William sent Harold's body to his mother the Countess Gytha, who

buried it at Waltham, while a third account shows us Editha of the Swan

Neck, Harold's wife, wandering through the blood-stained grass, among

the fallen English, until she found the body of her husband, which she

craved leave to carry away. William, this version adds, could not deny

her.

[Sidenote: THE FIELD OF BLOOD]

Fuller writes in the _Worthies_, concerning the wonders of

Sussex:--"Expect not here I should insert what _William_ of _Newbury_

writeth (to be recounted rather amongst the _Untruths_ than _Wonders_);

viz. 'That in this County, not far from Battail-Abby, in the Place

where so great a slaughter of the Englishmen was made, after any shower,

presently sweateth forth very fresh blood out of the Earth, as if the

evidence thereof did plainly declare the voice of Bloud there shed, and

crieth still from the Earth unto the Lord.' This is as true, as that in

_white_ chalky Countries (about Baldock in Hertfordshire) after rain run

rivolets of _Milk_; Neither being anything else than the Water

discoloured, according to the _Complexion_ of the Earth thereabouts."

[Illustration: _Mount Street, Battle._]

The Conqueror was true to his vow, and the Abbey of St. Martin was

quickly begun. At first there was difficulty about the stone, which was

brought all the way from Caen quarries, until, according to an old

writer, a pious matron dreamed that stone in large quantities was to be

found near at hand. Her vision leading to the discovery of a

neighbouring quarry, the work proceeded henceforward with exceeding

rapidity.

[Sidenote: ST. MARTIN'S ABBEY]

Although the first Abbot was appointed in 1076, William the Conqueror

did not live to see the Abbey finished. Sixty monks of the Order of St.

Benedict came to Battle from the Abbey of Marmontier in Normandy, to

form its nucleus. It was left to William Rufus to preside over the

consecration of Battle, which was not until February, 1095, when the

ceremony was performed amid much pomp. William presented to the Abbey

his father's coronation robe and the sword he had wielded in the battle.

Several wealthy manors were attached and the country round was exempted

from tax; while the Abbots were made superior to episcopal control, and

were endowed with the right to sit in Parliament and a London house to

live in during the session. Indeed nothing was left undone that could

minister to the pride and power of the new house of God.

The Abbey of St. Martin was quadrangular, standing in the midst of a

circle nine miles round. Within this were vineyards, stew ponds and rich

land. Just without was a small street of artisans' dwellings, where were

manufactured all things requisite for the monks' material well-being.

The church was the largest in the country, larger even than Canterbury.

It was also a sanctuary, any sentenced criminal who succeeded in

sheltering therein receiving absolution from the Abbot. The high altar,

as I have said, was erected precisely on the spot where Harold fell: a

spot on which one may now stand and think of the past.

Battle Abbey was more than once visited by kings. In 1200 John was

there, shaking like a quicksand. He brought a piece of our Lord's

sepulchre, which had been wrested from Palestine by Richard the Lion

Heart, and laid it with tremulous hands on the altar, hoping that the

magnificence of the gift might close Heaven's eyes towards sins of his

own. In 1212, he was at Battle Abbey again, and for the last time in

1213, seeking, maybe, to find in these silent cloisters some

forgetfulness of the mutterings of hate and scorn that everywhere

followed him.

[Sidenote: KINGS AT BATTLE]

Just before the Battle of Lewes, Henry III. galloped up, attended by a

body-guard of overbearing horsemen, and levied large sums of money to

assist him in the struggle. After the battle he returned, a weary

refugee, but still rapacious.

These visits were not welcome. It was different when Edward II. slept

there on the night of August 28th, 1324. Alan de Ketbury, the Abbot, was

bent on showing loyalty at all cost, while the neighbouring lords and

squires were hardly less eager. The Abbot's contribution to the kitchen

included twenty score and four loaves of bread, two swans, two rabbits,

three fessantes, and a dozen capons; William de Echingham sent three

peacocks, twelve bream, six muttons, and other delicacies; and Robert

Acheland four rabbits, six swans, and three herons.

In 1331, Abbot Hamo and his monks kept at bay a body of French

marauders, who had landed at Rye, until the country gentlemen could

assemble and repulse them utterly.

Then followed two peaceful centuries; but afterwards came disaster, for,

in 1558, Thomas Cromwell sent down two commissioners to examine into the

state of the Abbey and report thereon to the zealous Defender of the

Faith. The Commissioners found nineteen books in the library, and

rumours of monkish debauchery without the walls. "So beggary a house,"

wrote one of the officers, "I never see." Battle Abbey was therefore

suppressed and presented to Sir Anthony Browne, upon whom, as we saw in

the first chapter, the "Curse of Cowdray" was pronounced by the last

departing monk.

To catalogue the present features of Battle Abbey is to vulgarise it.

One comes away with confused memories of grey walls embraced by white

clematis and red rose; gloomy underground caverns with double rows of

arches, where the Brothers might not speak; benignant cedars blessing

the turf with extended hands; fragrant limes waving their delicate

leaves; an old rose garden with fantastic beds; a long yew walk where

the Brothers might meditatively pace--turning, perhaps, an epigram,

regretting, perhaps, the world. Nothing now remains of the Refectory,

where, of old, forty monks fed like one, except the walls. It once had a

noble roof of Irish oak, but that was taken to Cowdray and perished in

the fire there, together with the Abbey roll. One of the Abbey's first

charms is the appropriateness of its gardens; they too are old. In the

cloisters, for instance, there are wonderful box borders.

[Illustration: _Battle Abbey. The Refectory._]

[Sidenote: TURNER'S PICTURE]

Turner painted "Battle Abbey: the spot where Harold fell," with a

greyhound pressing hard upon a hare in the foreground, and a Scotch fir

Italianated into a golden bough.

The town of Battle has little interest. In the church is a brass to

Thomas Alfraye and his wife Elizabeth--Thomas Alfraye "whose soul"

according to his epitaph,

In active strength did passe

As nere was found his peere.

One would like to know more of this Samson. The tomb of Sir Anthony

Browne is also here; but it is not so imposing as that of his son, the

first Viscount Montagu, which we saw at Easebourne. In the churchyard is

the grave of Isaac Ingall, the oldest butler on record, who died at the

age of one hundred and twenty, after acting as butler at the Abbey for

ninety-five years.

From Battle one may reach easily Normanhurst, the seat of the Brasseys,

and Ashburnham Park, just to the north of it, a superb undulating

domain, with lakes, an imposing mansion, an old church, brake fern,

magnificent trees and a herd of deer, all within its confines. Of the

church, however, I can say nothing, for I was there on a very hot day,

the door was locked, and the key was at the vicarage, ten minutes'

distant, at the top of a hill. Churches that are thus controlled must be

neglected.

[Sidenote: ASHBURNHAM]

Ashburnham Place once contained some of the finest books in England and

is still famous for its relics of Charles I.; but strangers may not see

them. The best Sussex iron was smelted at Ashburnham Furnace, north of

the park, near Penhurst. Ashburnham Forge was the last to remain at work

in the county; its last surviving labourer of the neighbourhood died in

1883. He remembered the extinguishing of the fire in 1813 (or 1811), the

casting of fire-backs being the final task. Penhurst, by the way, is one

of the most curiously remote villages in east Sussex, with the oddest

little church.

I walked to Ashburnham from Ninfield, a clean breezy village on the hill

overlooking Pevensey Bay, with a locked church, and iron stocks by the

side of the road. It is stated somewhere that at "that corner of Crouch

Lane that leads to Lunford Cross, and so to Bexhill and Hastings," was

buried a suicide in 1675. At how many cross roads in Sussex and

elsewhere does one stand over such graves?

[Sidenote: CROWHURST]

One may return to Hastings by way of Catsfield, which has little

interest, and Crowhurst, famous for the remains of a beautiful manor

house and a yew tree supposed to be the oldest in Sussex. It is curious

that Crowhurst in Surrey is also known for a great yew.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

WINCHELSEA AND RYE

Medieval Sussex--The suddenness of Rye--The approach by

night--Cities of the plain--Old Winchelsea--The freakish sea--New

Winchelsea--The eternal French problem--Modern Winchelsea--The

Alard tombs--Denis Duval and the Westons--John Wesley--Old

Rye--John Fletcher--The Jeakes'--An unknown poet--Rye church--The

eight bells--Rye's streets--Rye ancient and modern--A Rye

ceramist--Pett--Icklesham's accounts--A complacent epitaph--Iden

and Playden--Udimore's church--Brede Place--The Oxenbridges--Dean

Swift as a baby.

In the opinion of many good judges Sussex has nothing to offer so

fascinating as Winchelsea and Rye; and in certain reposeful moods, when

the past seems to be more than the present or future, I can agree with

them. We have seen many ancient towns in our progress through the

county--Chichester around her cathedral spire, Arundel beneath her grey

castle, Lewes among her hills--but all have modern blood in their veins.

Winchelsea and Rye seem wholly of the past. Nothing can modernise them.

Rye approached from the east is the suddenest thing in the world. The

traveller leaves Ashford, in a South Eastern train, amid all the

circumstances of ordinary travel; he passes through the ordinary scenery

of Kent; the porters call Rye, and in a moment he is in the middle ages.

Rye is only a few yards from its station: Winchelsea, on the other hand,

is a mile from the line, and one has time on the road to understand

one's surroundings. It is important that the traveller who wishes to

experience the right medieval thrill should come to Winchelsea either at

dusk or at night. To make acquaintance with any new town by night is to

double one's pleasure; for there is a first joy in the curious half-seen

strangeness of the streets and houses, and a further joy in correcting

by the morrow's light the distorted impressions gathered in the dark.

[Illustration: _The Landgate, Rye._]

[Sidenote: APPROACH AT DUSK]

To come for the first time upon Winchelsea at dusk, whether from the

station or from Rye, is to receive an impression almost if not quite

unique in England; since there is no other town throned like this upon a

green hill, to be gained only through massive gateways. From the station

one would enter at the Pipewell Gate; from Rye, by the Strand Gate. The

Strand approach is perhaps a shade finer and more romantically unreal.

[Sidenote: THE FREAKISH SEA]

Winchelsea and Rye are remarkable in being not only perched each upon a

solitary hillock in a vast level or marsh, but in being hillocks in

themselves. In the case of Winchelsea there are trees and green spaces

to boot, but Rye and its hillock are one; every inch is given over to

red brick and grey stone. They are true cities of the plain. Between

them are three miles of flat meadow, where, among thousands of sheep,

stands the grey rotundity of Camber Castle. All this land is _polder_,

as the Dutch call it, yet not reclaimed from the sea by any feat of

engineering, as about the Helder, but presented by Neptune as a free and

not too welcome gift to these ancient boroughs--possibly to equalise his

theft of acres of good park at Selsey. Once a Cinque Port of the first

magnitude, Winchelsea is now an inland resort of the antiquary and the

artist. Where fishermen once dropped their nets, shepherds now watch

their sheep; where the marauding French were wont to rush in with sword

and torch, tourists now toil with camera and guide-book.

The light above the sheep levels changes continually: at one hour Rye

seems but a stone's throw from Winchelsea; at another she is miles

distant; at a third she looms twice her size through the haze, and

Camber is seen as a fortress of old romance.

Rye stands where it always stood: but the original Winchelsea is no

more. It was built two miles south-south-east of Rye, on a spot since

covered by the sea but now again dry land. At Old Winchelsea William the

Conqueror landed in 1067 after a visit to Normandy; in 1138 Henry II.

landed there, while the French landed often, sometimes disastrously and

sometimes not. In those days Winchelsea had seven hundred householders

and fifty inns. In 1250, however, began her downfall. Holinshed

writes:--"On the first day of October (1250), the moon, upon her change,

appearing exceeding red and swelled, began to show tokens of the great

tempest of wind that followed, which was so huge and mightie, both by

land and sea, that the like had not been lightlie knowne, and seldome,

or rather never heard of by men then alive. The sea forced contrarie to

his natural course, flowed twice without ebbing, yeelding such a rooring

that the same was heard (not without great woonder) a farre distance

from the shore. Moreover, the same sea appeared in the darke of the

night to burne, as it had been on fire, and the waves to strive and

fight togither after a marvellous sort, so that the mariners could not

devise how to save their ships where they laie at anchor, by no cunning

or shift which they could devise. At Hert-burne three tall-ships

perished without recoverie, besides other smaller vessels. At

Winchelsey, besides other hurte that was doone, in bridges, milles,

breakes, and banks, there were 300 houses and some churches drowned with

the high rising of the water course."

