to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street,
is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old
Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down
which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its
crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep
angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of
the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best
thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses,
strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is
the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to
it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at
the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form
excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are
as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in
the rendering of it.
Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric
epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport
to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local
celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be
anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual,
unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the
epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he
did _not_ see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn
that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:
Here lies an only darling Boy
Who was his widow’d Mother’s joy;
Her grief and sad affliction prove
How tenderly she did him love.
In childish play he teas’d a mule
Which rag’d its angry owner’s soul,
And through whose angry blows and spleen
This child so soon a corpse was seen.
His Mother now is left to mourn
The loss of her beloved Son.
Though sighs and tears will prove in vain,
She hopes in Heaven to meet again.
The name of a modern public-house in the town, the “Kicking Donkey,”
near St. Clement’s Church, would appear to have derived from this,
although the pictorial sign represents the quite different scene of a
seaside holiday-maker trying to keep his seat on the back of a restive
jackass.
The second unusual epitaph is to a smuggler:
This Stone
Sacred to the memory of
Joseph Swain, Fisherman
was erected at the expence of
the members of the friendly
Society of Hastings
in commiseration of his cruel and
untimely death and as a record of
the public indignation at the needless
and sanguinary violence of
which he was the unoffending Victim
He was shot by Geo. England, one
of the Sailors employ’d in the Coast
-blockade service in open day on the
13th March 1821 and almost instantly
expir’d, in the twenty ninth Year of
his age leaving a Widow and five
small children to lament his loss.
The third immortal is Edward Alldridge, “who was Maliciously shot,
April 23rd, 1806. Aged 41 years.” It is curious that his son Edward
was, according to the same stone, “accidentally shot, May 13th, 1810.
Aged 15 years.”
[Illustration: ALL SAINTS’.]
There is little time in this age for brooding over historical
celebrities or notorieties, but if Hastings dwelt much upon the past,
it could find little pleasure in the recollection that it was the
birthplace of Titus Oates, whose baptism is registered in 1619, in the
books of All Saints’, of which his father was afterwards rector. Titus
was himself curate here.
Much, indeed, might be written of the clergy of All Saints’, but not a
large proportion of it to their credit. I do not know if we may fairly
include him who was hanged at Tyburn in 1586 for the crime of forging
his presentation to the living. He was not properly rector. As he had
to be hanged in any case, it seems a pity they did not suspend him from
the tower of All Saints’; it would have been much more picturesque. He
was practically wasted at Tyburn, where executions were an everyday
dish.
Then there was the Reverend Mr. Hinson, royalist, who, busily
denouncing the Roundheads in his sermon of Sunday, July 9th, 1643, was
told that the subjects of his abuse were in the town, and the stern
Colonel Morley even then on the way to make him prisoner. He left his
discourse at a loose end and bunked, hooked it, vamoosed, cut his
stick, fled, or merely went—just as you please. Only, perhaps, to say
he “went” hardly meets the case, for he departed with such celerity
that he had not time even to shift his surplice. The Roundheads
thereupon occupied the church, made it a dormitory, preached burlesque
sermons from the pulpit, and generally behaved like blasphemous
blackguards, finally making off with all the surplices they could find.
Mr. Hinson was arrested three days later and lodged in a filthy gaol,
with a tinker to match, who was not only dirty but rude, and, declaring
he was the elder of the two, and therefore privileged, took the one
bench in the place, leaving the curate the cold, cold floor. He had
three weeks’ imprisonment at Hastings, and how much beside would have
been awarded him in London, whither he was removed, we do not know,
for he escaped and joined his King at Oxford, and so is heard of no
more.
