Part 13

He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree, talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles' Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available, he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the Mouth or Nose, or both."

The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him. Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.

The date of the monument's disappearance is not clearly established, but old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen, during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.

For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed, the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun in 1701 by the then vicar.

A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a year lived here, in a cottage oddly named "Upper Repentance."

The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, passes a couple of cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device intended to represent bats' wings, and inscribed "J. T. 1815." They are known as "Batswing Cottages," but what induced "J. T." to call them so, and even who he was, seems to be unknown.

Over the rise of Cockshut Hill and through a wooded cutting the road comes to Woodhatch and the "Old Angel" inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.

Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, illustrates the ancient times when the De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down in these levels ending in "wood" recall the dense forests that once overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood, Hookwood--vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The scattered "leys"--Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like--allude to the clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old bosquets may be traced on the map--Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk's Gate and Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole sluggishly winding through them--a scene not unbeautiful in its placid way.

The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862, marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the "Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.

[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]

Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath, referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet, and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat, low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."

The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley churchyard was flooded.

A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be performed, the roads being four feet under water.

XXI

[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]

The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.

Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay, thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.

The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its interior assorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of village church, and presents many features of interest to the archæologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late brass, now mural, in the chancel, dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously, Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early period those of Purley and Sandersted--Sander's-stead, or dwelling. Sir Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth's time, bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in 1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where, in happier times, they ruled.

[Sidenote: NEWDIGATE]

One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the "Surrey Oaks," fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the county, and is worth visiting, if only for a peep into the curious timber belfry of its little church, which contains a hoary chest, contrived out of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.

But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and attractions. Here a primitive pavement or causeway is very noticeable, formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the grassy margins of the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even now) of the time when

Essex full of good housewyfes, Middlesex full of stryves, Kentshire hoot as fire, Sowseks full of dirt and mire

was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the Wealden clay asserted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for pedestrians were necessities.

The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble, fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built of Charlwood stone.

Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--grass, wheat, and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.

[Sidenote: IFIELD]

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 Sussex meet, and was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County Oak."

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 brass 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 recumbent 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.

[Sidenote: SUSSEX IRON]

Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex 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 Sussex 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 Sussex 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 Sussex 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 classes. 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, passing 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 passing 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.

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 passing 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-passengers.

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-snatchers 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 chink 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.

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 assured 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 spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, 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 illustrations. 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.

An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass 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 sexton, "be hynde," remarking that it is "arnshunt."

The sturdy 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 superstition of his remote age, has put his "fear of God," 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 God, 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 associated 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]

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 classic 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 multitudes--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 "noble art"?