The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"

The Norman-French in which Wace writes is somewhat puzzling, but the general sense of it is that “the night before the battle was fought, as I am told, the English were joyous, laughing much and skylarking. They ate and drank all night, refusing to take any repose, and skipped about, dancing and singing.”

Then he gives us the English shouts, as heard by the Normans:

or, as we may put it, “Bubble it up!” they cried, and “Wassail!” and “Let it come,” and “Drink hail!” “Drink hinderwards and drink to me, drink health and drink to me!” Modernised, and applied to beer, which is to our times what mead or metheglin was to the Saxons, “Bubble it up!” would appear to mean “Froth it up,” or “Put a good head on it”; while “Let it come” and “Drink hail!” are simply “Pass the bottle” and “Here’s your health!” But how you drink “hinderwards,” unless it means “Pass the bottle back again,” I cannot conceive.

At any rate, it is quite evident, by this account, that these English warriors had each a thoroughly good skinful of booze overnight. They seem to have almost wallowed in it, and were precisely the men who would have appreciated the bibulous spirit of that drinking ballad of modern times, which ran something after this style:

and so forth, in a style eminently calculated to win the hearts of my lords Ardilaun, Iveagh, Hindlip, and Burton.

But the Saxon mead, which may still be discovered in remote parts of the country as the home-brewed “metheglin,” a sweet and sickly liquor made from honey, is a heady drink, a great deal more likely to result in a splitting headache the next morning than the clearer brew of the barley; and the Norman libellers would have us believe that, because of that matutinal headache, and an enlarged vision which led the English to see two, or three, Normans for every one—and to strike at the ones that were not there—they lost the Battle of Hastings.

The historical facts do not quite fit in with that view. Doubtless the English and the Norman methods of passing the battle-eve were different. For one thing, the Norman wolf was posing, until he almost deceived himself, as the injured party, and one fighting the battle of religion as well as of personal wrongs; and he acted fully up to those parts. The English, on the other hand, were elated with their recent victory in the north, and felt a not unnatural confidence in their ability to repeat it. Therefore, they went into battle with less solemnity than the Normans. But we nowhere read that the English battle-axes were swung with the less terrible effect because of the revels which may or may not have passed overnight in the English camp, and nothing seems more certain than that victory only fell to the Normans because of the mistaken warlike ardour of a portion of the English army, which broke its ranks in order to pursue a panic-stricken section of the Norman array, and thus afforded William’s cavalry a footing on that bitterly contested hill of Senlac.

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The battle began about nine o’clock in the morning, the Norman army marching from Hastings by the spot where Crowhurst Park is now seen, to Telham Hill, the “Hetheland” of the chroniclers. Here the Norman knights put on their armour, and here William made his vow that if victory were given him he would build a great abbey on the spot where he saw the emblazoned English banner of the Fighting Man flung proudly upon the morning breeze. His army then advanced to the attack, the archers on foot in the front rank, the swordsmen behind them, and in the rear the cavalry. William himself was armed with an iron mace, the weapon also carried by his brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.

The fight began with a discharge of arrows from the Norman ranks, followed by the singular interlude provided by Taillefer, the Norman jongleur, or minstrel, who rode forth from the ranks singing songs of chivalry, and of the knightly doings of Roland and Charlemagne. He had begged from William the privilege of striking the first blow, but as he went out into the space between the confronting armies he assumed first his character of a juggler, throwing his sword into the air, and then catching it, to the astonishment of the English, who doubtless wondered what manner of warrior was this. But, ceasing his tricks, he suddenly rushed upon the English ranks, and piercing one Englishman with his lance and striking down another with his sword, was thereupon himself slain. It was the bravest, or, if you will, the most foolhardy, act of the battle, for he went forth to certain death. But his action did this much: it heated the blood of both sides, and those who might have fought at the beginning without the full fury of enthusiasm, now fell to it in frenzy, fired by his example. It heartened William’s second line, the infantry, to their heavy task of advancing, under the showers of English stones and javelins, up the hill to the attempted destruction of the palisade; but although they strove, the effort was too great. All who approached within the reach of English arms and English axes were struck down, almost cleaved asunder, and although the rear ranks filled the air with Dieu aide! they wavered from that first onset, the English shouting “Out, out!” as they thrust back every one from their defences, varying that cry with the pious invocations, “Holy Rood,” “Holy Cross,” and “God Almighty!”

