One of the earliest evidences of the permanence of this settlement was the building of a chapel, in 1684. This is the existing church, dedicated by the then ascendant Royalists to “King Charles the Martyr.” It and the Pantiles—and of course the Common—are the only vestiges of the Tunbridge Wells of that time.
It is to Queen Anne that we owe the name of the Pantiles. She had come here while still the Princess Anne, for the health of herself and her ailing son, the Duke of Gloucester, and gave a hundred pounds for paving the walk, so that no other little boy, duke or commoner, should stumble there, as hers had done. When she returned, the next season, her hundred pounds had been expended in some mysterious way totally unconnected with pavements, and so, very rightly offended, she left the place, never to revisit it, even though the authorities at last hastened to lay the walk with those pantiles that gave it so distinctive a title. Stone slabs, in 1793, replaced those red tiles, and for a lengthy period the stupidity of the local governing body rechristened the famous walk “the Parade,” but it has now reverted to its original style.
XXVI
Tunbridge Wells of to-day bears not the slightest resemblance, apart from these three landmarks of Church, Common, and Pantiles, to the resort of long ago. It is unlike in appearance and manners. To-day you see an overgrown town with suburban roads climbing up all the hillsides, and continued, if you explore them, on the corresponding descent. It is an effect of grey sobriety, for the greatest period of its expansion was in the ’60’s and ’70’s, when plaster was prevalent; and its chief hotel was built in the days before architects could be made to understand that comfort is desired by guests more than grandeur. To climb up flights of stairs to enter the front door is a weariness, and bedrooms twice as lofty as they are broad or long outrage one’s sense of proportion.
Socially, too, Tunbridge Wells of to-day is the antipodes of what it was. The traveller of old who “took the waters,” presently arriving “by the grace of God,” in his chariot, or by public coach, did no sooner come up from Tonbridge within sight of the Spa, than he was assailed by a swarm of touts who thrust their heads into the windows, eager to bespeak his custom:
To-day you enter from the railway-station, and the only people who take any interest in you are the cabmen. That is distinctly a gain, for touts are an abomination; but the public life once insisted upon by Nash is as distinctly a loss. The fact is that the English have no genius for it, and the climate really forbids. Moreover the local conditions are different. It is a great residential town now, and visitors are in the minority.
Still you see the Pantiles, with the quaint colonnade and the overshadowing limes, now grown very reverend trees indeed, but it is not a scene of gaiety, and when on summer nights the place is beautifully illuminated with coloured electric lights, and open-air concerts are held there, it is a crowd of servants and of shopkeepers’ assistants that listens.
Alas! for the red-heeled, red-faced voluptuaries, the patched and powdered beauties, the morris-dancers, the fiddlers! They have all danced or hobbled off, and have been long since ferried over to the other side of Styx. And where they leered and ogled and minced, “protested,” and “stopped their vitals,” in their eighteenth-century way, there are a few inquisitive tourists peering about in corners, and really wondering if all those tales of eld are so much moonshine.
The waters of Tunbridge Wells and the Roman Catholic clergy have, according to Mrs. Malaprop, one quality in common: both are “chalybeate.” Perhaps they owed much of their old-time popularity to being described as “salutiferous,” and certainly they were likely to impress people more, and to do more imaginary good, under that title than if merely “health-giving.”
But the good wrought by the water is undoubted. It will not mend broken bones, nor set up an altogether shattered constitution; it is not Lethean, and at a draught you do not forget sorrows; but it is an excellent tonic, and—experto crede—good for incipient dyspepsia. Modern scepticism looks upon the fine air of Tunbridge Wells, rather than the water, as author of the beneficial effects upon visitors, and so it is less taken than formerly. It is safe to say that the majority of those who taste it are impelled by curiosity, and to all the taste suggests ink.
