The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

XXII

CRAWLEY

The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the “White Lion,” and a few attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers’ attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A mean little house called “Casa querca”—by which I suppose the author means Oak House—is “refinement,” as imagined in the suburbs, and excites the passing sneer, “Is not the English language good enough?” If the Italians will only oblige, and call their own “Bella Vistas” “Pretty View,” and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.

CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.

At the beginning of Crawley stands the “Sun” inn, and away at the other end is the “Half Moon”; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum when passing through, “Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?” Every one unfamiliar with the road “gave it up”; when came the answer, “Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other.” It is evident that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers.

We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early coaching days, that Crawley was a “poor place,” by which we may suppose that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect—a city?

Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us; but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn tale of grab.

Even Crawley’s generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards’ winding of their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of “Sally in our Alley” or “Love’s Young Dream.” Then the “George” was the scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the chink and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time, but a real journey, of five hours.

CRAWLEY, 1789.Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap. Occasionally some great cycle “scorch” is in progress, when whirling enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of the “George” spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen and bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the roads are peopled again.

There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey, embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.

They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad. Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very attractive ruin indeed.

Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789, when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead, took notes for his book, “An Excursion to Brighthelmstone.” It is a work of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist’s illustrations. That they should have lived, you who see the reproduction will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is otherwise greatly changed.

AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.

An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that the greater part of “Crawley” is not in that parish at all, but in the adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same side of the street belong to Crawley.

In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in this admonitory fashion:

Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde
He war be for whate comyth be hynde.

When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone, it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton, “be hynde,” remarking that it is “arnshunt.”

THE “GEORGE,” CRAWLEY.

The sturdy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing Noah’s dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.

But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling superstition of his remote age, has put his “fear of God,” in a very literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the terrified minds of the dark ages, when God, the loving Father, was non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures are merely like infantile grotesques.

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