Travel in the old days—Sequestered Sussex—Country homes—A mellow land—A gibbet post and its story—Chiddingly and its church—The Pelham buckle—Wayside crosses—St. Dunstan's tongs and his anvil—A curious brass—Iron stocks—Home again.

From Worthing our road led for three or four miles along "the beached margin of the sea," a straight stretch of dreary and shelterless shingly road, looking doubly dreary after the pleasant green lanes we had so recently travelled. At the end of this we crossed the Arun close above where it joins the Channel, its short race run, its life almost too brief to grow into a real river; sea-gulls were whirling about it, but what they did there I could not make out; they were not catching fish, nor did they alight on the land or the water, but kept whirling round and round restlessly just over one spot in an apparently purposeless manner; but it pleased me to watch them, for the freedom of the wing is a glorious thing. When sea-gulls do this away from the sea I am told it is a sign of bad weather.

On the other side of the river stood the old town of Shoreham with its shipping, and above the town rose its weather-beaten, ancient Norman church tower; square, massive, grey and stern like its builders, strangely sculptured, too, by the salt spray and sea winds that have wrought their will upon it. From our point of view the town had an ancient look, though much of it is modern enough, but the grime of its smoke had toned down the new to the old. Beyond Shoreham lies Brighton, and to avoid the tedious and unprofitable drive through both towns and along a mere succession of houses we turned up by the river-side and went northward inland in search of old-fashioned places.

We paid a toll at the bridge by which we crossed the Arun, and that was the only toll we had on the way. Years ago, when I was much younger and took long driving tours, the tolls I had to pay at the toll-gates often cost me more than my dinner, to say nothing of the provoking fact of having frequently to pull up, and often besides be kept waiting for change. Those old toll-keepers were a race apart, and in remote places would dally at the gate whilst they asked me for the news of the day. Such trifles seem to make those old times appear farther off than they are. It was slow travelling then, and with tired horses often your choice of an inn for the night was "Hobson's choice," for you could not go farther—yet these leisured old times make pleasant memory. Now wherever you go you can rarely escape the morning newspaper; to do so is a test of remoteness indeed. What with telegraphs, telephones, railways and motors, news travels fast and the world is made smaller. It was the coach that brought the first tidings of events in times past, and its arrival was eagerly watched for in the towns and villages on the way: so was the news of Trafalgar and Waterloo spread through the land. Some of those toll-keepers, it is said, were in league with the highwayman, and signalled to him about any likely passing and lonely traveller by an open or a shut window, at night by means of a light in the same window; but this may be scandal. At least we know that some rascally landlords of inns were accomplices of the highwayman; rumour indeed has it that Dick Turpin was so indignant at a certain landlord giving information to a rival "when under articles to him" that he threatened to shoot that landlord. In return for his services the toll-keeper was never robbed of his day's takings. There is a tale told of a certain lady of quality who in those exciting times of travel always used to take with her a purse filled with base coin to hand over: but how, I wonder, did that lady become possessed of so much base coin?

It was a pleasant drive by the side of the river to the pretty village of Bramber, with its half-timber cottages and fragment of a Norman castle on a wooded knoll. I think it was at Bramber that a friend told me a few years ago he visited an interesting little museum and found the following admission notice: "Adults twopence, Children One penny, Ladies and gentlemen what they will." I wonder how many extra pennies good folk were induced to part with for the glory of being in the latter category? A somewhat similar notice I read in an inn garden: "People must not pluck the flowers. Ladies and gentlemen never do." There was some art in that notice.

From Bramber we drove through a fine open country of wide prospects, the forgathering of the hedgerow trees making the distance look like one vast forest—a forest never reached but that always circles the horizon. Next we came to Henfield, a quiet and picturesque village. After Henfield we got into a sequestered land beyond railways and on to some pleasant by-roads and narrow lanes where in sunny nooks hosts of wild flowers flourished, and the hedges delighted in tangled disorder. We were again in a land of sleepy farmsteads of the old Sussex type, farmsteads of time-toned walls, weather-tinted tiling, long, low, lichen-laden roofs, and great chimney-stacks—always a great and shapely chimney-stack of much the same pattern, but of a very good and pleasing pattern. This type of farmhouse is not confined to Sussex, but may be found over its near borders both in Kent and in Surrey. Such farmhouses are much sought after to-day, I am told, to be converted into homes for town people, because of their picturesque charm. This has come about, I believe, in a measure owing to the motor-car making accessible even remote country places; no longer do people depend wholly on the railway as formerly; indeed an estate agent told me that often the stipulation of country home seekers now is "not near a railway." People,