You come past the Church of King Charles, with its sundial inscribed, “You may Waste but cannot Stop me,” to the Pantiles and the spring. The water is, by an old Act of Parliament, free to all, but there are two granite basins: one, with a gigantic utensil like a pantomime soup-ladle, with which, bending down, you scoop up the water, in company with Lazarus and the vulgar herd; another where, in more genteel fashion, you pay a penny and are handed a glassful by one of the two old ladies known as “Dippers.” If you please, you can commute your payments by subscribing 2s. a week, 3s. 6d. for two weeks, or 30s. for a year. By that time the three grains of iron contained in every gallon of the water should have strung the participant up to concert-pitch, and have plated his teeth with a coating of iron, unless he adopts the old custom of cleaning them with sage-leaves, after drinking.
XXVII
No one would dream of describing Tunbridge Wells as a “manufacturing town,” but it has, and has had for considerably over two hundred years, a peculiar industry. Few are those who have not heard of “Tunbridge ware,” a species of delicate inlay work in coloured woods, which may be described as mosaic work, something in the nature of tesselated pavement reduced to terms of wood; the tesseræ in this case being very thin strips, fillets, and roundels applied in patterns to work-boxes, inkstands, backs of brushes, and a large variety of fancy articles.
Any attempt to describe the ware, or the process of its manufacture, seems at the first blush a rather hopeless enterprise. We may, however, give another analogy, and compare it with parquetry flooring in miniature and in many colours.
That it is no mushroom fashion may be discovered by the visitor to South Kensington, who in the Museum will discover a backgammon-board designed by the Comte de Grammont and made for him in 1664. He presented it to Mary Kirke, Maid of Honour to the Queen of Charles the Second, during a royal visit to “the Welles.” This interesting evidence of the antiquity of the ware is decorated with forget-me-nots, interlacing the Count’s initials and those of Mary Kirke, and shows that the art was even then fully developed.
Fashions change, and in all those years Tunbridge ware has had many vicissitudes. In the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign a very large trade was done in a cheap line of articles in light woods—commonly sycamore—printed upon from transfers, not inlaid in any way, and thus, strictly speaking, not the true ware at all. Examples of this period are still to be met with in curiosity shops, with views, not only of Tunbridge Wells, but of every other place then of popular resort, and the sight of them brings faint reminiscences of times when girls wore bonnets and book-muslin dresses and gentlemen still dared to appear in public in white duck trousers. The ware of that age was, in fact, as popular then as the little fancy china articles with local armorial bearings are now.
That fashion passed, and the true manufacture regained its vogue. The prominent makers for generations had been Fenner & Nye, established on Mount Ephraim in 1720, succeeded in turn by Edmund Nye, and finally by Thomas Barton, in 1863. Barton’s showrooms were in the Pantiles until recent years, but the business, conducted on the old time-honoured lines of making the best possible article and charging for it accordingly, could not survive the modern rage for cheapness at the sacrifice of excellence, and as Barton grew old the business declined with him and finally gave place to another, where you can still purchase Tunbridge ware in innumerable forms at popular prices, and be perfectly satisfied, until it is compared with that of sixty years ago. The public has no cause for complaint. It pays only for what it gets; but there is, and can only be, the most superficial resemblance between the costly work of a bygone age and that of the present era.
A partial knowledge of these things has led some writers to describe this manufacture as a “doomed industry”; but, like so many “doomed” people, institutions, and trades, it maintains an astonishing vitality, and there is probably more Tunbridge ware made now than in the times when an article cost twice as much.
The methods employed are of some interest. Radiating, star-like patterns are produced ingeniously by building up in long sticks glued together around a central core, afterwards to be sawn off in veneer-like strips: a hundred to a stick. These are then mounted on to the articles to be decorated. In the case of more ambitious and pictorial efforts, such as a view of the Pantiles (a favourite subject) in coloured woods, the craftsman works to a coloured sketch, divided up like a Berlin wool pattern. In such cases the little wooden cubes are of necessity extremely minute. Mounted on to the wooden surface of workbox or other article, the work has then to undergo many sandpaper scrubbings, with sandpaper of increasing fineness, and is at last polished to an exquisite finish.
