Highways and Byways in Sussex

An intermediate dweller at Frog Firle was one Robert Andrews, who, when unwell, seems to have been attended by William Benbrigg. Miss Florence A. Pagden, in her agreeable little history of Alfriston, from which I have been glad to borrow, prints two of Mr. Benbrigg's letters of kindly but vague advice to his patient. Here is one:—

"Mr. Andrews,

"I have sent you some things which you may take in the manner following, viz.:—of that in the bottle marked with a + you may take of the quantity of a spoonfull or so, now and then, and at night take some of those pills, drinking a little warm beer after it, and in the morning take 2 spoonfulls of that in —— bottle fasting an hour after it, and then you may eat something, you may take also of the first, and every night a pill, and in the morning. I hope this will do you good, which is the desire of him who is your loving friend,

"Wm. Benbrigg."

Alfriston once had a race meeting of its own—the course is still to be seen on the southern slope of Firle Beacon—and it also fostered cricket in the early days. A famous single-wicket match was contested here in 1787, between four men whose united ages amounted to 297 years. History records that the game was played with "great spirit and activity." Mr. Lower records, in 1870, that the largest pear and the largest apple ever known in England were both grown at Alfriston, but possibly the record has since been broken.

The smallest church in Sussex is however still to Alfriston's credit, for Lullington church, on the hill side, just across the river and the fields to the east of Alfriston church, may be considered to belong to Alfriston without any violence to its independence. As a matter of fact, the church was once bigger, the chancel alone now standing. What Charles Lamb says of Hollington church in Chapter XXXVI. of this book, would be more fitting of Lullington.

We have come to Alfriston from Lewes, proposing to return there; but it might well be made a centre, so much fine hill country does it command. Alfriston to Seaford direct, over the hills and back of the cliffs and the Cuckmere valley; Alfriston to Eastbourne, crossing the Cuckmere at Litlington, and beginning the ascent of the hills at West Dean; Alfriston to Lewes over Firle Beacon; Alfriston to Newhaven direct; Alfriston to Jevington and Willingdon;—all these routes cover good Down country, making the best of primitive rambles by day and bringing one at evening back to the "Star," this mediæval inn in the best of primitive villages. Few persons, however, are left who will climb hills—even grass hills—if they can help it; hence this counsel is likely to lead to no overcrowding of Fore Down, The Camp, Five Lords Burgh, South Hill, or Firle Beacon.

I might here, perhaps, be allowed to insert some verses upon the new locomotion, since they bear upon this question of walking in remote places, and were composed to some extent in Sussex byways in the spring of 1903:—

A SONG AGAINST SPEED.

To return to Alfriston, there are two brief excursions (possible in the vehicles that are glanced at in the foregoing verses) which ought to be described here: to Alciston and to Wilmington. Alciston is a little hamlet under the east slope of Firle Beacon, practically no more than a farm house, a church, and dependant cottages. It is on a road that leads only to itself and "to the Hill" (as the sign-boards say hereabout); it is perhaps as nearly forgotten as any village in the county; and yet I know of no village with more unobtrusive charm. The church, which has no vicar of its own, being served from Selmeston, a mile away, stands high amid its graves, the whole churchyard having been heaped up and ramparted much as a castle is. In the hollow to the west of the church is part of the farmyard: a pond, a vast barn with one of the noblest red roofs in these parts, and the ruins of a stone pigeon house of great age and solidity, buttressed and built as if for a siege, in curious contrast to the gentle, pretty purpose for which it was intended. Between the church and the hill, and almost adjoining it, is the farmhouse, where the church keys are kept—a relic of Alciston Grange (once the property of Battle Abbey)—with odds and ends of its past life still visible, and a flourishing fig-tree at the back, heavy with fruit when I saw it under a September sun. The front of the house looks due east, across a valley of corn, to Berwick church, on a corresponding mound, and beyond Berwick to the Downs above Wilmington. And at the foot of the garden, on the top of the grey wall above the moat, is a long, narrow terrace of turf, commanding this eastern view—a terrace meet for Benedick and Beatrice to pace, exchanging raillery.

