many incidents in the history of smuggling. Between this point and
Lamberhurst, four miles distant, there were, in the once-upon-a-time of
coaching days, two turnpike-gates. The pikeman’s house remains at both
places.
The level tract of land at this point was known to old road-books as
“Lindridge Causeway,” and owed its name, according to John Harris, who
wrote a “History of Kent” in 1719, to one Lindridge, who was born in
1560, lived in a house adjacent to Lamberhurst, and “built a handsome
causeway here, called after him.” At that time there was still a stone
to his memory in the porch of Lamberhurst church.
The name of “Lamberhurst Quarter,” given to the district on this
hill-top above Lamberhurst village, is one of those many mysteries of
place-names that now can never be authoritatively explained; but it is
supposed to derive from some ancient partition of the manor into four
parts—quarters of a knight’s fee.
Down below, on the right hand, are spread out the many-serried ranks of
the hop-gardens. You look down upon them as a commanding officer might
upon his phalanxed battalions.
XXX
Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as
extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be
the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards
of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who
learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until
the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the
Roman Catholics were wont to remark.
There is no certainty about hops, and a hop-grower will readily admit
that his trade is little better than gambling. Knowledge, capital,
industry are all insufficient to arm him against fate in the shape of
red spider, mould, fly, or bad markets, and he is commonly content if
he can secure one good crop at average prices in three years. It is a
costly cultivation, coming, with rent, rates, taxes, materials, and
labour, to an average of £25 per acre.
Only land “just so” will serve. A little too heavy, a little too
light, or not being drained to perfection, will spell failure, and a
hop-garden must be drained, with pipes or tiles, at least as well as a
house.
The hop-grower’s year begins in March, when the “hills,” or stools,
are uncovered and dressed by pruning. Then the poles are set up: from
two to four to each “hill.” The “hills” being six feet apart, it is
a simple calculation to arrive at the number of poles to the acre.
There are 3,600, forming a considerable item in the grower’s accounts.
Made of ash, alder, chestnut, larch, or oak, of from ten to twelve
years’ growth, the great and constant demand for them has given their
characteristic appearance to large tracts of land in Kent and Sussex,
where the young woodlands are as much a feature as the hop-gardens and
the oast-houses themselves. Poles are from thirteen to fourteen feet
long, and cost from twelve shillings to a guinea a hundred, larch being
the most lasting. To preserve them as long as possible, they are often
dipped in creosote.
Early in May the hop-gardens begin to give employment to the women. The
young shoots are tied with rushes to the poles, and constantly thinned
out, and the poles themselves tied together with a maze of interlacing
string for the support of the climbing bine.
All through the summer the alleys between the plants must be kept well
weeded, and only when August ends does the grower begin to see his
reward in sight; but then rain may bring the “mould,” or the “fly”
may come, and all his toil be wasted. Only one thing will cure the
“fly,” and that is something utterly beyond control—the coming of the
“ladybird.”
Most people know the ladybird or “lady-cow,” as it is sometimes called:
the little winged insect with the hard shell of a post-office red,
subject of the old rustic rhyme, in which, placing it on the tip of the
finger, it would be addressed in this wise:
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home:
Your house is all burnt, and your children all gone.
Little pop-pop sits on the cold stone,
Crying for mammy, and mammy don’t come.
I heard that rhyme very early, and shall never quite lose the forlorn
sense of tragedy in it.
The ladybird is the deadly foe of the “fly,” and seems by some
extraordinary instinct to know when and where that pest is rampant;
for there is nothing more certain than that a plague of “fly” will be
followed by an incursion of ladybirds in countless millions, coming
even across the Channel, as steamboat passengers, plentifully covered
with them, have testified. The sky rains ladybirds, come vengefully
to exterminate the hop-grower’s enemy and to ensure that British beer
shall be properly bittered.
If the hops survive all these dangers and chances and are a generally
abundant crop, the grower is sometimes in almost as bad a case as if
they had been a failure, for prices then rule so ruinously low that
they do not pay the cost of growing. Hops have been so high as £25 a
hundredweight in times of scarcity, when those fortunate enough to be
favoured with a good crop, while their neighbours’ were failures, have
retired with fortunes. On the other hand, they have been so low as
fifty shillings.