To the true artistic eye these ingenious imitations of drawings or paintings scarcely commend themselves, and Tunbridge ware finds its best exposition in the boxes inlaid with squares of various woods, in which you can see the grain and colour natural to each.
Great expense and care were formerly taken to secure beautiful varieties of wood, and no fewer than eighty, English and foreign, were in constant use. It was found that no wood naturally gave green or silver-grey, and it was therefore necessary to procure those colours artificially. Green was obtained from “decayed oak,” the fallen boughs of oak-trees stained green by fungoid growths. To get grey, bird’s-eye maple and Hungarian ash were steeped in the chalybeate waters of “the wells”; and a beautiful white was produced by boiling holly.
XXVIII
The fine upland Common of Tunbridge Wells is one of the town’s greatest assets. Extraordinary outcrops of rock occur on it, and away to where it merges into Rusthall Common is that bourne of many a pilgrimage—the famous Toad Rock: an immense mass of sandstone really very like a toad squatting on its haunches, and not by any means of so uncertain a shape as that of so many of those queer rocks in which you see just what you please, like Hamlet’s cloud, “almost in shape of a camel,” “like a weasel,” and finally “very like a whale.” The Toad Rock has not so many imaginary incarnations, and looks only like a toad. In these days it has been found necessary to protect it with a defensive iron railing, but this precaution has not served to exclude the usual fools who carve their folly deeply into everything capable of being marked with a penknife.
The natural gorge close by, known as Gibraltar Rocks, still is marked by one of the houses built on the Common by a sentimental English Government for the French priests exiled from France at the Revolution. In addition, the Government made them an allowance for their maintenance.
The population of Rusthall, to judge from the language and behaviour of its boys and young men, must be in a very primitive stage of civilisation. The stupid foulness and vileness of their conduct in the neighbourhood of that public resort, the Toad Rock, any day and every day deserve the attention of the police.
Tunbridge Wells is a neighbourhood of rocks, but none others approach the weird scene at the spot appropriately called High Rocks, less than two miles distant, on the way to Groombridge. It is not the “Finest Scenery in England,” as claimed by Mr. Thomas Coster, proprietor of the “High Rocks Hotel,” who charges sixpence to enter; but it is highly curious. Many ingenious and enterprising sightseers, chiefly active cyclists, resenting the being clicked through a turnstile at sixpence a head, take Mr. Coster and his encircling fences in the rear, and, entering a little wood, insinuate themselves into his domain and see his rocks for nothing. His rocks! On the whole, their enterprise has my respectful admiration, for it seems absurd to treat Nature as if she had made this scene in the infancy of the world for the purpose of providing a showman with an income.
ABERGAVENNY’S “A.”
The writer of a guide-book published in 1810 describes the “High Rocks” as “romantic scenery,” and says that, “combining with the wish to please and be pleased,” the spot “tended to create an agreeable relief to that tædium which will frequently encroach on a place of public resort.” There is a specious plausibility about this which leads the reader at first to idly agree; but the muzziness of thought and woolliness of expression very soon lead one to the opinion that the writer, although he may have had an inkling of what he meant when he set out, very soon lost himself on the way.
The High Rocks cover a space of about two acres, and consist of a great wooded bluff hanging, cliff-like, over the road, and intersected in innumerable directions with fissures, gullies, and ravines from fifty to seventy feet deep. These ravines are crossed by numerous wooden bridges, and ascended or descended by rustic stairs. There is the Bell Rock, which gives forth a metallic sound when struck; the Warning Rock, and all sorts of other rocks, fantastically named; and there are swings and brake-loads of excursionists, and mazes. Altogether, the place is pretty well exploited, and the penknife has been busy on every spot within reach.