In Berwick church, by the way, is a memorial to George Hall, a former rector, of whom it is said that his name "speaks all learning humane and divine," and that his memory is "precious both to the Muses and the Graces." The Reverend George Hall's works seem, however, to have vanished.

Wilmington, north-east of Alfriston, occupies a corresponding position to that of Alciston in the north-west; but having a "lion" in the shape of the Long Man it has lost its virginal bloom. Wilmington is providing tea and ginger beer while Alciston nurses its unsullied inaccessibility. The Long Man is a rude figure cut in the turf by the monks of the Benedictine priory that once flourished here, the ruins of which are now incorporated (like Alciston Grange) in a farm house on the east of the village. At least, it is thought by some antiquaries that the effigy is the work of the monks; others pronounce it druidical. The most alluring of several theories, indeed, would have the figure to represent Pol or Balder, the Sun God, pushing aside the doors of darkness—Polegate (or Bolsgate) near by being brought in as evidence.

CHAPTER XXIX

Chief of what was known nearly a hundred years ago as the "Alfriston Gang" was Stanton Collins, who lived at Market Cross House. Collins employed his men not only in assisting him in smuggling, but for other purposes removed from that calling by a wide gulf. Thus when Mr. Betts, the minister of the Lady Huntingdon chapel at Alfriston, was high-handedly suspended by the chief trustee of the chapel, on account of his opposition to that gentleman's proposed union with his deceased wife's sister, it was Collins's gang who invaded the chapel, ejected the new minister, replaced Mr. Betts in the pulpit, and mounted guard round it while he continued the service. Mr. Betts was equal to the occasion: he gave out the hymn "God moves in a mysterious way."

Collins terrorised the country-side for some years (except upon the score of personal bravery and humorous audacity, I doubt if his place is quite on the golden roll of smugglers) and was at length brought within the power of the law for sheep-stealing, and sentenced to seven years. The last of his gang, Bob Hall, died in the workhouse at Eastbourne in 1895, aged ninety-four.

Sussex may always be proud of her best smugglers. There were brutal scoundrels among them, such as the men that murdered Chater and were executed at Chichester in 1748 (the report may be read in Mr. H. L. Stephen's State Trials, vol. iv.); but the ordinary smuggler was often a fine rebellious fellow, courageous, resourceful, and gifted with a certain grim humour that led him, as we have seen, to hide his tubs as often in the belfry or the churchyard as anywhere else, and enough knowledge of character to tell him when he might secure the silence of the vicar with an oblatory keg. The Sussex clergy seemed to have needed very little encouragement to omit smuggling from the decalogue. It is, I think, the late Mr. Coker Egerton, of Burwash, who tells of a Sussex parson feigning illness a whole Sunday on hearing suddenly in the morning that a cargo, hard pressed by the revenue, had in despair been lodged among his pews. But the classical passage on this subject comes from Cornwall, from the pen of R. S. Hawker, the vicar of Morwenstowe and the author of "The Song of the Western Men." He was not himself a smuggler, but his parishioners had no scruples, and his heart was with the braver side of the business:—

It was full sea in the evening of an autumn day when a traveller arrived where the road ran along by a sandy beach just above high-water mark. The stranger, who was a native of some inland town, and utterly unacquainted with Cornwall and its ways, had reached the brink of the tide just as a "landing" was coming off. It was a scene not only to instruct a townsman, but also to dazzle and surprise. At sea, just beyond the billows, lay the vessel, well moored with anchors at stem and stern. Between the ship and the shore boats, laden to the gunwale, passed to and fro. Crowds assembled on the beach to help the cargo ashore. On the one hand a boisterous group surrounded a keg with the head knocked in, for simplicity of access to the good cognac, into which they dipped whatsoever vessel came first to hand; one man had filled his shoe. On the other side they fought and wrestled, cursed and swore. Horrified at what he saw, the stranger lost all self-command, and, oblivious of personal danger, he began to shout, "What a horrible sight! Have you no shame? Is there no magistrate at hand? Cannot any justice of the peace be found in this fearful country?"

