CHAPTER IVDane Hill—Epitaphs—A wild bit of country—Ashdown Forest—Exploring—The use of maps—Curious inn signs—A Tudor home—The Devil's door—A medieval priest and guest house—Old-fashioned flowers—An ancient interior—Curious carvings—Roads in the old times—The window and hearth tax.Out of Horsted Keynes we followed a friendly lane that quickly dipped down into a deep and wooded valley and then rose steeply to Dane Hill, an elevated spot that probably derives its name from an early Danish camp, or from some forgotten battle taking place there during the Danish occupation; its commanding situation suggests it may have been a fortified post. Place-names, preserved through generations, often mark spots where some far-off and unrecorded event has taken place, and I am inclined to think Dane Hill is one of these. I hunted through several volumes of general and local history, but failed to find any mention of a battle there; sometimes, however, tradition is founded on fact, though one cannot accept any tradition as trustworthy; still, where probability and tradition go hand in hand, I am inclined to give ear to tradition. Some day perhaps some Archaeological Society may go digging about Dane Hill and make discoveries.Dane Hill is crowned by a fine, large church, not ancient, nor yet quite of recent days, for its stones have grown grey with years, however many or few those years may be. Access is afforded to the churchyard by some steps, and at the side of these stands a modern, tall-pillared, canopied cross; the carving and shaft of this are beautifully neat, a careful copy of old work, yet without even a hint of its spirit or vigour, it being all scraped and smoothed to a meaningless finish, as though any mark of handiwork was a thing to be ashamed of; the old monkish craftsmen knew their art better, for it is the human touch revealed upon it that gives meaning to the meaningless stone. There is no soul behind the modern workman's tool: how can we expect it when for long years we have been making a human machine of him? Look at his lifeless productions, however painstakingly carved, and compare them with the grotesque gargoyles that verily seem to breathe and to struggle of the medieval sculptor, or any other like work of his hands; the latter too was a creator, not a mere copyist. His creatures resemble nothing on earth or in water that has been as far as I know, yet they look like things that could live.Somehow the large churchyard looked strange to me, and for the moment I could not reason why; then suddenly I realised it was because there was not a gravestone in it, not even a grass-grown mound: did the people of the small hamlet never die? The harvest gathered in God's acre is generally so plentiful. Then I solved the mystery; onthe opposite side of the road I discovered a little cemetery hidden by trees and where the gravestones were many, each with its loving tribute to the underlying dead. To judge by the tombstone inscriptions in our churchyards, what paragons of perfection lie sleeping there, what saintly virtues they possessed! Would that I had met them in the flesh! Why always of yesterday and not of to-day? Small wonder that a little girl who had been reading similar eulogies asked her father, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Only once have I come upon an epitaph that might possibly bear an unkind interpretation, and this read, "He was ...," leaving the rest to be filled in by the imagination. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, according to Plutarch, "laid down a justly commended law that no man must speak ill of the dead," and wisely ordered, for the dead cannot defend themselves nor can have any say upon what is inscribed above their dust, excepting in those few instances when the living have written their own epitaphs, not always laudatory by the way, and one cannot but admire their candour. For example, there is the much-quoted one that Dr. Lloyd, a dean of St. Asaph (deceased 1663), wrote for himself, and it will bear quoting again:This is the epitaphOf the Dean of St. Asaph,Who, by keeping a tableBetter than he was able,Ran much into debtWhich is not paid yet.At Dane Hill we came upon a good main roadthat led us to a wild, open upland reaching far on either hand, a delightful bit of unsophisticated nature where the land is poor as land well can be, so poor that according to a local expression "it would make a crow cry to fly over it," yet beautiful in colour to look upon. A glorious stretch of wide and wild country bare to the sky and swept by all the winds that blow, and the absence of any bounding hedges or fences left the eye at liberty to rove over it unchecked to the furthermost horizon of distant hills "rolling in the blue," and to the fir-fringed heights ahead of Ashdown Forest darkly outlined against the sky. Glorious in colour with its masses of purple heather and golden gorse, and sweet was the odour of the gorse that came wafted to us on the soft west wind. All England is not tamed or cultivated, and I am thankful, in a scenic sense, that some portions of it, such as the moors and heaths, still resist the dominion of man, as they have done for ages past. Not so Cobbett, for thus he writes apparently of this very spot in hisRural Rides: "You cross Ashdown Forest ... verily the most villainously ugly spot I ever saw in England ... getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till at last you see some rising spots which instead of trees present you with some ragged, hideous rocks." But no land was beautiful in Cobbett's view, I take it, unless it would grow good wheat; he notices the rocks, "hideous" in his eyes, though romantic in others, but has not a word for the glowing gorse or purple heather that I presumed flourished there in his day, as now. What wasgorse or heather or their rich colours to him? You cannot eat gorse or heather; mere beauty he considered not, but a well-grown field of turnips sent him into raptures. Ashdown Forest climbing the hillside, though it only grows trees, is to me with its green glades, its groves of pine and their dim pillared recesses, as delightfully shady and as silent a retreat as the heart of man could desire, yet Cobbett deems it a "most villainously ugly spot." Let no one trust Cobbett'sRural Ridesas a touring guide. Nor by his own showing does he appear to have been a very gracious traveller, for thus he writes of one inn where he stopped the night and left the next morning early: "By making a great stir in rousing waiters and boots and maids, and leaving behind me the name of a 'noisy troublesome fellow,' I got clear." I read Cobbett'sRural Ridesin the hopes of gaining some information about scenery—and the only information I could gain was about the qualities, good or bad, of agricultural land. Now the titleRural Ridessuggests pleasant rovings, not lectures upon land and upon politics.We drove on to a spot right on the top of a hill overlooking Ashdown Forest, and there the road began a long and gradual descent, out of the sunshine into the green gloom of the woods. This descent we should have taken had we not espied a lonely byway to our left that appeared to keep on the high and open ground, so we chose the sunshine, the