A tablet in the church to a former rector with the humorous name of
Webster Whistler, a connection of Sir Whistler Webster, of Battle
Abbey, reminds one of a curious incident. He died at the great age of
eighty-four in 1831. A distinguished pluralist, he held the rather
distant benefice of Newtimber, on the Brighton Road, in addition
to this in Hastings. A quarrel with the squire of Newtimber led to
the living of that tiny place being put up to auction in 1817. The
clergyman was interested enough to be in London when the sale took
place, and to his disgust heard the auctioneer describe Newtimber as
held by an infirm and hoary vicar with one foot in the grave, and that
consequently the reversion would soon fall in. The Reverend Whistler
was then but seventy, and as hale and hearty as a ploughman. He arose
in wrath, and so convinced the room of his being good for another
twenty years that the advowson found no purchaser.
The much-beneficed Whistler was no ill friend to the smugglers, who
then formed a considerable part of the population of Hastings, and
passively lent his church to them for a cellar. It was told of him
that, hearing movements one night in his garden, and preparing to fire
upon those he thought to be burglars, a voice reassured him with the
whisper, “Hush, your reverence, it’s the brandy!” It was the smugglers’
thank-offering. The only flaw in this story is the circumstance that
the clergyman would not have mistaken his smuggling friends for
midnight marauders, for he was used to find such gifts brought to
his door. Later, when this kind of friendly understanding became too
notorious, the kegs were deposited in the crowded churchyard, and
visitors at his table sometimes heard him tell his man to “go and see
if there’s any brandy in old Swain”: “old Swain” being one of the
numerous clan of that very common name at Hastings, and lying in a
table-like tomb which made an excellent and unsuspected cellar.
When this picturesque cleric happened to find his cellar low, he was
not averse from hinting at the fact in the texts of his sermons.
Discourses upon the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” and on
the miracle of turning water into wine, with applications readily
understood by his congregation, rarely failed in their object; for we
must by no means suppose that a smuggler was necessarily a lawless and
an impious, or even an ungrateful man: and a fervent piety was no bar
to “free trading.”
The most striking thing in All Saints’ Church is a curious notice in
the belfry, with words and letters running together like those of an
ill-read proof:
This is a belfry that is free
for all those that can civil be
and if you please to chime or ring
it is a very pleasant thing
There is no musick playd or sung
like unto Bells when they rwell rung
then ring your bells well if you can
Silence is best for every man.
But if you ring in Spur or hat
sixpence you pay besure of that
and if a bell you overthrow
pray pay a groat before you go
People who are commonly civil are not, as a rule, enjoined to show
civility, and it is therefore fair to assume that there had been
disturbances, and sweet bells jangled, before this old notice was set
up.
LI
All Saints’ Street is the most picturesque in the old town. Its houses
are for the most part ancient, and rarely are two alike. Many are
gabled, some lean heavily forward or against their neighbours, others
have latticed casements and great heavy timber frames; few are those
that are not sketchable, and in between them goes the long narrow
street, deep down below the raised pavements, towards the sea. The most
picturesque of these ancient tenements, and perhaps also the oldest,
is certainly the most famous, for it was the home of the aged mother
of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel at the time when his squadron came
cruising off the Sussex coast. We are told how, coming off Hastings,
the Admiral, saying he had business ashore, was rowed to the Stade.
Walking up All Saints’ Street, to the house pictured here, a humble old
woman came forth, and he kissed her, called her “Mother,” and asked her
blessing.
If improving frenzy will permit, the old house, already well on into
its fifth century, is sound enough to last centuries more; and when
modern iron and steel have rusted, or become brittle, its stout oaken
timbering will be as sturdy as ever.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE, ALL SAINTS’ STREET.]
Between All Saints’ Street and High Street formerly ran the Bourne
stream to the sea. Its course is now marked by Bourne Street, running,
narrow and steep, to the shore.
And there is the sea. Not something outside the picture, as it seems to
the road-farer who, tracing the road to Brighton, comes at last to the
Aquarium, and finds the beach and the sea, as it were, “side-shows,”
but an intimate part of the place—great waves slapping down vigorously
upon a narrow shore, and, when the stormy winds do blow, spouting in
great clouds of spray overhead, bringing with them tons of shingle or
taking away many cubic yards of Parade and sea-wall.