A way to Hastings by Tunbridge Wells lay in coaching days through Frant, Wadhurst, and Ticehurst, emerging upon the direct road again at Stone Crouch. It is a wildly beautiful wooded district, passing through a line of country where an immense upholstered letter A is noticeable on almost every cottage, sometimes in company with the Neville portcullis, indicating the ownership of the Marquis of Abergavenny in the country-side. Near Frant an extraordinary gateway into the park of Eridge abuts upon the wayside, flanked by his Bull’s Head crest and adorned with the punning motto, Ne vile celis: “Wish nothing base.” A proud motto, woefully smirched by Lord William Neville in recent years, when he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for forgery.
XXIX
The main road is more quickly regained at Pembury Green, where the last suburbs of Tunbridge Wells end.
Pembury Green is an old hamlet reared in modern times up to the status of a separate parish, with a tall-spired church built where it has no business to be—on the green that gives the place its distinguishing name. There are plenteous evidences, in the number of inns and Cyclists’ Rests, that Pembury Green is a favourite resort in the long days of summer.
The number of refreshment places along the Hastings Road catering for cyclists is more marked than even on that very much exploited highway, the road to Brighton. Perhaps on a road so hilly as this those pushers of the reluctant pedal require more frequent halts and more sustenance.
Most wayside inns nowadays express their readiness to entertain wheelmen by exhibiting the modest announcement, “Accommodation for Cyclists,” hinged on to their old signs; but, apart from these, the keeping of “Cyclists’ Rests” along the main roads has become an industry as congested as the close professions.
The natural history of Cyclists’ Rests affords interest to the peripatetic philosopher. They range from the cheap boudoir-like kind, a couple or so miles out from a town, where the articles most in demand are weak tea and hairpins, down to the sometimes bare, sometimes grubby little dens in remoter places, labelled in illiterate fashion,
“CYCLIƧT REƧT”
designed to suit the shallow pockets of the long-distance-riding club cyclist; where, in discomfort, you eat off delf plates laid on tables covered with slimy “American cloth,” and get a good “blow-out” and a shakedown in an attic with precipitous floor and sloping roof for an incredibly small sum.
The first variety are fully furnished for feminine cyclists with materials for tea, with the hairpins already mentioned, with chocolates, a carafe of weary-looking home-made lemonade with a lemon stuck in the neck of it, the usual fizzy “minerals,” and sixpennyworth of buns. Wonders may be wrought on a basis so slight.
The other kind is of sterner stuff. Who rides far must feed well. Tea for the hard rider, no less than for the ambling lady cyclist, is essential, but it must be tea with a tang to it, and plenty of it; and it gets mixed, in course of feeding, with such meats as the “Rest” affords, with the result—a medical expert would say—that the interior of that cyclist is converted into a tannery, and his food turned to leather by the tannic acid of his drink. And yet I never heard of a healthy, active cyclist being inconvenienced, much less laid low, by such immoral feeding.
It is a solitary road beyond Pembury Green, varied only by a few scattered houses, all the way to Lamberhurst. Kipping’s Cross is the first of these intervals, and there stands the “Blue Boys” inn, with an oast-house for only neighbour. The “Blue Boys” is practically dated by its odd picture sign, showing two blue-jacketed postboys shaking hands and lifting each a convivial glass, whether to their noble selves or to George the Fourth, whose medallion portrait is below, cannot be said.
Beyond the inn is the cross-road leading to Goudhurst, scene of many incidents in the history of smuggling. Between this point and Lamberhurst, four miles distant, there were, in the once-upon-a-time of coaching days, two turnpike-gates. The pikeman’s house remains at both places.
The level tract of land at this point was known to old road-books as “Lindridge Causeway,” and owed its name, according to John Harris, who wrote a “History of Kent” in 1719, to one Lindridge, who was born in 1560, lived in a house adjacent to Lamberhurst, and “built a handsome causeway here, called after him.” At that time there was still a stone to his memory in the porch of Lamberhurst church.