breezy upland, and the byway: a solitary signpost pointed down this with "West Hoathly" boldly displayed on its extended arm. Now West Hoathlywas but a name to us, but to West Hoathly we would go; we might make discoveries there—which we did.Writing of signposts reminds me that when touring in Somerset some years ago I asked my way of a man by the roadside, and he said to me, "Go straight on to the next parson; he will direct you." "The next parson," I exclaimed in astonishment; "whatever do you mean? I may not meet a parson for miles, or at all." "I see you don't understand," was the reply, "but us calls direction-posts parsons in these parts." "How is that?" I queried. "Well, I don't exactly know why, but us do." As I could glean nothing further I sought information elsewhere, and was fortunate enough to find a man who explained to me that "Some folks hereabouts calls direction-posts parsons, because they point the right way but don't go it. It's quite an old joke in these parts;" and he grinned as he repeated the joke to me. Old though it was I had not heard it before, though a Somerset clergyman to whom I told the story often had.A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon itremote from town or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me, travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude; then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200, covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom, Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and, to the vision, brought the distance so near.So, keeping still on the ridge of the hill, we came to West Hoathly standing high above the country around. Here we pulled up under the shelter of a yew-tree overhanging the churchyard, and opposite to a clean and creeper-covered little inn curiously entitled "The Cat"; and this reminds me that we observed some singular inn signs during the journey, and here are samples of a few of them: "The World turned upside Down," but unfortunately there were only those words on the signboard; I should have liked to see a pictured representation of the world shown thus. Then there was "The Devil's Elbow"—how did that originate, I wonder?—and "The Merry Mouth," showing a big mouth smiling a welcome on the sign; "The Labour in Vain" had pictured two white men endeavouring to scrub a black man white, truly a quaint idea. In Wales I noticed "The Aleppo Merchant," a sign I had not seen before, and of its significance I know nothing. "The End of the World" was realised by the world in flames; and there were others.AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.Strolling about the ancient village, I espied, on the further side of the churchyard, a grey old home of the Tudor time, so substantially built those long years ago that to-day it looks, but for the time-toning of its stones and the slight crumbling of one here and there, almost as perfect as when first finished. Its mullion windows are without the usual transomes, and do not seem to need them; their leaden lattice-panes gleamed, just then, cheerfully in the light. Windows are the eyes of a house, in their way as expressive as those of a human being. I like to see a clear eye and a bright window. The old home was retired behind a high and buttressed wall, and in the centre of the wall was an arched outer doorway.Somewhat back from the village streetStands the old-fashioned country seat.Its roof is of stone slates, the most lasting and the most lovely kind of roof imaginable, beautiful when new, and yet more beautiful when old; the stone slates in this case, as in every other I know, being carefully "sized down, the smaller ones to the top and the bigger towards the eaves, which gives one the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish's scales or a bird's feathers." There is no ornamentation at all about the building except some restrained carving at the top of the arched doorway in the garden wall; the charm of thebuilding lies in its simplicity and goodly proportions, perhaps also in the feeling of lastingness in that it seems fitted to still stand unhurt, as in the past, all the winds and storms of heaven for years uncounted, without a thought of repairs. A modern builder's "desirable residence" never gives me such an impression—indeed, it does not appear to me even "desirable." We seem to have lost all love of building simply, let alone honestly. We too often seek after striking effect and even quaintness, so as to challenge attention, if not admiration, to the loss of all repose and the sentiment of home; for a man's dwelling-place should be first of all to him a home.Once I knew a country squire who desired to build himself a house on a fresh and more healthy site than that in which he lived, so he employed an up-to-date architect, full of ideas, to design him one. In due course the architect placed the elevation of the proposed house before the squire. It was a most unrestful production of needless gables for the sake of gables, tortured stone, and meaningless carvings, in all styles and no style at all, but intended to be impressive and to please. The architect said he thought it original and that it would "look well in stone." "Good gracious," exclaimed the squire, "do you think I am going to take a chair and sit out-of-doors and look at my house? I want one to live in." "Those are the very words I said to him," the squire told me, adding, "I asked for a home, and he produced a nightmare!"Modest in size though that old Tudor home at West Hoathly is, yet it suggests a certain sense of importance, just because it is so well built, with no pretence about it; and what a charm those two words, "no pretence," in an age of pretence and shams, convey. Pretence is an undesirable quality that threatens to submerge us all some day unless we cast it off, realising the utter nonsense and snobbishness of it. Modesty is a thing above most others to be desired, though a famous American once declared that "in our free country a man can get on very well without it." I quite believe that. But you cannot, architecturally speaking, in an ancient land "put new wine into old wine skins" successfully, or with any sense of artistic fitness—the new wine of novelty, I mean; that is best left for fresh lands that have no traditions.I took a photograph of the old Tudor house from the churchyard, and there I got a-chatting with a man in a faded tweed suit who had watched my proceedings with apparent interest. I took him to be a local inhabitant, but to use an antiquary's favourite expression, "I could not quite sum him up," nor did he enlighten me as to who or what he was; but, after all, it was no affair of mine. At first he talked about the weather, by way of introduction, I presume, for it is a topic that never fails amongst country folk. I really do not know what they would do in dull places without the weather to praise or abuse; even the tramp, whose sole object is to beg, invariably first starts upon the weather, and so he feels his way."If you are interested in old places," said the stranger, "you should see the ancient priest-house a little lower down the road," pointing indefinitely into space. "It's well worth seeing; and you might like to take a glance