No one could ever entertain the remotest doubt of Hastings being,
in the most intimate sense, the seaside. The roadway of the front,
especially the front of the Old Town, is so narrow, and the
groyne-protected beach in general of such meagre proportions that,
to be housed on the front, is to enjoy every sea-salty benefit of an
ocean voyage, without its accompanying miseries of sickness. But the
situation is not without its own peculiar drawbacks. Just as some great
vessel, ploughing through heaving billows, will, in sailor language,
“ship it green,” so do the more exposed houses take full measure when
waves run high, cataracts flowing down basement steps and converting
coal-cellars into impromptu marine tanks.
The elements at Hastings are at odds with the Board of Trade, which
has forbidden the Corporation to take beach from the foreshore. Winds,
waves, and currents deposit shingle in the roadway, and it has then to
be cleared up; and, since the Government Department cannot require it
to be replaced, it is sold. According to the town accounts for 1904,
the Town Council in that year made £24 out of 120 tons of beach washed
up in this way.
The sea in this Old Town corner of Hastings is undoubtedly the
“ever fresh, the ever free” of the poet: the rolling ocean, the
heaving billow, and everything adjectival in the marine sort. It is
unquestionably that which you fail in many places of the Eastbourne
type quite to realise: the home of little sprats and great whales;
the cruising-ground of fisher-boats, steamships, and navies, no less
than of the _Albertine_, the _New Albertine_, and the _Favourite_
sailing-yachts, on which you get very seasick for the ridiculous sum of
a shilling an hour.
The sea is that which your point of view makes it: home of the guardian
fleets; a course upon which steamships earn dividends for their owners;
the grave of thousands of drowned sailors; or fishing-ground for
trawlers and seiners.
For what were you created? Answer, wild waves! For the delight of the
midsummer child, with spade and bucket, and clothes tucked up; to
enable the railway companies to run excursions to the “resorts” risen
by the edge of you? What, on balance, are you: blessing or curse? You
render our shores inviolate, but your sundering straits and oceans
perpetuate Babel and maintain conflicting nationalities.
Were it not for you and St. George’s Channel there would be no Ireland,
and consequently no Home Rule Question. For that, at any rate, we owe
you a grudge—and must, since we cannot yet shift to fill that Channel
up—continue to owe it.
[Illustration: HASTINGS OLD TOWN.]
This is the Stade, where the fisher-town exists, sufficient to itself,
self-contained, and quite as apart in feeling, manners and customs,
from the modern town and St. Leonards as though it were sundered by
gulfs and distances, instead of just adjoining. Not a gulf, in fact,
but something in the way of a mountain—the West Hill—intervenes, and
only by the narrow line of George Street, Pelham Place, and Castle
Street is ready communication open. It is sufficiently ready, but
new town and old have different ideals in life, and agree to mingle
over that thoroughfare threshold only when business calls. In the
unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine
at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps,
gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets
are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not
gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite.
The grandest view of Hastings is that of the Old Town from hard by
the modern, but picturesque, Lifeboat House, whence you see the great
East Hill looming magnificently up above the huddled houses that,
whether they be of old red brick or tarred wood, are all, in the mass,
artistically “right.” It is, in the summer, a crowded quarter, for the
excursionists who feel a little abashed by the stucco magnificences and
primnesses of newer Hastings and St. Leonards, and cannot elsewhere
come into close communion with the untamed sea, find here an ideal
dumping-ground for babies and provision-baskets. Here, thanks to modern
masonry groynes, a fine mass of beach is gradually accumulating, in
heaped-up plenty.
But it is not a crowded beach and a sunny sky that give the artist
his chance at this point. His opportunity comes at those times when
most folk would choose to be under shelter; when the rainbow arches in
the leaden sky, the domestic washing of the Old Town flaps wetly in
the squalls, and the distant tackle-boxes and the bell-turret of the
Fishermen’s Church stand out almost in the blackness of silhouettes.
Then the East Hill looks all its size, and more.
