In another mile is Stone Crouch, whose name of “crouch,” meaning merely a cross—probably a cross-road—prepares one for that most solitary and most rustic hamlet, with a farmhouse and its dependent cottages and barns, all in the old Kentish style. The farmhouse was once a coaching inn, and appears to have borne the sign of the “Postboy,” now taken by a house on the way from Lamberhurst, half a mile before the hamlet is reached.
On the left is the great park of Bedgebury, the seat until 1887, when he died, of A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, once prominent in the House of Commons. He was the descendant of one John Hope, a Hollander, of Amsterdam, whose son settled in England about 1800. That origin was the subject of a curious allusion in Parliament, during the debate of April 12th, 1867, on the Representation of the People Bill: a measure vehemently opposed by Beresford-Hope, whose clumsy, burly form and grotesque mannerisms in speaking were often commented upon. He spoke with emphasis of voice and gesture against that proposal of Disraeli’s, and declared, rather offensively, that he “would vote with whole heart and conscience against the Asian mystery.”
To this the “Asian mystery” himself rejoined that “all the honourable member’s exhibitions in the House are distinguished by a prudery which charms me, and when he talks of Asian mysteries, I may, perhaps, by way of reply, remark that there is a Batavian grace about his exhibition which takes the sting out of what he has said.”
He might even have said batrachian grace, for Beresford-Hope on his legs in the House was something froglike.
The house at Bedgebury, originally built in 1688 by Sir James Hayes, from sources romantically drawn out of treasure recovered from a sunken Spanish galleon, has been twice remodelled, lastly in the ’60’s, and is typical of the taste then prevailing for French architecture of what we may term the Alexandra Palace, Grosvenor Place, and Buckingham Palace Hotel type: which is to a Londoner an easier method of comparison than by naming it the “Louis the Fourteenth style.” It is a type distinguished by scaly Mansard roofs and spiky crestings, and has long been outmoded.
Beresford-Hope was a connoisseur of sorts, with a ready purse for church-restoration, conducted sometimes with that “zeal not according to knowledge” St. Paul laments, and exemplified in the little church of Kilndown, outside Bedgebury Park.
At Flimwell, which is merely a hamlet at the cross-roads, formed into a parish in 1839 by annexing portions of the neighbouring parishes of Etchingham, Ticehurst, and Hawkhurst, the road finally enters Sussex. “Flimwell Vent” is the style by which the place is known to old Turnpike Acts. The name sounds mysterious, but is only a strangely perverted version of “went,” the old rustic word for a cross-road. This, where roads go in four different directions, would be a “four-went way.” The draughtsmen who drew up those acts simply did not understand the term, and spelled it, as Mr. Tony Weller did his name, with a “we.”
The place is not unknown to history. In 1265, Henry the Third having, after a short siege, seized Tonbridge Castle, marched south, and, passing Combwell, a nunnery in the parish of Goudhurst, found the dead body of his cook, Master Thomas, who had incautiously strayed from the main body. According to contemporary records, the enraged King ordered three hundred and fifteen archers to be beheaded “at the place which is called Flimerwelle,” and here accordingly “they were surrounded like so many innocent lambs in a field, and butchered.”
The Angevin kings had no sense of proportion, and a perverted one of justice.
The left-hand road at Flimwell is the way to Rye, leading over what was once the wild and lonely region of Seacox Heath, haunt of the desperate smugglers then infesting this part of the country. The heath is now a thing of the past. Enclosure and farming have abolished it, and perhaps the only fragment of it left is a delightful little patch of brilliant heather preserved in the gardens of Lord Goschen’s mansion of “Seacox Heath.” Portions remain of old buildings once belonging to a house traditionally said to have been used as a warehouse by the half-mythical smuggler, Arthur Grey, but the present house was built in 1871 by Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen. It is a rather severe and formal Renaissance building, in a pale yellow sandstone quarried on the estate, and defies the canons of proportion suited to a country house, running to height rather than ground-space—a fashion imposed in streets where houses are built shoulder to shoulder, but unnecessary and undesirable on sites such as this.
It is a beautiful site; a lofty ridge facing south and overlooking many miles of lovely country. Ornate gardens, in which the most brilliant flowers predominate, surround the house, and beyond them are dense plantations of the choicest conifers, collected from all parts of the world.
Between Flimwell and Hastings, a distance of 18¾ miles, there were no fewer than six turnpike-gates levying tribute upon road-users, but in spite of these heavy exactions—perhaps even because of them—the expenditure of the Flimwell and Hastings Turnpike Trust largely exceeded its income, and in 1835 it was £11,000 in debt. In the end Parliament abolished turnpikes, and the bondholders who had lent money on the security of the tolls and the good faith of the Government lost their capital, not only here but all over the country.