[Sidenote: WINCHELSEA'S VICISSITUDES]

The Winchelsea people, however, did not abandon their town. In 1264

Henry III. was there on his way to the Battle of Lewes, and later,

Eleanor, wife of Henry's conqueror, de Montfort, was there too, and

encouraged by her kindness to them the Winchelsea men took to active sea

piracy, which de Montfort encouraged. In 1266, however, Prince Edward,

who disliked piracy, descended upon the town and chastised it bloodily;

while on February 4, 1287, a greater punishment came, for during another

storm the town was practically drowned, all the flat land between Pett

and Hythe being inundated. New Winchelsea, the Winchelsea of to-day, was

forthwith begun under royal patronage on a rock near Icklesham, the

north and east sides of which were washed by the sea. A castle was set

there, and gates, of which three still stand--Pipewell, Strand and

New--rose from the earth. The Grey Friars monastery and other religious

houses were reproduced as at Old Winchelsea, and a prosperous town

quickly existed.

New Winchelsea was soon busy. In 1350 a battle between the English and

Spanish fleets was waged off the town, an exciting spectacle for the

Court, who watched from the high ground. Edward III., the English king,

when victory was his, rode to Etchingham for the night. In 1359, 3,000

Frenchmen entered Winchelsea and set fire to it; while in 1360 the

Cinque Ports navy sailed from Winchelsea and burned Luce. Such were the

reprisals of those days. In 1376 the French came again and were repulsed

by the Abbot of Battle, but in 1378 the Abbot had to run. In 1448 the

French came for the last time, the sea having become very shallow; and a

little later the sea receded altogether, Henry VIII. suppressed the

religious houses, and Winchelsea's heyday was over.

She is now a quiet, aloof settlement of pleasant houses and gardens,

prosperous and idle. Rye might be called a city of trade, Winchelsea of

repose. She spreads her hands to the sun and is content.

[Sidenote: THE ALARD TOMBS]

Winchelsea's church stands, as a church should, in the midst of its

green acre, fully visible from every side--the very antipodes of Rye.

Large as it now is, it was once far larger, for only the chancel and

side aisles remain. The glory of the church is the canopied tomb of

Gervase Alard, Admiral of the Cinque Ports, and that of his grandson

Stephen Alard, also Admiral, both curiously carved with grotesque heads.

The roof beams of the church, timber from wrecked or broken ships, are

of an integrity so thorough that a village carpenter who recently

climbed up to test them blunted all his tools in the enterprise.

[Illustration: _Sedilia and Tombs of Gervase and Stephen Alard,

Winchelsea._]

[Sidenote: THE WESTONS]

All that remains of the Grey Friars monastery may now be seen (on

Mondays only) in the estate called The Friars: the shell of the chapel's

choir, prettily covered with ivy. Here once lived, in the odour of

perfect respectability, the brothers Weston, who, country gentlemen of

quiet habit at home, for several years ravaged the coach roads elsewhere

as highwaymen, and were eventually hanged at Tyburn. Their place in

literature is, of course, _Denis Duval_, which Thackeray wrote in a

house on the north of the churchyard, and which is all of Winchelsea and

Rye compact, as the author's letters to Mr. Greenwood, editor of

_Cornhill_, detailing the plot (in the person of Denis himself) go to

show. Thus:--

"I was born in the year 1764, at Winchelsea, where my father was a

grocer and clerk of the church. Everybody in the place was a good

deal connected with smuggling.

"There used to come to our house a very noble French gentleman,

called the COUNT DE LA MOTTE, and with him a German, the BARON DE

LUeTTERLOH. My father used to take packages to Ostend and Calais for

these two gentlemen, and perhaps I went to Paris once, and saw the

French Queen.

"The squire of our town was SQUIRE WESTON of the Priory, who, with

his brother, kept one of the genteelest houses in the country. He

was churchwarden of our church, and much respected. Yes, but if you

read the _Annual Register_ of 1781, you will find that on the 13th

July the sheriffs attended at the TOWER OF LONDON to receive

custody of a De la Motte, a prisoner charged with high treason. The

fact is, this Alsatian nobleman being in difficulties in his own

country (where he had commanded the Regiment Soubise), came to

London, and under pretence of sending prints to France and Ostend,

supplied the French Ministers with accounts of the movements of the

English fleets and troops. His go-between was Luetterloh, a

Brunswicker, who had been a crimping-agent, then a servant, who was

a spy of France and Mr. Franklin, and who turned king's evidence on

La Motte, and hanged him.

"This Luetterloh, who had been a crimping-agent for German troops

during the American war, then a servant in London during the Gordon

riots, then an agent for a spy, then a spy over a spy, I suspect to

have been a consummate scoundrel, and doubly odious from speaking

English with a German accent.

"What if he wanted to marry THAT CHARMING GIRL, who lived with Mr.

Weston at Winchelsea? Ha! I see a mystery here.

"What if this scoundrel, going to receive his pay from the English

Admiral, with whom he was in communication at Portsmouth, happened

to go on board the _Royal George_ the day she went down?

"As for George and Joseph Weston, of the Priory, I am sorry to say

they were rascals too. They were tried for robbing the Bristol mail

in 1780; and being acquitted for want of evidence, were tried

immediately after on another indictment for forgery--Joseph was

acquitted, but George was capitally convicted. But this did not

help poor Joseph. Before their trials, they and some others broke

out of Newgate, and Joseph fired at, and wounded, a porter who

tried to stop him, on Snow Hill. For this he was tried and found

guilty on the Black Act, and hung along with his brother.

"Now, if I was an innocent participator in De la Motte's treasons,

and the Westons' forgeries and robberies, what pretty scrapes I

must have been in.

"I married the young woman, whom the brutal Luetterloh would have

had for himself, and lived happy ever after."

And again:--

[Sidenote: DENIS DUVAL'S BOYHOOD]

"My grandfather's name was Duval; he was a barber and perruquier by

trade, and elder of the French Protestant church at Winchelsea. I

was sent to board with his correspondent, a Methodist grocer, at

Rye.

"These two kept a fishing-boat, but the fish they caught was many

and many a barrel of Nantz brandy, which we landed--never mind

where--at a place to us well known. In the innocence of my heart,

I--a child--got leave to go out fishing. We used to go out at night

and meet ships from the French coast.

"I learned to scuttle a marlinspike,

reef a lee-scupper,

keelhaul a bowsprit

as well as the best of them. How well I remember the jabbering of

the Frenchmen the first night as they handed the kegs over to us!

One night we were fired into by his Majesty's revenue cutter

_Lynx_. I asked what those balls were fizzing in the water, etc.

"I wouldn't go on with the smuggling; being converted by Mr.

Wesley, who came to preach to us at Rye--but that is neither here

nor there...."

[Illustration: _The Ypres Tower, Rye._]

[Sidenote: JOHN WESLEY]

It was under the large tree of the west wall of the churchyard that in

1790 John Wesley preached his last outdoor sermon, afterwards walking

through "that poor skeleton of ancient Winchelsea," as he called it.

Rye, like Winchelsea, has had a richer history than I can cope with. She

was an important seaport from the earliest times; and among other of our

enemies who knew her value were the Danes, two hundred and fifty of

whose vessels entered the harbour in the year 893. Later the French

continually menaced her, hardly less than her sister Cinque Port, but

Rye bore so little malice that during the persecutions in France in the

sixteenth century she received hundreds of Huguenot refugees, whose

descendants still live in the town. Many monarchs have come hither,

among them Queen Elizabeth, in 1573, dubbing Rye "Rye Royal" and

Winchelsea "Little London."

[Sidenote: THE THREE JEAKES]

Rye has had at least one notable son, John Fletcher the dramatist,

associate of Francis Beaumont and perhaps of Shakespeare, and author of

"The Faithful Shepherdess." Fletcher's father was vicar of Rye. The town

also gave birth to a curious father, son, and grandson, all named Samuel

Jeake. The first, born in 1623, the author of "The Charters of the

Cinque Ports," 1728, was a lawyer, a bold Nonconformist, a preacher, an

astrologer and an alchemist, whose library contained works in fifteen

languages but no copy of Shakespeare or Milton. He left a treatise on

the Elixir of Life. The second, at the age of nineteen, was "somewhat

acquainted with the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, rhetoric, logic, poetry,

natural philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, astronomy,

astrology, geography, theology, physics, dialling, navigation,

caligraphy, stenography, drawing, heraldry and history." He also drew

horoscopes, wrote treatises on astrology and other sciences, suffered,

like his father, for his religion, and when he was twenty-nine married

Elizabeth Hartshorne, aged thirteen and a half. They had six children.

The third Samuel Jeake was famous for constructing a flying machine,

which refused to fly, and nearly killed him.

Rye also possessed an unknown poet. On a blank leaf in an old book in

the town's archives is written this poem, in the hand of Henry VIII.'s

time:--

What greater gryffe may hape

Trew lovers to anoye,

Then absente for to sepratte them

From ther desiered joye?

What comforte reste them then

To ease them of ther smarte,

But for to thincke and myndful bee

Of them they love in harte?

And eicke that they assured bee

Etche toe another in harte,

That nothinge shall them seperate

Untylle deathe doe them parte?

And thoughe the dystance of the place

Doe severe us in twayne,

Yet shall my harte thy harte imbrace

Tyll we doe meete agayne.

[Sidenote: THE SANGUINARY BUTCHER]

The church, the largest in Sussex, dominates Rye from every point, and

so tightly are the houses compressed that from the plain the spire seems

to be the completion not only of the church but of the town too. The

building stands in what is perhaps the quietest and quaintest church

square in England, possessing beyond all question the discreetest of

pawnbroker's shops, marked by three brass balls that positively have

charm. The church is cool and spacious, with noble plain windows (and

one very pretty little one by Burne-Jones), and some very interesting

architectural features. Too little care seems, however, to have been

spent upon it at some previous time. The verger shows with a pride

little short of proprietary a mahogany altar said to have been taken

from one of the vessels of the Armada (and therefore oddly inappropriate

for a Church of England service), and the tomb of one Alan Grebell, who,

happening one night in 1742 to be wearing the cloak of his

brother-in-law the Mayor, was killed in mistake for him by a "sanguinary

butcher" named Breeds. Breeds, who was hanged in chains for his crime,

remains perhaps the most famous figure in the history of Rye.

Externally Rye church is magnificent, but the pity of it is that its

encroaching square deprives one of the power to study it as a whole.

Among the details, however, are two admirable flying buttresses. The

clock over the beautiful north window, which is said to have been given

to the town by Queen Elizabeth, is remarkable for the two golden cherubs

that strike the hours, and the pendulum that swings in the central tower

of the church, very nigh the preacher's head.

[Sidenote: EIGHT BELLS]

Rye's eight bells bear the following inscription:--

To honour both of God and King

Our voices shall in concert ring.

May heaven increase their bounteous store

And bless their souls for evermore.

Whilst thus we join in joyful sound

May love and loyalty abound.

Ye people all who hear me ring

Be faithful to your God and King.

Such wondrous power to music's given

It elevates the soul to heaven.

If you have a judicious ear

You'll own my voice is sweet and clear.

Our voices shall with joyful sound

Make hills and valleys echo round.

In wedlock bands all ye who join,

With hands your hearts unite;

So shall our tuneful tongues combine

To laud the nuptial rite.

Ye ringers, all who prize

Your health and happiness,

Be sober, merry, wise,

And you'll the same possess.