Wace tells us of those battle-cries in his quaint renderings of the English the Normans heard:

Or, translated:

If the English really did say “’Oly Cross,” it shows us that the letter “h” was as slighted in the eleventh century as it is in the twentieth.

The Norman infantry had now recoiled, and the turn of the cavalry was come. The choicest chivalry of Normandy, however, strove in vain uphill against the English defences, and many a horse and his mail-clad rider fell beneath the axes. Harold’s choice of a battle-ground and his defensive tactics were fully justified, and the Battle of Senlac would have been his but for the fatal impetuosity of a portion of his less disciplined troops, who, seeing the panic and headlong flight of the Norman army, broke their ranks in pursuit. The temptation was great, for everywhere the Normans were in flight, and the awful cry had been raised among them that William himself was dead. It was only by removing his helmet and disclosing his face that his men were assured of his existence. “Madmen!” he cried. “Why flee ye? Death is behind, victory before you. I live, and by God’s grace I will conquer,” and so saying he forced those immediately around him back into the fray.

This incident has been carefully pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry, where we see “the Duke comforting his young soldiers” by disclosing his face, while his standard-bearer draws attention to him. The impressiveness of the scene is perhaps a little marred by the grotesque drawing, and by the extraordinary likeness of “the Duke” to Mr. Arthur Roberts, and of one of the “young soldiers” to accepted caricatures of Mr. Austen Chamberlain.

Meanwhile the flying Norman infantry had in other parts of the field turned upon their pursuers, and here the sword proved the better weapon, for the rash English were cut to pieces. Then, somewhere about three o’clock in the afternoon, began the most terrible attack of that dreadful day, in the desperate charge made by William, his brothers Odo and Robert, and their attendant knights, against the sturdy group around Harold and the English standard. William, on horseback, sought out the English King, and might have met him face to face, had not the King’s brother, Gurth, flung a spear at him, which, although it missed the greater mark, brought down his horse. Unlucky, ill-aimed blow! It brought Gurth and William face to face, afoot, and presently the English Earl was lying dead from a blow of the Duke’s mace. Near by, and almost at the same time, fell Harold’s other brother, Leofwin. The English fortunes were indeed running low, but the battle was not yet decided. Still that devoted phalanx of axemen hewed down most of those who approached, and the day was neither lost nor won. It was then that the ill-judged pursuit made by the English a little earlier bore bitter fruit—the sorrow of it! William had noted its effect, and now that his direct attacks were like to fail, he had recourse to the wily trick of a feigned flight. Accordingly, to his instructions, a wing of his army turned tail and fled, as though in panic; and immediately, learning nothing from that earlier disaster, a portion of the English came down after them. It was the turning-point of the day, for the ground the English had left was just the one end of the hill where the rise was appreciably less steep, and more easily to be charged up by the Norman cavalry. The fight down in the valley between the pretended fugitives and their pursuers meanwhile went forward with varying fortunes. The flying Frenchmen turned, as before, but this time the English seized on an outlying hill, and although they fell, they fell in company with their foes. In their turn, they inveigled the French horsemen into charging upon them into an unsuspected ravine, where they fell in a mass and were despatched to the last man, so that the old chroniclers tell us, and the Bayeux Tapestry shows, how the hollow was filled with the dead.

William and the pick of his army now beset the hill from its western slope, thus left open by the descent of the pursuing English, and here, and along the ridge to the very spot where Harold stood, wielding his axe with the best of them beneath his standard, the fight stubbornly continued. The autumn day was now fast drawing to its close, and the battle might have been still undecided that night, had it not been for an inspiration that seized William. His archers had hitherto not made any great impression. He now ordered them to shoot their arrows into the air, so that they might descend with terrific force upon the heads of the English; and this done, the execution was dreadful. Many were struck in the eye by the falling shafts, among them Harold, the English King himself. An arrow pierced his right eye, and as he agonisedly strove to withdraw it, the shaft broke. Let us not enlarge upon this dreadful end of the patriot King, who was presently discovered and slain by the Norman knights as he lay upon the ground at the foot of his royal banner.