A farmhouse one mile on the road beyond Flimwell, with brick-and-tile front and weather-boarded back, and with oast-houses and hop-gardens attached to it, is known, for some inscrutable reason, as “Mountpumps.” In another two miles the road comes to Hurst (i.e. Wood) Green.
XXXIV
Hurst Green is a large hamlet, and an offshoot of Etchingham; created by the road travel of the last hundred years. It is in two most distinct parts: one unmistakably Georgian, the other just as distinctly Late Victorian, shading off into Early Edwardian. Although one continuous street, divided only by a cross-road, the two parts of Hurst Green are very different in appearance, and look so antagonistic that it would not be surprising to learn that the inhabitants of either will have no dealings with those of the other.
The traveller comes first to the more recent portion: very red and raw, and there he finds a reason for much of these developments, in a large and highly ornate Police-station, which is not merely that, but a Court-house as well. Hurst Green, it seems, is the headquarters of a Petty Sessional division of the county of Sussex: much to the advantage of the great neighbouring “George” inn and its rival over the way, the “Queen’s Head.” When the railway came, and the custom fell off and the great stables were deserted, the two old inns were in grave danger of extinction. Only the Petty Sessions saved the situation. To-day, when the awful majesty of the Bench has dealt with the crimes and misdemeanours of the district—awarding fine or imprisonment for poaching or the juvenile rifling of orchards—the upholders of law and order and the rights of property in ground-game adjourn for refreshment, and in the “George” drink confusion to the illegal midnight sportsman and the youthful apple-stealers, while the friends and relations of those hardened criminals drown their sorrows at the “Queen’s Head.”
Although the call of nature may be attended to, and thirst and hunger handsomely appeased at Hurst Green, the æsthetic sense is unlikely to be full fed. Satisfaction of that kind—but none of the other—is amply obtained at Etchingham, one mile distant, down a bye-road.
Travellers to and from Hastings by South Eastern Railway are familiar with Etchingham, as a place with a station where no train appears ever to stop; and indeed to the ordinary mind there seems, not merely no reason for stopping, but none for a station at all. For Etchingham is just what you see from the passing train: a great, impressive church, and one or two ancient farmsteads. There was no village when the station was built, in 1847, and the place was, except for that beautiful church and those farms, a solitude. A solitude, too, it remained until 1904, when an entirely new village was begun. There it blooms to-day, in red brick, like a scarlet geranium, and the South Eastern Railway is at last, after close upon two generations, justified of its prescience.
There seems never to have been a village at Etchingham. Only a manor-house of the de Etchinghams; and that disappeared so long ago that little is known of it. Its last traces were erased when the railway came, and the station stands on the site. There is something so typical of the age in that circumstance that one cannot but stand and admire the dramatic completeness, the colossal audacity of it.
ETCHINGHAM.
But a something greater than the manor-house of those ancient lords remains; in the great church they built. It stands so near the railway that one might pitch a stone from the train into the churchyard; and, as it is one of the finest churches in Sussex, it never fails to hold the glance of those who pass this way. It was built, on the site of an earlier, by Sir William de Etchingham, in 1365, and is a cruciform building, with massive central tower, in the Late Decorated style—that large and bold phase of Gothic which comes between Early English and Perpendicular, and looks lovingly back upon the grace of the earlier and forward to the lofty emptiness of the later, with a richness of detail peculiar to itself. A special note of this church is the fine tracery of its east window, in the easy flowing style, common in France but comparatively rare in this country, known as Flamboyant. The low pyramidical spire of the tower still supports the original copper weathervane, in the form of a banneret displaying the fretty coat of arms of the de Etchinghams, and on the floor of the chancel are the almost life-sized figures, in engraved brass, of the founder himself, and his son and grandson. Sir William, the builder of the church, died in 1387. He still darkly, in obscure Norman-French and black-letter, begs the prayers of all: “I was made and formed of Earth; and now have I returned to Earth. William de Etchingham was my name. God have pity on my soul; and all you who pass by, pray to Him for me.”
If salvation be found in church-building—and there are yet those who seek it that way—then, in those many mansions beyond, William de Etchingham is well-housed, for he built not only a large church, but a beautiful.
He endowed it, too, and the eighteen carved miserere stalls yet remain where the priests sang their office. If you turn up those hinged seats, you will find odd carvings on the under side; among them the biting satire, disloyal in such a place, of the fox in the habit of a priest, preaching to geese.