Hardly less interesting than the church are the by-streets of Rye, so

old and simple and quiet and right; particularly perhaps Mermaid Street,

with its beautiful hospital. In the High Street, which is busier, is

the George Inn, the rare possessor of a large assembly room with a

musicians' gallery. One only of Rye's gates is standing--the Landgate;

but on the south rampart of the town is the Ypres Tower (called Wipers

by the prosaic inhabitants), a relic of the twelfth century, guarding

Rye once from perils by sea and now from perils by land. Standing by the

tower one may hear below shipbuilders busy at work and observe all the

low-pulsed life of the river. A mile or so away is Rye Harbour, and

beyond it the sea; across the intervening space runs a little train with

its freight of golf players. In the east stretches Romney Marsh to the

hills of Folkestone.

Extremes meet in Rye. When I was last there the passage of the Landgate

was made perilous by an approaching Panhard; the monastery of the

Augustine friars on Conduit Hill had become a Salvation Army barracks;

and in the doorway of the little fourteenth-century chapel of the

Carmelites, now a private house, in the church square, a perambulator

waited. Moreover, in the stately red house at the head of Mermaid Street

the author of _The Awkward Age_ prosecutes his fascinating analyses of

twentieth-century temperaments.

[Sidenote: RYE POTTERY]

Among the industries of Rye is the production of an ingenious variety of

pottery achieved by affixing to ordinary vessels of earthenware a veneer

of broken pieces of china--usually fragments of cups and saucers--in

definite patterns that sometimes reach a magnificence almost Persian.

For the most part the result is not perhaps beautiful, but it is always

gay, and the Rye potter who practises the art deserves encouragement. I

saw last summer a piece of similar ware in a cottage on the banks of the

Ettrick, but whether it had travelled thither from Rye, or whether

Scotch artists work in the same medium, I do not know. Mr. Gasson, the

artificer (the dominating name of Gasson is to Rye what that of Seiler

is to Zermatt), charges a penny for the inspection of the four rooms of

his house in which his pottery, his stuffed birds and other curiosities

are collected. The visit must be epoch-making in any life. Never again

will a broken tea-cup be to any of Mr. Gasson's patrons merely a broken

tea-cup. Previously it may have been that and nothing more; henceforward

it is valuable material which, having completed one stage of existence,

is, like the good Buddhist, entering upon another of increased radiance.

More, broken china may even become the symbol of Rye.

[Illustration: _Court Lodge, Udimore._]

[Sidenote: PETT AND ICKLESHAM]

Between Hastings and Winchelsea are the villages of Guestling, Pett, and

Icklesham, the last two on the edge of the Level. Of these, Icklesham is

the most interesting, Guestling having recently lost its church by fire,

and Pett church being new. Pett stands in a pleasant position at the end

of the high ground, with nothing in the east but Pett Level, and the sea

only a mile away. At very low tide the remains of a submerged forest

were once discernible, and may still be.

Icklesham also stands on the ridge further north, overlooking the Level

and the sea, with Winchelsea not two miles distant in the east. The

church is a very fine one, with a most interesting Norman tower in its

midst. The churchwardens accounts contain some quaint entries:

[Sidenote: CHURCHWARDENS' ACCOUNTS]

1732. Paid for ye Stokes [stocks] _L_4 10_s._ 8-3/4_d._

1735. January ye 13 pd for a pint of wine and for eight pound of

mutton for Good[man] Row and Good[man] Winch and Goody Sutors for their

being with Goody in her fitts 3_s._

1744. Fevery ye 29 paid Gudy Tayler for going to Winshelse for to give

her Arthor Davy [affidavit] 1_s._ 6_d._

1746. April 26 gave the Ringers for Rejoycing when ye Rebels was beat

15_s._ (This refers to Culloden. There are two sides in every battle;

how do Burns's lines run?--

Drumossie moor--Drumossie day--

A waefu' day it was to me!

For there I lost my father dear,

My father dear, and brethren three.)

One of the Icklesham gravestones, standing over the grave of James King,

who died aged seventeen, has this complacent couplet:

God takes the good--too good on earth to stay,

And leaves the bad--too bad to take away.

Two miles to the west of Icklesham, at Snaylham, close to the present

railway, once stood the home of the Cheyneys, a family that maintained

for many years a fierce feud with the Oxenbridges of Brede, whither we

soon shall come. A party of Cheyneys once succeeded in catching an

Oxenbridge asleep in his bed, and killed him. Old Place farm, a little

north of Icklesham, between the village and the line, marks the site of

Old Place, the mansion of the Fynches, earls of Winchelsea.

[Sidenote: PLAYDEN AND IDEN]

The mainland proper begins hard by Rye, on the other side of the

railway, where Rye Hill carries the London road out of sight. This way

lie Playden, Iden, and Peasmarsh: Playden, with a slender spire, of a

grace not excelled in a county notable, as we have seen, for graceful

spires, but a little overweighted perhaps by its cross, within whose

church is the tomb of a Flemish brewer, named Zoctmanns, calling for

prayers for his soul; Iden, with a square tower and a stair turret, a

village taking its name from that family of which Alexander Iden, slayer

of Jack Cade, was a member, its home being at Mote, now non-existent;

and Peasmarsh, whose long modest church, crowned by a squat spire, may

be again seen, like the swan upon St. Mary's Lake, in the water at the

foot of the churchyard. At Peasmarsh was born a poor artificial poet

named William Pattison, in whose works I have failed to find anything of

interest.

[Illustration: _Udimore Church._]

The two most interesting spots in the hilly country immediately north of

the Brede valley (north of Winchelsea) are Udimore and Brede. Concerning

Udimore church, which externally has a family resemblance to that of

Steyning, it is told that it was originally planned to rise on the other

side of the little river Ree. The builders began their work, but every

night saw the supernatural removal of the stones to the present site,

while a mysterious voice uttered the words "O'er the mere! O'er the

mere!" Hence, says the legend, the present position of the fane, and the

beautiful name Udimore, or "O'er the mere," which, of course, becomes

Uddymer among the villagers.

[Illustration: _Brede Place._]

[Sidenote: BREDE PLACE]

From Udimore one reaches Brede by turning off the high road about two

miles to the east. But it is worth while to keep to the road a little

longer, and entering Gilly Wood (on the right) explore as wild and

beautiful a ravine as any in the county. And, on the Brede by-road, it

is worth while also to turn aside again in order to see Brede Place.

This house, like all the old mansions (it is of the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries), is set in a hollow, and is sufficiently gloomy in

appearance and surroundings to lend colour to the rumour that would have

it haunted--a rumour originally spread by the smugglers who for some

years made the house their headquarters. An underground passage is said

to lead from Brede Place to the church, a good part of a mile distant;

but as is usual with underground passages, the legend has been held so

dear that no one seems to have ventured upon the risk of disproving it.

Amid these medieval surroundings the late Stephen Crane, the American

writer, conceived some of his curiously modern stories.

One of the original owners (the Oxenbridges) like Col. Lunsford of East

Hoathly was credited by the country people with an appetite for

children. Nothing could compass his death but a wooden saw, with which

after a drunken bout the villagers severed him in Stubb's Lane, by

Groaning Bridge. Not all the family, however, were bloodthirsty, for at

least two John Oxenbridges of the sixteenth century were divines, one a

Canon of Windsor, the other a "grave and reverent preacher."

[Sidenote: DEAN SWIFT'S CRADLE]

The present vicar of Brede, the village on the hill above Brede Place,

has added to the natural antiquities of his church several alien

curiosities, chief among them being the cradle in which Dean Swift was

rocked. It is worth a visit to Brede church to be persuaded that that

matured Irishman ever was a baby.

[Illustration: _Brede Place, from the South._]

CHAPTER XXXIX

ROBERTSBRIDGE

Horace Walpole in difficulties--A bibliophile's

threat--Salehurst--Bodiam--Northiam--Queen Elizabeth's dinner and

shoes--Brightling--Jack Fuller--Turner in East Sussex--The Burwash

country--Sussex superstitions--_Sussex Folk and Sussex

Ways_--Liberals and Conservatives--The Sussex

character--Independent bellringers--"Silly Sussex"--Burwash at

Cricket--James Hurdis--A donkey race--"A hint to great and little

men"--Henry Burwash--Etchingham--Sir John Lade and the

Prince--Ticehurst and Wadhurst.

Robertsbridge is not in itself a particularly attractive place; but it

has a good inn, and many interesting villages may be reached from it,

the little light railway that runs from the town to Tenterden, along the

Rother valley, making the exploration of this part of Sussex very

simple.

Horace Walpole came to difficulties hereabout during his Sussex journey.

His sprightly and heightened account is in one of the letters: "The

roads grew bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness,

our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness. However, without being at

all killed, we got up, or down--I forget which, it was so dark,--a

famous precipice called Silver Hill, and about ten at night arrived at a

wretched village called Rotherbridge. We had still six miles hither, but

determined to stop, as it would be a pity to break our necks before we

had seen all we had intended. But, alas! there was only one bed to be

had: all the rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the

house called mountebanks; and with one of whom the lady of the den told

Mr. Chute he might lie. We did not at all take to this society, but,

armed with links and lanthorns, set out again upon this impracticable

journey. At two o'clock in the morning we got hither to a still worse

inn, and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom had just shot a

smuggler. However, as we were neutral powers, we have passed safely

through both armies hitherto, and can give you a little farther history

of our wandering through these mountains, where the young gentlemen are

forced to drive their curricles with a pair of oxen. The only morsel of

good road we have found, was what even the natives had assured us were

totally impracticable; these were eight miles to Hurst Monceaux."

[Sidenote: FOR BOOK BORROWERS]

A pretty memento of the Cistercian Abbey here, of which small traces

remain on the bank of the river, has wandered to the Bodleian, in the

shape of an old volume containing the inscription: "This book belongs to

St. Mary of Robertsbridge; whoever shall steal or sell it, let him be

Anathema Maranatha!" Since no book was ever successfully protected by

anything less tangible than a chain, it came into other hands,

underneath being written: "I John Bishop of Exeter know not where the

aforesaid house is; nor did I steal this book, but acquired it in a

lawful way." On the suppression of the Abbey of Robertsbridge by Henry

VIII. the lands passed to Sir William Sidney, grandfather of Sir Philip.

Salehurst, just across the river from Robertsbridge, has a noble church,

standing among trees on the hill side--the hill which Walpole found so

precipitous. Within, the church is not perhaps quite so impressive as

without, but it has monuments appertaining probably to the Culpepers,

once a far-reaching aristocratic Sussex family, which we met first at

Ardingly, and which is now extinct or existent only among the peasantry.

[Illustration: _Bodiam Castle._]

[Sidenote: BODIAM CASTLE]

The first station on the Rother valley light railway is Bodiam, only a

few steps from Bodiam Castle sitting serenely like a bird on the waters

of her moat. This building in appearance and form fulfils most of the

conditions of the castle, and by retaining water in its moat perhaps

wins more respect than if it had stood a siege. (Local tradition indeed

credits it with that mark of active merit, but history is silent.) It

was built in the fourteenth century by Sir Edward Dalyngruge, a hero of

Cressy and Poictiers. It is now a ruin within, but (as Mr. Griggs'

drawing shows) externally in fair preservation and a very interesting

and romantic spectacle.

Below Bodiam is Ewhurst, and a little farther east, close to the Kentish

border, Northiam. Ewhurst has no particular interest, but Northiam is a

village apart. Knowing what we do of Sussex speech we may be certain

that Northiam is not pronounced by the native as it is spelt. Norgem is

its local style, just as Udiham is Udgem and Bodiam Bodgem. But though

he will not give Northiam its pleasant syllables, the Northiam man is

proud of his village. He has a couplet:

Oh rare Northiam, thou dost far exceed

Beckley, Peasmarsh, Udimore and Brede.

