used in the work, remains, and so do those brushwood thickets that
contributed charcoal to the industry. Brushwood coppices are still one
of the character-touches of the place, and those “leather-legged chaps,
the clay and coppice people,” as Cobbett names them, are, as they have
been from Saxon times, the greater proportion of the inhabitants. Any
day their rustic and toil-worn figures, bent under huge faggots, may be
seen in Battle street, and they serve to show how, although the Normans
and the monks in turn have gone, the rural Saxon people remain.
When Sir Anthony Browne came into possession of Battle, he lost no
time in demolishing the church of the Abbey and many of its domestic
surroundings. The Abbot’s great hall and apartments he converted into
a mansion, and with a portion of the stones from the demolished church
added other rooms.
[Illustration: BATTLE ABBEY.]
XLV
All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great
Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the
Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds
of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and
pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden
beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it
was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern
drawing-room that was the monastic “locutorium,” or parlour, for the
reception of strangers; they stand on the terrace, and look down upon
the valley of Senlac and the corresponding heights of Telham, the way
the Conqueror’s army advanced to the attack. Then the guide conducts to
the site of the High Altar, the spot where Harold fell, to the gardens,
once the Cloisters; then to the great roofless Refectory. Beneath it
are the three fine crypts. One of them the guide calls the Scriptorium,
but the name has little meaning for him. If you ask him to point out
the site of the Œsophagus, the Pericardium, or the Cerebellum, he will
look puzzled for a moment; but, rallying, will declare them to have
been destroyed so long ago that their sites are uncertain. At last,
with evident relief, he conducts the crowd to the gate, and saying,
“That’s all I can show you to-day, ladies and gentlemen,” dismisses
them.
A relic of more savage times than these of ours still exists in the
market-place, in the iron ring to which the bull was tethered when
bull-baiting was a popular sport. It has recently been covered over
with earth.
[Illustration: BATTLE CHURCH.]
The parish church of Battle, standing beside the road on the way out
of the town, was a “peculiar,” _i.e._ independent of ecclesiastical
control. Its incumbent is not merely a vicar or a rector, but a dean,
and is appointed by the owner of Battle Abbey, still the lay Abbot. In
the chancel lie Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, with a magnificent
tomb over them, and in the churchyard is the humble stone to Isaac
Ingall, who died after ninety years’ service at the Abbey, in 1798,
aged 120. Beginning as postilion, he ended as major-domo. At the age
of 107, resentful of some indignity—perhaps some one had called him
“old”—he went off in quest of another situation.
[Illustration: A BYE-ROAD AT BATTLE.]
Beneath the town and the church, the road crosses the railway. The
allotment gardens, squalid with little sheds, after their kind, stand
below Harold’s centre, on the spot where the fight raged fiercest. But
the finest idea of the battlefield is to be obtained from the bye-road
that here turns to the right, and, skirting the park, runs to the site
of the old Powder Mills. It is far better than looking down, with the
crowd, from the terrace of the Abbey, and hearing the parrot-talk of
a guide. Here you are in the spirit-company of the invaders, and can
appreciate better their task of charging up to that ridge where Harold
and his warriors stood then, where the Abbey buildings stand now.
It is magnificent. The park-like landscape, dotted with clumps of trees
in the uplands; a line of oaks and undergrowth following the course
of the stream in the bottom; the town nested in woods, and Caldbeck
windmill on the right, where, the rustics say, William “called ’em
back.” Away down by Powder Mill House, in the coppices, one may still
see the rocky ravine in whose depths the Norman cavalry fell in the
fierce rally after their pretended flight. The ledges still drip red,
as they needs must do, for the ground is rich in iron; but, although
the explanation of the old legend that the soil weeps blood is prosaic
enough, yet the sight is not without its impressiveness, and vividly
recalls the magnificent opening lines of _Maud_:
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath;
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”
XLVI
Over Telham Hill to Starr’s Green, past Crowhurst Park, where an
ancient tumulus peeps over the palings, lies the way to Hastings. On
the left-hand is the beautiful, but neglected, Beauport Park, fast
going back to wildness. Here a fork in the road is furnished with a
signpost directing both ways to Hastings. This puzzler for strangers
is explained by the right-hand and shorter route being the “New London
Road,” made when St. Leonards came into existence, and that to the left
the “Old London Road,” in exclusive use in days before St. Leonards was
thought of.
[Illustration: THE ROAD PAST CROWHURST PARK.]
The “new” road leads down to Hollington, a suburban village almost
entirely swallowed up by expansion of the town. One of the
old-established sights of Hastings is, or was, Old Roar, half a mile or
so to the left-hand of it.