at the church, it's very old too." I thanked him for the information. Then he led me to the porch and pointed out the oak door there that was grey, not dark, with age, begging me to notice the date upon it, marked in big studded nails, "March 31, 1626." "There's a Devil's door in the north wall; you might take a look at that now you're here, but it's built up," remarked my companion. "The Devil's door!" I exclaimed. "I never heard of such a thing. Surely the Devil does not go to church?" I was puzzled; I asked for enlightenment. "Well, you see," came the reply, "it's certainly not everybody nowadays who is aware of the fact, but in past times there used to be a small doorway on the north side of churches to let the Devil out when a child was baptized, and it was always kept open on such an occasion; but that's an ancient superstition." I was anxious to learn more about it. The stranger had become interesting, and I wished to chat longer with him; but he suddenly exclaimed, "I must be really getting home or the missus will wonder whatever has become of me. I promised to be home ten minutes ago; it don't do to offend my missus"—and I thought he laid a special and meaning emphasis on "my"; so he bade me a polite good-day and hurried off. He was a meek-looking man. I hope he did not get a scolding for the time he took talkingto me. I wished his missus had been away from home that day, for I was anxious to learn more about the Devil's door; my curiosity was aroused. That call of the missus was most provoking. I nearly followed the stranger home to glean what further information on the way I could, but I thought he might not care for my company under the circumstances. Thus the traveller in out-of-the-way places picks up forgotten facts or fables, surprising traditions, and odd bits of local lore; but the chaff has to be winnowed from the corn.On my return home I hunted in every likely book for any information upon the Devil's doorway, but found no allusion to the subject. I sought out several parsons, presuming that one of them would surely be able to throw some light on the matter; but they all declared that they had never heard of such a thing, so I began to think that the stranger had made a fool of me, and that I was myself a fool to be so easily taken in. Yet when I recalled the stranger's face, it had an honest look; he seemed hardly a man to invent so poor a joke, and, provided it was a joke, I failed to see the humour of it. Then one day afterwards, when chatting with a learned antiquary, I suddenly remembered about the Devil's door; so I mentioned the tale about it I had been told, and he confirmed the truth of it. "Such doors in churches were quite common, if not universal, long ago," he said; "they were always on the north or Devil's side of the church, and may still be found in many churches, though their purport has long been forgotten. I even remember a certainparson who, only twenty odd years past, insisted on having this door kept wide open during a christening, so as to afford a ready escape for the Devil, who was supposed to be driven out of the child." Curiously enough, after making so many vain inquiries on the subject, I found friends to whom the former existence and use of the Devil's door was quite well known.Leaving the church I went down the village street to inspect the ancient priest-house. This proved to be a long, low, half-timber building; its roof was of stone slates, as most roofs of the period were; the house has manifestly been restored at some recent time, though carefully restored backwards, as far as I could judge, to the intention of the original builder. Unfortunately my photograph, here reproduced, gives no hint of the bloom of age that is upon it, or of the subtle curves of the weather-bleached timber caused by the stress of time. I have found in photographing many an ancient building, unless its walls are actually broken and decayed away, how little the photograph realises its antiquity. In my photograph of Boarstall Tower (that we shall come to later on), in spite of the years the tower has stood, and in spite of the battering of two sieges it has undergone, the ancient structure, hoary with the antiquity of over five centuries, looks almost as though the builder had but lately completed his work.The approach to the priest-house was by a stone-flagged footway across a garden gay and sweet-scented with old-fashioned flowers. "Scents are the souls of flowers," says an old writer whose name I have forgotten: if only these hardy, old-fashioned flowers were rare and difficult to grow, how we should prize them for their charm of colour and their sweetness, both so happily combined! But the modern highly-paid gardener despises them as common: well, the uncultivated foxglove is common enough flourishing in neglected spots, yet no pampered hothouse flower seems half so graceful, stately, or pleasing to my eye.A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.The door of the house was of oak and nail-studded, and there was a quaintly-shaped iron knocker on it of some antiquity; a gentle tap or two of this brought an old woman to me. "Could I see the house?" I queried. "Why, certainly," she replied; "that's what I be here for, to show it to any one, and to take care of it. I'm only too pleased to see a visitor, I don't see many; it be a bit dull living here alone, it makes me feel almost silly like at times. Come in, please." Fortune was kind; I hardly expected to see over the place, and I found not only ready admission but a guide at my service. The old body proved intelligent but talkative; she told me one thing after another about the place and its history in such breathless succession that I scarce could follow her; I begged for a little time just to jot down a note or two, but as soon as I started to do this she recommenced prattling harder than ever. I think I never before met a woman capable of getting in so many words to the minute, though I have met many very capable ones in that respect. The worst of it was, she had really much of interest to relate, but so eager and inso much haste was she to relate it that I could only secure stray items out of her hurricane of abundance. She had the history of the old place by heart, and was learnedly—would only that she had been leisurely—informative about its contents.First I was shown the living-room, or ancient kitchen, a picturesquely antique apartment with its low black-beamed ceiling, its red brick floor, its recessed lattice window, its door that opened with a wooden latch, its wide stone hearth fireplace, with andirons in position and logs of wood laid between them ready for the burning, not to forget the chimney crane with an iron pot suspended from it, nor the brick oven by the side for the baking of bread—and what superlatively excellent bread those old brick ovens produced! In some things we have progressed backwards, and one of these is the making and baking of bread. The iron fire-back, I noticed, had the royal arms cast in bold relief upon it, but in place of the unicorn was the Elizabethan griffin, and on the quarterings of the shield (I believe that is the correct heraldic expression) were only the three lions of England and the fleurs-de-lis