The name of “Lamberhurst Quarter,” given to the district on this hill-top above Lamberhurst village, is one of those many mysteries of place-names that now can never be authoritatively explained; but it is supposed to derive from some ancient partition of the manor into four parts—quarters of a knight’s fee.
Down below, on the right hand, are spread out the many-serried ranks of the hop-gardens. You look down upon them as a commanding officer might upon his phalanxed battalions.
XXX
Hops are grown in the neighbourhood of Lamberhurst almost as extensively as around Maidstone itself, which every one knows to be the metropolis of the cultivation. The hop-gardens are the vineyards of England, and so marked a feature that it surprises the inquirer who learns that the brewer’s hop was not introduced to this country until the reign of Henry the Eighth. “Hops and heresy came in together,” the Roman Catholics were wont to remark.
There is no certainty about hops, and a hop-grower will readily admit that his trade is little better than gambling. Knowledge, capital, industry are all insufficient to arm him against fate in the shape of red spider, mould, fly, or bad markets, and he is commonly content if he can secure one good crop at average prices in three years. It is a costly cultivation, coming, with rent, rates, taxes, materials, and labour, to an average of £25 per acre.
Only land “just so” will serve. A little too heavy, a little too light, or not being drained to perfection, will spell failure, and a hop-garden must be drained, with pipes or tiles, at least as well as a house.
The hop-grower’s year begins in March, when the “hills,” or stools, are uncovered and dressed by pruning. Then the poles are set up: from two to four to each “hill.” The “hills” being six feet apart, it is a simple calculation to arrive at the number of poles to the acre. There are 3,600, forming a considerable item in the grower’s accounts. Made of ash, alder, chestnut, larch, or oak, of from ten to twelve years’ growth, the great and constant demand for them has given their characteristic appearance to large tracts of land in Kent and Sussex, where the young woodlands are as much a feature as the hop-gardens and the oast-houses themselves. Poles are from thirteen to fourteen feet long, and cost from twelve shillings to a guinea a hundred, larch being the most lasting. To preserve them as long as possible, they are often dipped in creosote.
Early in May the hop-gardens begin to give employment to the women. The young shoots are tied with rushes to the poles, and constantly thinned out, and the poles themselves tied together with a maze of interlacing string for the support of the climbing bine.
All through the summer the alleys between the plants must be kept well weeded, and only when August ends does the grower begin to see his reward in sight; but then rain may bring the “mould,” or the “fly” may come, and all his toil be wasted. Only one thing will cure the “fly,” and that is something utterly beyond control—the coming of the “ladybird.”
Most people know the ladybird or “lady-cow,” as it is sometimes called: the little winged insect with the hard shell of a post-office red, subject of the old rustic rhyme, in which, placing it on the tip of the finger, it would be addressed in this wise:
I heard that rhyme very early, and shall never quite lose the forlorn sense of tragedy in it.
The ladybird is the deadly foe of the “fly,” and seems by some extraordinary instinct to know when and where that pest is rampant; for there is nothing more certain than that a plague of “fly” will be followed by an incursion of ladybirds in countless millions, coming even across the Channel, as steamboat passengers, plentifully covered with them, have testified. The sky rains ladybirds, come vengefully to exterminate the hop-grower’s enemy and to ensure that British beer shall be properly bittered.
If the hops survive all these dangers and chances and are a generally abundant crop, the grower is sometimes in almost as bad a case as if they had been a failure, for prices then rule so ruinously low that they do not pay the cost of growing. Hops have been so high as £25 a hundredweight in times of scarcity, when those fortunate enough to be favoured with a good crop, while their neighbours’ were failures, have retired with fortunes. On the other hand, they have been so low as fifty shillings.
