The Brighton Road Part 15

In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Suss.e.x meet, and was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County Oak."

[Ill.u.s.tration: On the Road to Newdigate.]

For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral curiosities. A bra.s.s for two brothers, with a curious metrical inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual _memento mori_ from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the rec.u.mbent effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, "a position," to quote "Thomas Ingoldsby," "so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days." The old pews came from St. Margaret's, Westminster. But so dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of day, however dull that day may be.

From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley.

The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much later date.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IFIELD MILL POND.]

[Sidenote: SUSs.e.x IRON]

Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most important ironworks in Suss.e.x, when Suss.e.x iron paid for the smelting.

Ironstone had been known to exist here even in the days of the Roman occupation, when Anderida, extending from the sea to London, was all one vast forest. Heaps of slag and cinders have been found, containing Roman coins and implements of contemporary date, proving that iron was smelted here to some extent even then. But it was not until the latter part of the Tudor period that the industry attained its greatest height. Then, according to Camden, "the Weald of Suss.e.x was full of iron-mines, and the beating of hammers upon the iron filled the neighbourhood round about with continual noise." The ironstone was smelted with charcoal made from the forest trees that then covered the land, and it was not until the first year or two of the last century that the industry finally died out. The last remaining ironworks in Suss.e.x were situated at Ashburnham, and ceased working about 1820, owing to the inability of iron-masters to compete with the coal-smelted ore of South Wales.

By that time the great forest of Anderida had almost entirely disappeared, which is not at all a wonderful thing to consider when we learn that one ironworks alone consumed 200,000 cords of wood annually. Even in Drayton's time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.

Relics of those days are plentiful, even now, in the ancient farmhouses; relics in the shape of cast-iron chimney-backs and andirons, or "fire-dogs," many of them very effectively designed; but, of course, in these days of appreciation of the antique, numbers of them have been sold and removed.

The water-power required by the ironworks was obtained by embanking small streams, to form ponds; as here at Ifield, where a fine head of water is still existing. Very many of these "Hammer Ponds" remain in Suss.e.x and Surrey, and were long so called by the rustics, whose unlettered and traditional memories were tenacious, and preserved local history much better than does the less intimate book-learning of the reading cla.s.ses.

But now that every ploughboy reads his "penny horrible," and every gaffer devours his Sunday paper, they have no memories for "such truck," and local traditions are fading.

Ifield ironworks became extinct at an early date, but from a very arbitrary cause. During the conflicts of the Civil War the property of Royalists was destroyed by the Puritan soldiery wherever possible; and after the taking of Arundel Castle in 1643, a detachment of troops under Sir William Waller wantonly wrecked the works then situated here, since when they do not appear to have been at any time revived.

It is a pretty spot to-day, and extremely quiet.

From here Crawley is reached through Gossop's Green.

XXII

[Sidenote: CRAWLEY]

The way into Crawley along the main road, pa.s.sing the modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the "White Lion," and a few attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers' attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A mean little house called "Casa querca"--by which I suppose the author means Oak House--is "refinement," as imagined in the suburbs, and excites the pa.s.sing sneer, "Is not the English language good enough?" If the Italians will only oblige, and call their own "Bella Vistas" "Pretty View," and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.]

At the beginning of Crawley stands the "Sun" inn, and away at the other end is the "Half Moon"; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum when pa.s.sing through, "Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?"

Every one unfamiliar with the road "gave it up"; when came the answer, "Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other." It is evident that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-pa.s.sengers.

We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early coaching days, that Crawley was a "poor place," by which we may suppose that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect--a city?

Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-s.n.a.t.c.hers who seized plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us; but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn tale of grab.

Even Crawley's generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards' winding of their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of "Sally in our Alley" or "Love's Young Dream." Then the "George" was the scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the c.h.i.n.k and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time, but a real journey, of five hours.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CRAWLEY, 1789.]

Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap.

Occasionally some great cycle "scorch" is in progress, when whirling enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of the "George" spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen _and_ bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the roads are peopled again.

There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey, embattled church tower lends an a.s.sured antiquity to the view; but there is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of that s.p.a.cious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her so!) rules the land. It is Suss.e.x, realised at a glance.

They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad.

Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very attractive ruin indeed.

Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789, when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead, took notes for his book, "An Excursion to Brighthelmstone." It is a work of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist's ill.u.s.trations. That _they_ should have lived, you who see the reproduction will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is otherwise greatly changed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.]

An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pa.s.s through the place, is that the greater part of "Crawley" is not in that parish at all, but in the adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same side of the street belong to Crawley.

In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in this admonitory fashion:

Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde He war be for whate comyth be hynde.

When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone, it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the s.e.xton, "be hynde," remarking that it is "arnshunt."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "GEORGE," CRAWLEY.]

The st.u.r.dy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing Noah's dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.

But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling superst.i.tion of his remote age, has put his "fear of G.o.d," in a very literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the terrified minds of the dark ages, when G.o.d, the loving Father, was non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures are merely like infantile grotesques.

XXIII

There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity a.s.sociated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station, resided Mark Lemon, editor of _Punch_, who died here on May 20th, 1870.

Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be converted into a grocer's shop.

[Sidenote: PRIZE-FIGHTS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCULPTURED EMBLEM OF THE HOLY TRINITY, CRAWLEY CHURCH.]

The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after pursuing him through the cla.s.sic pages of "Boxiana" and the voluminous records of "Pugilistica," after consulting, too, that sprightly work "The Fancy"; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time to time, when great mult.i.tudes--princes, patricians, and plebeians of every description--hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so much a side.

It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the "n.o.ble art"?

Many were the merry "mills" which "came off" at Crawley Downs, Copthorne Common, and Blindley Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men, conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord Yarmouth ("Red Herrings"), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are they not set forth with much circ.u.mstantial detail in the pages of "Fistiana" and "Boxiana"? There shall you read how the Prince Regent witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and Martin on Crawley Downs. "Boxiana" gives a full account of it, and is even moved to verse, in this wise:

THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY BETWEEN THE NONPAREIL AND THE OUT-AND-OUTER.