A less anxious, but infinitely more busy time has come when the picking
arrives. Responsible gangers have to be employed, and hop-cutters. The
hop-cutter cuts through the bines, pulls up the poles, and lays them
across the bins of sacking into which the pickers strip the flowers
of the hop. The ganger measures out the stripped hops, and in his
note-book credits each picker with the amount of his picking, at the
rate of eight bushels a shilling.
The hopper’s hut is not the last word in convenience, although for
the occasion, and by way of change from the hopper’s native slum, it
may be comfortable enough. It is usually one of a long row of little
brick dens, not altogether unlike some of the wild animals’ lairs at
the Zoological Gardens, and is whitewashed inside in the manner of a
cattle-pen. There are—is it necessary to add?—no pictures on the walls
and no domestic knick-knacks. There is not even any furniture, nor a
bed. If you are a hopper you doss on the floor, luxuriating in clean
straw provided by the hop-grower, and wrapped in the not over-clean
blankets brought by yourself; and you and yours “clean yourselves”—in
these circles you do not merely “wash”—in the open, at buckets and
tins. In the open, too, you dress and get shaved, and cook and eat; and
if the August and September days be kind, there is enjoyment rather
than discomfort in it. Sometimes barns and tents supplement the huts:
sometimes, too, it rains, and then, on a really wet day, when work is
at a standstill and the women and the children are miserable and sulky
and cry, the male hopper—who, although as a rule he uses dreadful
language, is not a bad fellow at heart—goes off to the nearest pub. and
soaks on four-ale, and there is trouble.
[Illustration: KENT.]
There are, every year, some 50,000 hop-pickers, picking from 35,000
to 40,000 acres of hop-gardens. Of these the larger proportion is
contributed by the villagers; but the railways convey about 20,000
from London by the “hopper specials” at very low rates, and many, who
cannot afford even those very cheap fares, tramp down.
The special trains would make the patrons of the Continental expresses
stare. They set out at midnight, or thereabouts, and are filled with a
motley crowd, bringing mattresses, blankets, frying-pans, kettles, and
a host of small domestic requirements for a fortnight or three weeks.
They book to whatever station they fancy as the likeliest point whence
to seek a job; for while some hop-pickers, during a steady succession
of years, know where they will be welcome, many of them go on sheer
speculation, and tramp from village to village until they find
vacancies. In later years, and in bad or wet seasons, the number of
the unsuccessful claiming admission at the casual wards, especially
at Maidstone, has seriously embarrassed the workhouse authorities and
those good folk who not only missionise the hoppers with Bible and
Prayer Book, but feed and clothe their bodies in this world as well as
showing anxiety for their souls in the next.
Hop-picking is for many poor Londoners the only holiday they get
throughout the year. It is that best of holidays, change of work and
of scene. Its chief merits are that it requires no skill, and that
the whole family can take part in it, except the baby, who is at any
rate brought into the hop-garden to look on, and left to amuse himself
or to sleep under an umbrella, while grandfather, grandmother,
father, mother, uncles and aunts, and brothers and sisters are all
busily filling the bins and earning, according to their degrees of
“slippiness,” a shilling to two shillings the day.
Each hop-grower is his own dryer: hence the kilns, the strangely
cowled “oast-houses” attached to every hop-garden. To these the hops
are taken, to be dried. Most oast-houses are circular, that form being
considered to distribute the heat more evenly than the square. The
interior is instructive, and would not be at all unwelcome on one of
those wet and chilly days that are not unknown to the English summer,
were it not for the universal practice of mixing sulphur with the coke
fires, which, to a stranger, results in an inconvenient hoarseness and
sore throat. The reason for the sulphur is that the fumes it throws
off give a yellowish colour to the dried hops, a tint conventionally
required by the factors, although it makes them neither better nor
worse.