of France, each repeated diagonally. On the big oak beam above the fireplace were carved sundry curious devices; they were but meaningless hieroglyphics to me, and the old body confessed that no one had been able to make anything of them; possibly they were "invented out of the carver's brain," with no other thought than to while away a dull hour or two.A good deal of what the old body told me might have been told to the winds for aught I couldremember or make note of; even an American tourist devoting ten whole days "to do" England in somehow, and allowing out of this twenty minutes for Westminster Abbey, could not have complained of such a guide delaying him. Not that all, or even the majority of Americans are like this, for I have met many cultured Americans seeing the old country every whit as leisurely as I. Indeed, I knew an American party who came over to take a motoring tour through England, and were so fascinated by a remote English village they chanced upon, besides finding there a really comfortable, old-fashioned inn, that the party, with one consent, stopped a whole week in that village, contentedly exploring the country around; and one of the party wrote me afterwards that she had never spent such a pleasant or a profitable week in her life, and she thought she might safely say the same of the rest.Of the hurried notes I managed to make about the priest-house at the time, and those I set down from memory afterwards, I gathered that it was built not later than 1350, possibly earlier. Originally there was a large hall heated by a fire on a raised stone set in the centre, the smoke of which escaped through a hole in the roof, and the old plaster of the roof still shows the blackening caused by the smoke. At either end of the hall were doors leading to offices, the sleeping-rooms being above these. Such was its simple plan. About 1522 the present chimney was built on the site of the ancient open fire, and the hall divided into two compartments "as you now see it." "And how do you know allthis?" queried I, when I could get a word in. "Well, you see, sir, at different times members of Archaeological Societies have been over to examine the building, and I always went over with them, and so I learnt a lot about it. The house was originally built by the Prior of Lewes as a hospital for invalid priests, and it also served the purpose of a guest-house for stray travellers; the roads in these parts were then but rough tracks through wild forests, full of wild beasts, they tell me. In the chimney a hiding hole was discovered, but it was only three feet square, and as a man could not get into it, it is supposed it was for hiding treasures, or perhaps books."The old house was full of ancient furniture and of odds and ends of curious things that served our ancestors. I remember there was a steel striker and a flint with a tinder-box; I tried my prentice hand with these, and after several attempts at last obtained a light, but with difficulty; it must have been trying and tedious work using this steel, flint, and tinder-box on a cold winter's morning. Little wonder so many houses in past times had their fires piled up at night so that they might keep in till the morning, when the smouldering ashes readily caused the fresh fuel put on them to become ignited. At one old manor-house I went over some years back, I was informed that the fire in the hall had not been out for two centuries; even in summer it was kept alight, day and night, for the walls of that house were thick, and the hall was only pleasantly warm on the fine August noon when I was there.A friend of mine told me that in 1908 he discovered a cottage at Huckaback, Castleton, Yorkshire, where the turf fire had not been out for sixty-eight years.Upstairs in the priest-house we noticed that the internal partitions were of wattle and daub; the daub, the old body said, consisting of pond slime combined with cow hair and chipped straw: pond slime does not sound nice, but the daub was lasting, to which fact my eye and the touch of my hand bore testimony. Then hanging on the walls we observed two parchment deeds framed, one being the original lease from "The Pryor of Lewes to T. Browne of Westhotheleigh, of the Parsonage House and barn." This was dated "9th yeare of Henry VIII." It did not escape my notice that, even so far back, this Brown rejoiced in an added "e." The other had two red seals attached, and related to the conveying of "the Rectory and Church of Westhotheley lately granted by Henry VIII. for her lyfe to Lady Anne Cleve." This was dated "Jan. 21st. 2nd of Elizabeth, 1560." The lettering of both of these documents was as clear and as black as the day they were written, and so quite easy to read, more so than many a modern letter I receive. The world has revolved countless times on its axis since the date of those deeds; but the writing of to-day is not so good as it was then, not even typewriting.On the ceiling of one of the top rooms is a Dedication Cross, deeply cut, showing the religious nature of the house; also we noticed there, put on one side, some fine oak carving which I learntformerly formed part of the chancel screen of the village church, it being torn down by the Puritans, who destroyed, or made a clearance of, "all carvings, images, and decorations" they found in the sacred edifice; and a rare clearance they appear to have made at West Hoathly. Besides this there was a large board showing signs of weathering, and plainly painted on it was "Cheese Room." "That," explained the guide, "did not belong to this place, but to a farmhouse near by. It is a relic of the window-tax days, when a window, used purely for trade purposes, was free of the tax, provided a notice of its use was placed above it. That is one of those notices. Possibly you may not have seen such a thing before." I had not. Indeed, I had almost forgotten that there had ever been such an iniquitous tax (and that there was a hearth-tax also), and was quite unaware of any such an exemption from it. I was always learning something on the road.Very interesting is the old priest-house at West Hoathly, the more so because it is not bare, but supplied with ancient, though not the original, furniture in keeping with the place, and with domestic appliances that were used in days remote. On my return home I sought for particulars of this house in two or three modern guide-books to the county, but could find no mention of it, although the church was briefly noticed, which shows that guide-book compilers miss many interesting features by the way, to the discovery of which the traveller must trust to his own devices; and do we not take a special personal pride and a greater delight in the good things thatwe discover for ourselves, than in those we first read of, or are told about? Much of the charm of a journey lies in making these discoveries, and in the delightful state of expectancy of mind knowing not what each day, or even hour, may reveal.CHAPTER V"Great-upon-Little"—The woods of Sussex—A maze of lanes—Frensham Pond—A holiday haunt—The legend of the shivering reeds—Rural inns—Roughing it (?)