Northiam's superiority to these pleasant spots is not absolute; but

there are certain points in which the couplet is sound. For example,

although Brede Place has no counterpart in Northiam, and although beside

Udimore's lovely name Northiam has an uninspired prosaic ring, yet

Northiam is alone in the possession of Queen Elizabeth's Oak, the tree

beneath which that monarch, whom we have seen on a progress in West

Sussex, partook in 1573 of a banquet, on her way to Rye. The fare came

from the kitchen of the timbered house hard by, then the residence of

Master Bishopp. During the visit her Majesty changed her shoes, and the

discarded pair is still treasured at Brickwall, the neighbouring seat of

the Frewens, the great family of Northiam for many generations. The

shoes are of green damask silk, with heels two and a half inches high

and pointed toes. The Queen was apparently so well satisfied with her

repast that on her return journey three days later she dined beneath the

oak once more. But she changed no more shoes.

Brickwall, which is occasionally shown, is a noble old country mansion,

partly Elizabethan and partly Stuart. In the church are many Frewen

memorials, the principal of which are in the Frewen mausoleum, a

comparatively new erection. Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York, was

from Northiam.

[Sidenote: A DANISH VESSEL]

In a field near the Rother at Northiam was discovered, in the year 1822,

a Danish vessel, which had probably sunk in the ninth century in some

wide waterway now transformed to land or shrunk to the dimensions of the

present stream. Her preservation was perfect. Horsfield thus describes

the ship: "Her dimensions were, from head to stern, 65 feet, and her

width 14 feet, with cabin and forecastle; and she appears to have

originally had a whole deck. She was remarkably strongly built; her bill

pieces and keels measuring 2 feet over, her cross beams, five in number,

18 inches by 8, with her other timbers in proportion; and in her

caulking was a species of moss peculiar to the country in which she was

built. In the cabin and other parts of the vessel were found a human

skull; a pair of goat's horns attached to a part of the cranium; a dirk

or poniard, about half an inch of the blade of which had wholly resisted

corrosion; several glazed and ornamental tiles of a square form; some

bricks which had formed the fire hearth; several parts of shoes, or

rather sandals, fitting low on the foot, one of which was apparently in

an unfinished state, having a last remaining in it, all of them very

broad at the toes; two earthern jars and a stone mug, all of very

ancient shape, a piece of board exhibiting about thirty perforations,

probably designed for keeping the lunar months, or some game or

amusement; with many other antique relics."

[Sidenote: OLD JACK FULLER]

Four miles west of Robertsbridge, up hill and down, is Brightling, whose

Needle, standing on Brightling Down, 646 feet high, is visible from most

of the eminences in this part of Sussex. The obelisk, together with the

neighbouring observatory, was built on the site of an old beacon by the

famous Jack Fuller--famous no longer, but in his day (he died in 1834

aged seventy-seven) a character both in London and in Sussex. He was big

and bluff and wealthy and the squire of Rose Hill. He sat for Sussex

from 1801 to 1812, and was once carried from the House by the Sergeant

at Arms and his minions, for refusing to give way in a debate and

calling the Speaker "the insignificant little fellow in a wig." His

election cost him _L_20,000 plus _L_30,000 subscribed by the county. When

Pitt offered him a peerage he said no: "I was born Jack Fuller and Jack

Fuller I'll die." When he travelled from Rose Hill to London Mr.

Fuller's progresses were almost regal. The coach was provisioned as if

for arctic exploration and coachman and footmen alike were armed with

swords and pistols. ("Honest Jack," as Mr. Lower remarks, put a small

value upon the honesty of others.) Mr. Fuller had two hobbies, music and

science. He founded the Fullerian professorships (which he called his

two children), and contributed liberally to the Royal Institution; and

his musical parties in London were famous. But whether it is true that

when the Brightling choir dissatisfied him he presented the church with

nine bassoons, I cannot say.

[Sidenote: TURNER IN SUSSEX]

John Fuller has a better claim to be remembered in Sussex by his

purchase of Bodiam Castle, when its demolition was threatened, and by

his commission to Turner to make pictures in the Rape of Hastings, five

of which were engraved and published in folio form, in 1819, under the

title _Views in Sussex_. One of these represents the Brightling

Observatory as seen from Rosehill Park. As a matter of fact, the

observatory, being of no interest, is almost invisible, although Mr.

Reinagle, A.R.A., who supplies the words to the pictures, calls it the

"most important point in the scene." Furthermore, he says that the

artist has expressed a shower proceeding "from the left corner." Another

picture is the Vale of Ashburnham, with the house in the middle

distance, Beachy Head beyond, and in the foreground woodcutters carrying

wood in an ox waggon. "The whole," says Mr. Reinagle, A.R.A., "is

happily composed, if I may use the term." He then adds: "The eye of the

spectator, on looking at this beautifully painted scene, roves with an

eager delight from one hill to another, and seems to play on the dappled

woods till arrested by the seat of Lord Ashburnham." Other pictures in

the folio are "Pevensey Bay from Crowhurst Park," a very beautiful

scene, "Battle Abbey," and "The Vale of Heathfield," painted from a

point above the road, with Heathfield House on the left, the tower on

the right, the church in the centre in the middle distance, and the sea

on the horizon: an impressive but not strictly veracious landscape.

In Brightling church is a bust to John Fuller, with the motto: "Utile

nihil quod non honestum." A rector in Fuller's early days was William

Hayley, who died in 1789, a zealous antiquary. His papers relating to

the history of Sussex, are now, like those of Sir William Burrell, in

the British Museum.

Our next village is Burwash, three miles in the north, built, like all

the villages in this switchback district, on a hill. We are now,

indeed, well in the heart of the fatiguing country which we touched at

Mayfield, where one eminence is painfully won only to reveal another.

One can be as parched on a road in the Sussex hop country as in the

Arabian desert. The eye, however, that is tired of hop poles and hills

can find sweet gratification in the cottages. Sussex has charming

cottages from end to end of her territory, but I think the hop district

on the Kentish side has some of the prettiest. Blackberries too may be

set down among the riches of the sand-hill villages.

[Sidenote: SUPERSTITIONS]

In Richard Jefferies' essay, "The Country-side: Sussex" (in _Field and

Hedgerow_), describing this district of the country, is an amusing

passage touching superstitions of these parts, picked up during hopping:

"In and about the kiln I learned that if you smash a frog with a stone,

no matter how hard you hit him, he cannot die till sunset. You must be

careful not to put on any new article of clothing for the first time on

a Saturday, or some severe punishment will ensue. One person put on his

new boots on a Saturday, and on Monday broke his arm. Some still believe

in herbs, and gather wood-betony for herb tea, or eat dandelion leaves

between slices of dry toast. There is an old man living in one of the

villages who has reached the age of a hundred and sixty years, and still

goes hop-picking. Ever so many people had seen him, and knew all about

him; an undoubted fact, a public fact; but I could not trace him to his

lair. His exact whereabouts could not be fixed. I live in hopes of

finding him in some obscure 'Hole' yet (many little hamlets are 'Holes,'

as Froghole, Foxhole). What an exhibit for London! Did he realise his

own value, he would soon come forth. I joke, but the existence of this

antique person is firmly believed in."

Burwash is one of the few Sussex villages that has been made the subject

of a book. The Rev. John Coker Egerton's _Sussex Folk and Sussex Ways_

(from which I have already occasionally quoted) was written here,

around materials collected during the author's period as rector of

Burwash. Mr. Egerton was curate of Burwash from 1857 to 1862, and from

1865 to 1867, when he became rector and remained in the living until his

death in 1888. His book is a kindly collection of the shrewd and

humorous sayings of his Sussex parishioners, anecdotes of characteristic

incidents, records of old customs now passing or passed away--the whole

fused by the rector's genial personality.

[Sidenote: PARTY POLITICS]

It is to Burwash and Mr. Egerton that we owe some characteristic scraps

of Sussex philosophy. Thus, Mr. Egerton tells of an old conservative

whose advice to young men was this: "Mind you don't never have nothing

in no way to do with none of their new-fangled schemes." Another Sussex

cynic defined party government with grim impartiality: "Politics are

about like this: I've got a sow in my yard with twelve little uns, and

they little uns can't all feed at once, because there isn't room enough;

so I shut six on 'em out of the yard while tother six be sucking, and

the six as be shut out, they just do make a hem of a noise till they be

let in; and then they be just as quiet as the rest."

The capacity of the Sussex man to put his foot down and keep it there,

is shown in the refusal of Burwash to ring the bells when George IV.,

then Prince of Wales, passed through the village on his return to

Brighton from a visit to Sir John Lade at Etchingham; the reason given

being that the First Gentleman in Europe when rung in on his way to Sir

John's had said nothing about beer. This must have been during one of

the Prince's peculiarly needy periods, for the withholding of strong

drink from his friends was never one of his failings. Another Burwash

radical used to send up to the rectory with a message that he was about

to gather fruit and the rector must send down for the tithe. The

rector's man would go down--and receive one gooseberry from a basket of

ten: all that was to be gathered that day.

Another Burwash man posed his vicar more agreeably and humorously in

another manner. Finding him a little in liquor the pastor would have

warned him against the habit, but the man was too quick. How was it, he

asked the vicar with well affected or real concern, that whenever he had

had too much to drink he felt more religious than at any other time?

The Burwash records indeed go far to redeem Sussex men from the epithet

"silly," which is traditionally theirs. Concerning this old taunt, I

like the rector's remarks in _Idlehurst_. The phrase, he says, "is

better after all than 'canny owd Cummerlan'' or calling ourselves 'free

and enlightened citizens' or 'heirs to all the ages.' But suppose Sussex

as silly as you like, the country wants a large preserve of fallow

brains; you can't manure the intellect for close cropping. Isn't it

Renan who attributes so much to solid Breton stupidity in his

ancestors?" I notice that Mr. H. G. Wells, in his very interesting book,

_Mankind in the Making_, is in support of this suggestion. The

_Idlehurst_ rector, in contrasting Londoners with Sussex folk,

continues: "The Londoner has all his strength in the front line: one can

never tell what reserves the countryman may not deploy in his slow way."

(Some old satirist of the county had it that the crest of the true

Sussex peasant is a pig couchant, with the motto "I wunt be druv." I

give this for what it is worth.)

[Sidenote: SUSSEX RESERVES]

It is to be doubted if any county has a monopoly of silliness. The fault

of Sussex people rather is to lack reserves, not of wisdom but of

effort. You see this in cricket, where although the Sussex men have done

some of the most brilliant things in the history of the game (even

before the days of their Oriental ally), they have probably made a

greater number of tame attempts to cope with difficulties than any other

eleven. For the "staying of a rot" Sussex has had but few

qualifications. The cricket test is not everything: but character tells

there just as in any other employment. Burwash, however, must be

exempted from this particular charge, for, whatever its form may be

now, its eleven had once a terrible reputation. I find in the county

paper for 1771 an advertisement to the effect that Burwash, having

"challenged all its neighbours without effect," invites a match with any

parish whatsoever in all Sussex.

[Sidenote: THE DONKEY RACE]

Mr. Egerton was not the first parson to record the manners of the

Burwash parishioner. The Rev. James Hurdis, curate there towards the end

of the preceding century, and afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford

(we saw his grave at Bishopstone), had written a blank verse poem in the

manner of Cowper, with some of the observation of Crabbe, entitled "The

Village Curate," which is a record of his thoughts and impressions in

his Burwash days. One could hardly say that "The Village Curate" would

bear reprinting at the present time; we have moved too far from its

pensiveness, and an age that does not read "The Task" and only talks

about Crabbe is hardly likely to reach out for Hurdis. But within its

limits "The Village Curate" is good, alike in its description of

scenery, its reflections and its satire. The Burwash donkey race is

capital:--

Then comes the ass-race. Let not wisdom frown,

If the grave clerk look on, and now and then

Bestow a smile; for we may see, Alcanor,

In this untoward race the ways of life.

Are we not asses all? We start and run,

And eagerly we press to pass the goal,

And all to win a bauble, a lac'd hat.

Was not great Wolsey such? He ran the race,

And won the hat. What ranting politician,

What prating lawyer, what ambitious clerk,

But is an ass that gallops for a hat?

For what do Princes strive, but golden hats?

For diadems, whose bare and scanty brims

Will hardly keep the sunbeam from their eyes.