A less anxious, but infinitely more busy time has come when the picking arrives. Responsible gangers have to be employed, and hop-cutters. The hop-cutter cuts through the bines, pulls up the poles, and lays them across the bins of sacking into which the pickers strip the flowers of the hop. The ganger measures out the stripped hops, and in his note-book credits each picker with the amount of his picking, at the rate of eight bushels a shilling.
The hopper’s hut is not the last word in convenience, although for the occasion, and by way of change from the hopper’s native slum, it may be comfortable enough. It is usually one of a long row of little brick dens, not altogether unlike some of the wild animals’ lairs at the Zoological Gardens, and is whitewashed inside in the manner of a cattle-pen. There are—is it necessary to add?—no pictures on the walls and no domestic knick-knacks. There is not even any furniture, nor a bed. If you are a hopper you doss on the floor, luxuriating in clean straw provided by the hop-grower, and wrapped in the not over-clean blankets brought by yourself; and you and yours “clean yourselves”—in these circles you do not merely “wash”—in the open, at buckets and tins. In the open, too, you dress and get shaved, and cook and eat; and if the August and September days be kind, there is enjoyment rather than discomfort in it. Sometimes barns and tents supplement the huts: sometimes, too, it rains, and then, on a really wet day, when work is at a standstill and the women and the children are miserable and sulky and cry, the male hopper—who, although as a rule he uses dreadful language, is not a bad fellow at heart—goes off to the nearest pub. and soaks on four-ale, and there is trouble.
There are, every year, some 50,000 hop-pickers, picking from 35,000 to 40,000 acres of hop-gardens. Of these the larger proportion is contributed by the villagers; but the railways convey about 20,000 from London by the “hopper specials” at very low rates, and many, who cannot afford even those very cheap fares, tramp down.
The special trains would make the patrons of the Continental expresses stare. They set out at midnight, or thereabouts, and are filled with a motley crowd, bringing mattresses, blankets, frying-pans, kettles, and a host of small domestic requirements for a fortnight or three weeks.
They book to whatever station they fancy as the likeliest point whence to seek a job; for while some hop-pickers, during a steady succession of years, know where they will be welcome, many of them go on sheer speculation, and tramp from village to village until they find vacancies. In later years, and in bad or wet seasons, the number of the unsuccessful claiming admission at the casual wards, especially at Maidstone, has seriously embarrassed the workhouse authorities and those good folk who not only missionise the hoppers with Bible and Prayer Book, but feed and clothe their bodies in this world as well as showing anxiety for their souls in the next.
Hop-picking is for many poor Londoners the only holiday they get throughout the year. It is that best of holidays, change of work and of scene. Its chief merits are that it requires no skill, and that the whole family can take part in it, except the baby, who is at any rate brought into the hop-garden to look on, and left to amuse himself or to sleep under an umbrella, while grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, uncles and aunts, and brothers and sisters are all busily filling the bins and earning, according to their degrees of “slippiness,” a shilling to two shillings the day.
Each hop-grower is his own dryer: hence the kilns, the strangely cowled “oast-houses” attached to every hop-garden. To these the hops are taken, to be dried. Most oast-houses are circular, that form being considered to distribute the heat more evenly than the square. The interior is instructive, and would not be at all unwelcome on one of those wet and chilly days that are not unknown to the English summer, were it not for the universal practice of mixing sulphur with the coke fires, which, to a stranger, results in an inconvenient hoarseness and sore throat. The reason for the sulphur is that the fumes it throws off give a yellowish colour to the dried hops, a tint conventionally required by the factors, although it makes them neither better nor worse.
The fires are on the ground level. Above, the hops are spread on the drying-floor, formed of wire-netting, covered with hair-cloth. Through this the warm air ascends, and in twelve hours some 1,050 lb. weight of hops are dried, and incidentally reduced by the evaporation of the moisture in them to 200 lb. The heat ascends and leaves the oast-house by the cowl, which turns on bearings, according to the direction of the wind.
