Highways and Byways in Sussex Part 24

I am an English man and naked I stand here, Musing in my mund what rayment I shall were; For now I wyll were this, and now I wyl were that; Now I wyl were I cannot tel what.

We shall see Andrew again when we come to Pevensey.

[Sidenote: OLD WILLS]

A glimpse of the orderly mind of a pre-Reformation Cuckfield yeoman is given in a will quoted recently in the _Suss.e.x Daily News_, in an interesting series of articles on the county under the t.i.tle of "Old-time Suss.e.x":

"In the yere of our lorde G.o.d 1545. the 26 day of June, I, Thomas Gaston, of the pish of Cukefelde, syke in body, hole, and of ppt [perfect] memorie, ordene and make this my last will and test, in manr. and forme folling.

Fyrst I bequethe my sowle to Almyghty G.o.d or [our] lady St. Mary and all the holy company of heyvyng, my bodie to be buried in the church yarde of Cukefeld.

It. (item) to the Mother Church of Chichester 4_d._

It. to the hye alter of Cuckfeld 4_d._

It. I will have at my buryall 5 ma.s.ses. In lykewise at my monthes mynd and also at my yerely mynd all the charge of the church set apart I will have in meate and drynke and to pore people 10_s._ at every tyme."

The high altar was frequently mentioned favourably in these old wills.

Another Cuckfield testator, in 1539, left to the high altar, "for tythes and oblacions negligently forgotten, sixpence." The same student of the _Calendar of Suss.e.x Wills in the District Probate Registry at Lewes, between 1541 and 1652_, which the British Record Society have just published, copies the following pa.s.sage from the will of Gerard Onstye, in 1568: "To mary my daughter __20, the ffeatherbed that I lye upon the bolsters and coverlete of tapestaye work with a blankett, 4 payres of shetts that is to say four pares of the best flaxon and other 2 payre of the best hempen the greate bra.s.se potte that hir mother brought, the best bord-clothe (table cloth?) a lynnen wh.e.l.le (_i.e._, spinning-wheel) that was hir mothers, the chaffing dish that hangeth in the parlor."

In those simple days everything was prized. In one of these Suss.e.x wills, in 1594, Richard Phearndeane, a labourer, left to his brother Stephen his best dublett, his best jerkin and his best shoes, and to Bernard Rosse his white dublett, his leathern dublett and his worst breeches.

[Sidenote: THE BELLS OF BOLNEY]

Three miles west of Cuckfield is Bolney, just off the London road, a village in the southern boundary of St. Leonard's Forest, the key to some very rich country. Before the days of bicycles Bolney was practically unknown, so retired is it. The church, which has a curious pinnacled tower nearly 300 years old, is famous for its bells, concerning whose melody Horsfield gives the following piece of counsel: "Those who are fond of the silvery tones of bells, may enjoy them to perfection, by placing themselves on the margin of a large pond, the property of Mr. W. Marshall; the reverberation of the sound, coming off the water, is peculiarly striking."

Sixty years ago this sheet of water had an additional attraction. Says Mr. Knox, "During the months of May and June, 1843, an osprey was observed to haunt the large ponds near Bolney. After securing a fish he used to retire to an old tree on the more exposed bank to devour it, and about the close of evening was in the habit of flying off towards the north-west, sometimes carrying away a prize in his talons if his sport had been unusually successful, as if he dreaded being disturbed at his repast during the dangerous hours of twilight. Having been shot at several times without effect, his visits to these ponds became gradually less frequent, but the surrounding covers being unpreserved, and the bird itself too wary to suffer a near approach, he escaped the fate of many of his congeners, and even re-appeared with a companion early in the following September, to whom he seemed to have imparted his salutary dread of man--his mortal enemy--for during the short time they remained there it was impossible to approach within gunshot of either of them."

The indirect road from Bolney to Hand Cross, through Warninglid and Slaugham (parallel with the coaching road), is superb, taking us again into the iron country and very near to Leonardslee, which we have already seen.

[Sidenote: THE MAGNIFICENT COVERTS]

The glory of Slaugham Place is no more; but one visible sign of it is preserved in Lewes, in the Town Hall, in the shape of its old staircase.