Weary of men's voices and their tread,
Of clamouring bells and whirl of wheels that pass,

desire to get into the real country and away from the crowd. I have just been reading in that delightful book, An Odd Farmhouse, how such an old house was found, and the charm of the life in it. "It lay in a dimple of the Downs, all around it were meadows.... A long, low, Jacobean building of simple but beautiful lines.... I looked through the dining-room windows and saw the tiled floor, the oak cupboards built into the wall, the great beams traversing the ceiling, the Gargantuan chimney-place, some eleven feet long, and deep enough to hold settles in the ingle-nook. There was a raised platform for logs, an old Sussex iron fire-back and a swinging crane with many hooks and arms." Such a picture sets me longing to live in some similar old Jacobean farmhouse: would only such good fortune were mine. I know the picture is true, for I have more than once, and in different old Jacobean homes, spent a night with mine hosts in them. I have sat in their ingle-nooks before blazing fires of logs on their hearths, watching the fitful flames leap up their wide chimneys, as they threw a ruddy glow on beamed ceiling and panelled wall whilst casting mysterious shadows around; and I have fed my full of the poetic charm and the romance, rare in these commonplace days, of those nights. The builder of a house never invented a better thing than the old-fashioned big ingle-nook: not the poor pretence affair that the modern architect calls one, with a cheerless, slow, combustion coal grate in its centre; but an ingle-nook at least ten feet wide—and many are more—with a big oak beam above, and deep enough to hold settles to seat comfortably four about the wide hearth, with its fire-back and fire-dogs intended for the burning of wood, such as they built in the Jacobean age when men knew how to build homes to live in and joy in, not merely houses for shelter—homes that were pictures without and within.

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But I have strayed from the road. It was a quiet land we were in, one out of the way of much traffic, for the lanes seemed to lead nowhere in particular, and only to exist for local convenience, but they take you into the heart of the real country: a land as hushed as ever it was in the distant days of "Queen Bess," for there has nothing arisen since to disturb its foretime tranquillity—unless, perhaps, the rare and temporary intrusion of a motor-car whose driver has lost his way. It is for such unpretentious, peaceful scenery that the Englishman yearns at times when in foreign lands far away. Just a yearning for the sight of England's green fields, green hedges, leafy elms, and old homes, nothing more. Even Byron, that wanderer, sings:

A green field is a sight which makes us pardon
The absence of that more sublime construction
Which mixes up vines, olives, precipices,
Glaciers, volcanoes, oranges, and ices.

Also did not Keats, when in Italy, once tell Severn that he lay awake one night just thinking all the while of England's green fields and her flowers?

I have often wondered how so simple a thing as a purely English pastoral landscape can so greatly please; wherein exactly lies its strong power to charm? I once took an American friend for a long drive through a beautiful corner of England. I selected it specially, wishing to give my visitor a pleasant impression of the old country. There were hills and fair woods on the way, winding streams with ancient stone bridges across them, a lovely ruined priory in a lonely glen, old homes, many gabled and ivy-clad, picturesque cottages, and a quaint, old-world village or two. These were some of the good things we saw. When the journey was ended—we took it by motor-car, so we went far—I asked my friend what pleased him the most. "Well, I think," said he, "it's the mellow, domesticated look of the country, as though man and nature had long been on familiar terms there; but what really appeals to me most are just your green meadows studded with daisies, and your beautiful hedges." It was actually the simple sight of the daisied meadows and the green hedges that pleased him more than all the other good things, and the other things were very good indeed. It is sometimes enlightening to see our land as others see it. Listen to what Mark Twain says in his More Tramps Abroad:—

After all, in the matter of certain physical patent rights there is only one England. Now that I have sampled the globe I am not in doubt. There is the beauty of Switzerland, and it is repeated in the glaciers and snowy ranges of many parts of the earth; there is the beauty of the fiord, and it is repeated in New Zealand and Alaska; there is the beauty of Hawaii, and it is repeated in ten thousand islands of the Southern Seas; there is a beauty of the prairie and the plain, and it is repeated here and there in the earth; each of these is worshipful, each is perfect in its way, yet holds no monopoly of its beauty; but that beauty which is England, is alone; it has no duplicate. It is made up of very simple details—just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin, and over all a mellow dreamland of history. But its beauty is incomparable, and all its own.

