justice.
The left-hand road at Flimwell is the way to Rye, leading over what
was once the wild and lonely region of Seacox Heath, haunt of the
desperate smugglers then infesting this part of the country. The heath
is now a thing of the past. Enclosure and farming have abolished it,
and perhaps the only fragment of it left is a delightful little patch
of brilliant heather preserved in the gardens of Lord Goschen’s mansion
of “Seacox Heath.” Portions remain of old buildings once belonging to
a house traditionally said to have been used as a warehouse by the
half-mythical smuggler, Arthur Grey, but the present house was built
in 1871 by Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen. It is a rather severe and
formal Renaissance building, in a pale yellow sandstone quarried on
the estate, and defies the canons of proportion suited to a country
house, running to height rather than ground-space—a fashion imposed in
streets where houses are built shoulder to shoulder, but unnecessary
and undesirable on sites such as this.
It is a beautiful site; a lofty ridge facing south and overlooking many
miles of lovely country. Ornate gardens, in which the most brilliant
flowers predominate, surround the house, and beyond them are dense
plantations of the choicest conifers, collected from all parts of the
world.
Between Flimwell and Hastings, a distance of 18¾ miles, there were no
fewer than six turnpike-gates levying tribute upon road-users, but
in spite of these heavy exactions—perhaps even because of them—the
expenditure of the Flimwell and Hastings Turnpike Trust largely
exceeded its income, and in 1835 it was £11,000 in debt. In the end
Parliament abolished turnpikes, and the bondholders who had lent money
on the security of the tolls and the good faith of the Government lost
their capital, not only here but all over the country.
A farmhouse one mile on the road beyond Flimwell, with brick-and-tile
front and weather-boarded back, and with oast-houses and hop-gardens
attached to it, is known, for some inscrutable reason, as “Mountpumps.”
In another two miles the road comes to Hurst (_i.e._ Wood) Green.
XXXIV
Hurst Green is a large hamlet, and an offshoot of Etchingham; created
by the road travel of the last hundred years. It is in two most
distinct parts: one unmistakably Georgian, the other just as distinctly
Late Victorian, shading off into Early Edwardian. Although one
continuous street, divided only by a cross-road, the two parts of Hurst
Green are very different in appearance, and look so antagonistic that
it would not be surprising to learn that the inhabitants of either will
have no dealings with those of the other.
The traveller comes first to the more recent portion: very red and
raw, and there he finds a reason for much of these developments, in a
large and highly ornate Police-station, which is not merely that, but
a Court-house as well. Hurst Green, it seems, is the headquarters of a
Petty Sessional division of the county of Sussex: much to the advantage
of the great neighbouring “George” inn and its rival over the way,
the “Queen’s Head.” When the railway came, and the custom fell off
and the great stables were deserted, the two old inns were in grave
danger of extinction. Only the Petty Sessions saved the situation.
To-day, when the awful majesty of the Bench has dealt with the crimes
and misdemeanours of the district—awarding fine or imprisonment for
poaching or the juvenile rifling of orchards—the upholders of law
and order and the rights of property in ground-game adjourn for
refreshment, and in the “George” drink confusion to the illegal
midnight sportsman and the youthful apple-stealers, while the friends
and relations of those hardened criminals drown their sorrows at the
“Queen’s Head.”
[Illustration: ETCHINGHAM CHURCH.]
Although the call of nature may be attended to, and thirst and hunger
handsomely appeased at Hurst Green, the æsthetic sense is unlikely to
be full fed. Satisfaction of that kind—but none of the other—is amply
obtained at Etchingham, one mile distant, down a bye-road.
Travellers to and from Hastings by South Eastern Railway are familiar
with Etchingham, as a place with a station where no train appears ever
to stop; and indeed to the ordinary mind there seems, not merely no
reason for stopping, but none for a station at all. For Etchingham
is just what you see from the passing train: a great, impressive
church, and one or two ancient farmsteads. There was no village when
the station was built, in 1847, and the place was, except for that
beautiful church and those farms, a solitude. A solitude, too, it
remained until 1904, when an entirely new village was begun. There it
blooms to-day, in red brick, like a scarlet geranium, and the South
Eastern Railway is at last, after close upon two generations, justified
of its prescience.
There seems never to have been a village at Etchingham. Only a
manor-house of the de Etchinghams; and that disappeared so long ago
that little is known of it. Its last traces were erased when the
railway came, and the station stands on the site. There is something so
typical of the age in that circumstance that one cannot but stand and
admire the dramatic completeness, the colossal audacity of it.