"No; thanks be to God," answered a hoarse, gruff voice. "None within eight miles."

"Well, then," screamed the stranger, "is there no clergyman hereabout? Does no minister of the parish live among you on this coast?"

"Aye! to be sure there is," said the same deep voice.

"Well, how far off does he live? Where is he?"

"That's he, sir, yonder, with the lanthorn." And sure enough there he stood, on a rock, and poured, with pastoral diligence, 'the light of other days' on a busy congregation.

The clergy, however, did not always know how useful they were. The Rev. Webster Whistler, of Hastings, records that he was awakened one night to receive a votive cask of brandy as his share of the spoil which, to his surprise, his church tower had been harbouring. A commoner method was to leave the gift—the tithe—silently on the doorstep. Revenue officers have perhaps been placated in the same way.

Smuggling, in the old use of the word, is no more. The surreptitious introduction into this country of German cigars, eau de Cologne, and Tauchnitz novels, does not merit the term. A revised tariff having removed the necessity for smuggling, the game is over; for that is the reason of the disappearance of the smuggler rather than any increased vigilance on the part of the coastguard. The records of smuggling show that the difficulties offered to the profession by the Government were difficulties that existed merely to be overcome. Perhaps fiscal reform may restore the old pastime.

The word smuggler arouses in the mind the figure of a bold and desperate mariner searching the coast for a signal that all is safe to land his cargo. But as a matter of fact the men who ran the greatest risks were not the marine smugglers at all, but the land smugglers who received the tubs on the shore and conveyed them to a hiding place preparatory to the journey to London, whither the major part was perilously taken. Such were the Alfriston smugglers. These were the men who fought the revenue officers and had the hair's-breadth escapes. These were the men whose houses were watched, whose every movement was suspected, who needed to be wily as the serpent and to know the country inch by inch.

Not that the sea smuggler ran no risks. On the contrary, he was continually in danger from revenue cutters and the coastguards' boats. Bloody fights in the Channel were by no means rare. He was also often in peril from the elements; his endurance was superb; he had to be a sailor of genius, ready for every kind of emergency. But the land smuggler was more vulnerable than the sea smuggler, his rewards were smaller, and his operations were less simple. There is a vast difference between a dark night at sea and a dark night on land. Once the night fell the sea was the smuggler's own: he was invisible, inaudible. But the land was not less the revenue officer's: the land smuggler had to show his signal light, he had to roll casks over the beach, he had to carry them into security. His horse's hoofs could not be stilled as oars are muffled, his wheels bit noisily into the road, he was liable to be stopped at any turn. And he ran these risks from the coast right into London. I doubt if the land smuggler has had his due of praise. Sometimes the land smuggler had to be land smuggler and sea smuggler too, for many of the ships never troubled to make a landing at all. They sailed as near the shore as might be and then sank the tubs, which were always lashed together and kept on deck in readiness to be thrown overboard in case of the approach of a cutter. The position of the mooring having been conveyed to the confederates on shore, the vessel was at liberty to return to France for another cargo, leaving the responsibility of fishing up the tubs, and getting them to shore and away, wholly with the land smuggler.

An old pamphlet, entitled, The Trials of the Smugglers ... at the Assizes held at East Grinstead, March 13, 14, 15, and 16, 1748-9, gives the following information about the duties and pay of the land smugglers at that day:—"Each Man is allowed Half a Guinea a Time, and his Expenses for Eating and Drinking, a Horse found him, and the Profits of a Dollop of Tea, which is about 13 Pounds Weight, being the Half of a Bag; which Profit, even from the most ordinary of their Teas, comes to 24 or 25 Shillings; and they always make one Journey, sometimes two, in a Week." But these men would be underlings. There were, I take it, land smugglers in control of the operations who shared on a more lordly scale with their brethren in the boat.