There must surely be some special charm in a country, unassuming though it may be, to cause such praise of it to be written. Does not even cosmopolitan Kipling pronounce his preference for "Sussex by the sea" over all the world?

We were in Sussex again, but, in spite of Kipling, I love Sussex inland, sequestered Sussex of woodlands, sleepy villages, ancient farmsteads and cottages, and genuine ruralness, infinitely more than "Sussex by the sea," with its fringe of more or less fashionable watering-places. Inland Sussex, on the whole, is the Sussex and the England of the long past, delightful to see, but much of seaside Sussex is the England of to-day, and is rather depressing to me. The real charm of Sussex lies in its ancientness and in its simple, good-humoured country folk, not in its modernness. People who rush from London by rail or by motor on the main highways to Brighton, or other of its seaside towns, know little of rural Sussex or the rare charms of its silvan scenes.

Travelling through this peaceful land, loitering along its lanes that tempted one to loiter because of their pleasantness, we eventually turned up at Ansty Cross, where we were on one of the three familiar Brighton roads, for there is a choice of roads from London to Brighton, all beloved of the speedy motorist who heeds not the scenery he passes; but they are dusty, with much hasting traffic, and not the roads that a quiet-loving pilgrim would choose. For this cause we did not go far on the Brighton road, but left it by the first promising lane, and in time we reached a little green in an out-of-the-way spot. I could not find it named on my map; there was no village there, but a cottage or two faced it, and in the centre of the green was a post with a weathercock on the top, and the weathercock had the date of years past pierced in it, a date I have forgotten. The post was railed round for protection, so I thought there might possibly be some story connected with it, otherwise why so protected? I asked particulars of a cottager, and he, nothing loth to be informing, told me that the post was part of an ancient gibbet—I do not remember having seen such a thing before—whereon a man was hung in chains for robbery and murder. It appears from the tale I was told that a tramp sought food and shelter one night at a cottage close by; the cottager took pity on him and gave him food and a night's lodging, and was in return robbed of the small savings he had by the scoundrel of a tramp, who richly deserved his fate. Such are the tales of the road.

It must have been a gruesome sight in old days, and one not at times to be avoided, for travellers to see a man hung up thus by the wayside, his shrivelled body swinging, or perhaps only his bones rattling, in the wind to the creaking of the chains. I remember a certain church clerk telling me a story of how in past days, at a spot near his church, a poor woman's only son was exposed on a gibbet—I think it was merely for stealing a sheep he suffered death, stolen to provide his widowed mother with food,—and how in after days the poor, bereaved, broken-hearted, solitary widow used to tramp all alone on dark winter nights to the gibbet to pick up any bones of her boy that might have fallen to the ground, and carry them carefully home, so that she might secretly bury them in a quiet corner of the churchyard. I could only hope that the story was not true, but the clerk assured me it was, "every word of it." Sometimes I am thankful I live in these latter days.

Then wandering over more winding lanes we came to the top of Scaynes Hill, where the road dropped down steeply before us, and from where there is a fine view looking over the fair wooded Weald to the bare but not barren downs, and just then over their long, undulating line the sea mists were creeping, and I thought there came wafted inland the rare scent of the sea. The mists kept rolling in great masses down the green sides of the hills, then as if by magic vanished from view. I never saw the South Downs look so glorious or so mountainous as they looked with their crowning of mists and their dark shadowed bases. To realise the full beauty of the downs you must see them in all weathers and not in sunshine alone. Sunshine is cheerful, but sunshine is a tamer; now mists give the downs just a suspicion of grandeur. Even Snowdon looks tame on a clear, cloudless day.

Descending Scaynes Hill we mounted again to a wide open common with a big white windmill topping it and so exposed to all the winds, a mill boldly in evidence that surely would have tempted Don Quixote, had he been of to-day and passed by that way, to try a tilt or two at it. Without the mill the common would have looked bare and have been wholly characterless except for its openness. I think, after an old castle or a ruined abbey, there is more character about a windmill than in any other building; moreover, a windmill is always a telling and a graceful structure, so a pleasing, even a poetic, feature in any landscape. I really think that more than half the charm of Holland lies in its many bickering windmills, and the life their whirling sails give to its flat and dreamy landscapes with their slow canals.