Slaugham Place was the seat of the Covert family, whose estates extended, says tradition, "from Southwark to the Sea," and, says the more exact Horsfield, from Crawley to Hangleton, above Brighton.

Slaugham Park used to cover 1200 acres, the church being within it.

Perhaps nowhere in Suss.e.x is the change so complete as here, and within recent times too, for Horsfield quotes, in 1835, the testimony of "an aged person, whom the present rector buried about twenty-five years back, who used to relate, that he remembered when the family at Slaugham Park, or Place, consisted of seventy persons." Horsfield continues, in a footnote (the natural receptacle of many of his most interesting statements):--"The name of the aged person alluded to was Harding, who died at nearly 100. According to his statement, the family were so numerous, they kept constantly employed mechanics of every description, who resided on the premises. A conduit, which supplied the mansion with water, is now used by the inhabitants of the village. The kitchen fireplace still remains, of immense size, with the irons that supported the cooking apparatus. The arms of the Coverts, with many impalements and quarterings, yet remain on the ruins. The princ.i.p.al entrance was from the east, and the grand front to the north. The pillars at the entrance, fluted, with seats on each side, are still there. According to the statement of the above person, there was a chapel attached to the mansion at the west part. The mill-pond flowed over nearly 40 acres, according to a person's statement who occupied the mill many years." The ruins, little changed since Horsfield wrote, stand in a beautiful old-world garden, which the traveller must certainly endeavour to enter.

[Sidenote: THE BRIGHTON ROAD]

A mile north of Slaugham is Hand Cross, a Clapham Junction of highways, whence Crawley is easily reached. Crawley, however, beyond a n.o.ble church, has no interest, its distinction being that it is halfway between London and Brighton on the high road--its distinction and its misfortune. One would be hard put to it to think of a less desirable existence than that of dwelling on a dusty road and continually seeing people hurrying either from Brighton to London or from London to Brighton. Coaches, phaetons, motor cars, bicycles, pa.s.s through Crawley so numerously as almost to const.i.tute one elongated vehicle, like the moving platform at the last Paris Exhibition.

And not only travellers on wheels; for since the fashion for walking came in, Crawley has had new excitements, or monotonies, in the shape of walking stockbrokers, walking butchers, walking auctioneers' clerks, walking Austrians pushing their families in wheelbarrows, walking bricklayers carrying hods of bricks, walking acrobats on stilts--all striving to get to Brighton within a certain time, and all accompanied by judges, referees, and friends. At Hand Cross, lower on the road, the numbers diminish; but every compet.i.tor seems to be able to reach Crawley, perhaps because the railway station adjoins the high road. It was not, for example, until he reached Crawley that the Austrian's wheelbarrow broke down.

[Sidenote: LINDFIELD]

On the other side of the line, two miles north-east of Hayward's Heath, is Lindfield, with its fine common of geese, its generous duck-pond, and wide straggling street of old houses and new (too many new, to my mind), rising easily to the graceful Early English church with its slender shingled spire. Just beyond the church is one of the most beautiful of timbered houses in Suss.e.x, or indeed in England. When I first knew this house it was a farm in the hands of a careless farmer; it has been restored by its present owner with the most perfect understanding and taste. For too long no one attempted to do as much for East Mascalls, a timbered ruin lying low among the fields to the east of the village; but quite recently it has been taken in hand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _East Mascalls--before renovation._]

A quaint Lindfield epitaph may be mentioned: that of Richard Turner, who died in 1768, aged twenty-one:--

Long was my pain, great was my grief, Surgeons I'd many but no relief.

I trust through Christ to rise with the just: My leg and thigh was buried first.

[Sidenote: "IDLEHURST"]

I must not betray secrets, but it might be remarked that that kindly yet melancholy study of Wealden people and Wealden scenery, called _Idlehurst_--the best book, I think, that has come out of Suss.e.x in recent years--may be read with some special appropriateness in this neighbourhood.