From the drying-floor to the cooling-floor the hops are transferred with a wooden shovel, and then packed into the “pockets.” “Pockets” are sacks, and are nowadays filled by being suspended from a hole in the floor, and filled with the light feathery dried hops; and then repeatedly pressed down, re-filled and re-pressed by a heavy iron screw-press. In the result, a pocket of hops is as hard and unyielding to the touch as a mass of iron, and samples cut from it hold together like so much cake-tobacco. The older method of packing was for a “jumper” to press the hops down by his own unaided efforts.
XXXI
Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it, for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively for their wooden stands.
Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing behind it, is in appearance—and in some sort in fact—an appanage of the lord of the manor, for it stands, with the residence, in the middle of his park.
It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy, with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise:
- Virgil Pomfret, Gent
- Livd so Respected
- That when the Sable Train of Mourning Friends
- Attended his breathless Corps
- Here to be Entombd
- Each tear ful Eye seem’d thus to Say
- There Goes an Honest Man
- 1765 Aged 77
This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small Pox,” aged 28.
I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it in this larcenous way.
At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in a valley with beautiful hills round it.”
Old writers gave it as their opinion that the place-name came from “the Anglo-Saxon Lam, meaning ‘loam,’” and supported their contention by referring to the sticky clay of the neighbourhood; but Lamberhurst probably took the first part of its name from the Saxon genitive plural for lambs. The second part means, of course, a wood. Most surrounding places take their names, in this manner, from natural objects.
Kent and Sussex here march together, and the village was, until 1894, in both counties, the dividing-line being the little river Teise that flows under the picturesque and narrow bridge in the village street. In that year, however, Lamberhurst was transferred wholly to Kent. The old “Chequers” inn, type of an old English hostelry, has lately been neighboured by an upstart hotel, disturbing with its raw newness the ancient peace of this Sleepy Hollow.
It was once a busy enough place, and black and smoky, for close by were the famous furnaces, or “bloomeries,” where iron-ore was smelted and cannon cast, and where the famous iron railings that now partly, and once wholly, surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral, were made. Great outcry was made when the railings were removed from the west front of the cathedral in 1873, but we need not lack in admiration of them to realise that the open space thus created is a better sight than the strictly enclosed approach to London’s chief place of worship. The railings originally weighed 200 tons, cost £11,202, and were considered to be the finest, as they certainly were the heaviest, in the world.
The site of the furnace is half a mile from Lamberhurst, on the way to Bayham Abbey. It is distinguished by a hammer-pond and a mouldy old house almost smothered in trees and creepers.
Along the valley of the stream that feeds this pond lie the ruins of Bayham Abbey, a remote home of Premonstratensian Canons, whose simple life was to the last in great contrast with the dissolute conduct of the great majority of the religious houses rightly abolished in the time of Henry the Eighth. But they had to suffer for the sins of the many, and although a crowd of rustics and others of better estate assembled in disguise and reinstated the canons, after they had been expelled by the Commissioners, it was only a temporary victory. Abbey and estates fell to Sir Anthony Browne, of whom we shall hear more at Battle; but what became of the wonderful bed upon which the blessed St. Richard of Chichester had slept, history sayeth not. It should have been presented to the most deserving hospital, for it wrought cures upon all who slept in it, no matter what the disease. But the Age of Faith was past, and the Blessed Bed was doubtless chopped up for firewood and its bedding dispersed: an inestimable loss to an ailing world. Imagine a bed sovran for every ill! How compute the value of it?
If the curse upon sacrilege were not such a chancy and fortuitous thing, one might look confidently for terrible happenings to the owners of the Bayham Abbey lands, the Pratts, Marquises Camden, who bought the estates from Viscount Montagu in 1714. But their elephant’s-head crest remains on all the cottages for miles around, and they continue to “live long and brosber.”
The ruins are visible from the road, lying amid rich water-meadows, and they are to be seen more intimately at the end of a phenomenally muddy lane. But you may not view them from within the enclosure except on one day of the week and at a fee of sixpence.