On all the routes employed by the land smugglers were certain cottages and farm-houses where tubs might be hidden. Houses still abound supplied with unexpected recesses and vast cellars where cargoes were stored on their way to London. In many cases, in the old days, these houses were "haunted," to put forth the legend of a ghost being the simplest way not only of accounting for such nocturnal noises as might be occasioned by the arrival or departure of smugglers and tubs, but also of keeping inquisitive folks at bay. Only a little while ago, during alterations to an old cottage high on the hills near my home in Kent, corroboration was given to a legend crediting the place with being a smuggler's "half-way house," by the builders' discovery of a cavern under the garden communicating with the cellar. For the gaining of such fastnesses the hollow ways of Sussex were maintained. Parson Darby's smuggling successor, in Mr. Horace Hutchinson's Sussex romance, A Friend of Nelson, thus described them to the hero of Withyham:—

"The sun strikes hot enough. Would you like to ride in the shade awhile?"

"Immensely," I replied, "if I saw the shade."

"Keep after me, then," said he; "but the roan will. You need not trouble!" In a moment, on his great big horse, he was forcing his way down what had looked to me no more than a rabbit-run through the roadside bushes. For a while I had noticed the road seemed flanked by a mass of boskage below it on the right-hand side. Into this, and downward, the man crammed his horse, squeezing his legs into the horse's flank. I followed closely, and in a yard or two found myself in a deep lane or cutting, very thickly overgrown, so that only occasional gleams of sunshine crept in through the leafage. We rode, as he had promised, in a most pleasant shade. The floor of this lane or passage was not of the smoothest, and we went at a foot's pace only, and in Indian file.

"What is the meaning of it all?" I asked him.

THE HOLLOW WAYS

"Well," said he, "you have heard, I suppose, of the 'hollow ways,' as they are called, of Sussex. This is one. They were in their origin lanes, I take it, and perhaps the only means of getting about the country. The rains, in this sandy soil, washing down, gradually deepened and deepened them. Folks grew to use the new roads as they were made, leaving the lanes unheeded, to be overgrown. Here and there certain base fellows of the lewder sort, commonly called smugglers, may have deepened them further, and improved on what Nature had begun so well, with the result that you can ride many a mile, mole-like, if you know your way, from the sea coast north'ard, never showing your face above ground at all. That is what it means," he ended.

Smuggling was in the blood of the Sussex people. As the Cornishman said to Mr. Hawker, "Why should the King tax good liquor?" Why, indeed? Everyone sided with the smugglers, both on the coast and inland. A Burwash woman told Mr. Egerton that as a child, after saying her prayers, she was put early to bed with the strict injunction, "Now, mind, if the gentlemen come along, don't you look out of the window." The gentlemen were the smugglers, and not to look at them was a form of negative help, since he that has not seen a gentleman cannot identify him. Another Burwash character said that his grandfather had fourteen children, all of whom were "brought up to be smugglers." These would, of course, be land smugglers—Burwash being on a highway convenient for the gentlemen between the coast and the capital.

CHAPTER XXX

The path to Mount Caburn winds upward just beyond the turn of the road to Glynde, under the Cliffe. Caburn is not one of the highest of the Downs (a mere 490 feet, whereas Firle Beacon across the valley is upwards of 700): but it is one of the friendliest of them, for on its very summit is a deep grassy hollow (relic of ancient British fortification) where on the windiest day one may rest in that perfect peace that comes only after climbing. Caburn is not unique in this respect; there is, for example, a similar hollow in the hill above Kingly Vale; but Caburn has a deeper cavity than any other that I can recall. On the roughest day, thus cupped, one may hear, almost see, the gale go by overhead; and on such a mild spring day as that when I was last there, towards the end of April, there is no such place in which to lie and listen to the lark. If one were asked to name an employment consistent with perfect idleness it would be difficult to suggest a better than that of watching a lark melting out of sight into the sky, and then finding it again. This you may do in Caburn's hollow as nowhere else. The song of the lark thus followed by eye and ear—for song and bird become one—passes naturally into the music of the spheres: there exist in the universe only yourself and this cosmic twitter.

