Highways and Byways in Sussex Part 20

To return to Rottingdean, it was above the village, seven hundred years ago, that a "sore scrymmysche" occurred between the French and the Cluniac prior of Lewes. The prior was defeated and captured, but the nature of his resistance decided the enemy that it was better perhaps to retreat to their boats. The holy man, although worsted, thus had the satisfaction of having proved to the King that a Cluniac monk in this country, was not, as was supposed at court, necessarily on the side of England's foes, even though they were of his own race.

According to the scheme of this book, we should now return to Brighton; but, as I have said, the right use to which to put Rottingdean is as the starting point for a day among the hills. Once out and above the village, the world is your own. A conspiracy to populate a part of the Downs near the sea, a mile or so to the east of Rottingdean, seems gloriously to have failed, but what was intended may be learned from the skeleton roads that, duly fenced in, disfigure the turf. They even have names, these unlovely parallelograms: one is Chatsworth Avenue, and Ambleside Avenue another.

CHAPTER XIX

Sh.o.r.eHAM

Hove the impeccable--The Aldrington of the past--A digression on seaports--Old Sh.o.r.eham and history--Mr. Swinburne's poem--A baby saint--Successful bribery--The Adur--Old Sh.o.r.eham church and bridge.

The cliffs that make the coast between Newhaven and Brighton so attractive slope gradually to level ground at the Aquarium and never reappear in Suss.e.x on the Channel's edge again, although in the east they rise whiter and higher, with a few long gaps, all the way to Dover.

It is partly for this reason that the walk from Brighton to Sh.o.r.eham has no beauty save of the sea. Hove, which used to be a disreputable little smuggling village sufficiently far from Brighton for risks to be run with safety, is now the well-ordered home of wealthy rect.i.tude. Mrs.

Grundy's sea-side home is here. Hove is, perhaps, the genteelest town in the world, although once, only a poor hundred years ago, there was no service in the church on a certain Sunday, because, as the clerk informed the complaisant vicar, "The pews is full of tubs and the pulpit full of tea"--a pleasant fact to reflect upon during Church Parade amid the gay yet discreet prosperity of the Brunswick Lawns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _New Sh.o.r.eham Church._]

West of Hove, and between that town and Portslade-by-Sea, is Aldrington.

Aldrington is now new houses and brickfields. Thirty years ago it was naught. But five hundred years ago it was the princ.i.p.al towns.h.i.+p in these parts, and Brighthelmstone a mere insignificant cl.u.s.ter of hovels.

Centuries earlier it was more important still, for, according to some authorities, it was the Portus Adurni of the Romans. The river Adur, which now enters the sea between Sh.o.r.eham and Southwick, once flowed along the line of the present ca.n.a.l and the Wish Pond, and so out into the sea. I have seen it stated that the mouth of the river was even more easterly still--somewhere opposite the Norfolk Hotel at Brighton; but this may be fanciful and can now hardly be proven. The suggestion, however, adds interest to a walk on the otherwise unromantic Brunswick Lawns. In those days the Roman s.h.i.+ps, entering the river here, would sail up as far as Bramber. Between the river and the sea were then some two miles--possibly more--of flat meadow land, on which Aldrington was largely built. Over the ruins of that Aldrington the Channel now washes.

[Sidenote: THE LIFE OF A HARBOUR]

Beyond Aldrington is Portslade, with a pretty inland village on the hill; beyond Portslade is Southwick, notable for its green; and beyond Southwick is Sh.o.r.eham. Southwick and Sh.o.r.eham both have that interest which can never be wanting to the seaport that has seen better days. The life of a harbour, whatever its state of decay, is eternally absorbing; and in Sh.o.r.eham harbour one gets such life at its laziest. The smell of tar; the sound of hammers; the laughter and whistling of the loafers; the continuous changing of the tide; the opening of the lock gates; the departure of the tug; its triumphant return, leading in custody a timber-laden barque from the Baltic, a little self-conscious and ashamed, as if caught red-handed in iniquity by this fussy little officer; the independent sailing of a grimy steamer bound for Sunderland and more coal; the elaborate wharfing of the barque:--all these things on a hot still day can exercise an hypnotic influence more real and strange than the open sea. The romance and mystery of the sea may indeed be more intimately near one on a harbour wharf than on the deck of a liner in mid-ocean.

Sh.o.r.eham has its place in history. Thence as we have seen, sailed Charles II. in Captain Tattersall's _Enterprise_. Four hundred and fifty years earlier King John landed here with his army, when he came to succeed to the English throne. In the reign of Edward III. Sh.o.r.eham supplied twenty-six s.h.i.+ps to the Navy: but in the fifteenth century the sea began an encroachment on the bar which discla.s.sed the harbour. It is now unimportant, most of the trade having pa.s.sed to Newhaven; but in its days of prosperity great cargoes of corn and wine were landed here from the Continent.

When people now say Sh.o.r.eham they mean New Sh.o.r.eham, but Old Sh.o.r.eham is the parent. Old Sh.o.r.eham, however, declined to village state when the present harbour was made.