A tablet on the wall records in Latin that the chancel was restored at the expense of the rector, Dr. Hugh Totty, who died, aged 101, in 1857. In the south aisle hangs a tilting-helmet and the erminois banner of Sir George Strode; and a mural monument to Henry Corbould, artist and ancestor of artists, who died, aged 57, in 1844, is a a shocking example of “Gothic,” as understood towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Even this, however, is not so bad as the tablet, with marble profile portrait medallion, to one “John Snepp, gent,” 1823.
The churchyard was once surrounded by a moat, in which, according to an ancient legend, there lay a great bell. How it came there the story did not say; but it was never to be drawn from its hiding-place until six yoke of white oxen should be brought for the purpose. The moat was drained long since; but legend was for once at fault, for no bell was found.
XXXV
Returning to Hurst Green, and resisting the temptation to turn aside for the purpose of seeing the farmhouse called “Squibs,” we come presently to Silver Hill, an eminence described by Horace Walpole, who in 1752 travelled Kent and Sussex with Mr. Chaloner Chute on antiquarian pilgrimage:
“The roads grew bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness, our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness. However, without being at all killed, we got up, or down—I forget which, it was so dark—a famous precipice called Silver Hill, and about ten at night arrived at a wretched village called Rotherbridge.”
He forgot which! That is—like the hill—rather steep. But he must have known by the time they returned, for he speaks of the view from the crest, on the homeward journey, as “the richest blue prospect you ever saw.” It is indeed very beautiful, and the fact has been recognised by some enthusiastic person who, in a field beside the road to the left, has erected a tall staging, known as “The Beacon,” for sightseers.
The hill is steep: not too steep for a determined cyclist to ride up it on the return, but still a very respectable gradient. It looks by no means so terrible as Walpole’s description would prepare the stranger for; but the roadway is, in fact, not that which gave these tourists and their guide such qualms, for it was reconstructed about 1830. Occasional lengths of deserted hollow road at the side are surviving portions of the old road, and are quite steep and rugged enough to acquit Walpole of unnecessary alarm.
Robertsbridge is a long, long village of old-fashioned houses huddled together on either side of a narrow street in the flats that form the valley of the Rother. Although Robertsbridge is so undeniably old it is not an independent village, being in the parish of the much smaller Salehurst, seen across the levels, a mile away.
It has never been determined whether Robertsbridge acquired its name from Robert de Saint Martin, who founded the Cistercian Abbey “de Ponte Roberti” here in 1176, or from a corrupted version of “Rotherbridge.” “Much,” as Sir Roger de Coverley says in The Spectator, “might be said on both sides.”
At any rate, it is unquestionably a place of bridges. There are seven in all, in a line along the road; but no one of them is at all considerable, and only three span any water, save in seasons of flood.
The beginning of the village, officially styled “Northbridge Street,” is generally styled “the Bridges”; but was in turnpike days, when a gate existed here, “the Clapper.”
The Abbey, long since demolished, lay one mile from the village, beside the Rother. Fragments of it are picturesquely built into the Abbey Farm, and serve as substantial walls for oast-houses. The most perfect relic is the crypt, inside the house, forming an ideally cool dairy.
To this has come the Abbey that gave hospitality to Edward the First and his successor; whose Abbot in 1193, in company with the Abbot of Boxley, was of sufficient importance to be entrusted with the mission of discovering the whereabouts on the Continent of the imprisoned Richard Cœur de Lion. All that is left of it, beside these fragments, is a manuscript volume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, inscribed: “This book belongs to St. Mary of Robertsbridge: whosoever shall steal it or sell it, or in any way alienate it from this house, let him be Anathema Maranatha.”
Notwithstanding this comprehensive curse, some one did steal it. A further inscription, written, it is thought, by John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, 1327-1369, declares: “I, John, Bishop of Exeter, know not where the aforesaid house is; nor did I steal this book, but acquired it in a lawful way.” It is quite surprising to find the old Churchmen believing in the efficacy of their curses, and thus seeking to turn them aside.
The site of the Abbey was granted by Henry the Eighth to Sir William Sidney, and there are those who like to think that his grandson, Sir Philip, would not have been killed at Zutphen, nor Algernon Sidney beheaded, had it not been for the curse upon sacrilege, sleeping in one generation to work woe in another.
For over one hundred and fifty years Robertsbridge Abbey was an iron and steel foundry, where cannon and shot were cast. In the garden of the farmstead a heap of cannon-balls, found about the premises, reminds the visitor of this closed chapter.
When Horace Walpole and his companion, descending Silver Hill in the dark, came to “the wretched village called Rotherbridge,” they would have stayed the night, if they could have found any decent accommodation. “But alas! there, was only one bed to be had. All the rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the house called ‘mountebanks,’ and with one of whom the lady of the den told Mr. Chute he might lie.” That was rather too much for Mr. Chute, who was a very great person indeed when he was at home at his stately seat, “The Vyne,” near Basingstoke, and he declined the fellowship.