—Waverley Abbey—The monks of old—The sites of abbeys—Quiet country towns—Stocks and whipping-post—A curious font—"A haven of rest."About a mile from West Hoathly, on the way we took, we were told of a local "lion" in the shape of a huge rock, firmly balanced on a very small one, which together have earned the title of "Great-upon-Little." The great top rock looks insecure enough, and as though a push of the hand would almost send it over. This curious rock stands in a romantic and deeply wooded glen some half a mile or so from the main road, and many other strangely shaped rocks are to be found there; shapes manifestly due to the erosion of the softer stone leaving the harder portions to stand out more or less prominently. To one who has beheld the wonderful rock formations of the Yellowstone Valley in America, this "Great-upon-Little" may appear but a trivial thing; still, in its way it is striking. But it was the rock-girt glen with its green woods, a glen steeply winding down the rough hillside, that charmed me infinitely more than this natural freak—averitable fairies' glen that would have made the fortune of any watering-place were it only near to it. Cobbett in hisRural Ridesthus discourses about this rock in his own peculiar way: "At this place there is a rock which they call 'Big-upon-Little,' that is to say, a rock upon another, the top one being longer and wider than the top of the one it lies on. This big rock is no trifling concern, being as big, perhaps, as a not very small house. How, then, came this big upon little? What lifted up the big? It balances itself naturally enough, but what tossed it up? I do not like to pay a parson for teaching me while I have God's own Word to teach me; but if any parson will tell me how big came upon little, I do not know that I shall grudge him a trifle. And if he cannot tell me this; if he say, 'All that we have to do is to admire and adore,' then I tell him that I can admire and adore without his aid, and that I will keep my money in my pocket." Which shows, however clever an agriculturist he may have been, Cobbett was woefully ignorant of geology, whilst little he cared for scenery. The reading of hisRides, allowing for much skipping, was a wearisome task to me, and glad was I when I came to the end of the book. After this dose of Cobbett and his grumblings, I had to take a course of genial Charles Lamb to put me in good humour again.Our road now took us by shadowy forests, which afforded us some shelter from the quiet rain which began to fall, and here and there we glimpsed, half drowned in foliage, a lowly cottage, with its film ofascending smoke, and now and then we caught a warm and fragrant whiff of burning wood that contrasted pleasantly with the cool scent of the many trees, their leaves rain-washed and shining. So we drove on through woods and woods again, with here and there a bit of wild waste, a patch of pasture, or a furrowed field, and here and there the gleam of water—driving first this way, then that, as it took our fancy. Some ways were wide and good, and some were narrow and bad, but the country had a remote and pleasant look; so with the roads I had no quarrel. The scenery concerns me more than the road. I never hesitate to desert the smooth highway for the rough and winding lane if the latter appear the more attractive. My mind is set on exploring, on seeking out odd nooks and corners, not on rushing from one town to another, though, when the highway suits my humour, along it I go contentedly enough.So we drove on till we came to a more open country of meadows and tilled fields and stray farmsteads, but with woods beyond again, and over these a peep of distant hills with misty clouds upon them. A mellow, home-like land it was, where wandering streams kept fresh the greenery of the fields, and ancient footpaths wound in and out, and tangled hedges that so beautify the land, though they show poor husbandry, bordered the roadside on either hand. Then we struck upon a fair main road, though there was little traffic on it; in time the road forked in two, and at the fork a signpost pointed with one arm the way "To Guildford," and withthe other arm the way "To Godalming." We chose the road to Godalming because it looked the more inviting. Now we passed other woods that climbed the low hills to our right, then we began to climb the hills ourselves, to descend again into the valley on the other side; so on through a rough country, dotted with pleasant homes, both old and new, we reached the long-streeted town of Godalming. I had an idea—how I came by it I cannot say—that Godalming was a pleasant and a picturesque town; my drive through it effectually got rid of that idea. I saw nothing pleasant or picturesque about it, even allowing for the determined and depressing drizzle that dulled the outlook. Perhaps I saw things crookedly that day, but to me, certainly, Godalming looked a one-streeted affair of commonplace houses and shops, with not a feature amongst the lot worth noticing, not even its old market-house.The road we took out of the town chanced to be the famous Portsmouth road, much favoured by motorists and other vehicular traffic, and not caring for so much company, in due course we took a by-road to our right without a thought as to where it might lead. We soon got into a tangle of narrow, signpostless lanes; so narrow in one part, indeed, became our way that our hood actually at times brushed the hedges on either side, a lane where almost "two barrows might tremble when they meet." Indeed, had we met any cart, conveyance, or another motor I cannot imagine what we should have done, but we met nothing; for miles the tangle of lanes appeared to be endless, one as narrow asthe other; then at last I espied a cottage and got down to ask where the lane led, for I felt like a man in a maze. Thrice I rapped loudly at the cottage door before I got an answer; then at the third emphatic rap an old woman appeared. "I be hard o' hearing," she remarked, by way of apology for her long coming. "The lane do lead to the pond. It's only about a mile farther on." "To the pond!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "What pond? We don't want to go to a pond!" "Why,thepond, to be sure," responded she; "but I've left my baking." And that was all I could get out of her, for, doubtless anxious about her baking, she rushed incontinently indoors and left me wondering. I could only presume that we were driving to a village pond, with the uncomfortable idea that there the narrow lane might end. There was nothing to do but to drive on—there was no space to turn; for miles we had not seen a soul, so unfrequented are some of the byways of populous England, but at last a man actually appeared trudging along the road. To him I repeated my query, and got the same reply!