The fires are on the ground level. Above, the hops are spread on the
drying-floor, formed of wire-netting, covered with hair-cloth. Through
this the warm air ascends, and in twelve hours some 1,050 lb. weight
of hops are dried, and incidentally reduced by the evaporation of the
moisture in them to 200 lb. The heat ascends and leaves the oast-house
by the cowl, which turns on bearings, according to the direction of the
wind.
From the drying-floor to the cooling-floor the hops are transferred
with a wooden shovel, and then packed into the “pockets.” “Pockets”
are sacks, and are nowadays filled by being suspended from a hole in
the floor, and filled with the light feathery dried hops; and then
repeatedly pressed down, re-filled and re-pressed by a heavy iron
screw-press. In the result, a pocket of hops is as hard and unyielding
to the touch as a mass of iron, and samples cut from it hold together
like so much cake-tobacco. The older method of packing was for a
“jumper” to press the hops down by his own unaided efforts.
XXXI
Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it,
for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside
the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical
yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively
for their wooden stands.
Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The
Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the
desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing
behind it, is in appearance—and in some sort in fact—an appanage of the
lord of the manor, for it stands, with the residence, in the middle of
his park.
It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply
embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a
solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in
the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy,
with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise:
Virgil Pomfret, Gent
Liv^d so Respected
That when the Sable Train of Mourning Friends
Attended his breathless Corps
Here to be Entomb^d
Each tear ful Eye seem’d thus to Say
There Goes an Honest Man
1765 Aged 77
This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife
was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in
the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small
Pox,” aged 28.
I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it
in this larcenous way.
At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard
Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given
to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in
a valley with beautiful hills round it.”
Old writers gave it as their opinion that the place-name came from “the
Anglo-Saxon _Lam_, meaning ‘loam,’” and supported their contention by
referring to the sticky clay of the neighbourhood; but Lamberhurst
probably took the first part of its name from the Saxon genitive
plural for lambs. The second part means, of course, a wood. Most
surrounding places take their names, in this manner, from natural
objects.
[Illustration: LAMBERHURST.]
Kent and Sussex here march together, and the village was, until 1894,
in both counties, the dividing-line being the little river Teise that
flows under the picturesque and narrow bridge in the village street.
In that year, however, Lamberhurst was transferred wholly to Kent. The
old “Chequers” inn, type of an old English hostelry, has lately been
neighboured by an upstart hotel, disturbing with its raw newness the
ancient peace of this Sleepy Hollow.
It was once a busy enough place, and black and smoky, for close by
were the famous furnaces, or “bloomeries,” where iron-ore was smelted
and cannon cast, and where the famous iron railings that now partly,
and once wholly, surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral, were made. Great
outcry was made when the railings were removed from the west front of
the cathedral in 1873, but we need not lack in admiration of them to
realise that the open space thus created is a better sight than the
strictly enclosed approach to London’s chief place of worship. The
railings originally weighed 200 tons, cost £11,202, and were considered
to be the finest, as they certainly were the heaviest, in the world.
The site of the furnace is half a mile from Lamberhurst, on the way to
Bayham Abbey. It is distinguished by a hammer-pond and a mouldy old
house almost smothered in trees and creepers.
[Illustration: BAYHAM ABBEY: ACROSS THE WATER-MEADOWS.]
Along the valley of the stream that feeds this pond lie the ruins of
Bayham Abbey, a remote home of Premonstratensian Canons, whose simple
life was to the last in great contrast with the dissolute conduct of
the great majority of the religious houses rightly abolished in the
time of Henry the Eighth. But they had to suffer for the sins of the
many, and although a crowd of rustics and others of better estate
assembled in disguise and reinstated the canons, after they had been
expelled by the Commissioners, it was only a temporary victory. Abbey
and estates fell to Sir Anthony Browne, of whom we shall hear more at
Battle; but what became of the wonderful bed upon which the blessed
St. Richard of Chichester had slept, history sayeth not. It should
have been presented to the most deserving hospital, for it wrought
cures upon all who slept in it, no matter what the disease. But the Age
of Faith was past, and the Blessed Bed was doubtless chopped up for
firewood and its bedding dispersed: an inestimable loss to an ailing
world. Imagine a bed sovran for every ill! How compute the value of it?