For what do Poets strive? A leafy hat,

Without or crown or brim, which hardly screens

The empty noddle from the fist of scorn,

Much less repels the critic's thund'ring arm.

And here and there intoxication too

Concludes the race. Who wins the hat, gets drunk.

Who wins a laurel, mitre, cap, or crown,

Is drunk as he. So Alexander fell,

So Haman, Caesar, Spenser, Wolsey, James.

[Sidenote: A STRATEGIC DUELLIST]

I find in the Sussex paper for 1792 the following contribution to the

history of Burwash: "A Hint to Great and Little Men.--Last Thursday

morning a butcher and a shopkeeper of Burwash, in this County, went into

a field near that town, with pistols, to decide a quarrel of long

standing between them. The lusty Knight of the Cleaver having made it a

practice to insult his antagonist, who is a very little man, the great

disparity between them in size rendered this the only eligible

alternative for the latter. The butcher took care to inform his wife of

the intended meeting, in hopes that she would give the Constables timely

notice thereof. But the good woman not having felt so deeply interested

in his fate as he expected, to make sure, he sent to the Constable

himself, and then marched reluctantly to the field, where the little,

spirited shopkeeper was parading with a considerable reserve of

ammunition, lest his first fire should not take place. Now the

affrighted butcher proceeded slowly to charge his pistols, alternately

looking towards the town and his impatient adversary. This man of blood,

all pale and trembling, at last began to despair of any friendly

interference, when the Constable very seasonably appeared and forbade

the duel, to his great joy, and the disappointment of the spectators."

[Sidenote: HENRY BURWASH]

Burwash had another great man of whom it is not very proud. Fuller shall

describe him:--"Henry Burwash, so named, saith my Author[3] (which is

enough for my discharge) from _Burwash_, a Town in this County. He was

one of _Noble Alliance_. And when this is said, _all is said_ to his

commendation, being otherwise neither good for Church nor State,

Soveraign nor Subjects; Covetous, Ambitious, Rebellious, Injurious.

"Say not, _what makes he here then amongst the worthies_? For though

neither _Ethically_ nor _Theologically_, yet _Historically_ he was

remarkable, affording something for our _Information_ though not

_Imitation_.

"He was recommended by his kinsman _Bartholomew de Badilismer_ (Baron of

_Leeds_ in _Kent_) to King _Edward_ the second, who preferred him Bishop

of _Lincoln_. It was not long before, falling into the King's

displeasure, his _Temporalities_ were seized on, and afterwards on his

submission restored. Here, instead of new _Gratitude_, retayning his old

_Grudge_, he was most forward to assist the Queen in the deposing of her

husband. He was twice Lord Treasurer, once Chancellor, and once sent

over Ambassador to the _Duke of Bavaria_. He died _Anno Domini_ 1340.

"Such as mind to be merry may read the pleasant Story of his apparition,

being condemned after Death to be _viridis viridarius, a green

Forrester_ because in his life-time he had violently inclosed other

men's Grounds into his Park. Surely such Fictions keep up the _best Park

of Popery (Purgatory)_, whereby their _fairest Game_ and greatest Gaine

is preserved."

[Illustration: _Shoyswell, near Ticehurst._]

Etchingham, the station next Robertsbridge, is famous for its church

windows, and its brasses to the Etchinghams of the past, an illustrious

race of Sussex barons. Among the brasses is that of William de

Etchingham, builder of the church, who died in 1345. The inscription, in

French, runs:--"I was made and formed of Earth; and now I have returned

to Earth. William de Etchingham was my name. God have pity on my soul;

and all you who pass by, pray to Him for me." Certainly no church in

Sussex has so many interesting brasses as these. A moat once surrounded

the God's acre, and legend had it that at the bottom was a great bell

which might never be drawn forth until six yoke of white oxen were

harnessed to it. Pity that the moat was allowed to run dry and the

harmless fiction exposed.

[Sidenote: A WAGER]

Sir John Lade, diminutive associate of George IV. in his young days (and

afterwards, coming upon disaster, coachman to the Earl of Anglesey),

once lived at Haremere Hall, near by. As we have seen, the First

Gentleman in Europe visited him there, and it was there one day, that,

in default of other quarry, Sir John's gamekeeper only being able to

produce a solitary pheasant, the Prince and his host shot ten geese as

they swam across a pond, and laid them at the feet of Lady Lade. Sir

John was the hero of the following exploit, recorded in the press in

October, 1795:--"A curious circumstance occurred at Brighton on Monday

se'nnight. Sir John Lade, for a trifling wager, undertook to carry Lord

Cholmondeley on his back, from opposite the Pavilion twice round the

Steine. Several ladies attended to be spectators of this extraordinary

feat of the dwarf carrying the giant. When His Lordship declared himself

ready, Sir John desired him to strip. 'Strip!' exclaimed the other; 'why

surely you promised to carry me in my clothes!' 'By no means,' replied

the Baronet; 'I engaged to carry _you_, but not an inch of clothes. So,

therefore, My Lord, make ready, and let us not disappoint the ladies.'

After much laughable altercation, it was at length decided that Sir John

had won his wager, the Peer declining to exhibit _in puris

naturalibus_."

[Sidenote: THE HAWKHURST GANG]

Ticehurst and Wadhurst, which may be reached either by road or rail from

Robertsbridge or Etchingham, both stand high, very near the Kentish

border. To the east of Hurst Green on the road thither (a hamlet

disproportionate and imposing, possessing, in the George Inn, a relic of

the days when the coaches came this way), is Seacox Heath, now the

residence of Lord Goschen, but once the home of George Gray, a member of

the terrible Hawkhurst gang of smugglers. Ticehurst has a noble church,

very ingeniously restored, with a square tower, some fine windows, old

glass, a vestry curiously situated over the porch, and an interesting

brass.

The Bell Inn, in the village, is said to date from the fifteenth

century.

At Wadhurst are many iron grave slabs and a graceful slender spire. The

massive door bears the date 1682. A high village, in good accessible

country, discovery seems to be upon it. London is not so near as at

Crowborough; but one may almost hear the jingling of the cabs.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Weever's _Funeral Monuments_.

CHAPTER XL

TUNBRIDGE WELLS

Over the border--The beginnings of the wells--Tunbridge Wells

to-day--Mr. George Meredith--The Toad and other

rocks--Eridge--Trespassing in Sussex--Saxonbury--Bayham

Abbey--Lamberhurst--Withyham--The Sackvilles--A domestic

autocrat--"To all you ladies now on land"--Withyham church--The

Sackville monument--John Waylett--Beer and bells--Parish

expenses--Buckhurst and Old Buckhurst--Ashdown Forest--Hartfield

and Bolebroke--A wild region.

I have made Tunbridge Wells our last centre, because it is convenient;

yet as a matter of strict topography, the town is not in Sussex at all,

but in Kent.

In that it is builded upon hills, Tunbridge Wells is like Rome, and in

that its fashionable promenade is under the limes, like Berlin; but in

other respects it is merely a provincial English inland pleasure town

with a past: rather arid, and except under the bracing conditions of

cold weather, very tiring in its steepnesses. No wonder the small

victoria and smaller pony carriage so flourish there.

[Illustration: _The Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells._]

The healthful properties of Tunbridge Wells were discovered, as I record

a little later, in 1606; but it was not until Henrietta Maria brought

her suite hither in 1630 that the success of the new cure was assured.

Afterwards came Charles II. and his Court, and Tunbridge Wells was made;

and thenceforward to fail to visit the town at the proper time each year

(although one had the poorest hut to live in the while) was to write

one's self down a boor. A more sympathetic patron was Anne, who gave

the first stone basin for the spring--hence "Queen's Well"--and whose

subscription of _L_100 led to the purchase of the pantiles that paved the

walk now bearing that name. Subsequently it was called the Parade, but

to the older style everyone has very sensibly reverted.

Tunbridge Wells is still a health resort, but the waters no longer

constitute a part of the hygienic routine. Their companion element, air,

is the new recuperative. Not that the spring at the foot of the Pantiles

is wholly deserted: on the contrary, the presiding old lady does quite a

business in filling and cleaning the little glasses; but those visitors

that descend her steps are impelled rather by curiosity than ritual, and

many never try again. Nor is the trade in Tunbridge ware, inlaid work in

coloured woods, what it was. A hundred years ago there was hardly a girl

of any pretensions to good form but kept her pins in a Tunbridge box.

The Pantiles are still the resort of the idle, but of the anonymous

rather than famous variety. Our men of mark and great Chams of

Literature, who once flourished here in the season, go elsewhere for

their recreation and renovation--abroad for choice. Tunbridge Wells now

draws them no more than Bath. But in the eighteenth century a large

print was popular containing the portraits of all the illustrious

intellectuals as they lounged on the Pantiles, with Dr. Johnson and Mr.

Samuel Richardson among the chief lions.

[Sidenote: THE DUVIDNEY LADIES]

The residential districts of Tunbridge Wells--its Mounts, Pleasant, Zion

and Ephraim, with their discreet and prosperous villas--suggest to me

only Mr. Meredith's irreproachable Duvidney ladies. In one of these

well-ordered houses must they have lived and sighed over Victor's

tangled life--surrounded by laurels and laburnum; the lawn either cut

yesterday or to be cut to-day; the semicircular drive a miracle of

gravel unalloyed; a pan of water for Tasso beside the dazzling step.

Receding a hundred years, the same author peoples Tunbridge Wells again,

for it was here, in its heyday, that Chloe suffered.

[Sidenote: ROCKS]

On Rusthall Common is the famous Toad Rock, which is to Tunbridge Wells

what Thorwaldsen's lion is to Lucerne, and the Leaning Tower to Pisa.

Lucerne's lion emerged from the stone under the sculptor's mallet and

chisel, but the Rusthall monster was evolved by natural processes, and

it is a toad only by courtesy. An inland rock is, however, to most

English people so rare an object that Rusthall has almost as many

pilgrims as Stonehenge. The Toad is free; the High Rocks, however, which

are a mile distant, cannot be inspected by the curious for less than

sixpence. One must pass through a turnstile before these wonders are

accessible. Rocks in themselves having insufficient drawing power, as

the dramatic critics say, a maze has been added, together with swings, a

seesaw, arbours, a croquet lawn, and all the proper adjuncts of a

natural phenomenon. The effect is to make the rocks appear more unreal

than any rocks ever seen upon the stage. Freed from their

pleasure-garden surroundings they would become beautifully wild and

romantic and tropically un-English; but as it is, with their notice

boards and bridges, they are disappointing, except of course to

children. They are no disappointment to children; indeed, they go far to

make Tunbridge Wells a children's wonderland. There is no kind of

dramatic game to which the High Rocks would not make the best

background. Finer rocks, because more remote and free from labels and

tea rooms, are those known as Penn's Rocks, three miles in the

south-west, in a beautiful valley.

[Sidenote: SAXONBURY]

Eridge, whither all visitors to Tunbridge Wells must at one time or

another drive, is the seat of the Marquis of Abergavenny, whose imposing

A, tied, like a dressing gown, with heavy tassels, is embossed on every

cottage for miles around. In character the park resembles Ashburnham,

while in extent it vies with the great parks of the south-west, Arundel,

Goodwood and Petworth; but it has none of their spacious coolnesses. Yet

Eridge Park has joys that these others know not of--brake fern four feet

high, and the conical hill on which stands Saxonbury Tower, jealously

guarded from the intruding traveller by the stern fiat of "Mr. Macbean,

steward." Sussex is a paradise of notice boards (there is a little

district near Forest Row where the staple industry must be the

prosecuting of trespassers), and one has come ordinarily to look upon

these monitions without active resentment; but when the Caledonian

descends from his native heath to warn the Sussex man off Sussex

ground--more, to warn the Saxon from his own bury--the situation becomes

acute. By taking, however, the precaution of asking at a not too

adjacent cottage for permission to ascend the hill, one may circumvent

the Scottish prosecutor.