—"To the pond"—adding, "It be only a bit farther on." I was more puzzled than ever. "What pond?" asked I. "Why, Frensham Pond, to be sure." Then it dawned upon me that a friend of mine had spoken of Frensham Pond, to which he frequently went a-fishing, and where he told me was a good inn—"the very place for a quiet holiday," and he was an artist not likely to speak favourably of a spot that had no scenic attractions.Right glad were we to escape from the narrowlane and to find ourselves at Frensham Pond, where the road widened out beside the still water, and where the little balconied inn my friend had told me about stood facing it. Now Frensham Pond is a large and beautiful sheet of water over a hundred acres in extent, and to go round it means a good three miles' walk, so the term pond is somewhat of a misnomer; "mere," I think, would be a better and less misleading title, more picturesque besides. A good deal depends on a name; at least one does expect a pleasant spot to bear a pleasant name: now "pond" is not one to conjure with.It was raining again, so we pulled up under the shelter of a spreading tree opposite the hotel, whereupon the landlord appeared at the door and invited me within; but I explained that I was only halting there, as I thought the shower would soon be over, and I wished to admire the view. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, so what need had I of an inn? "It's a lovely spot," the landlord remarked, and as I looked over the little lonely lake with its near background of pines, of heathery hills beyond these, and nothing else in view, I fully agreed with him. Even in the rain the prospect pleased me; there was an individuality about it, it was fresh to my eye, nothing quite like it had I seen before. "You really should make up your mind to stop here," the landlord continued, doubtless with an eye to business. "There's fine fishing in the pond, and a boat at your service; there's plenty of big pike and perch that are willing to be caught"—which was very kind of the fish; I have not found them so obliging in otherparts. There was a man in a boat on the water getting wet, but catching nothing, as far as I could make out, unless it were a cold. It seemed poor sport to me to sit thus patiently in a boat with the rain coming down, watching for the bob of a float on the chance of catching a fish not worth eating. Fly-fishing is quite another story. When you wander along the banks of some fair mountain river or stream, even if you have poor sport, you have a pleasant ramble over rock and boulder and amongst pleasant scenes; moreover, your time is ever agreeably occupied in casting your flies and watching them dance on the running water till comes a splash, a tug, and a tasteful trout good to look at, good to eat, and worth the basketing!Suddenly the rain stopped, the grey clouds vanished, the sun shone forth again out of a sky as blue as the summer sea; the erst leaden lake looked like molten gold, the hills became a burning purple, but the dark pines seemed darker still by the contrast with the brightness around. What wind there was had dropped, but all the reeds were quivering, and I thought of the legend of the shivering reeds.Leaving Frensham—where, by the way, in the tower of its church is preserved an ancient copper cauldron that tradition asserts once belonged to Mother Ludlam, a reputed local witch—we drove by devious roads through a sandy and heathery land, and into pine woods, the resinous odours of which filled pleasantly the air. We passed one or two lonely little inns on our way. To me a picturesque, though little regarded, feature of the roadside is the cosy country inn of the class that rises superior to the public-house but is less pretentious than an hotel, where I have found, during my old tramping days, humble doubtless, but sufficiently comfortable quarters, and where I got in touch with the simple and friendly country folk, and so could learn how the world treated them, and what they thought of it, and their ideas in general. The only way to do this is to mix with the country folk on their own ground, and clad in a suit of homely tweed, with often muddy boots, I was not looked upon as a superior person, so the talk I listened to was not curbed; only perhaps at times my speech, I feared, might betray me, for I could in no way manage the country accent, but I spoke little, whilst my ears did me silent service.Imagination fondly stoops to traceThe parlour splendours of that festive place;The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door."A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."Dear old Izaak Walton called such an inn "a good honest ale-house," and that title takes my fancy. "I'll now lead you to a good honest ale-house," says that rare old angler, "where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck upon the walls.... Come, hostess, where are you? Is supper ready?... Be as quick as you can, for I believe we are all very hungry." That is the sort of inn for me; I do not desire luxury when I go a-touring. The more homely my hostelry the more to my taste, so longas I find cleanliness, civility, and reasonable comfort thereat. I even enjoy what some people might term "roughing it" at times; in truth I have spent many delightful red-letter days (some of the most healthful and enjoyable I have ever spent) "roughing it" in a log-hut on the wild far-off Californian mountains, and there I found a wealthy and a titled Englishman doing the same thing, purely for the pleasure of it. If in some remote parts and on rare occasions I was doubtful as to the cleanliness of my inn, I made a point of not unpacking the car before I had sampled the landlord and the accommodation offered. I am glad to say that never once, on this journey, did I find the inn I selected fail to satisfy my modest requirements.Loitering along we came at the foot of a long hill, passing first through gloomy woods, to a spot low down where the indolent winding Wey widened out into a quiet, clear-watered pool, and all around were pine-clad hills; an old water-mill and one or two ancient cottages completed the scene, just serving to humanise it and nothing more. It was a lovely spot, and there we pulled up to enjoy its beauties at our leisure. I know no other country in the wide world with spots so peace-bestowing as, here and there, one finds in England, and to come upon them unawares intensifies the charm of them; I cannot think of a word that precisely defines their special character, but "benign" is not far out.Then I consulted the map and traced on it the river's course, and so made out, roughly, where we were, and it chanced I noticed on the map"Waverley Abbey" marked apparently near by. Now I had a dim recollection, but nothing more, that there was such an abbey, ruined of course, somewhere in England, but as to where it stood I had not given a thought up till that moment; if I had to hazard a guess as to its location, I am afraid I should have guessed Yorkshire, though the fact came back to me that Waverley Abbey suggested to Scott the title of one of his famous novels. Ivinghoe in Bucks is also credited with having given him the slightly altered title ofIvanhoe. Rumour asserts that his attention was called to the uncommon name by the local rhyme:Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe,Hampden of Hampden did forego,For striking ye Prynce a blow,Glad that he might escape it so."Ye Prynce" was the Black Prince, and Hampden an ancestor of John Hampden, so tradition says, and the blow was given over a dispute about a game of racquets that Hampden lost. I love these old local rhymes and sayings that the inquiring traveller so often comes upon, for they frequently relate to past historical or traditional happenings that