After a time our road led us between great rocks, so quickly in England does the scenery change its character, for the rocks suggested a road in the wild North Country; it was as though we had suddenly been transported there. So we reached steep-streeted Uckfield, and in a few more miles the little railless town of East Hoathly, somewhat beyond which I espied, peeping over distant woods, a tall stone church steeple; it attracted my eye, for it is an unusual sight in Sussex, where the churches have mostly square towers, or steeples roofed with oak shingles. On consulting my map I found the steeple belonged to Chiddingly church, a little remote village off any main road. I had indeed some trouble in finding my way there along the narrow lanes that alone led to it. The church proved interesting. For the village I cannot say much. It consisted of but a few houses, not more than half a dozen, I think, a small shop where they appeared to sell everything from bacon to pins (it was the post office also), and a little inn boasting of the sign of "The Six Bells," a sign that presumably gives one the number of bells in the steeple, for it was an old custom to represent the number of bells in the neighbouring church on an inn sign—one amongst other odd bits of information I picked up on the journey; my journey indeed provided me with quite a storehouse of information about unimportant matters.

Chiddingly church has an ancient and time-worn look. I noticed that the steeple was bound round with iron chains, and I asked a man of the place if he knew why they were there, for they were not ornamental. "They be to keep the old steeple together," said he. Poor old steeple, thought I, to have to depend upon chains to hold it in place. "It was the village blacksmith's idea," explained the man. Now I should have thought it was an architect's job. But iron chains exposed thus to all storms would in no long time rust away, I should imagine, though I dare say they will last for some years; but never before have I seen a building so repaired. It is truly a primitive arrangement without even the advantage of being picturesque.

The west doorway displays at either end of the drip moulding the quaint device of the Pelham buckle. Now this device was the crest or badge of Sir John Pelham, that gallant knight who made prisoner the King of France at the famous fight of Poictiers, after which he assumed as his crest or badge a representation of the sword-belt buckle of the captured king, and on any building he founded, or helped in its construction, he caused a carving of that badge to be placed. This bit of information I also picked up on the way, though on a previous tour. On a good many churches in Sussex you will find the Pelham buckle engraved. Such was the pride of the Pelhams.

The west window of the church is notably out of the centre of the tower, and is but one example of many showing how the old builders considered not strict uniformity, and by so doing, I feel, added a certain charm of irregularity to their structures; they were content with eye measurements; to-day the foot-rule settles everything with a mathematical and eye-provoking accuracy.

Within the church what first caught my eye was the gorgeous monument, in a side building all to itself, of "Sir John Jefferay, Knt., late Lord Chief Baron of the Excheqvr," who "dyed the xxiii of May 1575." This monument is somewhat mutilated, it is said at one time by country folk who mistook it for the tomb of the hated Judge Jeffreys. A little away from the church stands a portion of the wing, with its windows bricked up, of the once stately home of the Jefferays, now converted into the outbuildings of a farmhouse—and that and their tomb marks the end of their glory.

I noticed in the church an old-fashioned two-decker pulpit, with a sounding-board above; you do not see many of these nowadays. This reminds me of a story of old times I heard on the way and that was fresh to me. It appears that in a certain country church a strange parson had taken duty one Sunday. Now it was the custom there not to begin the service before the squire had arrived. But the strange parson knew nothing of this nor of the squire, so he promptly started with "When the wicked man," whereupon the clerk below hurriedly stood up and in a loud whisper exclaimed, "You must not begin yet, sir, he has not come in."

From Chiddingly we proceeded over hilly and winding lanes and roads to Cross-in-Hand, a lonely spot with an inn and a few cottages, so named, I presume, from a pre-Reformation cross that probably once stood there. These at the junction of roads (as here), where they often were placed, were frequently provided with a hand to point out the way, and so were the forerunners of the later finger-posts. A few more miles brought us to historic Mayfield, set boldly on a hill, where in the Convent (once the palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury) they show you the veritable tongs of St. Dunstan, and point out the very dent made in them caused by his Satanic Majesty's nose when he pinched it, and his anvil also at which the saint was at work at the time. They sell picture post-cards of them in the town also. I thought it was a monk of Glastonbury, and at Glastonbury, who had the credit of this thrilling exploit; but at Mayfield they declare the event took place there, and are not the actual tongs proof sufficient? At Glastonbury there are no such tongs; now at Mayfield the doubting traveller may see the tongs and the dent in them.