The hill is very important ground in English history, as the following

passage from Sir William Burrell's MSS. in the British Museum

testifies:--"In Eridge Park are the remains of a military station of the

Saxon invaders of the country, which still retains the name of Saxonbury

Hill. It is on the high ground to the right, as the traveller passes

from Frant to Mayfield. On the summit of this hill (from whence the

cliffs of Dover may be seen) are to be traced the remains of an ancient

fortification; the fosse is still plainly discernible, enclosing an area

of about two acres, from whence there is but one outlet. The apex of the

hill within is formed of a strong compact body of stone, brought hither

from a distance, on which doubtless was erected some strong military

edifice. This was probably one of the stations occupied by the Saxons

under Ella, their famous chief, who, at the instance of Hengist, King of

Kent, invaded England towards the close of the fifth century. It is said

that they settled in Sussex, whence they issued in force to attack the

important British station of Anderida or Andredceaster. Antiquaries are

not agreed as to the precise situation of this military station; some

imagining it to have been at Newenden, on the borders of Kent; others at

Pevensey, or Hastings, in Sussex. The country, from the borders of Kent

to those of Hampshire, comprises what was called the Forest of

Andredsweald, now commonly called the Weald, was formerly full of strong

holds and fastnesses, and was consequently well calculated for the

retreat of the ancient Britons from before the regular armies of the

Romans, as well as for the establishment of points of attack by the

succeeding invaders who coped with them on terms somewhat reversed. The

attack of the Saxons on Anderida was successful, and the consequence was

their permanent establishment in Sussex and Surrey, from which time they

probably retained a military station on this hill.

"There is likewise within the park a place called Danes Gate. This was

doubtless a part of a military way; and as it would happen that the last

successful invaders would occupy the same strong posts which had been

formed by their predecessors, this Danes Gate was probably the military

communication between Crowborough, undoubtedly a Danish station, and

Saxonbury Hill."

The view from Saxonbury extends far in each quarter, embracing both

lines of Downs, North and South. The long low irregular front of Eridge

Castle is two or three miles to the north-west, with its lake before it.

[Sidenote: LORD NORTH'S DISCOVERY]

Queen Elizabeth stayed at Eridge for six days in 1573, on her progress

to Northiam, where we saw her dining and changing her shoes. Lord

Burleigh, who accompanied her, found the country hereabouts dangerous,

and "worse than in the Peak." It was another of the guests at Eridge

that made Tunbridge Wells; for had not Dudley, Lord North, when

recuperating there in 1606, discovered that the (Devil-flavoured)

chalybeate water of the neighbourhood was beneficial, the spring would

not have been enclosed nor would other of London's fatigued young bloods

have drunk of it.

[Illustration: _Bayham Abbey._]

[Sidenote: BAYHAM ABBEY]

Enough remains of Bayham Abbey, five miles south-east of Tunbridge

Wells, to show that it was once a very considerable monastery. The

founder was Sir Robert de Turneham, one of the knights of Richard

Coeur de Lion, famous for cracking many crowns with his "fauchion,"

and the founder also of Combwell Abbey at Goudhurst, not far distant.

Edward I. and Edward II. were both entertained at Bayham, while a

fortunate visit from St. Richard, Bishop of Chichester, put the Abbey in

possession of a bed (on which he had slept) which cured all them that

afterwards lay in it. Between Bayham and Goudhurst is Lamberhurst, on

the boundary. (The church and part of the street are indeed in Kent.)

Lamberhurst's boast is that its furnaces were larger than any in Sussex;

and that they made the biggest guns. The old iron railings around St.

Paul's are said to have come from the Lamberhurst iron works--2,500 in

all, each five feet six inches in height, with seven gates. The

Lamberhurst cannon not only served England, but some, it is whispered,

found their way to French privateers and were turned against their

native land.

Sweetest of spots in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells is Withyham,

in the west, lying to the north of Ashdown Forest, a small and retired

village, with a charming church, a good inn (the Dorset Arms), Duckings,

a superb piece of old Sussex architecture, Old Buckhurst, an interesting

ruin, new Buckhurst's magnificent park, and some of the best country in

the county. Once the South Down district is left behind I think that

Withyham is the jewel of Sussex. Moreover, the proximity of the wide

high spaces of Ashdown Forest seems to have cleared the air; no longer

is one conscious of the fatigue that appertains to the triangular hill

district between Tunbridge Wells, Robertsbridge and Uckfield.

[Sidenote: THE SPLENDID SACKVILLES]

Withyham is notable historically for its association with the great and

sumptuous Sackville family, which has held Buckhurst since Henry II.,

and of which the principal figure is Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst,

first Earl of Dorset, who was born here in 1536, Queen Elizabeth's Lord

Treasurer and part author of _Gorboduc_. After him came Robert

Sackville, second earl, who founded Sackville College at East Grinstead;

and then Richard, the third earl, famous for the luxury in which he

lived at Knole in Kent and Dorset House in London. Among this nobleman's

retinue was a first footman rejoicing (I hope) in the superlatively

suitable name of Acton Curvette: a name to write a comedy around.

Richard Sackville, the fifth earl, was a more domestic peer, of whom we

have some intimate and amusing glimpses in the memorandum books and

diaries which he kept at Knole. Thus:--

"Hy. Mattock for scolding to extremity on Sunday 12th

October 1661 without cause 0 0 3

"Hy. Mattock for disposing of my Cast linnen without my

order 0 0 3

"Robert Verrell for giving away my money 0 0 6"

[Sidenote: "TO ALL YOU LADIES"]

Lastly we come to Charles Sackville, sixth earl, that Admirable

Crichton, the friend of Charles II. and the patron of poets, who spent

the night before an engagement in the Dutch war in writing the sprightly

verses, "To all you ladies now on land," wherein occurs this agreeable

fancy:--

Then, if we write not by each post,

Think not we are unkind;

Nor yet conclude our ships are lost

By Dutchmen or by wind;

Our tears we'll send a speedier way:

The tide shall bring them twice a day.

The king with wonder and surprise,

Will swear the seas grow bold;

Because the tides will higher rise

Than e'er they did of old:

But let him know it is our tears

Bring floods of grief to Whitehall-stairs.

Upon the sixth Earl of Dorset's monument in Withyham Church is inscribed

Pope's epitaph, beginning:--

Dorset, the grace of Courts, the Muses pride,

Patron of arts, and judge of nature dy'd!

The scourge of pride, though sanctify'd or great,

Of fops in learning, and of knaves in state:

Yet soft his nature, though severe his lay,

His anger moral, and his wisdom gay.

The church is very prettily situated on a steep mound, at the western

foot of which is a sheet of water; at the eastern foot, the village. So

hidden by trees is it that approaching Withyham from Hartfield one is

unconscious of its proximity. The glory of the church is the monument,

in the Sackville Chapel, to Thomas Sackville, youngest son of the fifth

Earl of Dorset. There is nothing among the many tombs which we have

seen more interesting than this, although for charm it is not to be

compared with, say, the Shurley monument at Isfield. The young man

reclines on the tomb; at one side of him is the figure of his father,

and at the other, of his mother, both life-like and life-size, dressed

in their ordinary style. The attitudes being extremely natural the total

effect is curiously realistic. On the sides of the tomb, in bas-relief,

are the figures of the six brothers and six sisters of the youth, some

quite babies. The sculptor was Caius Cibber, Colley Cibber's father.

Other monuments are also to be seen in the Sackville Chapel, but that

which I have described is the finest.

Had Withyham church not been destroyed by fire, in 1663, in a "tempest

of thunder and lightning," it would now be second to none in Sussex in

interest and the richness of its tombs; for in that fire perished in the

Sackville aisle, now no more, on the northern side, other and perhaps

nobler Sackville monuments. The vaults, where many Sackvilles lie, were

not however injured. In the Sackville Chapel is a large window recording

the genealogy of the family, which is now represented by Earl De la

Warr, at the foot of which are the words in Latin, "The noble family of

Sackville here awaits the Resurrection."

[Sidenote: JOHN WAYLETT, BELL-FOUNDER]

Withyham has three of the bells of John Waylett, an itinerant

bell-founder at the beginning of the eighteenth century. His method was

to call on the vicar and ask if anything were wanted; and if a bell was

cracked, or if a new one was desired, he would dig a mould in a

neighbouring field, build a fire, collect his metal and perform the task

on the spot. Waylett's business might be called the higher tinkering.

Sussex has some forty of his bells. He cast the Steyning peal in 1724,

and earlier in the same year he had made a stay at Lewes, erecting a

furnace there, as Benvenuto Cellini tells us he used to do, and

remedying defective peals all around. Among others he recast the old

treble and made a new treble for Mayfield. It seems to have been

universally thirsty work: the churchwardens' papers contain an account

for beer in connection with the enterprise:

[Sidenote: BEER]

_L s. d._

For beer to the ringers when the Bell founder was here 2 6

When the bell was weighed 3 6

When the bell was loaded 2 0

In carrying ye bell to Lewes and back again 1 10 0

When the bell was waid and hung up 3 0

For beer to the officers and several others a

hanging up ye bell 18 0

In beer to the ringers when ye bell was hung 6 6

The Withyham churchwardens also expended 3_s._ 6_d._ on beer when

Waylett came to spread thirst abroad. I find also among the entries from

the parish account-book, which Mr. Sutton, the vicar, prints in his

_Historical Notes on Withyham_, a very interesting and informing book,

the following items:

1711. April ye 20, pd. to Goody Sweatman _s. d._

for Beere had at ye Books making 2 6

Aug. ye 19, pd. to Edward Groombridge for digging a

grave and Ringing ye Nell for Goody Hammond 2 6

Aug. ye 26, pd. to Sweatman for beere at ye

Writing of Boocks for ye window-tax 2 0

Aug. 15th, Pd. to Sweatman for beer at ye

chusing of surveyor Decbr ye 26 5 0

1714. Pd. to good wife Sweatman for beer

when ye bells were put to be cast 2 6

Buckhurst, one of the seats of Lord De la Warr, is a splendid domain,

with the most perfect golf greens I ever saw, but no deer, all of them

having been exiled a few years since. The previous home of the

Sackvilles was Old Buckhurst in the valley to the west, of which only

the husk now remains. One can see that the mansion was of enormous

extent; and the walls were so strongly built that when an attempt was

recently made to destroy and utilise a portion for road mending, the

project had to be abandoned on account of the hardness of the mortar.

One beautiful tower (out of six) still stands. An underground passage,

which is said variously to lead to the large lake in Buckhurst Park, to

the church, and to Bolebroke at Hartfield, has never been explored

farther than the first door that blocks the way; nor have the seven cord

of gold, rumoured to be buried near the house, come to light.

[Sidenote: OLD RURAL ARCHITECTURE]

[Sidenote: IN PRAISE OF "DUCKINGS"]

It was of Duckings, the beautiful timbered farmhouse of which Withyham

is justly proud, that Jefferies thus wrote, in his essay on "Buckhurst

Park": "Our modern architects try to make their rooms mathematically

square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like pigeon-holes in a

bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the corners, and are said

to go through a profound education before they can produce these

wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could not get an

arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished timber

beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a tree.

Their rooms they liked of many shapes, and not at right angles in the

corners, nor all on the same dead level of flooring. You had to go up a

step into one, and down a step into another, and along a winding passage

into a third, so that each part of the house had its individuality. To

these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they were not mere

walls, but became part of existence. A man's house was not only his

castle, a man's house was himself. He could not tear himself away from

his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the root,

almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes

unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark

beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed

horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor. This

horizontal beam has warped a little in the course of time, the

alternate heat and cold of summers and winters that make centuries. Up

to this beam the lower wall is built of brick set to curve of the

timber, from which circumstance it would appear to be a modern

insertion. The beam, we may be sure, was straight originally, and the

bricks have been fitted to the curve which it subsequently took. Time,

no doubt, ate away the lower work of wood, and necessitated the

insertion of new materials. The slight curve of the great beam adds, I

think, to the interest of the old place, for it is a curve that has

grown and was not premeditated; it has grown like the bough of a tree,

not from any set human design. This, too, is the character of the house.