Thus fell Harold, in his prime, for he was but forty-four years of age. It happened long, long ago; but although much else has turned to dry-as-dust in that vast interval, and although many historical figures and the deeds they wrought are mere vacuities, emptinesses, and parchment-like bogles, the heroic death of Harold in defence of his country still calls up bitter sorrow in those of us to whom history is not merely the printed page, or a glass-covered case in a museum.

When Harold fell England fell with him. All who fought with him that day knew it must be so, yet the fight, although it was by now a hopeless cause, went on until the evening deepened into night; and although those of meaner estate may have fled when the fortunes of the day were obviously lost, those of higher sort plied their axes to the death. Few of them escaped, or sought to do so. Yet, even as the last streaks of waning day faded into night the defeated and fleeing English turned once more upon their foes, and in the marshy hollow in the rear of the battle-ground, then eloquently called “Malfosse,” slew in great numbers the Norman horsemen who incautiously pursued them. It was the last expiring effort of the day, but so sturdy an one that the Normans were for awhile stricken again with a temporary panic, thinking that English reinforcements had arrived. But no fresh troops were come to save that situation; and not even at this last moment had the northern Earls, Edwin and Morcar, sent aid to redeem their characters. They live in history in company with Judas and many another perjured traitor. By their treachery England was lost.

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The battle was over, after more than nine hours’ continued fighting; and now William’s tent was pitched upon the spot where the English standard had been planted. There he supped, and there, amid the thousands of dead and dying, he slept. On the morrow the mutilated body of Harold was found; but neither the bribes nor the entreaties of his aged mother, Gytha, who had now lost all her sons in battle, could induce William to yield it to her or any other. The perjurer, the excommunicate, he swore, should not have religious sepulture. Harold’s body should rest in unhallowed ground, beneath a cairn of stones on the rocks of Hastings, and should thus in death guard the Saxon shore he had guarded in life. And so to the shore at Hastings, wrapped in a purple robe, his body was borne. And truly, no other burial could be so fitting for the hero whose life was given for his trust. The Duke of Normandy was no sentimentalist, and to the minds of that age unconsecrated interment was a thing to be thought of only with a shudder; but he was chivalrously poetic here, without a suspicion of it himself, for no hero was ever laid in more fitting place than Harold, by the salt selvedge of the coast he had sworn to protect, and did protect to his last moment: and as for consecration—why, there be those who dare to think that the laying there of this man’s body, who shed his life-blood for the land that gave him birth, was itself hallowing and consecration transcendent for that rocky marge.

But the epic fitness of Harold’s resting-place was not perceived by that age, or was thought a thing of lesser moment than that he should be accorded religious burial; and thus it happened that, when the fury of the Conqueror’s first rage had died down, permission was accorded for Harold’s body to be translated to Waltham Abbey, the great minster himself had founded in Essex. The last days of the terrible year of 1066 were drawing in when that re-interment took place, and Sussex lost the bones of her patriot.

This is pre-eminently the era of national memorials, when heroes of to-day and of yesterday and other personages whom we are not all agreed to call heroes are honoured in effigies of bronze. ’Tis but yester-year since Alfred the Great was duly, and properly, commemorated in this shape, in his city of Winchester, and a statue of William of Orange—our William the Third—was erected, not so long since, on the spot where he landed, at Brixham, in Tor Bay; but Harold yet awaits his turn. For the why of it, I know not; unless indeed it be that we English are ever a thought too practical, and honour, not so much endeavour, as success. Alfred was successful; Harold in the end was crushed, and his England broken. Yet it was not himself was lacking; it was his rash irregulars, who, by their headlong zeal, lost him the day. He strove his utmost, and that utmost was, beyond rivalry, noble.