have been wholly or half forgotten, and are only otherwise to be found in odd musty volumes that no one cares to read.We stopped the car in a sheltered corner not far from the lodge entrance to a pleasant park, and seeing no one around I ventured to ask at the lodge the whereabouts of the abbey. "You're close to it," responded the young woman, who promptly andcivilly came at my call; "it's only a short walk across the fields." Moreover, she came outside and pointed me out the way, bidding me keep to the path by the river till I came to a bridge, "then to your left you will see the ruins." Clearer instructions could no one give, and so I found the abbey. Pleasant indeed was the short stroll to it by the side of the lazy river, with the greenest of green meadows on one hand so soft to the tread, and wide spreading trees on the other that threw "tangles of light and shadow below." So listlessly the water flowed it hardly seemed to flow at all; manifestly the river was loth to leave so fair a spot to join the stormy sea, and fain would linger there in peace. I think it was Wordsworth who first endowed Nature with a living personality.Of Waverley's once stately pile little now is left but crumbling walls and vacant archways; still, its low, roofless remains cover much ground, a fact that attests its former size and glory. The quiet country around, I imagine, has not changed noticeably, if at all, since the abbey stood proudly there in its prime—to stand, as the early builders doubtless thought, till the Day of Doom; but the future was not at their command. As in the past the placid river flows by it without a murmur, the hills beyond rise boldly to the sky, the luscious meadows round about are the same luscious meadows that the old monks trod; but their erst lordly edifice is mostly dust, its stones having been basely used for other buildings, and for a long while to make and mend the roads; still, the country looks as green and fresh as ever, its youthrenewed by every recurring summer. I can recall no spot of which so poignantly and so pregnantly may be said, "Sic transit gloria mundi."An almost saintly silence brooded there; I heard neither stir of leaf nor song of bird, nor caught I sight of any living thing to break the solitude. It was as though the monks had laid a spell of profound peace over all, a spell unbroken yet—and may it never be!A region of repose it seems,A place of slumber and of dreams,Remote among the wooded hills.The peace-bestowing silence and restful solitude of the spot will linger with me as long as my memory lasts. Great must have been the temptation, in a troublous age, to be a monk, so to escape from all the turmoil of it, and to live at peace and at ease in some such earthly paradise. Many a world-weary man to-day well might sigh for such a harbour of rest.Truly those monks of old had an eye for pleasant places; they built "in fair grounds," as the sites of their many abbeys prove. Father Gonzague, Prior of Storrington, puts it: "Some were built in the valley by the running stream, or on the jutting hill, overhanging the river bank, like St. Agatha's and Eggleston in Yorkshire; others close on the seashore, within hearing of the perpetual cadence of the waves, like Torre, the wealthiest of the English houses in Devonshire, on a spot the charm of which is not easily surpassed, backed by hills and uplands, with just room enough on the plain for the noblechurch, the monastery and its outbuildings, its gardens, its fish ponds, and its mill; or again among the deep and narrow dales of Derbyshire; or the gentle swell of the Kentish hills; in the forest land of Nottinghamshire, like Welbeck; or else in remote and wild retreats, speaking of penance and detachment, like the Abbey of Magdalen's Vale at Shap, in Westmoreland." Then there are others in situations quite as romantic and as gracious: there is Tintern by the winding Wye, Bolton by the tumbling Wharfe, Fountains sheltered amongst the woods, Rievaulx amongst the hills, Llanthony lone amongst the mountains, Cleeve secluded in the "Vale of Flowers," and many another—all in well-favoured spots and tranquil ones in ancient days, and some, like Waverley, as tranquil now.A better judge of scenery than the monk of old there could not be; where stood his abbey there was a pleasant land, well watered, overflowing with beauty, and not seldom "overflowing with milk and honey" too. If one could trust that rare romancer Time, the monks were a jovial lot—"peace to their ashes"—reaping where they had not sown, and garnering where they had not toiled; making sure of heaven above whilst also making sure of the good things of the world below, ay, and enjoying them to the full as much as any sinner. To make the best of both worlds, especially this one, that was their motto, and they lived up to it. Of the modern monks that I have seen, one half look fat and lazy, the other half lean and sour, with an aspect of piety that would not have disgraced the strictest Puritan.But I know not if one can fairly judge of the old by the new. "Tempora mutantur," and possibly monks with them, and this is all that need be said.Of the scant abbey ruins the only portion not wholly exposed to the weather is what looks like the crypt, with its fine and delicate Early English pillars and groined roof; but it has a fireplace, and from a label attached to its walls I learned it was the "Layman's Refectory." The rest of the ruins are roofless, and it is difficult to make out, with any certainty, even the site of the church—at least I found it so. On the greensward I noticed, level with the ground surface, a stone coffin vacant and exposed to the sky, presumably discovered there and left undisturbed save for the removal of its covering; this was hollowed out to the shape of a body, with a place for the head; probably it belonged to one of the stately abbots' dust and ashes long years ago, but the interior of the stone still preserves the chisel marks of the ancient mason, as sharp almost to-day as when first made. Somehow those marks so old, yet so clear, that but for the time-stains upon them might be of recent date, bridged over the centuries and brought the past quite close to me.Leaving the old abbey to its peaceful seclusion, we once more resumed our way and soon found ourselves at Farnham, far famed for its castle and its ancient coaching hostelry—"The Bush," to wit—and possibly also for hops and ale, but of these I am not so sure. "The Bush," says Thackeray in hisVirginians, "is a famous inn which has stood in Farnham town for these three hundred years."But why I refer to this old house, in passing, is that its sign is the oldest of signs, which, in ancient days, consisted simply of a bush hung out at the end of a pole to show that wine, or ale, was sold there. Hence doubtless the saying of Shakespeare, "Good wine needs no bush."After Farnham we struck the Winchester highway, dusty with much traffic at the time, so to escape both the traffic and the dust we took the first lane we came to—a lane that led past hop-gardens, up hill and down again; next winding round a well-wooded park it brought us to the little out-of-the-world village of Crondall, where I noticed one or two quaint half-timber houses of