North of Lindfield is Ardingly, now known chiefly in connection with the large school which travellers on the line to Brighton see from the carriage windows as they cross the viaduct over the Ouse. The village, a mile north of the college, is famous as the birthplace of Thomas Box, the first of the great wicket-keepers, who disdained gloves even to the fastest bowling. The church has some very interesting bra.s.ses to members of the Wakehurst and Culpeper families, who long held Wakehurst Place, the Elizabethan mansion to the north of the village. Nicholas Culpeper of the _Herbal_ was of the stock; but he must not be confounded with the Nicholas Culpeper whose bra.s.s, together with that of his wife, ten sons and eight daughters, is in the church, possibly the largest family on record depicted in that metal. The church also has a handsome canopied tomb, the occupant of which is unknown.

From Ardingly superb walks in the Suss.e.x forest country may be taken.

CHAPTER XXIII

FOREST COUNTRY AGAIN

Balcombe--The iron furnace and the iron horse--Leonard Gale of Tinsloe Forge--Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt of Crabbet--"The Old Squire"--Frederick Locker-Lampson of Rowfant--The Rowfant books--"To F. L."--The Rowfant t.i.tmice.

On leaving the train at Balcombe, one is quickly on the densely wooded Forest Ridge of Suss.e.x, here fenced and preserved, but farther east, when it becomes Ashdown Forest, consisting of vast tracts of open moorland and heather. Balcombe has a simple church, protected by a screen of Scotch firs; its great merit is its position as the key to a paradise for all who like woodland travel. From Balcombe to Worth is one vast pheasant run, with here and there a keeper's cottage or a farm: originally, of course, a series of plantations growing furnace wood for the ironmasters. In Tilgate Forest, to the west of Balcombe Forest, are two large sheets of water, once hammer-ponds, walking west from which, towards Horsham, one may be said to traverse the Lake Country of Suss.e.x.

A strange transformation, from Iron Black Country to Lake Country!--but nature quickly recovers herself, and were the true Black Country's furnaces extinguished, she would soon make even that grimy tract a haunt of loveliness once more.

No longer are heard the sounds of the hammers, but Balcombe Forest, Tilgate Forest, and Worth Forest have still a constant reminder of machinery, for very few minutes pa.s.s from morning to night without the rumble of a train on the main line to Brighton, which pa.s.ses through the very midst of this wild game region, and plunges into the earth under the high ground of Balcombe Forest. I know of no place where the trains emit such a volume of sound as in the valley of the Stanford brook, just north of the tunnel.

The noise makes it impossible ever quite to lose the sense of modernity in these woods, as one may on Sh.e.l.ley Plain, a few miles west, or at Gill's Lap, in Ashdown Forest; unless, of course, one's imagination is so complaisant as to believe it to proceed from the old iron furnaces.

This reminds me that Crabbet, just to the north of Worth (where church and vicarage stand isolated on a sandy ridge on the edge of the Forest), was the home of one of the most considerable of the Suss.e.x ironmasters, Leonard Gale of Tinsloe Forge, who bought Crabbet, park and house, in 1698--since "building," in his own words, is a "sweet impoverishing."

[Sidenote: WORTH CHURCH]

But we must pause for a moment at Worth, because its church is remarkable as being the largest in England to preserve its Saxon foundations. Suss.e.x, as we have seen, is rich in Saxon relics, but the county has nothing more interesting than this. The church is cruciform, as all churches should be, and there is a little east window in the north transept through which, it is conjectured, arrows were intended to be shot at marauding Danes; for an Englishman's church was once his castle. Archaeologists familiar with Worth church have been known to pa.s.s with disdain cathedrals for which the ordinary person cannot find too many fine adjectives.

[Sidenote: MR. BLUNT'S BALLAD]

[Sidenote: THE OLD SQUIRE]

To regain Crabbet. The present owner, Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, poet, patriot, and breeder of Arab horses, who is a descendant of the Gales, has a long poem ent.i.tled "Worth Forest," wherein old Leonard Gale is a notable figure. Among other poems by the lord of Crabbet is the very pleasantly English ballad of

THE OLD SQUIRE.

I like the hunting of the hare Better than that of the fox; I like the joyous morning air, And the crowing of the c.o.c.ks.