is a dark red-brick building of the seventeenth century: this is
Pocock's Grammar School, which readers of Thackeray will remember as
the place where Denis Duval was sent to be educated. A little farther
along we come to Conduit Hill, in which is situate the Ancient
Monastery of the Austin Friars--a fair building, possessing that rare
thing, flamboyant tracery. If the ghosts of the little brothers of
bygone days ever return to their former haunts, they must be deeply
grieved or intensely amused, for the building has been everything from
a malt-house to a Salvation Army barracks.
As we leave the town a flood of questions surges into the brain,
perhaps never to be answered. Why is it there is such an attraction
about Rye? Why will men and women travel half across the world to see
these crooked streets once more? Why should the very mention of the
name conjure up such haunting memories of the past? There is very
little in the place that is actually old--a gateway, one or two houses,
a small tower, a church--yet the impression is one of remotest
antiquity.
BODIAM
When in 1377, following on other successful raids, the French descended
on Rye and sacked and fired the town, it became evident that Hastings
could no longer afford sufficient protection to that stretch of the
coast, or to the important river valley leading thence inwards; and the
necessity for another stronghold was immediately realized. Thus did
Bodiam come into existence.
It so happened that, at the moment when the defenceless condition of
the Rother became apparent, there had come into the district a knight
well skilled in all the military arts, one Edward Dalyngrigge, a member
of an old Sussex family and brother to the sheriff of the county.
Dalyngrigge had spent many years in France, and taken part in numerous
expeditions, some of them scarcely creditable. Following a fierce but
capable warrior, one ready for almost any emergency, he had learned not
only the art of the soldier but also the science of the castellan.
Now, Sir Edward was married to Elizabeth Wardeux, the heiress of the
manor of Bodiam, and therefore possessed of the old moated manor-house
some distance from the river. Consequently, in virtue of the necessity
of the times, Sir Edward had little difficulty in extracting the
licence to build a suitable castle.
======================================================================
[Illustration: BODIAM CASTLE]
The castle is a ruin--a mere empty shell--but outwardly its towers and
walls rise sheer from the lily-covered waters of the moat in a fine
state of preservation.
(_See page 59_)
======================================================================
The site selected was the left bank of the Rother, at a spot some
thirty feet above the level of the water. Partly by excavation, partly
by damming up, a great reservoir was constructed, 525 feet from north
to south and 330 feet from east to west; and in the centre an island
was left, a little over an acre in extent. On this island the castle
was erected; and the basin was flooded from a little stream which the
premeditating builder had previously diverted and dammed. Northward
the ground rose pretty steeply from the moat, a circumstance which
seems to detract somewhat from the strength of the castle, till we
remember that the planning and building were done in the days before
artillery had become the deciding factor in warfare. Southwards the
ground fell away to the river, and because of this much doubt has been
cast on the efficacy of the stronghold. It has been pointed out
frequently that an investing army would have had little difficulty in
piercing the bank of the basin; but there was no mediaeval siege whereby
its strength might have been tested.
The castle was built in the form of a parallelogram, after the French
model, with four strong curtain walls protected at the angles by boldly
projecting round towers, 54 feet high and 29 in diameter. Three of the
curtain walls had intermediate square towers, while the fourth, that on
the northern side, had a double tower flanking the great gateway.
Between this deep and well-protected portal and the land stood an
octagonal platform on which was built an advance work, or barbican, the
intervening spaces being bridged by drawbridges. Thus was the way into
the castle strongly held by a succession of defences.
As we approach the castle now from any side, it is difficult to realize
that it is a ruin--a mere empty shell. Outwardly its towers and walls
rise sheer from the lily-covered waters of the moat in a fine state of
preservation: curtain walls, round towers, square towers,
battlements,--all are there as in the days that were. True, the
drawbridges are gone, and of the barbican only a fragment remains; but
of the great donjon itself nothing appears to be missing until--until
we cross the causeway where once the drawbridge rose and fell, and so
come to the interior. Then do we realize the antiquity of the place;
for everything has crumbled to dust, leaving just here and there a
suggestion of what has been--a window, a buttress, a fireplace. Lines
from Lord Thurlow's sonnet come to mind:
"Thou hast had thy prime,
And thy full vigour, and the eating harms
Of age have robb'd thee of thy warlike charms,
And placed thee here, an image in my rhyme;
The owl now haunts thee, and oblivion's plant,
The creeping ivy, has o'er-veil'd thy towers;
And Rother looking up with eye askant,
Recalling to his mind thy brighter hours,
Laments the time, when fair and elegant
Beauty first laugh'd from out thy joyous bowers".