If the curse upon sacrilege were not such a chancy and fortuitous
thing, one might look confidently for terrible happenings to the owners
of the Bayham Abbey lands, the Pratts, Marquises Camden, who bought the
estates from Viscount Montagu in 1714. But their elephant’s-head crest
remains on all the cottages for miles around, and they continue to
“live long and brosber.”
The ruins are visible from the road, lying amid rich water-meadows, and
they are to be seen more intimately at the end of a phenomenally muddy
lane. But you may not view them from within the enclosure except on one
day of the week and at a fee of sixpence.
XXXII
Restrictions upon sight-seeing in this neighbourhood are particularly
severe. On the rising ground out of Lamberhurst, for example, lies
Scotney Castle, a lovely, sequestered ruin partly surrounded by a
great, lake-like moat, and only a little less romantic than Bodiam
itself. To reach it you go past a very modern lodge and along a
half-mile of wooded drive, chiefly of laurels and sweet chestnuts. But
permission is granted on only one day of the week, doubtless in the
hope that the precise day will not be remembered. On any summer’s day
numerous vehicles and parties, some of them come from long distances,
may be seen turned back by the lodge-keeper.
Scotney was ever the home of romance, for one of its earliest owners,
Walter de Scotney, was executed at Winchester in 1259 for administering
poison to the Earl of Gloucester and others. The humour of it is that
Walter de Scotney was probably quite innocent. The Earl recovered,
but his brother, William de Clare, died, as also did the Abbot of
Westminster. The Earl himself seems to have had a narrow escape, for
he lost hair, nails, teeth, and skin, and must have been one vast
comprehensive ache, and in a more painful condition than that of a
chicken plucked alive.
Scotney then passed to the Darrells, who led a finely dramatic life
here until they ended, to an effective and tragical “curtain.”
The old castle lies in a watery hollow beneath the modern Gothic
mansion, and itself consists of two distinct portions: the castellated
building erected about 1418 by Archbishop Chicheley, and the later
manor-house of the Darrells, who in Queen Elizabeth’s time were Roman
Catholics, maintaining their religion and its observances in spite of
the laws, ordinances, and penalties levelled against Papist recusants.
[Illustration: SCOTNEY CASTLE.]
To secure their officiating priests against arrest the Darrells
contrived a highly ingenious hiding-hole in their mansion, and it was
speedily found useful. It was the Christmas night of 1598, towards
the end of Elizabeth’s long reign, and Father Blount, a well-known and
keenly sought priest, was in the house with his servant when the party
were surprised by a search-expedition, who, having got wind of Blount’s
presence, were bent on capturing him.
While the enemy were demanding admittance, Blount and his servant were
hurried into the courtyard, where a huge stone in the wall, turning
upon a pivot, gave entrance to the hiding-place. Unluckily for them,
a portion of a girdle-strap was caught between the stone and the rest
of the wall, and showed plainly. Meanwhile the search-party had been
admitted, and, securing the inmates of the house in one room, proceeded
to search the place.
While they were thus engaged an outside servant of the family chanced
to see the girdle, and promptly cut it off, calling as loudly as he
dared to the fugitives to pull in the fragment that was still visible.
The sharp-eared search-party, hearing a voice in the courtyard, rushed
out and sounded the walls all round, without making any discovery, but
kept it up until the rain, which had set in, disgusted them, when they
retired, intending to resume the search on the morrow.
As Blount’s own record of the adventure tells us, he and his servant
were concealed for days under a staircase. At last, afraid to risk the
result of another day’s proceedings, they escaped under cover of night.
Barefooted they crossed the courtyard, climbed the walls and swam the
moat, then covered with thin ice. They did well to fly, for next day
their hiding-place was discovered.
In later years the castle and manor-house, by that time ruined, was the
haunt of smugglers, among whom the Darrells themselves were reputed
to be prominent. To-day the beautiful spot is surrounded not only by
the moat, but by exquisite gardens. The two remaining towers of the
mediæval castle rise picturesquely from the still waters, and within
the wreck of the Elizabethan mansion there are rooms contrived for the
gamekeeper.