But a something greater than the manor-house of those ancient lords
remains; in the great church they built. It stands so near the railway
that one might pitch a stone from the train into the churchyard; and,
as it is one of the finest churches in Sussex, it never fails to hold
the glance of those who pass this way. It was built, on the site of
an earlier, by Sir William de Etchingham, in 1365, and is a cruciform
building, with massive central tower, in the Late Decorated style—that
large and bold phase of Gothic which comes between Early English and
Perpendicular, and looks lovingly back upon the grace of the earlier
and forward to the lofty emptiness of the later, with a richness of
detail peculiar to itself. A special note of this church is the fine
tracery of its east window, in the easy flowing style, common in France
but comparatively rare in this country, known as Flamboyant. The low
pyramidical spire of the tower still supports the original copper
weathervane, in the form of a banneret displaying the fretty coat of
arms of the de Etchinghams, and on the floor of the chancel are the
almost life-sized figures, in engraved brass, of the founder himself,
and his son and grandson. Sir William, the builder of the church, died
in 1387. He still darkly, in obscure Norman-French and black-letter,
begs the prayers of all: “I was made and formed of Earth; and now have
I 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.”
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT VANE, ETCHINGHAM.]
If salvation be found in church-building—and there are yet those who
seek it that way—then, in those many mansions beyond, William de
Etchingham is well-housed, for he built not only a large church, but a
beautiful.
He endowed it, too, and the eighteen carved miserere stalls yet remain
where the priests sang their office. If you turn up those hinged seats,
you will find odd carvings on the under side; among them the biting
satire, disloyal in such a place, of the fox in the habit of a priest,
preaching to geese.
[Illustration: BRASS OF SIR WILLIAM DE ETCHINGHAM.]
A tablet on the wall records in Latin that the chancel was restored
at the expense of the rector, Dr. Hugh Totty, who died, aged 101, in
1857. In the south aisle hangs a tilting-helmet and the erminois banner
of Sir George Strode; and a mural monument to Henry Corbould, artist
and ancestor of artists, who died, aged 57, in 1844, is a a shocking
example of “Gothic,” as understood towards the middle of the nineteenth
century. Even this, however, is not so bad as the tablet, with marble
profile portrait medallion, to one “John Snepp, gent,” 1823.
[Illustration: THE FOX PREACHING TO THE GEESE.]
The churchyard was once surrounded by a moat, in which, according to
an ancient legend, there lay a great bell. How it came there the story
did not say; but it was never to be drawn from its hiding-place until
six yoke of white oxen should be brought for the purpose. The moat was
drained long since; but legend was for once at fault, for no bell was
found.
XXXV
Returning to Hurst Green, and resisting the temptation to turn aside
for the purpose of seeing the farmhouse called “Squibs,” we come
presently to Silver Hill, an eminence described by Horace Walpole,
who in 1752 travelled Kent and Sussex with Mr. Chaloner Chute on
antiquarian pilgrimage:
“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.”
He forgot which! That is—like the hill—rather steep. But he must have
known by the time they returned, for he speaks of the view from the
crest, on the homeward journey, as “the richest blue prospect you ever
saw.” It is indeed very beautiful, and the fact has been recognised by
some enthusiastic person who, in a field beside the road to the left,
has erected a tall staging, known as “The Beacon,” for sightseers.
The hill is steep: not too steep for a determined cyclist to ride up it
on the return, but still a very respectable gradient. It looks by no
means so terrible as Walpole’s description would prepare the stranger
for; but the roadway is, in fact, not that which gave these tourists
and their guide such qualms, for it was reconstructed about 1830.
Occasional lengths of deserted hollow road at the side are surviving
portions of the old road, and are quite steep and rugged enough to
acquit Walpole of unnecessary alarm.
Robertsbridge is a long, long village of old-fashioned houses huddled
together on either side of a narrow street in the flats that form the
valley of the Rother. Although Robertsbridge is so undeniably old it
is not an independent village, being in the parish of the much smaller
Salehurst, seen across the levels, a mile away.
It has never been determined whether Robertsbridge acquired its name
from Robert de Saint Martin, who founded the Cistercian Abbey “de Ponte
Roberti” here in 1176, or from a corrupted version of “Rotherbridge.”
“Much,” as Sir Roger de Coverley says in _The Spectator_, “might be
said on both sides.”
At any rate, it is unquestionably a place of bridges. There are
seven in all, in a line along the road; but no one of them is at all
considerable, and only three span any water, save in seasons of flood.
The beginning of the village, officially styled “Northbridge Street,”
is generally styled “the Bridges”; but was in turnpike days, when a
gate existed here, “the Clapper.”
The Abbey, long since demolished, lay one mile from the village, beside
the Rother. Fragments of it are picturesquely built into the Abbey
Farm, and serve as substantial walls for oast-houses. The most perfect
relic is the crypt, inside the house, forming an ideally cool dairy.
