Highways & Byways in Sussex by E. V. Lucas (e reader pdf best .txt) đź“•
[Sidenote: MIDHURST]
If we are to begin our travels in Sussex with the best, then Midhurst is the starting point, for no other spot has so much to offer: a quiet country town, gabled and venerable, unmodernised and unambitious, with a river, a Tudor ruin, a park of deer, heather commons, immense woods, and the Downs only three miles distant. Moreover, Midhurst is also the centre of a very useful little railway system, which, having only a single line in each direction, while serving the traveller, never annoys him by disfiguring the country or letting loose upon it crowds of vandals. Single lines always mean thinly populated country. As a pedestrian poet has sung:--
My heart leaps up when I behold A single railway line; For then I know the wood and wold Are almost wholly mine.
And Midhurst being on no great high road is nearly always quiet. Nothing ever hurries there. The people live their own lives, passing along their few narrow streets and the one broad on
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I know of no town with so low a pulse as this precipitous little settlement under the shadow of Rome and the Duke. In spite of picnic parties in the park, in spite of anglers from London, in spite of the railway in the valley, Arundel is still medieval and curiously foreign. On a very hot day, as one climbs the hill to the cathedral, one might be in old France, and certainly in the Middle Ages.
Time's revenges have had their play in this town. Although the church is still bravely of the establishment, half of it is closed to the Anglican visitor (the chancel having been adjudged the private property of the Dukes of Norfolk), and the once dominating position of the edifice has been impaired by the proximity of the new Roman Catholic church of St. Philip Neri, which the present Duke has been building these many years. Within, it is finished, a very charming and delicate feat in stone; but the spire has yet to come. The old Irish soldier, humorous and bemedalled, who keeps watch and ward over the fane, is not the least of its merits.
Although the chancel of the parish church has been closed, permission to enter may occasionally be obtained. It is rich in family tombs of great interest and beauty, including that of the nineteenth Earl of Arundel, the patron of William Caxton. In the siege of Arundel Castle in 1643, the soldiers of the parliamentarians, under Sir William Waller, fired their cannon from the church tower. They also turned the church into a barracks, and injured much stone work beyond repair. A fire beacon blazed of old on the spire to serve as a mark for vessels entering Littlehampton harbour.
Bevis of Southampton, the giant who, when he visited the Isle of Wight, waded thither, was a warder at Arundel Castle; where he ate a whole ox every week with bread and mustard, and drank two hogsheads of beer. Hence "Bevis Tower." His sword Morglay is still to be seen in the armoury of the castle; his bones lie beneath a mound in the park; and the town was named after his horse. So runs a pretty story, which is, however, demolished with the ruthlessness that comes so easily to the antiquary and philologist. Bevis Tower, science declares, was named probably after another Bevis—there was one at the Battle of Lewes, who took prisoner Richard, King of the Romans, and was knighted for it—while Arundel is a corruption of "hirondelle," a swallow. Mr. Lower mentions that in recent times in Sussex "Swallow" was a common name in stables, even for heavy dray horses. But before accepting finally the swallow theory, we ought to hear what Fuller has to say:—"Some will have it so named from Arundel the Horse of Beavoice, the great Champion. I confess it is not without precedence in Antiquity for Places to take names from Horses, meeting with the Promontory Bucephalus in Peloponesus, where some report the Horse of Alexander buried, and Bellonius will have it for the same cause called Cavalla at this day. But this Castle was so called long before that Imaginary Horse was foled, who cannot be fancied elder than his Master Beavoice, flourishing after the Conquest, long before which Arundel was so called from the river Arund running hard by it."
The owls that once multiplied in the keep have now disappeared. They were established there a hundred years or so ago by the eleventh Duke, and certain of them were known by the names of public men. "Please, your Grace, Lord Thurlow has laid an egg," is an historic speech handed down by tradition. Lord Thurlow, the owl in question, died at a great age in 1859.