From the ruined fragments we mentally reconstruct the scene of the
interior, the single courtyard in the centre, the two-story buildings
all around with the chapel going up through both stories, and we note
with astonishment the comparative convenience and comfort of the
arrangements of the compact little fortalice.
Certainly Bodiam (or Bojum, as it is pronounced locally) is the most
picturesque castle in the south, many say in the whole, of England.
Nestling in the little valley, surrounded by luxuriant greenery, it has
not the impressive grandeur of the stronghold flaunting its strength at
the head of some precipitous cliff, or bidding defiance to the hungry
seas, but it has a beauty more at one with the spirit of Sussex and the
south.
And yet, Bodiam is a place of inviolate mystery. You can fall in love
with its unique situation, with its delightful lily-covered,
bird-haunted setting; you can be impressed by its note of artistic
completeness; but always there is something of loneliness and horror
about the place. Its walls are grey, but not with the grey of other
castles. It is a cold, pitiless grey, no matter how the sun shine, no
matter how the water throw up again the quivering light. There is a
shudder in the air on the blithest summer day. Perhaps it is that
places, no less than men, gradually take upon them a personality. If
that is so, then surely Bodiam has taken the personality of its old
founder, Dalyngrigge, a bleak enough man, if records speak truly, a man
dark in deed and light of word.
At Bodiam we leave this Enchanted Garden; and as we go we begin to
wonder that a place so rich in memories and in charm has no
representative poet, or, indeed, school of poets. Sussex in general
seems to have been sadly neglected by our singers. Kipling has
probably sung most in her praises; but even for Kipling the great chalk
downs have always been Sussex. And most of our other poets--Habberton
Lulham, Arthur F. Bell, Rosamund Watson, Wilfred Scawen Blunt--have
followed in his steps. Only occasionally has one ventured down into
the marshlands and the low rolling hills and the little river valleys
in quest of beauty. And yet beauty indescribable is here for the
seeking. Probably the poet who knows us best is Ford Maddox Hueffer,
whose volume, _The Cinque Ports_, contains some magnificent
word-pictures of these happy little hills and dales, and whose novel,
_The 'Half Moon'_, gives such a faithful picture of Rye of ancient
days. The following fragment from one of his poems gives the marsh in
all its beauty:
"Up here, where the air's very clear,
And the hills slope away nigh down to the bay,
It is very like Heaven....
"For the sea's wine-purple and lies half asleep
In the sickle of the shore and, serene in the west,
Lion-like purple and brooding in the even,
Low hills lure the sun to rest.
"Very like Heaven.... For the vast marsh dozes,
And waving plough-lands and willowy closes
Creep and creep up the soft south steep;
In the pallid North the grey and ghostly downs do fold away.
And, spinning spider-threadlets down the sea, the sea-lights dance,
And shake out a wavering radiance...."
We close with a short passage from the volume on the Cinque Ports. It
was written concerning the old military canal at Winchelsea, but in its
brooding spirit of contentment it applies but little less to the whole
of this wonderful area. "Nowhere is one so absolutely alone; but
nowhere do inanimate things--the water plants and the lichens on the
stiles--afford so much company. It must not be hurried through, or it
is a dull, flat stretch. But linger and saunter through it, and you
are caught by the heels in a moment. You will catch a malady of
tranquillity--a kind of idle fever that will fall on you in distant
places for years after. And one must needs be the better, in times of
storm and stress, for that restful remembrance."
End of Project Gutenberg's Hastings and Neighbourhood, by Walter Higgins