Unhappily, brutal things have been done in modern times to East Hill
and West, in the cutting of shafts through the chalk for lifts; and
the scar thus made in the face of the East Hill is, from many points,
atrociously prominent; while day-trippers have even been known to
mistake the embattled lift-station on the sky-line up there for the
Castle.
LII
But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St.
Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to
sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House
for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging,
very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt,
stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there
would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and
Tackleway, that goes inland, parallel with All Saints’ Street, to the
back of All Saints’ itself?
[Illustration: OLD TACKLE-BOXES, HASTINGS.]
The “tackle-boxes” on the beach at Rock-a-Nore are a peculiar feature
of the fisherman’s quarter. They are tall, tower-like, black-tarred
wooden sheds of four or five storeys’ height, built in rows at
right-angles to the sea, and identified by letters of the alphabet.
In them are stored the nets and miscellaneous gear of the smacks.
Generally groups of depressed, guernseyed, weather-beaten smacksmen may
be seen and spoken with while mending their tackle, and are as unlike
the fishermen and longshore folk of the comic artists as well may be.
They are not so phenomenally broad in the “starn,” so pot-bellied,
nor so patchy; and, instead of having that little dense patch of
spade-beard, like the chin-beards of Rameses and other typical Egyptian
statues, as inseparable from the conventional fisherman as a nimbus
from the head of a saint, they are either very full-whiskered or quite
clean-shaven. But the conventional fisherman will no more become
obsolete than the conventional burglar with his ankle-jacks, his fur
cap, and his furtive glance; or the conventional John Bull. There is
nothing like them on earth, but they are necessary abstractions for the
feeding of unimaginative minds.
You may read in the guide-books how the term “Chop-back” will rouse a
Hastings fisherman to fury, and timid, yet inquiring people, approach
the subject with them apologetically; but I declare they turn a puzzled
look upon you, and seem hardly to comprehend the meaning of what is
supposed to be a very offensive name—“Hastings Chop-backs,” deriving
from the supposed descent of the Hastingers from those Norse rovers
whose terrible axes cleaved their enemies down the back from skull
to chine. Traditions of this undoubted antiquity are deserving of
all respect, and probably the Hastings fisherfolk are descendants of
those fierce rovers, but they are the mildest vikings it is possible
to conceive, and would no more think of chopping any one down the
back than they would dream of refusing a drink, even though the Blue
Ribbonites of the Mission Church are active among them.
“Fishin’ ain’t wot it wur” is the general verdict; neither for
“hur’n”—that is to say, “herring”—in the fore-part of the year, nor for
mackerel in the after; yet the fish-market on the Stade seems busier
than ever in the mornings, and over a thousand people subsist upon the
proceeds of the harvest of the sea. But the fisherman is forced to
cruise greater distances than before, the Channel being fished out and
clean-swept by trawlers. Indeed, to listen to the doleful talk of a
Hastings fisherman, one might think that not a single sprat or mackerel
swam the English Channel between the North Foreland and the Lizard.
Those who explore this corner of old Hastings will acquire odd pieces
of information from the fisherfolk. Rock-a-Nore, it will be found from
them, and from one’s own personal experience, is the coldest place in
the town; and, although they are not responsive to “Chop-backs,” they
tell you that “Bourne” (_i.e._ Eastbourne) men are “Winnicks.” They
look with disapproval on the new harbour-works; and are, indeed, true
Conservatives, for they instinctively think any change to be inevitably
for the worse.
Were I a fisherman I should, at any rate, resent the inference of
the Mission Church planted on the beach, in their midst, as though
an outpost of Christianity among the heathen. And such a mildewed,
blue-mouldy, repellent building! But perhaps the situation, at the
remote end—the _cul-de-sac_—of the beach, suggested the idea of
paganism, piracy, and all sorts of unchristian things, at Rock-a-Nore;
but if it be true that _Labore est orare_, then the fishermen are on
more certain ground than many of the prayerful people who missionise
them.