XXXII
Restrictions upon sight-seeing in this neighbourhood are particularly severe. On the rising ground out of Lamberhurst, for example, lies Scotney Castle, a lovely, sequestered ruin partly surrounded by a great, lake-like moat, and only a little less romantic than Bodiam itself. To reach it you go past a very modern lodge and along a half-mile of wooded drive, chiefly of laurels and sweet chestnuts. But permission is granted on only one day of the week, doubtless in the hope that the precise day will not be remembered. On any summer’s day numerous vehicles and parties, some of them come from long distances, may be seen turned back by the lodge-keeper.
Scotney was ever the home of romance, for one of its earliest owners, Walter de Scotney, was executed at Winchester in 1259 for administering poison to the Earl of Gloucester and others. The humour of it is that Walter de Scotney was probably quite innocent. The Earl recovered, but his brother, William de Clare, died, as also did the Abbot of Westminster. The Earl himself seems to have had a narrow escape, for he lost hair, nails, teeth, and skin, and must have been one vast comprehensive ache, and in a more painful condition than that of a chicken plucked alive.
Scotney then passed to the Darrells, who led a finely dramatic life here until they ended, to an effective and tragical “curtain.”
The old castle lies in a watery hollow beneath the modern Gothic mansion, and itself consists of two distinct portions: the castellated building erected about 1418 by Archbishop Chicheley, and the later manor-house of the Darrells, who in Queen Elizabeth’s time were Roman Catholics, maintaining their religion and its observances in spite of the laws, ordinances, and penalties levelled against Papist recusants.
To secure their officiating priests against arrest the Darrells contrived a highly ingenious hiding-hole in their mansion, and it was speedily found useful. It was the Christmas night of 1598, towards the end of Elizabeth’s long reign, and Father Blount, a well-known and keenly sought priest, was in the house with his servant when the party were surprised by a search-expedition, who, having got wind of Blount’s presence, were bent on capturing him.
While the enemy were demanding admittance, Blount and his servant were hurried into the courtyard, where a huge stone in the wall, turning upon a pivot, gave entrance to the hiding-place. Unluckily for them, a portion of a girdle-strap was caught between the stone and the rest of the wall, and showed plainly. Meanwhile the search-party had been admitted, and, securing the inmates of the house in one room, proceeded to search the place.
While they were thus engaged an outside servant of the family chanced to see the girdle, and promptly cut it off, calling as loudly as he dared to the fugitives to pull in the fragment that was still visible. The sharp-eared search-party, hearing a voice in the courtyard, rushed out and sounded the walls all round, without making any discovery, but kept it up until the rain, which had set in, disgusted them, when they retired, intending to resume the search on the morrow.
As Blount’s own record of the adventure tells us, he and his servant were concealed for days under a staircase. At last, afraid to risk the result of another day’s proceedings, they escaped under cover of night. Barefooted they crossed the courtyard, climbed the walls and swam the moat, then covered with thin ice. They did well to fly, for next day their hiding-place was discovered.
In later years the castle and manor-house, by that time ruined, was the haunt of smugglers, among whom the Darrells themselves were reputed to be prominent. To-day the beautiful spot is surrounded not only by the moat, but by exquisite gardens. The two remaining towers of the mediæval castle rise picturesquely from the still waters, and within the wreck of the Elizabethan mansion there are rooms contrived for the gamekeeper.
XXXIII
Weird oast-houses of a gigantic size raise their lofty cowls against the sky-line outside Lamberhurst, and, with their vanes decorated with images of the Kentish Horse, look like the architecture of Nightmare.
Half a mile onwards, an old toll-house, added to in later years, has the appearance of a lodge. Beyond it, the road has at some distant period been raised from a very deep dingle, as may be judged from the farm in the neighbouring hollow, and from the Bewl Bridge, under whose arch the little Bewl stream rushes, with a hoarse voice, far below.