It is not large, nor overburdened with gables, not ornamental, nor what

is called striking, in any way, but simply an old English house, genuine

and true. The warm sunlight falls on the old red tiles, the dark beams

look the darker for the glow of light, the shapely cone of the hop-oast

rises at the end; there are swallows and flowers, and ricks and horses,

and so it is beautiful because it is natural and honest. It is the

simplicity that makes it so touching, like the words of an old ballad.

Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which is something of a show

place, and people go to see it, and which certainly has many more lines

in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not appeal to me, because it

seemed too purposely ornamental. A house designed to look well, even age

has not taken from its artificiality. Neither is there any cone nor

cart-horses about. Why, even a tall chanticleer makes a home look

homely. I do like to see a tall proud chanticleer strutting in the yard

and barely giving way as I advance, almost ready to do battle with a

stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the simple old home by Buckhurst

Park."

[Sidenote: ASHDOWN FOREST]

The forest of which Ashdown Forest was a part extended once in unbroken

sombre density from Kent to Hampshire, a distance of 120 miles. It was

known to the Romans as Sylva Anderida, giving its name to Anderida (or

Pevensey) on the edge of it; to the Saxons it was Andreaswald. Wolves,

wild boar and deer then roamed its dark recesses. Our Ashdown

Forest--all that now remains of this wild track--was for long a Royal

hunting ground. Edward III. granted it to John of Gaunt, who, there's no

doubt, often came hither for sport. It is supposed that he built a

chapel near Nutley ("Chapel Wood" marks the site) where, on one occasion

at least, John Wycliffe the reformer officiated. At Forest Row, as we

have seen, the later lords who hunted here built their lodges and kept

their retainers. There are no longer any deer in the Forest; the modern

sportsman approaches it with a cleek where his forerunner carried a bow.

A hundred years ago, in the smuggling days, it was a very dangerous

region.

[Illustration: _Ashdown Forest, from East Grinstead._]

Hartfield, the village next to Withyham in the west, is uninteresting;

but it has a graceful church, and at Bolebroke, once the home of the

Dalyngruges, whom we met at Bodiam, and later of the Sackvilles, are the

remains of a noble brick mansion. The towered gateway still stands, and

it is not difficult to reconstruct in the mind's eye the house in its

best period. Of old cottage architecture Hartfield also has a pretty

example in Lych-Gate Cottage, by the churchyard. "Castle field," north

of the village, probably marks the site of an ancient castle, or hunting

lodge, of the Barons of Pevensey. That there was good hunting in these

parts the name Hartfield itself goes to prove.

[Sidenote: OUR JOURNEY'S END]

Between Withyham and Hartfield in the north, and Crowborough Beacon and

Wych Cross in the south, is some of the finest open country in Sussex,

where one may walk for hours and meet no human creature. Here are silent

desolate woods--the Five Hundred Acre Wood, under Crowborough, chief of

them--and vast wastes of undulating heath, rising here and there to

great heights crowned with fir trees, as at Gill's Lap. A few enclosed

estates interrupt the forest's open freedom, but nothing can tame it.

Sombre dark heather gives the prevailing note, but between Old Lodge and

Pippinford Park I once came upon a green and luxuriant valley that would

not have been out of place in Tyrol; while there is a field near Chuck

Hatch where in April one may see more dancing daffodils than ever

Wordsworth did.

And here we leave the county.

CHAPTER XLI

THE SUSSEX DIALECT

French words at Hastings and Rye--Saxon on the farms--Mr. W. D.

Parish's _Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect_--The rules of the

game--The raciest of the words--A Sussex criticism of Disraeli--The

gender of a Sussex nose--A shepherd's adventures--Sussex words in

America--"The Song of Solomon" in the Sussex vernacular.

The body of the Sussex dialect is derived from the Saxon. Its

accessories can be traced to the Celts, to the Norse--thus _rape_, a

division of the county, is probably an adaptation of the Icelandic

_hreppr_--and to the French, some hundreds of Huguenots having fled to

our shores after the Edict of Nantes. The Hastings fishermen, for

example, often say _boco_ for plenty, and _frap_ to strike; while in the

Rye neighbourhood, where the Huguenots were strongest, such words as

_dishabil_ meaning untidy, undressed, and _peter grievous_ (from

_petit-grief_) meaning fretful, are still used.

But Saxon words are, of course, considerably more common. You meet them

at every turn. A Sussex auctioneer's list that lies before me--a

catalogue of live and dead farming stock to be sold at a homestead under

the South Downs--is full of them. So blunt and sturdy they are, these

ancient primitive terms of the soil: "Lot 1. Pitch prong, two half-pitch

prongs, two 4-speen spuds, and a road hoe. Lot 5. Five short prongs,

flint spud, dung drag, two turnip pecks, and two shovels. Lot 9. Six hay

rakes, two scythes and sneaths, cross-cut saw, and a sheep hook. Lot 39.

Corn chest, open tub, milking stool, and hog form. Lot 43. Bushel

measure, shaul and strike. Lot 100. Rick borer. Lot 143. Eight knaves

and seven felloes. Lot 148. Six dirt boards and pair of wood hames. Lot

152. Wheelwright's sampson. Lot 174. Set of thill harness. Lot 201.

Three plough bolts, three tween sticks. Lot 204. Sundry harness and

whippances. Lot 208. Tickle plough. Lot 222. Iron turnwrist [pronounced

turn-riced] plough. Lot 242. 9-time scarifier. Lot 251. Clod crusher.

Lot 252. Hay tedder." From another catalogue more ram=alogues, these

abrupt and active little words might be called, butt at one. As "Lot 4.

Flint spud, two drain scoops, bull lead and five dibbles. Lot 10. Dung

rake and dung devil. Lot 11. Four juts and a zinc skip." Farm labourers

are men of little speech, and it is often needful that voices should

carry far. Hence this crisp and forcible reticence. The vocabulary of

the country-side undergoes few changes; and the noises to-day made by

the ox-herd who urges his black and smoking team along the hill-side are

precisely those that Piers Plowman himself would have used.

[Sidenote: SAXON PERSISTENT]

Another survival may be noticed in objurgation. A Sussex man swearing by

Job, as he often does, is not calling in the aid of the patient sufferer

of Uz, but Jobe, the Anglo-Saxon Jupiter.

A few examples of Sussex speech, mainly drawn from Mr. Parish's

_Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect_ will help to add the true flavour to

these pages. Mr. Parish's little book is one of the best of its kind;

that it is more than a contribution to etymology a very few quotations

will show.

[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX RULES]

Mr. Parish lays down the following general principles of the Sussex

tongue:--

_a_ before double _d_ becomes _ar_; whereby ladder and adder are

pronounced larder and arder.

_a_ before double _l_ is pronounced like _o_; fallow and tallow become

foller and toller.

_a_ before _t_ is expanded into _ea_; rate, mate, plate, gate, are

pronounced r[dot above e][dot above a]t, m[dot above e][dot above a]t,

pl[dot above e][dot above a]t, g[dot above e][dot above a]t.

_a_ before _ct_ becomes _e_; as satisfection, for satisfaction.

_e_ before _ct_ becomes _a_; and affection, effect and neglect are

pronounced affaction, effact and neglact.

Double _e_ is pronounced as _i_ in such words as sheep, week, called

ship and wick; and the sound of double _e_ follows the same rule in fild

for field.

Having pronounced _ee_ as _i_, the Sussex people in the most impartial

manner pronounce _i_ as _ee_; and thus mice, hive, dive, become meece,

heeve, and deeve.

_i_ becomes _e_ in pet for pit, spet for spit, and similar words.

_io_ and _oi_ change places respectively; and violet and violent become

voilet and voilent, while boiled and spoiled are bioled and spioled.

_o_ before _n_ is expanded into _oa_ in such words as pony, dont, bone;

which are pronounced p[dot above o][dot above a]ny,

d[dot above o][dot above a]nt, b[dot above o][dot above a]n.

_o_ before _r_ is pronounced as _a_; as carn and marning, for corn and

morning.

_o_ also becomes _a_ in such words as rad, crass, and crap, for rod,

cross, and crop.

_ou_ is elongated into _aou_ in words like hound, pound, and mound;

pronounced haound, paound, and maound.

The final _ow_, as in many other counties, is pronounced er, as foller

for fallow.

The peculiarities with regard to the pronunciation of consonants are not

so numerous as those of the vowels, but they are very decided, and seem

to admit of less variation.

Double _t_ is always pronounced as _d_; as liddle for little, &c., and

the _th_ is invariably _d_; thus the becomes _de_; and these, them,

theirs--dese, dem, deres.

_d_ in its turn is occasionally changed into _th_; as in fother for

fodder.

The final _sp_ in such words as wasp, clasp, and hasp are reversed to

wapse, clapse and hapse.

Words ending in _st_ have the addition of a syllable in the possessive

case and the plural, and instead of saying that "some little birds had

built their nests near the posts of Mr. West's gate," a Sussex boy would

say, "the birds had built their nestes near the postes of Mr. Westes'

gate."

[Sidenote: EAST AND WEST]

Roughly speaking, Sussex has little or no dialect absolutely its own;

for the country speech of the west is practically that also of

Hampshire, and of the east, that of Kent. The dividing line between east

and west, Mr. Cripps of Steyning tells me, is the Adur, once an estuary

of the sea rather than the stream it now is, running far inland and

separating the two Sussexes with its estranging wave.

Mr. Parish's pages supply the following words and examples of their use,

chosen almost at random:--

Adone (Have done, Leave off): I am told on good authority that when a

Sussex damsel says, "Oh! do adone," she means you to go on; but when she

says, "Adone-do," you must leave off immediately.

Crownation (Coronation): "I was married the day the Crownation was, when

there was a bullock roasted whole up at Furrel [Firle] Park. I

d[dot above o][dot above a]n't know as ever I eat anything so purty in

all my life; but I never got no further than Furrel cross-ways all

night, no more didn't a good many."

Dentical (Dainty): "My Master says that this here Prooshian (query

Persian) cat what you gave me is a deal too dentical for a poor man's

cat; he wants one as will catch the meece and keep herself."

Dunnamany (I do not know how many): "There was a dunnamany people come

to see that gurt hog of mine when she was took bad, and they all guv it

in as she was took with the information. We did all as ever we could for

her. There was a bottle of stuff what I had from the doctor, time my leg

was so bad, and we took and mixed it in with some milk and give it to

her lew warm, but naun as we could give her didn't seem to do her any

good."

Foreigner (A stranger; a person who comes from any other county but

Sussex): I have often heard it said of a woman in this village, who

comes from Lincolnshire, that "she has got such a good notion of work

that you'd never find out but what she was an Englishwoman, without you

was to hear her talk."

[Sidenote: "FRENCHYS"]

Frenchy (A foreigner of any country who cannot speak English, the

nationality being added or not, as the case seems to require): thus an

old fisherman, giving an account of a Swedish vessel which was wrecked

on the coast a year or two ago, finished by saying that he thought the

French Frenchys, take 'em all in all, were better than the Swedish

Frenchys, for he could make out what they were driving at, but he was

all at sea with the others.

Heart (Condition; said of ground): "I've got my garden into pretty good

heart at last, and if so be as there warn't quite so many sparrs and

greybirds and roberts and one thing and t'other, I dunno but what I

might get a tidy lot of sass. But there! 'taint no use what ye do as

long as there's so much varmint about."

Hill (The Southdown country is always spoken of as "The Hill" by the

people in the Weald): "He's gone to the hill, harvesting."

Ink-horn (Inkstand): "Fetch me down de inkhorn, mistus; I be g'wine to

putt my harnd to dis here partition to Parliament. 'Tis agin de Romans,

mistus; for if so be as de Romans gets de upper harnd an us, we shall be

burnded, and bloodshedded, and have our Bibles took away from us, and

dere'll be a hem set out."

Justabout (Certainly, extremely): "I justabout did enjoy myself up at

the Cristial Palace on the Forresters' day, but there was a terr'ble

gurt crowd; I should think there must have been two or three hundred

people a-scrouging about."