So, with links and lanthorns, they continued their journey, and arrived at Battle, hardly six miles away, at two o’clock in the morning, to a “still worse” inn, “and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom had just shot a smuggler. However, as we were neutral powers, we have passed safely through both armies hitherto.”
One would like to identify that “den.” The term would scarcely apply to the “George,” then, as now, the principal house, and a good specimen of the old English inn, whose proprietor, according to an advertisement in The General Evening Post of 1784, when the house was to let, had a “part-share” in the post-coach on the road to Hastings, described as a “favourite place for sea-bathing.” Was it the “Seven Stars”? Or was it not the “Stag’s Head” of other days, a shy-looking cottage lying low down on the right of the “George,” and well remembered locally to have been the haunt of the smugglers of Darvell Wood?
Robertsbridge is pure Sussex, and pronounces local place-names in a manner peculiar to itself. In the result those names do not appear any the more poetic—Udiham becoming “Udjem,” Bodiam “Bodjem,” Northiam “Norjem,” and Horsmonden “Ors’nd’n.” The story is even told of a stranger asking an inhabitant of Heathfield the way to that place, and of that unlettered person for long declaring he had “niver ’eared of sech a name in these parts.” At last a light broke in upon him. “You means Efful,” he said.
Robertsbridge has now two railway-stations—that of the South Eastern, opened in 1851, and a newer, on the Kent and East Sussex Light Railway, recently made; but it is as old-fashioned as ever, and the subject-matter of the inns at night is apt to be of such recollections as that of how, seventy years ago, there were only three pairs of top-boots in the parish, and how farmers going up to London to cut an occasional dash would borrow them for the jaunt.
XXXVI
It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward.
Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his own computation.” Within the church there are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cast-iron slabs to Peckhams and Stevens: relics of the forgotten iron-founding industry of the district.
The contemplative person, for whom antiquity is not everything, who finds interest in things of the present as well as those of the past, may discover some entertainment in noticing how exquisitely the accommodation in the House of God shades off in fine distinctions, from the cushioned seats and carpeted floors in front, to the strips of carpet and the fibre matting of the intermediate, and lastly to the bare seats and naked boards of those nearest the door—and the draughts. He notices how things religious and things secular are all ordered in these beautiful gradations: the three classes on railways, and the more than three orders of seats in theatres; and he wonders—that contemplative person—whether the “many mansions” prepared in the Father’s house partake of the like subtleties.
The road to Bodiam—spelled “Bodiham” on old maps—is hilly and circuitous; but it brings you at last to that tiny village overlooking the Rother marshes, and to that castle which, more than any other ancient fortress in England, figures the fairy home of the Sleeping Beauty. Bodiam Castle stands on the hillside, beautifully rural, and is surrounded by a very broad and very clear moat of running water, fed from the never-failing springs that flow from the higher ground and are dammed at this point. The grey and lichened walls of the castle rise sheer from the water, amid a wealth of the loveliest water-lilies.
It is mediævalism incarnated. The walls and the eight towers, alternately round and square, are almost perfect, and the wooden gate yet hangs on its hinges across the bridge, where the portcullis grins and the holes in the masonry remain above, to show how, by flinging molten lead, boiling water, hot pitch, and domestic abominations upon the heads of the enemy, the garrison were prepared to hold their own.
But history tells us nothing of sieges or conflicts here. Possibly Sir Edward Dalyngruge, warrior of Crecy and Poictiers, who in the fourteenth century built it, was too strong a castellan, and his moated fortalice more than a thought too formidable. At any rate, it is a castle without a story.
XXXVII
The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe, how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event, and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise enough to keep the fact to themselves.
Although it all happened so long ago, almost the first thing the stranger hears of in Robertsbridge to this day is that mystic gold. Reduced to plain facts, it seems that during his work in Barn Field, on Taylor’s Farm, January 12th, 1862, a ploughman suddenly drove his plough into an entangled mass of metal that brought him up with a jerk. He threw the pieces on the baulk, and when his day’s work was done showed them to his master, who thought they were brass, and gave them to him. They were really, from the description afterwards given of them, gold torques and other Early British ornaments, and had lain there two thousand years. The metal weighed no less than thirteen pounds.
After vainly endeavouring to sell the “old brass” to one dealer after another, a Hastings man more wideawake than the rest, suspecting it to be the more precious metal, gave the ploughman 6d. a pound for it—liberal man! He lost no time in travelling to London, where he sold it to a refiner, who melted it down and paid him £529 12s. 7d. for the resultant 153 oz. 12 gr. of fine gold. A piece had already been sold to a Hastings jeweller for £18.