Old Roar was a waterfall, and the ravine through which it roared exists
to this day, as those who seek it, after tracing several fields and
pathways hemmed in between villas, shall find. Even so far back as
1827 it was described as “not so considerable as thirty years ago,”
and sceptical writers of that time declared there never had been a
period when it was not said of Old Roar that “he is not so good as
last season.” In 1841 Mrs. Mozley, sister of Cardinal Newman, wrote
a novel called “The Lost Brooch,” which no one has ever succeeded in
reading, and in it she describes Old Roar as possessing “all the points
necessary for a very good cataract, except one—water: rather a serious
want in a waterfall.” Yet there was a time when its hoarse voice was to
be distinctly heard a mile away. Pause to-day on the wooden bridge that
spans the gorge, and only a dampness that discolours the stones is seen
through the trees that spring from the sides.
This is typical of much else around Hastings or any other town that has
equally expanded. To the right of the road lies Hollington church: the
“Church in the Wood,” famous in all this country-side as a romantic
solitude. There are woods here now, but not so extensive as before, and
the church is no longer in them, but on the fringe of what remains.
The church itself, restored and practically rebuilt, is utterly and
absolutely without interest; and the churchyard is now nothing but a
cemetery filled with costly and pretentious monuments. Yet, such is
the force of habit and tradition, it will be found, on examining the
huge, ledger-like visitors’ book kept in the porch, that an average of
five hundred people make pilgrimage to the spot daily in the holiday
season. They see nothing worth the trouble, and having seen it go away
again not displeased, for to visit the “Church in the Wood” is a duty
laid upon the holiday-maker, and will be, even when there is no wood
remaining. The way to and from it is by “Old Church Road,” where you
find houses named with even more than the usual want of propriety.
Thus “Sea View” does not look upon the sea, “Fair View” is opposite a
manure-heap, and from “Old Church View” you cannot view the church.
It is not worth the while exploring the New London Road. It is
dispiriting, and those electric tramways that are the tyrants of the
roads for miles around Hastings and St. Leonards render the way of
the cyclist down Silverhill hazardous in the extreme. It is true the
map shows the attractive name of “Bohemia” here, but it is only a
mean—the meanest and miserablest—suburb. Henri Murger, Bohemian of that
artistic and literary Bohemia that is not mapped, died, disillusioned,
exclaiming against his wasted life in that land of rosy visions, “_pas
de Bohème_,” and we may adopt his saying and, appropriating it to this
drab purlieu, turn back and make for Hastings by the Old London Road,
itself not particularly attractive in these times.
[Illustration: JUNCTION OF ROADS SPOILED BY TRAMWAYS, BALDSLOW.]
You come along it, at the beginning of Baldslow, to a weird corner
where a road comes up from Sedlescomb and, cutting under the Old London
Road in an archway, makes for St. Leonards. Here the tramway poles
and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow
itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt
windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its
component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised
ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees.
Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort,
are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees
are those christened by Mr. Hare “Huz and Buz.”
Holmhurst is not historic, in the larger way, but to those who are
familiar with the literary work of Augustus J. C. Hare, it is a place
to be regarded with interest and affection. Augustus Hare wrote many
books. His “Walks in Rome” and “Walks in London” are the best known of
them, but his “Story of my Life” is of course the most intimate, and
it is the most endearing. His own half-humorous declaration that it
is “a ponderous autobiography of a nobody” was heartily and unkindly
endorsed by reviewers, but, at any rate, no one can read those six
volumes without conceiving an affection for the author of them. He was
a lovable man.
Augustus Hare, born 1834, died January 22nd, 1903, never married. He
came of the family of Hares of Hurstmonceaux, a family at one time so
numerous and so abundantly intermarried with the titled and landed
classes that he could claim cousinship in different degrees with a very
large circle in Society. But to call him a Society man would be as
unjust as it would be to style him a _dilettante_ in literature and the
arts, for he had no vices, was no idler, and earned a very excellent
literary repute. The “Story of my Life,” made up, as it is, largely
from letters and journals, recounting his visits and the people he met,
earned him with some sour critics of his work, the opprobrious title
of “literary valet,” but it is so sincere and without artifice that
the reproach is most undeserved, although his artistic, friendly, and
family sympathies certainly often led him into praises which amusingly
remind one of the famous epitaph on that Lady Jones who was “bland,
passionate, and deeply religious. She was a niece of Horace Walpole and
painted in water-colours, and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
A welcome guest at country-house parties, he generally figured at
them as a family connection, as a literary man and artist, and as an
accomplished narrator of ghost stories. He indeed “called cousins” with
so many people of note that the Crown Prince of Sweden, to whom he
became bear-leader for a time, when asked what astonished him most in
England, replied “the number of Mr. Hare’s cousins.” He was, in fact,
the human exemplar of the fabled “hare with many friends.”