To this has come the Abbey that gave hospitality to Edward the First
and his successor; whose Abbot in 1193, in company with the Abbot of
Boxley, was of sufficient importance to be entrusted with the mission
of discovering the whereabouts on the Continent of the imprisoned
Richard Cœur de Lion. All that is left of it, beside these fragments,
is a manuscript volume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, inscribed:
“This book belongs to St. Mary of Robertsbridge: whosoever shall steal
it or sell it, or in any way alienate it from this house, let him be
Anathema Maranatha.”
[Illustration: THE ABBEY FARM.]
Notwithstanding this comprehensive curse, some one did steal it. A
further inscription, written, it is thought, by John Grandison, Bishop
of Exeter, 1327-1369, declares: “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.” It is quite surprising to find the old Churchmen
believing in the efficacy of their curses, and thus seeking to turn
them aside.
The site of the Abbey was granted by Henry the Eighth to Sir William
Sidney, and there are those who like to think that his grandson, Sir
Philip, would not have been killed at Zutphen, nor Algernon Sidney
beheaded, had it not been for the curse upon sacrilege, sleeping in one
generation to work woe in another.
For over one hundred and fifty years Robertsbridge Abbey was an iron
and steel foundry, where cannon and shot were cast. In the garden of
the farmstead a heap of cannon-balls, found about the premises, reminds
the visitor of this closed chapter.
When Horace Walpole and his companion, descending Silver Hill in
the dark, came to “the wretched village called Rotherbridge,” they
would have stayed the night, if they could have found any decent
accommodation. “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.” That was rather too much for Mr. Chute, who was a very
great person indeed when he was at home at his stately seat, “The
Vyne,” near Basingstoke, and he declined the fellowship.
So, with links and lanthorns, they continued their journey, and arrived
at Battle, hardly six miles away, at two o’clock in the morning, 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.”
One would like to identify that “den.” The term would scarcely apply to
the “George,” then, as now, the principal house, and a good specimen of
the old English inn, whose proprietor, according to an advertisement
in _The General Evening Post_ of 1784, when the house was to let, had
a “part-share” in the post-coach on the road to Hastings, described as
a “favourite place for sea-bathing.” Was it the “Seven Stars”? Or was
it not the “Stag’s Head” of other days, a shy-looking cottage lying low
down on the right of the “George,” and well remembered locally to have
been the haunt of the smugglers of Darvell Wood?
Robertsbridge is pure Sussex, and pronounces local place-names in a
manner peculiar to itself. In the result those names do not appear any
the more poetic—Udiham becoming “Udjem,” Bodiam “Bodjem,” Northiam
“Norjem,” and Horsmonden “Ors’nd’n.” The story is even told of a
stranger asking an inhabitant of Heathfield the way to that place, and
of that unlettered person for long declaring he had “niver ’eared of
sech a name in these parts.” At last a light broke in upon him. “You
means Efful,” he said.
Robertsbridge has now two railway-stations—that of the South Eastern,
opened in 1851, and a newer, on the Kent and East Sussex Light
Railway, recently made; but it is as old-fashioned as ever, and the
subject-matter of the inns at night is apt to be of such recollections
as that of how, seventy years ago, there were only three pairs of
top-boots in the parish, and how farmers going up to London to cut an
occasional dash would borrow them for the jaunt.
XXXVI
It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its
mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having
seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward.
Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite
bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged
stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died
October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers
of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his own computation.”
Within the church there are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century
cast-iron slabs to Peckhams and Stevens: relics of the forgotten
iron-founding industry of the district.
[Illustration: THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM.]
The contemplative person, for whom antiquity is not everything,
who finds interest in things of the present as well as those of the
past, may discover some entertainment in noticing how exquisitely the
accommodation in the House of God shades off in fine distinctions,
from the cushioned seats and carpeted floors in front, to the strips
of carpet and the fibre matting of the intermediate, and lastly to the
bare seats and naked boards of those nearest the door—and the draughts.
He notices how things religious and things secular are all ordered
in these beautiful gradations: the three classes on railways, and
the more than three orders of seats in theatres; and he wonders—that
contemplative person—whether the “many mansions” prepared in the
Father’s house partake of the like subtleties.
The road to Bodiam—spelled “Bodiham” on old maps—is hilly and
circuitous; but it brings you at last to that tiny village overlooking
the Rother marshes, and to that castle which, more than any other
ancient fortress in England, figures the fairy home of the Sleeping
Beauty. Bodiam Castle stands on the hillside, beautifully rural, and is
surrounded by a very broad and very clear moat of running water, fed
from the never-failing springs that flow from the higher ground and are
dammed at this point. The grey and lichened walls of the castle rise
sheer from the water, amid a wealth of the loveliest water-lilies.