This is indeed, geographically, a dead-end, under the grey-white cliffs
of East Hill; and being so, the Hastings Corporation have planted here
those undesirable things—a mortuary and a dust-shoot. Next door to the
mortuary you see the grim, unconscious humour of a warehousing firm’s
announcement, “Tapner and Co. for Removals,” and at the end of all
things, where a gigantic stone and concrete groyne projects into the
sea, there is the town dust-destructor. Beyond is the perilous beach to
Ecclesbourne, where the toppling cliffs above and the treacherous tide
below often offer the unwary the unwelcome choice of being crushed or
drowned.
LIII
On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and
the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up
aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman
Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those
chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous
climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and
although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you
swiftly and without toil to that height, the elderly and the unduly
fleshy, Hamlet-like persons among them, “fat and scant of breath,”
take advantage of it, and archæologise easefully by the aid of modern
mechanism. But little remains to arouse enthusiasm or to employ
the pencil of the artist, and that which might have been, from its
situation, as imposing as the Castle of Dover itself, is but the matter
of a few speculative arches and grizzled masonry.
Ever since the historic period, and doubtless long before the era of
recorded things began, there existed a castle, or a fortified post,
on this lofty cliff-top, where the shattered ruins of Hastings Castle
still stand, few and almost formless—the long superannuated warden of
the town that has grown so great and has now absolutely no defences
against the foreign foe.
When the Normans came, they found defences of some nature here, and
hastened from their landing-place at Pevensey to seize and to more
strongly fortify them, as scenes in that graphic record, the Bayeux
Tapestry, show. The wooden walls, palisades, and outworks thus hastily
constructed by the Conqueror’s men were speedily discarded for a
permanent building of stone, and the grim hold thus erected was given
into the custody of the Norman Counts d’Eu; who, jointly with the
Abbots of Fécamp, were responsible for keeping open the sea-passage
between England and Normandy. This duty was laid upon those secular
and ecclesiastical personages in consideration of the rights granted to
the Count d’Eu in the Castle and the Old Town, and the lordship over
the “New Burgh” bestowed upon the Abbot of Fécamp.
Time has worked odd changes with Hastings and very thoroughly obscured
the ancient names, so that what was then the “old town” has been so
long and so utterly swept away and built over that its very existence
at any former time is unknown to all save Dryasdust and his brethren.
The old original “old town” stood, in fact, where the new town of
Hastings stands to-day, and the Old Town of the present time is the
“New Burgh” referred to in Domesday Book as the property of the Abbot
of Fécamp. Dryasdust, who is a very estimable person and a learned,
will tell you all you want to know about it—and much more; but he is
always so fully informed, and diverges so abundantly and promiscuously
into notes, parentheses, sub-heads, and innumerable asides of that kind
that he presently lands you in topographical swamps and mazes, and,
feeding you overfull of knowledge, gives you a severe literary and
antiquarian indigestion.
In short, to make a plain story of it, where modern Hastings stands,
practically level with the water, there spread, at the time when the
Battle of Hastings was fought, a quiet inlet of the sea. This was the
haven, the natural harbour of refuge against winds and waves, that
originally caused the site of Hastings to be selected for a port. It
would never have been chosen and settled had it been without shelter,
as it is now; and Hastings of to-day is merely an artificial growth,
like Brighton, Eastbourne, and many another seaside town, sprung up to
serve a century or more of holiday-making by the sea. The town, as we
see it to-day, would have been impossible had the place depended merely
upon fishing and shipping; for on this stark-naked foreshore, swept by
gales and raging seas, there is no shelter for vessels.
It was, in fact, the early silting up of this haven that led to the
utter obliteration of the original old town dependent upon it. When
the tide no longer flowed up to its ancient quays and wharves, their
use, of course, vanished, and they eventually disappeared. In those
long-departed days the Castle cliffs and a long reef of rocks extended
a considerable distance out to sea, and formed the natural protection
for this inlet; but in the course of centuries the sea made such
inroads that the protection at last disappeared, and the shingle, in
its easterly march, instead of being kept out in the Channel and on its
course, found entrance, and steadily, and by no means slowly, cut off
the haven from the outer waters.