Rumours of this extraordinary find soon spread, and in the end the ploughman and the sharp dealer were arraigned at the Winter Sessions at Lewes, December 1862, on the charge of illegally disposing of treasure-trove, the property of Her Majesty the Queen. They were each fined £265, half-value of the metal disposed of, or ordered to be imprisoned until the money was paid. Fairy gold has ever brought trouble upon those who find it.
It is useless to speculate upon the possible antiquarian value of the ancient ornaments thus destroyed; but it must have been many times that of the mere metal.
The other main staples of talk are cattle, hops, and wool. If you cannot talk wool, hops, or cattle at Robertsbridge without some knowledge of those subjects, you are self-condemned. There is a fortnightly cattle-market; “ship” browse in many flocks on the surrounding pastures, but everywhere are the hop-gardens and their inseparable oast-houses.
XXXVIII
Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington, three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern highway.
The “John’s Cross” inn, the old toll-house, and a few cottages sum up the hamlet, and the rest of the way to Battle is of almost unbroken loneliness, except for the railway level-crossing, mid-way.
If, before we come into the town of Battle, we re-read the stirring story of the Norman invasion of 1066, and of the Battle of Senlac, known more generally to the world as the Battle of Hastings, fought on Saturday, October 14th, in that year, so fatal to English liberties, on the spot where Battle Abbey stands,—if, I say, before approaching Battle, we read anew the story of that history-making day of carnage, we shall come into the quiet town with highly exalted feelings, and shall find it a place of many and deep significances to us.
With the tale of that historic struggle thus freshened in our memories, it is not merely the quiet little Sussex country town to which we now come, but to the commanding hill of Senlac, overlooking the seven miles of wooded lesser hills and vales by which the Norman host advanced from Hastings.
The Norman invasion of England, the catastrophe of Senlac, and the woes that then befell the English may all be traced to the weak character and foolish policy of Edward the Confessor, a king whose reputation for piety has, during all these intervening centuries, glozed over his lack of the first qualities of kingship. Firm rule, wise and far-seeing policy at home and abroad—those are the qualities, above all others, we look for in a king, and mere saintliness of character in a ruler has never yet, nor ever will, serve the turn of any nation. Edward the Confessor has, time beyond the memory of man, been held up as a pattern of all the virtues. We are told how he founded the Abbey of St. Peter, which we now call Westminster Abbey, on Thorney Isle; we listen, with what faith we may, to the story of how successfully he prayed away the nightingales who were disturbing his orisons at Havering-atte-Bower. We know that Rome, in the fulness of time, canonised him; but we know also that, however fitted he was in life for the cloister, however unaffected his piety, however mild and urbane his rule, certainly, from the patriotic view-point, his métier was not d’être roi, for he it was who brought over the Normans to his court, and by his favours to them showed them how desirable a country was this England.
Edward was, in short, a Normanised Englishman. The long years of exile he had passed oversea in Normandy, before he was called upon to rule over Saxon England, had set their seal upon him, and his favourite courtiers were of Norman-French nationality. He had, certainly, married Editha, daughter of the great Saxon Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold; but his quarrels with her family go largely toward making up the story of his reign. The head and front of his offending is undoubtedly the alleged bequest, at a comparatively early period, of his crown to William, Duke of Normandy. Apart from the fact that the succession was not his to give, and would in any case have been the business of the Witan, this devising of crown and country to an alien whose ways were not those of the Saxons, and between whose people and Edward’s people the keenest jealousy and animosity already existed, was unpatriotic to the last degree; and had the “Confessor” been made to suffer the terrible fate that befell the second Edward, himself the patron of alien courtiers, that fate had been better deserved. Nay, were justice done the memory of that traitor to his country, his shrine in Westminster Abbey would be torn down and demolished.