[Sidenote: MR. SWINBURNE'S POEM]

New Sh.o.r.eham church, quite the n.o.blest in the county, dates probably from about 1100. It was originally the property of the Abbey of Saumur, to whom it was presented, together with Old Sh.o.r.eham church, by William de Braose, the lord of Bramber Castle. It is New Sh.o.r.eham Church which Mr. Swinburne had in mind (or so I imagine) in his n.o.ble poem "On the South Coast":--

Strong as time, and as faith sublime,--clothed round with shadows of hopes and fears, Nights and morrows, and joys and sorrows, alive with pa.s.sion of prayers and tears,-- Stands the shrine that has seen decline eight hundred waxing and waning years.

Tower set square to the storms of air and change of season that glooms and glows, Wall and roof of it tempest-proof, and equal ever to suns and snows, Bright with riches of radiant niches and pillars smooth as a straight stem grows.

Stately stands it, the work of hands unknown of: statelier, afar and near, Rise around it the heights that bound our landward gaze from the seaboard here; Downs that swerve and aspire, in curve and change of heights that the dawn holds dear.

Dawn falls fair on the grey walls there confronting dawn, on the low green lea, Lone and sweet as for fairies' feet held sacred, silent and strange and free, Wild and wet with its rills; but yet more fair falls dawn on the fairer sea.

Rose-red eve on the seas that heave sinks fair as dawn when the first ray peers; Winds are glancing from sunbright Lancing to Sh.o.r.eham, crowned with the grace of years;

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Old Sh.o.r.eham Bridge._]

[Sidenote: A Sh.o.r.eHAM EPITAPH]

In the churchyard there was once (and may be still, but I did not find it) an epitaph on a child of eight months, in the form of a dialogue between the deceased and its parents. It contained these lines:--

"'I trust in Christ,' the blessed babe replied, Then smil'd, then sigh'd, then clos'd its eyes and died."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Old Sh.o.r.eham Church._]

Sh.o.r.eham's notoriety as a pocket borough--it returned two members to Parliament, who were elected in the north transept of the church--came to a head in 1701, when the nave means by which Mr. Gould had proved his fitness were revealed. It seemed that Mr. Gould, who had never been to Sh.o.r.eham before, directed the crier to give notice with his bell that every voter who came to the King's Arms would receive a guinea in which to drink Mr. Gould's good health. This fact being made public by the defeated candidate, Mr. Gould was unseated. At the following election, such was the enduring power of the original guinea, he was elected again.

After the life of the harbour, the chief interest of Sh.o.r.eham is its river, the Adur, a yellow, sluggish, shallow stream, of great width near the town, which at low tide dwindles into a streamlet trickling through a desert of mud, but at the full has the beauty of a lake. Mr.

Swinburne, in the same poem from which I have been quoting, thus describes the river at evening:--

Skies fulfilled with the sundown, stilled and splendid, spread as a flower that spreads, Pave with rarer device and fairer than heaven's the luminous oyster-beds, Gra.s.s-embanked, and in square plots ranked, inlaid with gems that the sundown sheds.

[Sidenote: MR. HENLEY'S POEM]

To the Adur belongs also another lyric. It is printed in _Hawthorn and Lavender_, to which I have already referred, and is one of Mr. Henley's most characteristic and remarkable poems:--

In Sh.o.r.eham River, hurrying down To the live sea, By working, marrying, breeding, Sh.o.r.eham Town, Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream, An old, black rotter of a boat Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote, Lay stranded in mid-stream; With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That made me think of legs and a broken spine; Soon, all too soon, Ungainly and forlorn to lie Full in the eye Of the cynical, discomfortable moon That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky, A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned; The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing; The poor old hulk remained, Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why-- Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying.

For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying-- Dying or dead; And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:-- "_Dear G.o.d, it's I!_"

The Adur is no longer the home of birds that once it was, but in the early morning one may still see there many of the less common water fowl. The road to Portsmouth is carried across the Adur by the Norfolk Suspension Bridge, to cross which one must pay a toll,--not an unpleasant reminder of earlier days.

Old Sh.o.r.eham, a mile up the river, is notable for its wooden bridge across the Adur to the Old Suss.e.x Pad, at one time a famous inn for smugglers. Few Royal Academy exhibitions are without a picture of Old Sh.o.r.eham Bridge and the quiet cruciform church at its eastward end.

[Sidenote: THE LOYAL CLERK]

A pleasant story tells how, in some Suss.e.x journey, William IV. and his queen chanced to be pa.s.sing through Sh.o.r.eham, coming from Chichester to Lewes, one Sunday morning. The clerk of Old Sh.o.r.eham church caught sight through the window of the approaching cavalcade, and leaping to his feet, stopped the sermon by announcing: "It is my solemn duty to inform you that their Majesties the King and Queen are just now crossing the bridge." Thereupon the whole congregation jumped up and ran out to show their loyalty.

CHAPTER XX

THE DEVIL'S d.y.k.e AND HURSTPIERPOINT

Suss.e.x and Leith Hill--The d.y.k.e hill--Two recollections--Bustard hunting on the Downs--The Queen of the gipsies--The Devil in Suss.e.x--The feeble legend of the d.y.k.e--Poynings--Newtimber--Pyecombe and shepherds' crooks--A Patcham smuggler--Wols...o...b..ry--Danny--An old Suss.e.x diary--Fish-culture in the past--Thomas Marchant's Sunday head-aches--Albourne and Bishop Juxon--Twineham and Squire Stapley--Zoological remedies--How to make oatmeal pudding.