The Lewes golfers, of both sexes, pursue their sport some way towards Caburn, and in the valley below the volunteers fire at their butts; but I doubt if the mountain proper will ever be tamed. Picnics are held on the summit on fine summer days, but for the greater part of the year it belongs to the horseman, the shepherd and the lark.

Mount Caburn gave its title to a poem by William Hay, of Glyndebourne House, in 1730, which ends with these lines, in the manner of an epitaph, upon their author:

William Hay (1695-1755) was author also of a curious Essay on Deformity, which Charles Lamb liked, and of several philosophical works, and was a very diligent member of Parliament.

Descending Caburn's eastern slope, and passing at the foot the mellowest barn roof in the county, beautifully yellowed by weather and time, we come to Glynde, remarkable among Sussex villages for a formal Grecian church that might have been ravished from a Surrey Thames-side village and set down here, so little resemblance has it to the indigenous Sussex House of God. As a matter of fact it was built in 1765 by the Bishop of Durham—the Bishop being Richard Trevor, of the family that then owned Glynde Place; which is hard by the church, a fine Elizabethan mansion, a little sombre, and very much in the manner of the great houses in the late S. E. Waller's pictures, the very place for a clandestine interview or midnight elopement. The present owner, a descendant of the Trevors and of the famous John Hampden, enemy of the Star Chamber and ship money, is Admiral Brand.

Glynde's most famous inhabitant was John Ellman (1753-1832) the breeder of sheep, who farmed here from 1780 to 1829 and was the village's kindly autocrat and a true father to his men. The last of the patriarchs, as he might be called, Ellman lodged all his unmarried labourers under his own roof, giving them when they married enough grassland for a pig and a cow, and a little more for cultivation. He built a school for the children of his men, and permitted no licensed house to exist in Glynde. Not that he objected to beer; on the contrary he considered it the true beverage for farm labourers; but he preferred that they should brew it at home. It was John Ellman who gave the South Down sheep its fame and brought it to perfection.

The most interesting account of South Down sheep is to be found in Arthur Young's General View of the Agriculture of the County of Sussex, which is one of those books that, beginning their lives as practical, instructive and somewhat dry manuals, mellow, as the years go by, into human documents. Taken sentence by sentence Young has no charm, but his book has in the mass quite a little of it, particularly if one loves Sussex. He studied the country carefully, with special emphasis upon the domain of the Earl of Egremont, an agricultural reformer of much influence, whom we have met as a collector of pictures and the friend of painters. For the Earl not only brought Turner into Sussex with his brushes and palette, but introduced a plough from Suffolk and devised a new light waggon. The other hero of Young's book is necessarily John Ellman, whose flock at Glynde he subjected to close examination. Thomas Ellman, of Shoreham, John's cousin, he also approved as a breeder of sheep, but it is John that stood nighest the Earl of Egremont on Young's ladder of approbation. John Ellman's sheep were considered the first of their day, equally for their meat and their wool. I will not quote from Young to any great extent, lest vegetarian readers exclaim; but the following passage from his analysis of the South Down type must be transplanted here for its pleasant carnal vigour: "The shoulders are wide; they are round and straight in the barrel; broad upon the loin and hips; shut well in the twist, which is a projection of flesh in the inner part of the thigh that gives a fulness when viewed behind, and makes a South Down leg of mutton remarkably round and short, more so than in most other breeds."