But clearer and wiser views at last prevailed with the cloistered King, and in that clarified and enlarged vision, he, drawing towards his end, designated the Saxon Harold, his brother-in-law, his successor. Wisdom, however, was vouchsafed him too late: the mischief was done. The fates were working in those years against England and for Duke William of Normandy, whom history knows, ad nauseam, as “William the Conqueror.” That historic personage was a great captain, strong in battle and in strategy, but he had also the mind of an attorney, which could quirk you and quibble you, and chouse you as efficiently as the sharpest practitioner that ever misused the law. It was no matter to that acute and ambitious brain that the sanctimonious “Confessor” had revoked his bequest in favour of Harold; to him, at least, it held good. And events marvellously aided him. Somewhere about 1064, Earl Harold, already king-designate, was voyaging down channel, when his ships were driven ashore on the coast of Ponthieu, in territory tributary to William. Those were times when to be cast ashore was to suffer, not only the discomforts incidental to shipwreck, but to be seized and held to ransom by the scarce more than robber-lords of that age. Such an one was Count Guy of Ponthieu, who speedily seized Harold and imprisoned him in his castle of Beaurain, and would have held him there, over against the arrival of that ransom, had it not been for the Duke, who, hearing of this odd freak of fate, and with a keen eye to how the incident could be used to his own advantage, demanded his release. But Harold’s enlargement from an acknowledged and undisguised prison was merely an exchange for a gilded captivity. Nominally, he was now become the guest of the Duke, in his palace at Rouen, but in reality he was his prisoner, only to be released on terms. Those terms were soon disclosed, and the English Earl, already marked as the successor of Edward, was made to swear, at Bayeux, as the price of his liberty, to become the guardian of William’s supposed interests in England, and to receive him, on Edward’s death, as King. These oaths he took, with others, upon a chest which William had secretly filled with the choicest saintly relics that Normandy contained. It does not become us, with our later knowledge of the very unsaintly character of the old bones usually palmed off in those times as the relics of saints, to scoff at Harold turning pale when the tremendous character of the contents of that chest was revealed to him. The credulity of that age did not permit him the assumption that the alleged relics were probably no more than the mere ordinary unsanctified plebeian bones and teeth and fragments of skin we may readily presume them to have been, with the same relation to the genuine articles as that of a Bank of Engraving note to one issued by the Bank of England. Harold accepted them, as he could not choose but do, at their face value, so to speak, and trembled.
Such is the story handed down to us. The oath taken, Harold was free to return; and, as his own conscience later told him, and as ours must needs tell us, was free to disregard an oath, however solemn, taken under circumstances of compulsion.
In two years from that time, January 5th, 1066, the Confessor died, with his latest breath naming Harold his successor—a choice later ratified by the council of the English realm. Harold was elected and proclaimed King, and the warrior-lawyer over in Normandy was left out in the cold. William, however, could not have been surprised at this, and set to work upon the next step in his scheme, which was to obtain the support of the Pope against “the perjurer,” as he was pleased to style Harold. All these things had been thought out long in advance by that wily brain. William, as claimant to the English throne, could be effectively aided by William as champion of the Church’s might; and William had ever been concerned, from motives of policy, to figure as one of the Church’s most devout sons. If you consider it, religion has ever, from the earliest times, been made the stalking-horse of scoundrels: a fact so patent that your playwright or your novelist is commonly concerned to furnish forth his villain with a text or a psalm, and thus moral sentiments on the stage are the stigmata of the wrong-doer.
XXXIX
The Pope, Alexander the Second, placing his ghostly terrors at the disposal of William, declared Harold an usurper, and William the lawful heir. Thus early had Englishmen to remember Rome for a disservice. It then remained only for William to collect his forces for an invasion of England. He set about the work with business-like promptitude and a settled determination which, by comparison, make the great Napoleon’s projected invasion of over seven hundred years later seem like the wayward fancy of an infant. The forests of Normandy were felled and converted into timber, and all the summer of 1066 thousands of shipwrights were busily employed in Norman havens building the vast fleet designed to invade our shores. When we form a mind’s-eye picture of a fleet, we necessarily visualise nowadays something very different from the flotilla prepared by the Duke of Normandy for the invasion of England; but we must go far back, beyond even the small ships with which Edward the First waged war in foreign parts, if we would see what William’s navy, made of the green timber that had been growing six months before, was like. His “ships” numbered, according to the lowest computation, six hundred and ninety-six: according to the highest, there were over three thousand; but if we turn to the indisputable evidence of the famous Bayeux Tapestry it will be seen that they were craft more in the nature of galleys—open boats with one mast.
The same want of exact figures meets the inquirer who seeks to learn the number of that invading army. Contemporary chroniclers are at great variance, the numbers, by their accounts, ranging from 14,000 up to 60,000. From February onwards to September those craft were building and that army collecting. Meanwhile King Harold was not idle. He had long been skilled in warfare, and was as able a general as William himself, and by sea and land he was gathering a force together that in all human probability would have annihilated the Norman host had it not been for the happening that at this juncture divided his attention.
That happening was the invasion of northern England by the Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada, in conjunction with Harold’s own brother, the banished rebel Tostig, in September, at the very time when the Duke of Normandy’s expedition was lying ready to sail, only waiting upon a southern wind. The Norwegian host landed in the Ouse and the Humber, and the English had been defeated at Fulford and Hardrada received in York as a conqueror before the English Harold could march from London to the scene. But when he arrived victory attended him, and in the Battle of Stamford Bridge, September 25th, he not only defeated the invaders, and killed Hardrada and his brother, Tostig, but almost annihilated the foreigners. It was the supreme victory of a great military career, and the last ever gained by the Saxon English. In the midst of the rejoicings and the absolutely necessary rest at York, Harold received the tidings of the Norman landing at Pevensey, near Hastings.