XXXIII
Weird oast-houses of a gigantic size raise their lofty cowls against
the sky-line outside Lamberhurst, and, with their vanes decorated with
images of the Kentish Horse, look like the architecture of Nightmare.
Half a mile onwards, an old toll-house, added to in later years, has
the appearance of a lodge. Beyond it, the road has at some distant
period been raised from a very deep dingle, as may be judged from the
farm in the neighbouring hollow, and from the Bewl Bridge, under whose
arch the little Bewl stream rushes, with a hoarse voice, far below.
[Illustration: WEIRD OAST-HOUSES, LAMBERHURST.]
In another mile is Stone Crouch, whose name of “crouch,” meaning merely
a cross—probably a cross-road—prepares one for that most solitary
and most rustic hamlet, with a farmhouse and its dependent cottages and
barns, all in the old Kentish style. The farmhouse was once a coaching
inn, and appears to have borne the sign of the “Postboy,” now taken by
a house on the way from Lamberhurst, half a mile before the hamlet is
reached.
On the left is the great park of Bedgebury, the seat until 1887, when
he died, of A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, once prominent in the House of
Commons. He was the descendant of one John Hope, a Hollander, of
Amsterdam, whose son settled in England about 1800. That origin was
the subject of a curious allusion in Parliament, during the debate of
April 12th, 1867, on the Representation of the People Bill: a measure
vehemently opposed by Beresford-Hope, whose clumsy, burly form and
grotesque mannerisms in speaking were often commented upon. He spoke
with emphasis of voice and gesture against that proposal of Disraeli’s,
and declared, rather offensively, that he “would vote with whole heart
and conscience against the Asian mystery.”
To this the “Asian mystery” himself rejoined that “all the honourable
member’s exhibitions in the House are distinguished by a prudery which
charms me, and when he talks of Asian mysteries, I may, perhaps, by way
of reply, remark that there is a Batavian grace about his exhibition
which takes the sting out of what he has said.”
He might even have said batrachian grace, for Beresford-Hope on his
legs in the House was something froglike.
The house at Bedgebury, originally built in 1688 by Sir James Hayes,
from sources romantically drawn out of treasure recovered from a sunken
Spanish galleon, has been twice remodelled, lastly in the ’60’s, and is
typical of the taste then prevailing for French architecture of what we
may term the Alexandra Palace, Grosvenor Place, and Buckingham Palace
Hotel type: which is to a Londoner an easier method of comparison
than by naming it the “Louis the Fourteenth style.” It is a type
distinguished by scaly Mansard roofs and spiky crestings, and has long
been outmoded.
Beresford-Hope was a connoisseur of sorts, with a ready purse for
church-restoration, conducted sometimes with that “zeal not according
to knowledge” St. Paul laments, and exemplified in the little church of
Kilndown, outside Bedgebury Park.
At Flimwell, which is merely a hamlet at the cross-roads, formed into
a parish in 1839 by annexing portions of the neighbouring parishes
of Etchingham, Ticehurst, and Hawkhurst, the road finally enters
Sussex. “Flimwell Vent” is the style by which the place is known to
old Turnpike Acts. The name sounds mysterious, but is only a strangely
perverted version of “went,” the old rustic word for a cross-road.
This, where roads go in four different directions, would be a
“four-went way.” The draughtsmen who drew up those acts simply did not
understand the term, and spelled it, as Mr. Tony Weller did his name,
with a “we.”
The place is not unknown to history. In 1265, Henry the Third having,
after a short siege, seized Tonbridge Castle, marched south, and,
passing Combwell, a nunnery in the parish of Goudhurst, found the dead
body of his cook, Master Thomas, who had incautiously strayed from the
main body. According to contemporary records, the enraged King ordered
three hundred and fifteen archers to be beheaded “at the place which is
called Flimerwelle,” and here accordingly “they were surrounded like so
many innocent lambs in a field, and butchered.”