To say, “He did his best,” is the noblest epitaph we can give any man, and none should grudge Harold posthumous honour. We “Englishmen,” as we may still call ourselves, are not yet so indisputably the masters of the world that we can afford to disregard our national heroes, and Harold’s statue, of appropriate heroic size, surely should stand prominently over Hastings, to show newer generations how we can honour even endeavour that has won to no position, and that we can remember even our defeated heroes.

The Conqueror, as we must call him, despite his studied avoidance of that title, inimical to his “legal” claim, fully redeemed his vow to build a great abbey upon the field of battle. He built the Abbey, which he dedicated to St. Martin of the Place of Battle, on the place where so many had been slain to satisfy his ambition, rearing the High Altar, the holiest spot, on the exact position where Harold had fallen. William Faber, that Fabricius, or smith, turned monk, who was present at the great battle, and had been at the Duke’s side when he vowed the Abbey here, would, when it came to the actual building of it, have chosen another site; for here, he urged, on the hill-top, water was lacking. Let him and his brethren from the Abbey of Marmoutiers build in the valley, where the springs were never dry. But this suggestion outraged the Conqueror’s sense of the dramatic fitness of things, which, as we have already seen in his selection of Harold’s seashore resting-place, was a very keen sense indeed. No: he would build upon the actual field of battle, or not at all; and if the Almighty spared his life, wine should be more plentiful in that Abbey than water elsewhere.

Battle Abbey very soon began to rise on that field of blood. The King of England, as he was now become, spent money freely on it from his treasury; ship-loads of the fine building-stone of Caen came continually across Channel from Normandy, until, by one of those miraculous dreams dreamt at need in those times, a bed of stone was discovered, and a quarry opened, in the neighbourhood. The rising Abbey was richly endowed with manors far and near, and was made the centre of a three miles’ circuit exempted from all other jurisdictions, ecclesiastical or civil. Its abbots, moreover, were mitred and seated in the councils of the realm, and beside holding the privilege of sanctuary, theirs were the rights of free warren, inquest, and treasure-trove. Were they merciful men and pitiful, then those dispositions could be humoured to the full, for they were given the prerogative of pardoning any criminal they met on his way to execution: a prerogative that meant much in those days, when execution was done upon criminals for a large variety of offences.

More interesting than all others among William’s gifts to the Abbey were his sword and his coronation robes, which, stripped of their gold and silver chains and amulets in the reign of Rufus, for centuries remained objects of the greatest curiosity. But the Abbey was long a-building, and twenty-eight years had flown since the battle and William himself had been seven years in his grave, before it was completed and finally consecrated.

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And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth, but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money: the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in Sussex. It was rotten-ripe and full fit to be plucked when Henry the Eighth ended the monasteries and when his Commissioners appeared before its doors on May 27th, 1538.

To sentimentalise over the suppression of places like Battle Abbey would be excusable in the ignorant; in those fully informed it would be criminal. It cannot be too often repeated that the work undertaken by Henry the Eighth was no mere capricious act of tyranny, was no unwarrantable or unprovoked attack upon the religious houses. Wyclif had long before, at the close of the fourteenth century, declared that the rotting trunk of the monastic establishments cumbered the ground. In 1414 over one hundred alien priories were suppressed. In 1489 Pope Innocent the Eighth issued to the Archbishop of Canterbury a commission for a general investigation. Parliament itself had petitioned Henry the Fourth for seizure of the possessions they administered so ill. Wolsey had from within the Church seen the decadence of the Abbeys and Priories, and himself suppressed a number of the smaller houses and devoted their property to the better use of education.

It is a cloud of witness to the general and cumulative disgust of the times with the enclosed life.

The Commissioners came to Battle, dressed fantastically in the plunder of other religious houses they had ransacked on their way, “decked in the spoils of the desecrated chapels, with copes for doublets, tunics for saddle-cloths, and the silver relic-cases hammered into sheaths for their daggers.” They, in short, committed on their side almost as many excesses as the foul-living, blasphemous monastic brethren had on theirs; but they had this excuse: that if they indeed made a mockery of religion, it was the monks themselves first showed them the way of it.

The report of Dr. Layton, Chief Commissioner, described the conduct of Battle as “the worst that ever I see in all other places, whereat I see specially the blake sort of dyvellyshe monks.” Their doings, however, had not been so bad as those of establishments subsequently visited, whose sins will scarce bear mention.

But the monks of Battle had always been prepared to go considerable lengths for money. In the monastery was hung the famous “Roll of Battle Abbey,” purporting to be the roll-call of the Norman knights on the morning of the Battle of Hastings, to which they answered “Here,” or “Ici,” or “Adsum,” as might be. This historical parchment is reported to have been removed to Cowdray, where it perished in the fire of 1793, but it had, centuries before, been so tampered with by the monks that all its value had been destroyed. It early became a foible among noble or wealthy families to declare that their ancestors “came over with the Conqueror,” and Battle Abbey was always ready to oblige a liberal patron by adding his name to the Roll. In the words of Dugdale: “Such hath been the subtility of some Monks of old, that, finding it acceptable unto most to be reputed descendants to those who were companions with Duke William in that memorable Expedition whereby he became Conqueror of this Realm, as that, to gratify them (but not without their own advantage) they inserted their Names into this antient Catalogue”; and Camden repeats the charge. “Whosoever,” he says, “considers well shall find them always to be forged, and those names inserted which were never mentioned in that authenticated record.”

On the surrender of Battle Abbey, it and its lands were granted by the King to Sir Anthony Browne, in 1538. The knight did not come into his property with the good will of the neighbourhood, which, pauperised by and dependent on the monks, with anger saw them thrust forth into the world, and loved to tell how the last of the brethren to issue from the gate turned and cursed him with the doom of the sacrilegious. “By fire and water,” he declared, his line should end. We are not told whether Sir Anthony Browne quailed—as on the stage he certainly would have done—or if he merely laughed; but there can be no doubt that the people of Battle awaited the issue with great interest, and that, when nothing happened, they were disappointed. Instead of Sir Anthony Browne or any of his family being cut off untimely, they flourished exceedingly, and his son became a peer, under the title of Viscount Montagu.

The estates of Battle passed from the family in the time of the sixth Viscount, who in 1719 sold them to Sir Thomas Webster, the first of a long line of Baronets who (with an interval from 1857 to 1901) have held them ever since. In all that time the curse slept, and possibly when the sixth Viscount Montagu parted with Battle and retired wholly to his great mansion and beautiful park of Cowdray, he thought the spell had been effectually broken by this severance.

But the long-dormant curse woke up and worked itself out in 1793, when the beautiful mansion of Cowdray was destroyed by fire. In the following month the eighth Lord Montagu, while yet ignorant of this disaster, met his death by drowning in the Falls of Lauffen, near Schaffhausen, when attempting to shoot the rapids in a boat. He was but twenty-four years of age.

The next heir to the estates of Cowdray, the ninth and last Viscount, was a Roman Catholic priest, who died childless, in 1797, in spite of the fact that he was dispensed from his vows in order that he might marry and continue the line. The property was then inherited by his sister, Mrs. Stephen Poyntz, whose two sons were shortly afterwards drowned at Bognor. Her husband then sold Cowdray.

All this proves how very careful it behoves those to be who launch curses on roving commissions. Even the Websters seem to have shared to some degree in this malediction, for the fourth Baronet committed suicide, June 3rd, 1800, by shooting himself with a pistol at his London house in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. He had been embarrassed by heavy losses at cards. This eccentric and unfortunate man, Sir Godfrey Webster, married Elizabeth Vassall, a great Jamaican heiress, who in 1795, at Florence, while her husband was away in England on business, left him and her two children for the third Lord Holland. Lord Stavordale, in his memoir, skates cautiously over the thin ice of this affair. He says the meeting of that guilty pair “was destined to alter the whole course of their lives. They became deeply attached to one another, and after many months spent in various parts of the Continent, returned to England in 1796.”

Sir Godfrey obtained a divorce in July, 1797, and two days later Lord Holland married the lady, known to diarists and writers of memoirs as “the celebrated Lady Holland.” Had she been less rich she would doubtless have been merely “the notorious.” Her entertainments and her biting wit (she was a kind of female Douglas Jerrold) absolved her from the ostracism that would have been the lot of one less wealthy, less acid, and less hospitable. She lived a long life in the centre of political and social functions, and died in 1845.

This Sir Godfrey Webster is “the very worthy Baronet” referred to by “Thomas Ingoldsby” in the preface to the second edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends” as “protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election”:

a novel reading of Iago’s passionate declaration, Othello, Act iii., Scene 3:

His also was the reading:

a new version of Bolingbroke’s speech in Richard the Second:

Sir Godfrey Webster, sixth Baronet, in 1857 sold Battle Abbey to Lord Harry Vane, afterwards Duke of Cleveland, chiefly because of the extraordinary situation brought about by there being at that time no fewer than five dowager Lady Websters drawing jointures from the already impoverished property. It had long been a cherished dream of the Websters to repurchase their old home, and this was realised in 1901 by Sir Augustus Webster, the present and eighth Baronet, on the death of the Duchess of Cleveland. But although he effected that aim, he could not maintain the Abbey itself, and accordingly let it to Mr. Grace, the wealthy American who resides there now and lords it over this historic spot and this beautiful park occupied by English gentlemen when the place whence he came was the primeval forest roamed by the North American redskin. It is a picturesque example of the newer conquering of England by the dollar, over eight hundred years after the famous battle that won it with the sword.

It is in a remote and picturesque corner of the park, in Powder Mill House, that Sir Augustus Webster resides; in a house which, as indicated by its name, was one of those gunpowder factories whose numerous accidents, according to Horsfield, historian of Sussex, “it would be harrowing to relate and uncharitable to publish.”

The manufacture is a thing of the past at Battle, but the great pond, used in the work, remains, and so do those brushwood thickets that contributed charcoal to the industry. Brushwood coppices are still one of the character-touches of the place, and those “leather-legged chaps, the clay and coppice people,” as Cobbett names them, are, as they have been from Saxon times, the greater proportion of the inhabitants. Any day their rustic and toil-worn figures, bent under huge faggots, may be seen in Battle street, and they serve to show how, although the Normans and the monks in turn have gone, the rural Saxon people remain.

When Sir Anthony Browne came into possession of Battle, he lost no time in demolishing the church of the Abbey and many of its domestic surroundings. The Abbot’s great hall and apartments he converted into a mansion, and with a portion of the stones from the demolished church added other rooms.

XLV

All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern drawing-room that was the monastic “locutorium,” or parlour, for the reception of strangers; they stand on the terrace, and look down upon the valley of Senlac and the corresponding heights of Telham, the way the Conqueror’s army advanced to the attack. Then the guide conducts to the site of the High Altar, the spot where Harold fell, to the gardens, once the Cloisters; then to the great roofless Refectory. Beneath it are the three fine crypts. One of them the guide calls the Scriptorium, but the name has little meaning for him. If you ask him to point out the site of the Œsophagus, the Pericardium, or the Cerebellum, he will look puzzled for a moment; but, rallying, will declare them to have been destroyed so long ago that their sites are uncertain. At last, with evident relief, he conducts the crowd to the gate, and saying, “That’s all I can show you to-day, ladies and gentlemen,” dismisses them.

A relic of more savage times than these of ours still exists in the market-place, in the iron ring to which the bull was tethered when bull-baiting was a popular sport. It has recently been covered over with earth.

The parish church of Battle, standing beside the road on the way out of the town, was a “peculiar,” i.e. independent of ecclesiastical control. Its incumbent is not merely a vicar or a rector, but a dean, and is appointed by the owner of Battle Abbey, still the lay Abbot. In the chancel lie Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, with a magnificent tomb over them, and in the churchyard is the humble stone to Isaac Ingall, who died after ninety years’ service at the Abbey, in 1798, aged 120. Beginning as postilion, he ended as major-domo. At the age of 107, resentful of some indignity—perhaps some one had called him “old”—he went off in quest of another situation.

Beneath the town and the church, the road crosses the railway. The allotment gardens, squalid with little sheds, after their kind, stand below Harold’s centre, on the spot where the fight raged fiercest. But the finest idea of the battlefield is to be obtained from the bye-road that here turns to the right, and, skirting the park, runs to the site of the old Powder Mills. It is far better than looking down, with the crowd, from the terrace of the Abbey, and hearing the parrot-talk of a guide. Here you are in the spirit-company of the invaders, and can appreciate better their task of charging up to that ridge where Harold and his warriors stood then, where the Abbey buildings stand now.

It is magnificent. The park-like landscape, dotted with clumps of trees in the uplands; a line of oaks and undergrowth following the course of the stream in the bottom; the town nested in woods, and Caldbeck windmill on the right, where, the rustics say, William “called ’em back.” Away down by Powder Mill House, in the coppices, one may still see the rocky ravine in whose depths the Norman cavalry fell in the fierce rally after their pretended flight. The ledges still drip red, as they needs must do, for the ground is rich in iron; but, although the explanation of the old legend that the soil weeps blood is prosaic enough, yet the sight is not without its impressiveness, and vividly recalls the magnificent opening lines of Maud:

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Over Telham Hill to Starr’s Green, past Crowhurst Park, where an ancient tumulus peeps over the palings, lies the way to Hastings. On the left-hand is the beautiful, but neglected, Beauport Park, fast going back to wildness. Here a fork in the road is furnished with a signpost directing both ways to Hastings. This puzzler for strangers is explained by the right-hand and shorter route being the “New London Road,” made when St. Leonards came into existence, and that to the left the “Old London Road,” in exclusive use in days before St. Leonards was thought of.

The “new” road leads down to Hollington, a suburban village almost entirely swallowed up by expansion of the town. One of the old-established sights of Hastings is, or was, Old Roar, half a mile or so to the left-hand of it.

Old Roar was a waterfall, and the ravine through which it roared exists to this day, as those who seek it, after tracing several fields and pathways hemmed in between villas, shall find. Even so far back as 1827 it was described as “not so considerable as thirty years ago,” and sceptical writers of that time declared there never had been a period when it was not said of Old Roar that “he is not so good as last season.” In 1841 Mrs. Mozley, sister of Cardinal Newman, wrote a novel called “The Lost Brooch,” which no one has ever succeeded in reading, and in it she describes Old Roar as possessing “all the points necessary for a very good cataract, except one—water: rather a serious want in a waterfall.” Yet there was a time when its hoarse voice was to be distinctly heard a mile away. Pause to-day on the wooden bridge that spans the gorge, and only a dampness that discolours the stones is seen through the trees that spring from the sides.

This is typical of much else around Hastings or any other town that has equally expanded. To the right of the road lies Hollington church: the “Church in the Wood,” famous in all this country-side as a romantic solitude. There are woods here now, but not so extensive as before, and the church is no longer in them, but on the fringe of what remains. The church itself, restored and practically rebuilt, is utterly and absolutely without interest; and the churchyard is now nothing but a cemetery filled with costly and pretentious monuments. Yet, such is the force of habit and tradition, it will be found, on examining the huge, ledger-like visitors’ book kept in the porch, that an average of five hundred people make pilgrimage to the spot daily in the holiday season. They see nothing worth the trouble, and having seen it go away again not displeased, for to visit the “Church in the Wood” is a duty laid upon the holiday-maker, and will be, even when there is no wood remaining. The way to and from it is by “Old Church Road,” where you find houses named with even more than the usual want of propriety. Thus “Sea View” does not look upon the sea, “Fair View” is opposite a manure-heap, and from “Old Church View” you cannot view the church.