The Arun at North Stoke
The Arun at North Stoke.To walk through Arundel Park is to receive a vivid impression of the size and richness of our little isolated England. Two or three great towns could be hidden in it unknown to each other. Valley succeeds to valley; new herds of deer come into sight at almost every turn; as far as the eye can see the grass hills roll away. Those accustomed to parks whose deer are always huddled close and whose wall is never distant, are bewildered by the vastness of this enclosure. Yet one has also the feeling that such magnificence is right: to so lovely a word as Arundel, to the Premier Duke and Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, should fittingly fall this far-spreading and comely pleasaunce. Had Arundel Park been small and empty of deer what a blunder it would be.
Walking west of Arundel through the vast Rewell Wood, we come suddenly upon Punch-bowl Green, and open a great green valley, dominated by the white façade of Dale Park House, below Madehurst, one of the most remote of Sussex villages.
By keeping due west for another mile Slindon is reached. This village is one of the Sussex backwaters, as one might say. It lies on no road that any one ever travels except for the purpose of going to Slindon or coming from it; and those that perform either of these actions are few. Yet all who have not seen Slindon are by so much the poorer, for Slindon House is nobly Elizabethan, with fine pictures and hiding-places, and Slindon beeches are among the aristocracy of trees. And here I should like to quote a Sussex poem of haunting wistfulness and charm, which was written by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who once walked to Rome and is an old dweller at Slindon:—
THE SOUTH COUNTRY.
Richard Newland, the father of serious cricket, came from this parish. He was born in 1718, or thereabouts, and in 1745 he made 88 for England against Kent. He was left-handed, and the finest bat ever seen in those days. He taught Richard Nyren, of Hambledon, all the skill and judgment that that noble general possessed; Nyren communicated his knowledge to the Hambledon eleven, and the game was made. An interest in historical veracity compels me to add that William Beldham—Silver Billy—talking to Mr. Pycroft, discounted some of Nyren's praise. "Cricket," he said, "was played in Sussex very early, before my day at least [he was born in 1766]; but that there was no good play I know by this, that Richard Newland, of Slindon in Sussex, as you say, sir, taught old Richard Nyren, and that no Sussex man could be found to play Newland. Now a second-rate man of our parish beat Newland easily; so you may judge what the rest of Sussex then were." But this is disregarding the characteristic uncertainty of the game.
If one would spend a day far from mankind, on high ground, there is no better way than to walk from Arundel through Houghton Forest (where, as we have seen, Charles II. avoided the Governor) to Cocking.
CHAPTER VIII LITTLEHAMPTONA children's paradise—Wind-swept villages—Cary and Coleridge—Sussex folklore—Climping—Richard Jefferies and Sussex—John Taylor the Water Poet—Highdown Hill—A miller in love with death—A digression on mills and millers—Treason at Patching—A wife in a thousand—A Sussex truffler—The Palmer triplets.
Littlehampton is favoured in having both sea and river. It also has lawns between the houses and the beach, as at Dieppe, and is as nearly a children's paradise as exists. The sea at low tide recedes almost beyond the reach of the ordinary paddler, which is as it should be except for those that would swim. A harbour, a pier, a lighthouse, a windmill—all these are within a few yards of each other. On the neighbouring beach, springing from the stones, you find the yellow-horned poppy, beautiful both in flower and leaf, and the delicate tamarisk makes a natural hedge parallel with the sea, to Worthing on the one side, and to Bognor on the other.
The little villages in the flats behind the eastern tamarisk hedge—Rustington, Preston, Ferring, are, in summer, veritable sun traps, with their white walls dazzling in radiance. Such trees as grow about here all bow to the north-east, bent to that posture by the prevailing south-west winds. A Sussex man, on the hills or south of them, lost at night, has but to ascertain the outline of a tree, and he may get his bearings. If he cannot see so much as that he has but to feel the bark for lichen, which grows on the north east, or lee, side.
It was at Littlehampton in September, 1817, that Coleridge met Cary, the translator of Dante. Cary was walking on the beach, reciting Homer to his son. Up came a noticeable man with large grey eyes: "Sir, yours is a face I should know. I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge."
The county paper for February 27, 1796, has this paragraph: "On Monday last a duel was fought betwixt Mr. R——n and Lieut. B——y, both of Littlehampton, in a field near that place, which, after the discharge of each a pistol, terminated without bloodshed. The dispute, we understand, originated about a pew in the parish church."
A local proverb says that if you eat winkles in March it is as
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