John Ellman by no means satisfied all his fellow breeders that he was right. His neighbour at Glynde, Mr. Morris, differed from him in the matter of crossing, and his cousin Thomas had other views on many points touching the flock. In the following passage Arthur Young expresses the extent to which individuality in sheep breeding may run:—"The South Down farmers breed their sheep with faces and legs of a colour, just as suits their fancy. One likes black, another sandy, a third speckled, and one and all exclaim against white. This man concludes that legs and faces with an inclination to white are infallible signs of tenderness, and do not stand against the severity of the weather with the same hardiness as the darker breed; and they allege that these sorts will fall off in their flesh. A second will set the first right, and pronounce that, in a lot of wethers, those that are soonest and most fat, are white-faced; that they prove remarkable good milkers; but that white is an indication of a tender breed. Another is of opinion that, by breeding the lambs too black, the wool is injured, and likewise apt to be tainted with black, and spotted, especially about the neck, and not saleable. A fourth breeds with legs and faces as black as it is possible; and he too is convinced that the healthiness is in proportion to blackness; whilst another says, that if the South Down sheep were suffered to run in a wild state, they would in a very few years become absolutely black. All these are the opinions of eminent breeders: in order to reconcile them, others breed for speckled faces; and it is the prevailing colour."

It is told that when the Duke of Newcastle used to pass through Glynde, on his way from Halland House, near East Hoathly, to Bishopstone, the peal of welcome was rung on ploughshares, since there was but one bell.

Ringmer, which lies about two miles north of Glynde, is not in itself a village of much beauty. Its distinction is to have provided William Penn with a wife—Gulielma Springett, daughter of Sir William Springett, a Puritan, whose bust is in the church and who died at the siege of Arundel Castle. The great Quaker thus took to wife the daughter of a soldier. When Gulielma Penn died, at the age of fifty, her husband wrote of her: "She was a Publick, as well as Private Loss; for she was not only an excellent Wife and Mother, but an Entire and Constant Friend, of a more than common Capacity, and greater Modesty and Humility; yet most equal and undaunted in Danger. Religious as well as Ingenuous, without Affectation. An easie Mistress, and Good Neighbour, especially to the Poor. Neither lavish nor penurious, but an Example of Industry as well as of other Vertues: Therefore our great Loss tho' her own Eternal Gain."

In Ringmer Church, I might add, is a monument to Mrs. Jeffray (née Mayney), wife of Francis Jeffray of South Malling, with another beautiful testimony to the character of a good wife:—

Ringmer was long famous for its mud and bad roads. Defoe (or another) says in the Tour through Great Britain:—"I travelled through the dirtiest, but, in many respects, the richest and most profitable country in all that part of England. The timber I saw here was prodigious, as well in quantity as in bigness; and seemed in some places to be suffered to grow only because it was so far from any navigation, that it was not worth cutting down and carrying away. In dry summers, indeed, a great deal is conveyed to Maidstone and other places on the Medway; and sometimes I have seen one tree on a carriage, which they call in Sussex a tug, drawn by twenty-two oxen; and, even then, it is carried so little a way, and thrown down, and left for other tugs to take up and carry on, that sometimes it is two or three years before it gets to Chatham. For, if once the rain comes on, it stirs no more that year, and sometimes a whole summer is not dry enough to make the road passable. Here I had a sight which, indeed, I never saw in any part of England before—namely, that going to a church at a country village, not far from Lewes, I saw an ancient lady, and a lady of very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen; nor was it done in frolick or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it." The old lady was not singular in her method of attending service, for another writer records seeing Sir Herbert Springett, father of Sir William, drawn to church by eight oxen: a determination to get to his pew at any cost that led to the composition of the following ballad, which is now printed for the first time:—

THE RIDE TO CHURCH.

"A true sonne of the Church of England."