Fate had indeed dealt hardly with that brave heart. He had marched full two hundred miles to meet one foe, and he was now to march back to face another, already established on the coast he had been so concerned to guard. For the south wind that had been denied William for near a month of waiting at the Dive and at St. Valery had, in this hour of his need, played Harold false and had wafted the Norman sails across the Channel. William landed unopposed on the deserted coast at Pevensey, twelve miles to the west of Hastings, in the early morning of September 28th, and the next day marched to Hastings, which he made the base of his operations. From that place he ravaged and laid waste all the surrounding country, with the intention of drawing Harold down to the sea-coast, to attack him in defence of his plundered and ill-treated subjects. He reasoned, as an invader even in these times must needs reason, that the chances were more in his favour if he could meet the English by the shore. Were he obliged to march inland to the attack, grave considerations of provisioning his army must be contended with, and in the event of defeat his difficulties would have increased with every mile he had advanced into the interior. He thus lay at Hastings, within reach of his ships, while Harold was marching southwards, and organising his army in London. There were not wanting those who at this time warned William earnestly against what they considered the folly of his enterprise. The might of the Saxons was no mere tale, and messengers, coming southward with news of how Harold had defeated the Norwegian invaders, and was now marching to repeat his victory upon the Norman host, might well have made even so tried and fearless a soldier as William retrace his steps. But he had come to victory or to death, and had staked all upon this one throw for that magnificent prize, the crown of England. Had he recrossed the Channel, it is certain that never again would the opportunity of landing on an unguarded coast be afforded him; and on all counts, now or never was his time. He had taken a high moral ground for his invasion, and was come, by his own claim, not as Conqueror, but as one claiming his legal rights, secured on the most sacred of oaths and hallowed by the blessing of the Church. Legal rights are the great standby of the plunderer and the spoiler, and the stirrup for William’s vaulting ambition was legality. It was, as we have seen, the kind of legality we associate rather with the pettifogging attorney than with justice; but he had wrung the blessing of Rome on it, and beside his banner floated the standard consecrated by the Pope.
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William “the Conqueror,” as history styles him, never so styled himself. His astute mind thrust such a warlike thing into the background. He had only come to claim his own, and was unfortunately obliged to fight for it against the perjurer! One can almost in imagination hear the pietistic snuffle of a Pecksniff in this mixture of legal and religious motives.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
Bayeux Tapestry.
It was about October 5th that Harold reached London. He lay there six days, awaiting the promised reinforcements from his northern Earls, which never came, and in the meanwhile calling in his levies from the near counties. But before he set out for Sussex he paid a last visit to his abbey of Waltham, which he had dedicated to the Holy Cross and had enriched with many gifts—evidences of his piety. For we must by no means believe that William, the self-constituted champion of sacred relics and the Church, alone practised, or professed, religion. Harold’s piety was at least as marked, and it is perhaps not altogether the Englishman’s sympathy for an Englishman, or his chivalrous regret for the vanquished, which sees in the ill-fated King’s abasement before the Holy Rood of Waltham on the eve of that fatal struggle a more sincere approach to the Most High. He lay prostrate upon the pavement in supplication, and the dark, wonder-loving legends of that time tell us that, as he did so, the hitherto raised head of the sacred image bowed itself upon the Cross, as though enacting again the tragedy of Calvary: in token, as the belief of that age ran, that the career of Harold was finished.
The English army set forth from London on Thursday, October 12th, and marched inevitably, it being the most direct route, by the line of country through which runs the Hastings Road of our own day. So speedily did the troops set out to meet their foe, that by Friday night Harold had pitched his camp on this hill of Senlac, eight miles from Hastings, on the site of this town of Battle.
A very ancient oak, known as the “Watch Oak,” stands in the private garden of a house on the bye-road to the right entering Battle. It is traditionally the spot whence Harold’s scouts watched for the approach of the invaders.
No one is skilled to tell us whence came this name of Senlac, nor what it meant. It was the “hill called Senlac.” Around it on three sides were hollows, marshy with the feeders of little streams. The Normans gave the name a French twist and called it “Sanglac” or “Sanguelac,” the Lake of Blood; but although their perversion of the name is ingenious, it will not serve our turn, since we see that the name of Senlac existed prior to the battle. Nor will yet another Gallicised version—that of Saintlache, or Holy Lake, do; and the meaning of the old name belonging to this place of battle must of necessity be left in obscurity.