It is mediævalism incarnated. The walls and the eight towers,
alternately round and square, are almost perfect, and the wooden gate
yet hangs on its hinges across the bridge, where the portcullis grins
and the holes in the masonry remain above, to show how, by flinging
molten lead, boiling water, hot pitch, and domestic abominations upon
the heads of the enemy, the garrison were prepared to hold their own.
But history tells us nothing of sieges or conflicts here. Possibly
Sir Edward Dalyngruge, warrior of Crecy and Poictiers, who in the
fourteenth century built it, was too strong a castellan, and his moated
fortalice more than a thought too formidable. At any rate, it is a
castle without a story.
XXXVII
The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe,
how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth
of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened
so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the
re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event,
and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they
had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise
enough to keep the fact to themselves.
Although it all happened so long ago, almost the first thing the
stranger hears of in Robertsbridge to this day is that mystic gold.
Reduced to plain facts, it seems that during his work in Barn Field,
on Taylor’s Farm, January 12th, 1862, a ploughman suddenly drove his
plough into an entangled mass of metal that brought him up with a
jerk. He threw the pieces on the baulk, and when his day’s work was
done showed them to his master, who thought they were brass, and gave
them to him. They were really, from the description afterwards given
of them, gold torques and other Early British ornaments, and had lain
there two thousand years. The metal weighed no less than thirteen
pounds.
After vainly endeavouring to sell the “old brass” to one dealer after
another, a Hastings man more wideawake than the rest, suspecting it
to be the more precious metal, gave the ploughman 6_d._ a pound for
it—liberal man! He lost no time in travelling to London, where he sold
it to a refiner, who melted it down and paid him £529 12_s._ 7_d._ for
the resultant 153 oz. 12 gr. of fine gold. A piece had already been
sold to a Hastings jeweller for £18.
Rumours of this extraordinary find soon spread, and in the end the
ploughman and the sharp dealer were arraigned at the Winter Sessions
at Lewes, December 1862, on the charge of illegally disposing of
treasure-trove, the property of Her Majesty the Queen. They were
each fined £265, half-value of the metal disposed of, or ordered to
be imprisoned until the money was paid. Fairy gold has ever brought
trouble upon those who find it.
It is useless to speculate upon the possible antiquarian value of the
ancient ornaments thus destroyed; but it must have been many times that
of the mere metal.
The other main staples of talk are cattle, hops, and wool. If you
cannot talk wool, hops, or cattle at Robertsbridge without some
knowledge of those subjects, you are self-condemned. There is a
fortnightly cattle-market; “ship” browse in many flocks on the
surrounding pastures, but everywhere are the hop-gardens and their
inseparable oast-houses.
XXXVIII
Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply
to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in
a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington,
three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern
highway.
The “John’s Cross” inn, the old toll-house, and a few cottages sum up
the hamlet, and the rest of the way to Battle is of almost unbroken
loneliness, except for the railway level-crossing, mid-way.
If, before we come into the town of Battle, we re-read the stirring
story of the Norman invasion of 1066, and of the Battle of Senlac,
known more generally to the world as the Battle of Hastings, fought on
Saturday, October 14th, in that year, so fatal to English liberties,
on the spot where Battle Abbey stands,—if, I say, before approaching
Battle, we read anew the story of that history-making day of carnage,
we shall come into the quiet town with highly exalted feelings, and
shall find it a place of many and deep significances to us.
With the tale of that historic struggle thus freshened in our memories,
it is not merely the quiet little Sussex country town to which we now
come, but to the commanding hill of Senlac, overlooking the seven miles
of wooded lesser hills and vales by which the Norman host advanced from
Hastings.
The Norman invasion of England, the catastrophe of Senlac, and the woes
that then befell the English may all be traced to the weak character
and foolish policy of Edward the Confessor, a king whose reputation
for piety has, during all these intervening centuries, glozed over his
lack of the first qualities of kingship. Firm rule, wise and far-seeing
policy at home and abroad—those are the qualities, above all others,
we look for in a king, and mere saintliness of character in a ruler
has never yet, nor ever will, serve the turn of any nation. Edward the
Confessor has, time beyond the memory of man, been held up as a pattern
of all the virtues. We are told how he founded the Abbey of St. Peter,
which we now call Westminster Abbey, on Thorney Isle; we listen, with
what faith we may, to the story of how successfully he prayed away the
nightingales who were disturbing his orisons at Havering-atte-Bower.
We know that Rome, in the fulness of time, canonised him; but we know
also that, however fitted he was in life for the cloister, however
unaffected his piety, however mild and urbane his rule, certainly, from
the patriotic view-point, his _métier_ was not _d’être roi_, for he it
was who brought over the Normans to his court, and by his favours to
them showed them how desirable a country was this England.