Oxen are now rarely seen on the Sussex roads, but on the hill sides a few of the farmers still plough with them; and may it be long before the old custom is abandoned! There is no pleasanter or more peaceful sight than—looking up—that of a wide-horned team of black oxen, smoking a little in the morning air, drawing the plough through the earth, while the ploughman whistles, and the ox-herd, goad in hand, utters his Saxon grunts of incitement or reproof. The black oxen of the hills are of Welsh stock, the true Sussex ox being red. The "kews," as their shoes are called, may still be seen on the walls of a smithy here and there. Shoeing oxen is no joke, since to protect the smith from their horns they have to be thrown down; their necks are held by a pitchfork, and their feet tied together.

Sussex roads were terrible until comparatively recent times. An old rhyme credits "Sowseks" with "dirt and myre," and Dr. Burton, the author of the Iter Sussexiensis, humorously found in it a reason why Sussex people and beasts had such long legs. "Come now, my friend," he wrote, in Greek, "I will set before you a sort of problem in Aristotle's fashion:—Why is it that the oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals, are so long legged in Sussex? May it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud by the strength of the ankle, that the muscles get stretched, as it were, and the bones lengthened?"

When, in 1703, the King of Spain visited the Duke of Somerset at Petworth he had the greatest difficulty in getting here. One of his attendants has put on record the perils of the journey:—"We set out at six o'clock in the morning (at Portsmouth) to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches, save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire, till we arrived at our journey's end. 'Twas hard service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day, without eating anything, and passing through the worst ways that I ever saw in my life: we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our coach which was leading, and his highness's body coach, would have suffered very often, if the nimble boors of Sussex had not frequently poised it, or supported it with their shoulders, from Godalming almost to Petworth; and the nearer we approached the duke's, the more inaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost six hours time to conquer."

To return to Ringmer, it was there that Gilbert White studied the tortoise (see Letter xiii of The Natural History of Selborne). The house where he stayed still stands, and the rookery still exists. "These rooks," wrote the naturalist, "retire every morning all the winter from this rookery, where they only call by the way, as they are going to roost in deep woods; at the dawn of day they always revisit their nest-trees, and are preceded a few minutes by a flight of daws, that act, as it were, as their harbingers." An intermediate owner of the house where Gilbert White resided, which then belonged to his aunt Rebecca Snooke, ordered all nightingales to be shot, on the ground that they kept him awake.

While at Ringmer, if a glimpse of very rich park land is needed, it would be worth while to walk three miles north to Plashetts, which combines a vast tract of wood with a small park notable at once for its trees, its brake fern, its lakes, and its water fowl. But if one would gain it by rail, Isfield is the station.

CHAPTER XXXI

Uckfield, on the line from Lewes to Tunbridge Wells, is our true starting point for the high sandy and rocky district of Crowborough, Rotherfield and Mayfield; but we must visit on the way Isfield, a very pretty village on the Ouse and its Iron River tributary. Isfield is remarkable for the remains of Isfield Place, once the home of the Shurleys (connected only by marriage with the Shirleys of Wiston). The house can never have been so fine as Slaugham Place, but it is evident that abundance also reigned here, as there. Over the main door was the motto "Non minor est virtus quam querere parta tueri," which Horsfield whimsically translates "Catch is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better." In the Shurley chapel, one of the sweetest spots in Sussex, are brasses and monuments to the family, notably the canopied altar tomb to Sir John Shurley, who died in 1631, his two wives (Jane Shirley of Wiston and Dorothy Bowyer, née Goring, of Cuckfield) and nine children, who kneel prettily in a row at the foot. Of these children it is said in the inscription that some "were called into Heaven and the others into several marriages of good quality"; while of Dorothy Shurley it is prettily recorded (this, as we have seen, being a district rich in exemplary wives) that she had "a merite beyond most of her time, ... her pitty was the clothing of the poore ... and all her minutes were but steppes to heaven." Our county has many fine monuments, but I think that, this is the most charming of all.