Harold chose his own battle-ground, and chose it with the trained, unerring eye of one who had been the victor in many hard-fought campaigns. Electing to take up a defensive position in a spot where the menace of his presence must needs make William fight, or remain disastrously inactive on the coast, he ranged his army on the summit of this long spur of hill that then thrust out boldly from the wooded surroundings and commanded a view over gorse-covered folds of down, away to the sea. He had every reason for this plan of awaiting attack, chief among them the totally different characteristics of the two armies: the Norman army being strong in cavalry, the Saxons fighting wholly on foot, from King Harold and his two brothers, Gurth and Leofwin, down to the merest churl; while on the Norman side there was a strong force of archers, and on the Saxon none whatever. The Saxons, or the English, as we perhaps should more properly name them, were armed with javelins and with the two-handed battle-axe. The battle-axe, carried over the shoulder and wielded from it with a two-handed grasp and a swing of the whole body, was a terrible weapon in the hands of a body of men acting purely on the defensive, but it was ill-adapted for pursuit. A blow from it was easily capable of cleaving, not only through the helmet and head of a horseman, but of felling both him and his horse. Such was the weapon upon which the English chiefly relied in standing their ground and to withstand the onset of the Norman horse, which, owing to Harold’s strategy in seizing this commanding eminence, would be under the necessity of charging uphill.
To render the position additionally secure, opportunity was taken, ere night fell, to fortify the edge of the plateau with a palisade cut from the surrounding woodlands, and to wattle it with twigs and boughs so closely interwoven that it was impossible for a single person to creep through. Here, then, the English army lay athwart where now runs the road to the sea, but where at that time, beside a landmark named in the old English Chronicle “the hoar apple-tree,” there was apparently no other salient object save the rough track which must even then have existed, leading down to the port of Hastings.
The night before the battle seems to us, and must even have seemed to the opposing armies, a tremendously fateful interlude. Political and other considerations were such that all must have known the fate of England to depend, not upon a long campaign and a series of marches and fights, but solely upon the issue of the great contest now impending. How, then, did they pass the eve of battle? The Normans are our chief, and almost sole, authorities here, and were concerned, as inevitably they would be, to picture the Norman army as a host of Christian soldiers going forth to war with a dissolute, drink-sodden rabble. According to this partisan view, the Battle of Senlac, or Hastings, was lost by the English chiefly owing to the effects upon them of an all-night orgie of wassailing. When morning came, and with it the great struggle that was to decide the fate of England, the English host were still muzzy with their potations of the night before, and had not the clear vision and cool judgment that are as necessary on the battlefield as elsewhere. What a fine theme for a Temperance Lecturer, hot on the subject of “the cursed drink”! Such an one might fitly show by this instance how indulgence in it destroys not only the individual but the nation itself; but no one seems ever to have fastened upon this very eloquent illustration.
The Saxons certainly were mighty topers, and it is by no means too much to say that they were a nation of drunkards. Ancient chroniclers at all points fully support this sweeping statement; amongst them William of Malmesbury, who tells us that the Anglo-Saxon rule was bad, and the monks and nobility corrupt. “Drinking in parties,” he says, “was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights, as well as days.”
Coming to a description of the night before the battle, he tells us, in the original Latin in which he wrote: “Angli, ut accepimus, totam noctem insomnem cantibus potibusque ducentes.” That is to say, in plain English, they kept awake all night, singing, and drinking innumerable drinks—which is a very fine, fearless way of preparing to meet the foe, and one highly expressive of contempt for him; but it is not a wise way.
He then proceeds to expand his argument by saying: “The vices attendant on drunkenness which enervate the human mind followed; hence it arose that, engaging William more with rashness and precipitate fury than military skill, they doomed themselves and their country to slavery by one, and that an easy, victory.”
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The Normans spent the night after a very different fashion—in prayer and in the confession of their sins—for they knew that many must fall on that eventful day. The Bishops of Coutances and Bayeux received their confessions, and recorded their vows on this Friday night that if they were spared on the morrow they would fast on Saturdays for the remainder of their lives. William, for his part, registered a solemn vow that if he gained the victory he would found a great church on the battlefield, in gratitude for the divine aid. The Normans, in short, made all due preparation; and as they prayed well, so did they fight, on that fatal morrow.
Another, and a highly picturesque, chronicler tells us delightfully of the alleged actual Saxon debauch on the battlefield, on the night before the fray. This account is by Wace, the author of several romances and narrative-poems in Norman-French. Wace wrote his jingling metrical narrative about 1170, more than a hundred years after the battle was fought, but probably incorporated the floating traditions of that great occasion, doubtless still plentiful in his time.
Here is his picture of the Saxon orgies: