The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

XVII

Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet another toll-gate. “Frenches” Gate took its title from the old manor on which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the unenclosed or free (franche) land of which it was wholly or largely composed.

Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history. When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816, Redhill was—a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes; but since that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000 persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we mean—not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.

The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the ’40’s, it was called “Warwick Town,” after the then Countess of Warwick, the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is, and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and “Redhill” this “Warwick Town,” by natural selection, became.

There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both look their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, “Mrs. Partington’s” remark that “comparisons is odorous” would be altogether in order.

Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne’s Asylum, housing between four and five hundred children of the poor.

“The Cutting” through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons, where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in another.

It is Holmesdale—the vale of holms, or oak woods—upon which you gaze from here; that

Vale of Holmesdall
Never wonne, ne never shall,

as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley A.D. 851.

In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top for the erection of a fort, and—in a burst of confidence—sold it again. The time is probably near when the War Office, like another “Sister Anne,” will “see somebody coming,” when this or another site will be re-purchased at a much enhanced, or scare, price.

EARLSWOOD

Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect “switchback,” as the cyclist who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do the trees look from this distance.

It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.

He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin, his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands gnarled and twisted with toil and rheumatism, he sat there in smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the “round frock” of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild wonder at their oddity and complication.

THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.

He was, it seemed, a “hedger and ditcher,” and his leathern gauntlets and billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.

“I’ve worked at this sort o’ thing,” said he, in conversation, “for the last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for’t too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an’ works from seven o’marnings to half-past five in the afternoon for that. You’ll be gettin’ more than two and twopence a day when you’re at work, I reckon.”

To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for he had visited London, and “a dirty place it was, sure-ly.” Also he had been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called “Madame Two Swords”: places that Londoners generally leave to provincials. Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock sights of town than townsfolk themselves.

From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the midnight of October 31st, 1881.

At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield Castle.

THUNDERFIELD CASTLE

Thunderfield Castle should—if tremendous names go for aught—be a stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the estate of Harrowslea—“Harsley,” as the countryfolk call it—supposed to have once belonged to King Harold.

There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons did name the place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it. It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who could often remain a “passive resister” and see the invaders struggling with the sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.

THUNDERFIELD CASTLE.

The history of Thunderfield will never be written, but if a guess may be hazarded, the final catastrophe, which was the prime cause of the half-burnt timbers and the many human remains discovered here long ago, was a storming of the place by the forces of the neighbouring de Warennes, ancient and bitter enemies of the de Clares; probably in the wars of the twelfth century, between King Stephen and the Empress Maud.

THE “CHEQUERS,” HORLEY.

It is an eminently undesirable situation for a residence, however suitable it may have been for defence; and the Saxons who occupied it must have known what rheumatism is. Dark woods now enclose the place, and cluttering wildfowl form its garrison.

The “Chequers” at Horley is not quite half way to Brighton, but in default of another it is the halfway house. Its name derives from the old chequy, or chessboard, arms of the Earls of Warren, chequered in gold and blue. They were not only great personages in this vale, but enjoyed in mediÆval times the right of licensing ale-houses: hence the many “Chequers” throughout the country. The newer portions of the house are typically suburban, but the old-world front, with its quaint portico, the whole shaded by a group of ancient oaks, remains untouched.

Horley—the “Hurle” of old maps—is very scattered: a piece here, another there, and the parish church standing isolated at the extreme southern end of the wide parish. It is situated on an extensive flat, reeking like a sponge with the waters of the Mole, but, although so entirely undesirable a place, is under exploitation for building purposes. A stranger first arriving at Horley late at night, and seeing its long lines of lighted streets radiating in several directions, would think he had come to a town; but morning would show him that long perspectives of gas-lamps do not necessarily mean houses to correspond. Evidently those responsible for the lamps expect a coming expansion of Horley; but that expectation is not very likely to be realised.

Much of Horley belongs to Christ’s Hospital, which is said to be under obligation to educate two children of poor widows, in return for the great tithes long since bequeathed to it, and is additionally accused of having consistently betrayed that trust.

THE “SIX BELLS,” HORLEY.

The parish church, chiefly of the Early English and Decorated periods of Gothic architecture, contains some brasses and a poor old stone effigy of a bygone lord of the manor, broken-nosed and chipped, but not without its interest. The double-headed eagle on his shield is still prominent, and the crowded detail of his mailed armour and the lacings of his surcoat are as distinct as when sculptured six centuries ago. He wears the little misericorde, or dagger, at his belt, the “merciful” instrument with which gentle knights finished off their wounded enemies in the chivalric days of old.

Many years ago some person unknown stole the old churchwardens’ account-book, dating from the sixteenth century. After many wanderings in the land, it was at length purchased at a second-hand bookseller’s and presented to the British Museum, in which mausoleum of literature, in the Department of Manuscripts, it is now to be found. It contains a curious item, showing that even in the rigid times that produced the great Puritan upheaval, congregations were not unapt for irreverence. Thus in 1632 “John Ansty is chosen by the consent of y^e minister and parishioners to see y^t y^e younge men and boyes behave themselves decently in y^e church in time of divine service and sermon, and he is to have for his paines ij^s.”

The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient “Six Bells” inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been eight in the belfry.

The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the “Six Bells,” and missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that “ye wooden tark so ef ye had to live in un.” A typical rustic had “comic brown-titus” acquired in one of those damp old cottages, and has “felt funny” ever since. One with difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as funny as he felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who pose as jesters.

Opposite Horley church is Gatwick Park, since 1892 converted into a racecourse, with a railway station of its own. Less than a mile below it, at Povey Cross, the Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton joins the main road.

Clyx.com