XLVII
The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third
son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he
was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and
mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt,
as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was
Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in
the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar
appropriateness in this adoption, which was undertaken in what seems
a very cold-blooded way: the parents to have no claim upon their son
and the aunt to be called “mother”; as indeed, throughout the story of
his life, she is styled. She brought him up and sent him to Oxford, and
for thirty years they lived together, as mother and son. He wrote a
panegyric on her, in the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” and in the long
story of his own is seen to have been very much more affectionate than
many real sons are. Yet the reader of his pages cannot help coming
to the conclusion that the “sweet mother,” as he constantly styles
her, was not only afflicted with a very dour religiosity, but was a
tyrant in his infancy, and an exacting invalid, and an incredibly
mean, parsimonious and suspicious creature during his youth and early
manhood. But, for all that, no real mother ever had so good a son, so
tender and constant a nurse in sickness, as he.
[Illustration: “HUZ AND BUZ”: ENTRANCE TO HOLMHURST.]
When, in 1860, it became necessary for his adopted mother to leave Lime
and seek a new home, they long sought the ideal home of their fancy,
which they named, in advance, “Holmhurst.” All through that summer
they inspected innumerable small estates in the south of England, but
none were in the least like that ideal “Holmhurst,” and they were on
the point of abandoning the quest for awhile, and going abroad, when a
neighbour sent a Hastings paper with the humble advertisement, “At Ore,
a house with thirty-six acres of land, to be let or sold.”
“What a horrible place this must be,” I said, “for they cannot find
one word of description”; for the very ugliest places we had seen had
often been described in the advertisements as “picturesque manorial
residences,” “beautiful villas with hanging woods,” &c. But my mother
rightly thought that the very simple description was perhaps in itself
a reason why we should see it.... Long before we could arrive at Ore,
we passed under a grey wall overhung by trees. “It looks almost as if
there might be a Holmhurst inside that wall,” I said. Then we reached
a gate between two clipped yew-trees, and a board announced, “This
house is to be let or sold.” We drove in. It was a lovely day. An
arched gateway was open towards the garden, showing a terrace, vases
of scarlet geraniums, and a background of blue sea. My mother and I
clasped each other’s hands and simultaneously exclaimed—“This is
Holmhurst!”
We found that the name of the place was Little Ridge. There were six
places called Ridge in the neighbourhood, and it was very desirable
to change the name, to prevent confusion at the post-office and
elsewhere. Could we call it anything but Holmhurst? Afterwards we
discovered that Holmhurst meant an ilex wood, and our great tree is an
ilex.
And here they made their home. Ten years later his adopted mother died
here, and here he passed out of these shadows and unrealities, suddenly
and painlessly, when another thirty-two years had gone, little more
than two years after he had, in writing the concluding words of the
story of his life, said:
When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the
Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has
usually been allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel
so young, the evening of life is closing in? Perhaps it may not be so;
perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson
should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s
sunrise.”
It would be unpardonable to leave unmentioned the additions to the
house he loved so well and the gardens and shrubberies he delighted
in. Still stands the sundial on the lawn, that sundial which had been
placed by his great-great-grandfather, Bishop Hare, on his house of
the Vatche, at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and was presented
to him in 1859 by the then owners of the Vatche. Still one looks
delightfully across these uplands down to the sea, where the craggy
ruins of Hastings Castle cut across the horizon, and the streets of
Hastings come crawling dimly up out of the vale; but the Hospice in the
grounds, where he continually housed and entertained his pensioners,
is empty, and the garden-paths have lost their trimness and become
overgrown with grass since strangers have come and reduced the staff.
Even Queen Anne, whom he brought down from London and set up in the
meadow, looks neglected.
Every Londoner is familiar with the white marble group of figures in
front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, representing Queen Anne (now, alas!
deceased) presiding over four seated effigies, emblematic of England,
France, Ireland, and the North American Colonies of her days; but few
recollect that this group is not the original of the one sculptured by
Bird in 1712. Bird’s work had for many years fallen into a disgraceful
state of neglect. Her Majesty’s nose had long been chipped off and her
forearms had disappeared, while the four seated figures, with scarce a
complete set of limbs among them, more nearly resembled the victims of
a railway accident than the highly respectable allegorical group they
really were. The whole composition was therefore cleared away, and an
entirely new and scrupulously exact replica was made by the afterwards
notorious Richard Belt, and placed in its stead.
[Illustration: QUEEN ANNE, AT HOLMHURST.]
The battered and grimy original disappeared from public ken, and was
wholly forgotten, when Mr. Hare in 1893 discovered its component parts
lying in a heap in the City of London stoneyard, on the point of being
broken up, and greatly coveted them for the embellishment of Holmhurst.
