From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the “deans.” North and South of the Downs are two different countries—so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter. But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.

The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean, by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course “Dean-ton”) near Newhaven, Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are strung along these last miles into Brighton—Pangdean and Withdean. Most of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first “dean” is one of these nonconformists.

Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.

Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other circumstance, a “dean” is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands, too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old toll-house.

Not so very old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807, was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for another term of years. It and its legend “NO TRUST,” painted large for all the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit, were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying at Patcham Gate, and yielded their “tuppences” with what grace they might.

On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still with difficulty be spelled the inscription:

Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,
who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,
November 7th, 1796.
Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,
Which piercÈd through the young man’s head.
He instant fell, resigned his breath,
And closed his languid eyes in death.
All you who do this stone draw near,
Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.
From this sad instance may we all,
Prepare to meet Jehovah’s call.

It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and “agin the Government”; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even middle-aged blood.

Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he was “unfortunately shot,” he, with many others of the gang, was coming from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves, careful only to make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales, who, met by a “riding officer,” was called upon to surrender himself and his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that Daniel was “too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before,” so he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery rhyme, was made of “lead, lead, lead,” Daniel was killed. Alas! poor Daniel.

An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham, sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully buttressed.

Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of Thomas À Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other “kick the beam.”