By the way, I heard a rather quaint story of the palace in the troublesome old days when the roads were infested with robbers. Late one night a loud knock was heard at the door, whereupon the porter opened the little iron-guarded shutter to see who was there, and discovered a man begging in God's name for some food; but the porter did not like the look of the stranger and took him for a thief, so he kept the door closed, when suddenly the big bolts flew aside of their own accord and the door opened of itself; it was a saint who was standing outside! But how could the poor porter tell that, if the man looked not the part? So I think it was hardly fair of the saint to reprove the porter for not at once opening the door in God's name. The modern tramp is no saint, but he makes very free use of God's name.

From Mayfield we struck west over a wild, open country in search of Ticehurst, that appeared, from my map, to be a little village or small town, fairly remote from the rail and therefore possibly interesting. It was a fine drive through a rough-and-tumble country, and though Ticehurst disappointed me, the road to it did not. Ticehurst proved to be a clean, neat, wide-streeted village, with a village well in the centre—a village of some old houses and pleasantly situated, but not otherwise specially attractive. The inn there is said to be of the fourteenth century, though it hardly looks it. Finding the village uninteresting I strolled to the church, a grey and ancient pile overlooking a vast extent of rolling and wooded hills. It was almost worth going to Ticehurst for that revelation of scenery. Over the church porch I noticed a parvis chamber, and within the building a quantity of stained glass in its many and large windows; some of the glass is old and good, some modern and not so good. I noticed also the curious circular clerestory windows of singular design, a unique feature of the church as far as my knowledge extends. Portions of the stone steps to the former rood-loft still exist, I observed, and there is an old carved oak cover to the font with a worn inscription on it that I could not decipher. The chief interest of Ticehurst church, however, lies in a curious brass to "John Wybarne Armigi," who died "sexto decimo die ffebruarii Anno Rigni Regis henrici Septimi quinto." He is represented on his brass in full armour between his two wives, and at least four times their size. This suggests that the brass was originally only intended for one figure, and that those of the two wives were added afterwards, so there was no room to make them larger in the remaining space available. It is, too, a curious circumstance that the armour shown is of a considerably earlier period than that in which this John Wybarne lived. This further suggests to me that it may have been a memorial to some former knight basely appropriated, for such things were done in times past, as many a palimpsest brass proves; to me in the details of its armour it bears a close resemblance to the one to Sir John D'Agentine at Horseheath in Cambridgeshire, bearing date of 1382.

From Ticehurst we had a glorious drive through a rolling and well-wooded country as far as the Hastings main road; this we followed to Robertsbridge with a long and steep descent to that little, old-fashioned town. I think it was Walpole, when posting one night this way, called this descent a precipice, but it scarcely is that. Those old travellers often took a strangely exaggerated view of things, some of them going so far as to call even the modest Welsh mountains "frightful, horrid, awe-inspiring," and so forth in superabundance.

We followed the Hastings road as far as Battle, where we turned to the right and proceeded westwards towards Eastbourne and home. In due course we came to Ninfield, a little village high up in the world, and not far from "Standard Hill," as shown on the Ordnance map, and where tradition asserts William the Conqueror of old first raised his banner in England, and the morrow beheld a kingdom he had won with the aid of his armoured knights and a ruse. The hill has a commanding position overlooking the country all round, so there is nothing improbable in the tradition recording a fact, and the name of the hill, preserved through centuries to this day, is suggestive. At Ninfield there are some iron stocks under trees by the wayside. I do not remember having seen stocks of iron before. There is a tale told of these, that a man was condemned to be placed in the wooden stocks that preceded them, only his friends hacked them to pieces overnight, and there were no stocks to put him in; so fresh ones of iron, not readily to be demolished, were ordered, which stand to this day as serviceable as when they were made, and that must be a long while ago, though I am unaware of the date when the punishment of the stocks was abolished.

We drove on from Ninfield over winding roads that led us along the top of the hills overlooking the sea, sparkling in the sunshine that day, and past time-mellowed farmsteads, many with their quaint, conical-roofed oast-houses adjoining; then we dropped suddenly down from the hills to the wide plain of the Pevensey marshes, green as a land may be; we were nearing Eastbourne and home, and the end of our journey. So now, kind reader—I think I may venture to call you "kind reader" as you have followed me so far, for that surely is test enough to admit of such an address—I here bid you a reluctant farewell; for your company in spirit on our pleasant journey I heartily thank you. Good-bye.