He found that the poor relics were jointly owned by the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and eventually
persuaded all those eminent personages to make him a present of the
remains, which were removed by road to Holmhurst, “at great expense,”
as he says, with the aid of twenty-eight horses, four trucks, four
trollies, and sixteen men. He re-erected them in his grounds, at a
still greater expense, on a circular stone pedestal, similar to the
original, which he had quarried from the outcroppings of stone on this
little estate.
XLVIII
Beyond Holmhurst comes the long-drawn parish of Ore, heralded by its
modern church, rather overloaded with ornament. It replaces the old
church of St. Helen, lying hidden away to the right, across a field and
within a belt of trees.
Augustus Hare thought the ruins of the old church “rather picturesque”:
an instance of how an everyday familiarity may blunt appreciation,
for they are picturesque without any minimising qualification. To the
active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb the tall
locked gate of the enclosure that keeps out the swarming mischievous
children that come destructively up out of Hastings, and easy to avoid
the plentiful nails and savage barbed wire that would induce others to
seek the keys at Ore Place.
It is a melancholy ruin of a fine church in the Perpendicular style,
built over five hundred years ago, and left to moulder away because
the neighbourhood lusted for the brand new building beside the road,
yonder. The roof is entirely gone, and part of the walls, covered in
places with ivy. Neglect is the note of the place. A curious relic
is fixed on the wall in the tower in the shape of a “pitch-pipe,” an
instrument used by parish clerks in the old days to give the key of
tunes to congregations. The unusual name of “Lavender” is seen on one
of the old tombstones.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE OLD CHURCH, ORE.]
Ore is a scattered parish: neither good town nor decent country. The
road passes the Hastings cemetery and the isolated suburb of St.
Helen’s Down, and comes to the enclosing wall and gates of Coghurst
Park, where an elaborately sculptured coat of arms, surmounted by the
crest of a hare and hound, looks down with contempt upon the poor
specimens of houses that have sprung up opposite.
And then you come to Ore itself, that used to be, not so very long
ago, a pleasant place—half village, half suburb. It is now a good deal
more like a slum, and the incursion of the electric tramways has
not improved it. The tram-lines are to be avoided by bearing to the
right, down the long and steeply descending Harold Road, which, like
too many of the modern developments of Hastings, is a road of mean and
paltry houses, built cheaply and faced with stucco that seems to have
been made of dirt, rather than of honest materials. There is a woeful
“respectability” about these roads that desolates the stranger. He sees
it clinging, ineffectual on insufficient means, to the bayed windows
and to the doors, painted and grained to resemble good woods, that will
insist upon warping. It resides in the long flights of steps up to
those doors, and is on outpost duty at the little brick entrance-piers,
too flimsy to hold up the not very great weight of the iron gates that
scream dismally on their hinges.
The Old London Road, however, continues down through Halton, and,
although it does not get rid of the tram-lines, comes, at the beginning
of Hastings, to a very pleasant hollow where the old elms still make an
avenue introductory to the town.
This is the most striking part of that valley between the east and west
hills in which the Old Town of Hastings lies. It was in the coaching
days a supremely beautiful entrance to the town, and travellers of that
time never tired of praising it. In front of them, in the V-like cleft,
sparkled the sea, with the trees surrounding the hoary red-capped roof
of All Saints’ in the foreground, and on either side steep grassy
slopes, as yet but thinly built upon. On the left-hand rose the Minnis
Rock (“Minnis” is Cantise for a rough, stony common), a stony outcrop
on the hillside that was the site of a hermitage until about 1436,
when the “new church of All Saints’ of Hastynges” was built, and gave
the death-blow to the hermits who had lived there upon the charity of
passers-by. The Rock is there to this day, and the rough chambers in
it, but they are choked with rubbish. The last occupants were very much
post-Reformation anchorites. They were an old couple who left the local
workhouse in 1783, and, in a secular way, subsisted upon alms which the
original hermits received for religion’s sake.
[Illustration: THE OLD LONDON ROAD.]
The modern terrace of High Wickham crowns the Minnis heights at this
day, and great masses of houses have encroached upon the natural beauty
of the scene; but still there is a very special charm in it.
It is the _old_ town you see there before you, for whose sake we have
come these last three miles by the Old London Road: the only Hastings
there was, until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The site selected for the town was sheltered, as the traveller viewing
it from this point may see. It lay in the deep and not very broad
ravine between the East and West Hills, and while the one protected it
from the winds of one quarter, the other served the like office in the
opposite direction. And through the centuries, the Castle crowning the
West Hill kept watch and ward over it against other foes. There you see
the few shattered walls of it, against the sky-line, and down in the
hollow St. Clement’s, the mother-church of Hastings.
XL