It is not worth the while exploring the New London Road. It is dispiriting, and those electric tramways that are the tyrants of the roads for miles around Hastings and St. Leonards render the way of the cyclist down Silverhill hazardous in the extreme. It is true the map shows the attractive name of “Bohemia” here, but it is only a mean—the meanest and miserablest—suburb. Henri Murger, Bohemian of that artistic and literary Bohemia that is not mapped, died, disillusioned, exclaiming against his wasted life in that land of rosy visions, “pas de Bohème,” and we may adopt his saying and, appropriating it to this drab purlieu, turn back and make for Hastings by the Old London Road, itself not particularly attractive in these times.

You come along it, at the beginning of Baldslow, to a weird corner where a road comes up from Sedlescomb and, cutting under the Old London Road in an archway, makes for St. Leonards. Here the tramway poles and wires are insistently ugly, and the village or hamlet of Baldslow itself is scarce prepossessing. A roadside public-house, a gaunt windmill, a few ugly cottages, and a tin tabernacle church are its component parts. But immediately beyond that corrugated and galvanised ecclesiastical horror the road grows beautiful, overhung with trees. Here, at the entrance to a country house in the domestic-gothic sort, are two very fine clipped yew-trees. It is Holmhurst, and the trees are those christened by Mr. Hare “Huz and Buz.”

Holmhurst is not historic, in the larger way, but to those who are familiar with the literary work of Augustus J. C. Hare, it is a place to be regarded with interest and affection. Augustus Hare wrote many books. His “Walks in Rome” and “Walks in London” are the best known of them, but his “Story of my Life” is of course the most intimate, and it is the most endearing. His own half-humorous declaration that it is “a ponderous autobiography of a nobody” was heartily and unkindly endorsed by reviewers, but, at any rate, no one can read those six volumes without conceiving an affection for the author of them. He was a lovable man.

Augustus Hare, born 1834, died January 22nd, 1903, never married. He came of the family of Hares of Hurstmonceaux, a family at one time so numerous and so abundantly intermarried with the titled and landed classes that he could claim cousinship in different degrees with a very large circle in Society. But to call him a Society man would be as unjust as it would be to style him a dilettante in literature and the arts, for he had no vices, was no idler, and earned a very excellent literary repute. The “Story of my Life,” made up, as it is, largely from letters and journals, recounting his visits and the people he met, earned him with some sour critics of his work, the opprobrious title of “literary valet,” but it is so sincere and without artifice that the reproach is most undeserved, although his artistic, friendly, and family sympathies certainly often led him into praises which amusingly remind one of the famous epitaph on that Lady Jones who was “bland, passionate, and deeply religious. She was a niece of Horace Walpole and painted in water-colours, and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

A welcome guest at country-house parties, he generally figured at them as a family connection, as a literary man and artist, and as an accomplished narrator of ghost stories. He indeed “called cousins” with so many people of note that the Crown Prince of Sweden, to whom he became bear-leader for a time, when asked what astonished him most in England, replied “the number of Mr. Hare’s cousins.” He was, in fact, the human exemplar of the fabled “hare with many friends.”

XLVII

The story of his life is a strange one. He tells how, as the third son, and most unwelcome addition to his parents’ growing family, he was, at the age of eighteen months, given away by his father and mother to a recently widowed and childless aunt, as eager to adopt, as his unnatural parents were keen to be rid of him. The aunt was Maria (Leycester) Hare, widow of his uncle Augustus; and thus, in the similarity of Christian names at least, there was a peculiar appropriateness in this adoption, which was undertaken in what seems a very cold-blooded way: the parents to have no claim upon their son and the aunt to be called “mother”; as indeed, throughout the story of his life, she is styled. She brought him up and sent him to Oxford, and for thirty years they lived together, as mother and son. He wrote a panegyric on her, in the “Memorials of a Quiet Life,” and in the long story of his own is seen to have been very much more affectionate than many real sons are. Yet the reader of his pages cannot help coming to the conclusion that the “sweet mother,” as he constantly styles her, was not only afflicted with a very dour religiosity, but was a tyrant in his infancy, and an exacting invalid, and an incredibly mean, parsimonious and suspicious creature during his youth and early manhood. But, for all that, no real mother ever had so good a son, so tender and constant a nurse in sickness, as he.