Know (Used as a substantive for knowledge): "Poor fellow, he has got no

know whatsumdever, but his sister's a nice knowledgeable girl."

Lamentable (Very): This word seems to admit of three degrees of

comparison, which are indicated by the accentuation, thus:--

[Sidenote: POSITIVE, COMPARATIVE, SUPERLATIVE]

_Positive_--Lamentable (as usually pronounced).

_Comparative_--Larmentable.

_Superlative_--Larment[dot above a][dot above a]ble.

"'Master Chucks,' he says to me says he, ''tis larmentable purty

weather, Master Crockham.' 'Larment[dot above a][dot above a]ble!' says

I."

Larder (Corruption of ladder): "Master's got a lodge down on the land

yonder, and as I was going across t'other day-morning to fetch a larder

we keeps there, a lawyer catched holt an me and scratched my face."

(Lawyer: A long bramble full of thorns, so called because, "When once

they gets a holt on ye, ye d[dot above o][dot above a]nt easy get shut

of 'em.")

Leetle (diminutive of little): "I never see one of these here gurt men

there's s'much talk about in the p[dot above e][dot above a]pers, only

once, and that was up at Smiffle Show adunnamany years agoo. Prime

minister, they told me he was, up at Lunnon; a leetle, lear, miserable,

skinny-looking chap as ever I see [Disraeli, I imagine]. 'Why,' I says,

'we d[dot above o][dot above a]n't count our minister to be much, but

he's a deal primer-looking than what yourn be.'"

Loanst (A loan): "Will you lend mother the loanst of a little tea?"

Master (Pronounced Mass). The distinctive title of a married labourer. A

single man will be called by his Christian name all his life long; but a

married man, young or old, is "Master" even to his most intimate friend

and fellow workmen, as long as he can earn his own livelihood; but as

soon as he becomes past work he turns into "the old gentleman," leaving

the bread-winner to rank as master of the household. "Master" is quite a

distinct title from "Mr." which is always pronounced Mus, thus: "Mus"

Smith is the employer. "Master" Smith is the man he employs. The old

custom of the wife speaking of her husband as her "master" still lingers

among elderly people; but both the word and the reasonableness of its

use are rapidly disappearing in the present generation. It may be

mentioned here that they say in Sussex that the rosemary will never

blossom except where "the mistus" is master.

May be and Mayhap (Perhaps). "May be you knows Mass Pilbeam? No!

d[dot above o][dot above a]n't ye? Well, he was a very sing'lar marn was

Mass Pilbeam, a very sing'lar marn! He says to he's mistus one day, he

says, 'tis a long time, says he, sence I've took a holiday--so cardenly,

nex marnin' he laid abed till purty nigh seven o'clock, and then he

brackfustes, and then he goos down to the shop and buys fower ounces of

barca, and he sets hisself down on the maxon, and there he set, and

there he smoked and smoked and smoked all the whole day long, for, says

he, 'tis a long time sence I've had a holiday! Ah, he was a very

sing'lar marn--a very sing'lar marn indeed."

Queer (To puzzle): "It has queered me for a long time to find out who

that man is; and my mistus she's been quite in a quirk over it. He

d[dot above o][dot above a]nt seem to be quaint with nobody, and he

d[dot above o][dot above a]nt seem to have no business, and for all that

he's always to and thro', to and thro', for everlastin'."

[Sidenote: "MUS REYNOLDS"]

Reynolds ("Mus Reynolds" is the name given to the fox): When I was first

told that "Muss Reynolds come along last night" he was spoken of so

intimately that I supposed he must be some old friend, and expressed a

hope that he had been hospitably received. "He helped hisself," was the

reply; and thereupon followed the explanation, illustrated by an

exhibition of mutilated poultry.

Short (Tender): A rat-catcher once told me that he knew many people who

were in the habit of eating barn-fed rats, and he added, "When they're

in a pudding you could not tell them from a chick, they eat so short and

purty."

Shruck (Shrieked): An old woman who was accidentally locked up in a

church where she was slumbering in a high pew, said, "I shruck till I

could shruck no longer, but no one comed, so I up and tolled upon the

bell."

Spannel (To make dirty foot-marks about a floor, as a spaniel dog

does): "I goos into the kitchen and I says to my mistus, I says ('twas

of a Saddaday), 'the old sow's hem ornary,' I says. 'Well,' says she,

'there ain't no call for you to come spanneling about my clean kitchen

any more for that,' she says; so I goos out and didn't say naun, for you

can't never make no sense of women-folks of a Saddaday."

Surelye: There are few words more frequently used by Sussex people than

this. It has no special meaning of its own, but it is added at the end

of any sentence to which particular emphasis is required to be given.

Tedious (Excessive; very): "I never did see such tedious bad stuff in

all my life." Mr. Parish might here be supplemented by the remark that

his definition explains the use of the word by old Walker, as related by

Nyren, when bowling to Lord Frederick Beauclerk, "Oh," he said, "that

was tedious near you, my lord."

Unaccountable: A very favourite adjective which does duty on all

occasions in Sussex. A countryman will scarcely speak three sentences

without dragging in this word. A friend of mine who had been

remonstrating with one of his parishioners for abusing the parish clerk

beyond the bounds of neighbourly expression, received the following

answer:--"You be quite right, sir; you be quite right. I'd no ought to

have said what I did, but I d[macron o][macron a]nt mind telling you to

your head what I've said a many times behind your back.--We've got a

good shepherd, I says, an axcellent shepherd, but he's got an

unaccountable bad dog!"

Valiant (Vaillant, French. Stout; well-built): "What did you think of my

friend who preached last Sunday, Master Piper?" "Ha! he was a valiant

man; he just did stand over the pulpit! Why you b[macron e][macron a]nt

nothing at all to him! See what a noble paunch he had!"

[Sidenote: "PAUL PODGAM"]

Yarbs (Herbs): An old man in East Sussex said that many people set much

store by the doctors, but for his part, he was one for the yarbs, and

Paul Podgam was what he went by. It was not for some time that it was

discovered that by Paul Podgam he meant the polypodium fern.

Such are some of the pleasant passages in Mr. Parish's book. In Mr.

Coker Egerton's _Sussex Folk and Sussex Ways_ is an amusing example of

gender in Sussex. The sun, by the way, is always she or her to the

Sussex peasant, as to the German savant; but it is not the only

unexpected feminine in the county. Mr. Egerton gives a conversation in a

village school, in which the master bids Tommy blow his nose. A little

later he returns, and asks Tommy why he has not done so. "Please, sir, I

did blow her, but her wouldn't bide blowed."

[Sidenote: THE SHEPHERD'S PERILS]

In the foregoing examples Mr. Parish has perhaps made the Sussex

labourer a thought too epigrammatic: a natural tendency in the

illustrations to such a work. The following narrative of adventure from

the lips of a South Down shepherd, which is communicated to me by my

friend, Mr. C. E. Clayton, of Holmbush, is nearer the normal loquacity

of the type:--"I mind one day I'd been to buy some lambs, and coming

home in the dark over the bostal, I gets to a field, and I knows there

was a g[macron e][macron a]t, and I kep' beating the hedge with my stick

to find the g[macron e][macron a]t, and at last I found 'en, and I goos

to get over 'en, and 'twas one of these here gurt ponds full of foul

water I'd mistook for the g[macron e][macron a]t, and so in I went, all

over my head, and I tumbles out again middlin' sharp, and I slips,

'cause 'twas so slubby, and in I goos again, and I do think I should ha'

been drownded if it warn't for my stick, and I was that froughtened, and

there were some bullocks close by, and I froughtened them splashing

about and they began to run round, and that froughtened me; and

there--well, I was all wet through and grabby, and when I got home I

looked like one of these here water-cress men. But I kep' my pipe in my

mouth all the time. I didn't lose 'en."

[Sidenote: SUSSEX WORDS IN AMERICA]

The late Mr. F. E. Sawyer, another student of Sussex dialect, has

remarked on the similarity between Sussex provincialisms and many words

which we are accustomed to think peculiarly American. One cause may be

the two hundred Sussex colonists taken over by William Penn, who, as we

have seen, was at one time Squire of Warminghurst. "In recent years we

have gathered from the works of American comic writers and others many

words which at first have been termed 'vulgar Americanisms,' but which,

on closer examination, have proved to be good old Anglo-Saxon and other

terms which had dropped out of notice amongst us, but were retained in

the _New_ World! Take, for instance, two 'Southern words,' (probably

Sussex) quoted by Ray (1674). _Squirm_:--Artemus Ward describes 'Brother

Uriah,' of 'the Shakers,' as '_squirming_ liked a speared eel,' and,

curiously enough, Ray gives 'To _squirm_, to move nimbly about after the

manner of an eel. It is spoken of eel.' Another word is 'sass' (for

sauce), also quoted by Artemus Ward.... Mrs. Phoebe Earl Gibbons (an

American lady), in a clever and instructive article in _Harper's

Magazine_ on 'English Farmers' (but, in fact, describing the

agriculture, &c., of Sussex in a very interesting way), considers that

the peculiarities of the present Sussex dialect resemble those of New

England more than of Pennsylvania. She mentions as Sussex phrases used

in New England--'You hadn't ought to do it,' and 'You shouldn't ought';

'Be you'? for 'Are you'? 'I see him,' for 'I saw.' 'You have a _crock_

on your nose,' for a smut; _nuther_ for neither; _p[dot above a]ssel_

for parcel, and a _pucker_ for a fuss. In addition she observes that

Sussex people speak of 'the _fall_' for autumn and 'guess' and 'reckon'

like genuine Yankees." So far Mr. Sawyer. Sussex people also, I might

add, "disremember," as Huck Finn used to do.

I should like to close the list of examples of Sussex speech by quoting

a few verses from the Sussex version of the "Song of Solomon," which Mr.

Lower prepared for Prince Lucien Buonaparte some forty years ago. The

experiment was extended to other southern and western dialects, the

collection making a little book of curious charm and homeliness. Here

is the fourth chapter:--

[Sidenote: THE SONG OF SOLOMON]

IV

1. Lookee, you be purty, my love, lookee, you be purty. You've got

dove's eyes adin yer locks; yer hair is like a flock of goaets dat

appear from Mount Gilead.

2. Yer teeth be lik a flock of ship just shared, dat come up from

de ship-wash; every one of em bears tweens, an nare a one among em

is barren.

3. Yer lips be lik a thread of scarlet, an yer speech is comely;

yer temples be lik a bit of a pomgranate adin yer locks.

4. Yer nick is lik de tower of Daoeved, built for an armoury, what

dey heng a thousan bucklers on, all shields of mighty men.

5. Yer two brestes be lik two young roes, what be tweens, dat feed

among de lilies.

6. Till de dee break, an der shadders goo away, I'll git me to de

mountain of myrrh, and to de hill of frankincense.

7. You be hem purty, my love; der auent a spot in ye.

8. Come along wud me from Lebanon, my spouse, wud me from Lebanon:

look from de top of Amana, from de top of Shenir an Hermon, from de

lions' dens, from de mountain of de leopards.

9. Ye've stole away my heart, my sister, my spouse. Ye've stole

away my heart wud one of yer eyes, wud one chain of yer nick.

10. How fair is yer love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is

yer love dan wine! an de smell of yer intments dan all spices.

11. Yer lips, O my spouse, drap lik de honeycomb; dere's honey an

melk under yer tongue; an de smell of yer garments is lik de smell

of Lebanon.

12. A fenced garn is my sister, my spouse, a spring shet up, a

fountain seaeled.

13. Yer plants be an archard of pomegranates wud pleasant fruits,

camphire an spikenard.

14. Spikenard an saffron, calamus an cinnamon, wud all trees of

frankincense, myrrh, an allers, wud all de best of spices.

15. A fountain of garns, a well of livin waters, an straims from

Lebanon.

16. Wake, O north win, an come, ye south; blow upon my garn, dat de

spices of it may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garn, an

ait his pleasant fruits.

[Illustration]