sufficient charm to cause me to stop and sketch them. Then after a short stretch of tree-bordered road we arrived at Odiham, a sleepy, sunny, wide-streeted town to which "no noisy railway speeds"; perhaps because of this it retains unhurt so much of its past-time naturalness. On a previous journey we had driven through Odiham, without however stopping, even though it pleased us, but we reached it by a different way. There is often a great deal in the first impression of a place, and this frequently depends upon how you approach it. No doubt there is a certain charm in the first view of fresh places, when such places possess the power to please and present themselves under favourable aspects, but it is wisdom not to linger in them overlong lest the eye should discover imperfections, so their poetry lose much of its glamour, or wholly vanish like a dream that has passed.Before, when at Odiham, the "George" inn there, facing the roadway with its cheerful front and projecting sign, attracted my attention: a typical old coaching hostelry that looks as though it had seen more prosperous days, yet it had not retired from business but kept open wide its doors, bravely facing changed circumstances. "Posting House" in letters large is still boldly displayed on its front, but its posting is done to-day by the landlord's motor-car!Paterson's Roads, the Bradshaw of our ancestors, mentions the "George" as the inn of the place, and nearly every old roadside inn one comes across still retains the very title given to it in that rare eighteenth and early nineteenth-century road-book, according to which of its many editions one consults.Now being, by chance, at Odiham again, I thought I would put up at the "George" and sample its entertainment. Quarters in the real country best please me, but they do not always materialise; next I prefer a modest hostelry in some quiet little town, and here I had my desire. So beneath the sign of the "George" I slept that night, and there I found a pleasant garden in the rear, good fare of the simple sort, much civility, and a most moderate bill; so, when next morning I departed, I left it with my blessing. I discovered that the inn was, unfortunately, for sale; it may have been sold by now. I can only trust that the old house may fall into the hands of worthy successors, and that it will, for as long as it stands, and long may that be, retain its good old name; for itmust be remembered it is the landlord makes the inn.Does not Alonzo of Aragon say that the recommendations of age are "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read"? and I should like to add old inns to rest at, and by preference those inns of the candle or lamp, mahogany or oak furniture, and wood-fire-on-the-hearth period, and these, the Fates be praised, are still to be found by the diligent searcher, and when found the wise traveller will not tell everybody about them. In this respect selfishness is a virtue, a moral obligation for the benefit of other quiet-loving travellers; for it is so easy to convert the old into the new, but the new cannot be converted into the old. I was tempted to photograph one of these ancient little inns I chanced upon, on account of its artistic signboard, for it is rare to meet with such artistic creations, though a few may be found to delight the eye of the wayfarer. My photograph, here reproduced, will show the skilful and effective painting of this signboard.Having still an hour or two of daylight left, I took a stroll round the little town; it did not take me long; then I came to the church, and in the roadway before it I discovered, carefully roofed over, its ancient stocks and whipping-post; evidently the Odiham people prize these relics of "the good" or bad "old days." Then I took a glance within the church, where I found much to interest me; there I noticed seven old brasses in an excellent state of preservation—for old brasses—and these were kept both bright and clean; they were fixed against the south wall all in close order, being doubtless removed from the floor at some former restoration. Though removed thus from their proper place over the dust they commemorate, and where they should rightly be, they certainly are seen to better advantage where they are—and their dead owners are not far off. All the brasses but two happily retain their inscriptions; the earliest bears date of 1400; one to a priest in his vestments that of 1498; and there is one to a man in armour, roughly but effectively engraved. The piscina, I noticed, had an ornamented pillar support; I do not remember having seen such an arrangement before. I noticed also the finely carved Elizabethan or Jacobean pulpit, and besides, a thing you seldom nowadays see in churches, an oak gallery, of considerable antiquity, upheld by stout oak posts. Then I became aware that I was not alone in the building, for I heard quiet footsteps, and looking round observed a man at the font, apparently examining it with considerable interest, so too I needs must go and examine it. Said the stranger to me, "This is a curious font and a very ancient one." "It certainly looks it," I replied. "Perhaps you may not know," he continued, "but it possesses a peculiar feature only to be found in one other font in England, and that is at Youlgrave in Derbyshire. Permit me to point out to you the cup-like projection on the top; this is provided to drain back into the basin any drops of water that might be accidentally spilt at a christening." Some people delight to be informing, but the information they impart depends for its value on their special knowledge of special subjects. I observed that the stranger was carefully consulting a handbook when I approached him, which he put away in his pocket, and I thought to myself possibly the stranger has just read up about the font in that book, and is merely imparting to me second-hand information gleaned from it just for the self-importance of imparting it, and to show his cleverness. I might have done him an injustice, but he spoke in a manner so authoritative as to challenge criticism. Anyway I have not the implicit faith in handbooks most people have, for more than once I have found them wrong in facts beyond dispute. So I have examined for myself the "curious" projection, being a bit of an archaeologist, though not a learned one, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing curious about it, and that it had merely been intended to receive a hinge for a font cover. But such an explanation is perhaps too simple to be satisfactory to certain minds to which only the singular or mysterious appeals.AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."Round the top of the font runs a much-worn inscription in long Lombardic, or other early lettering, of which I could make nothing; no more could the stranger, but he made excuse that the light was very poor; so it was. "If we only had a guide-book," I said suggestively, but he failed to take the hint.Leaving the church I noticed some picturesque alms-houses adjoining its quiet "God's Acre," built of brick but grey with age, of one story, uneven-roofed, with shapely chimney-stacks, whichhouses with their enclosed garden, full of flowers—and weeds—reminded me of Walker's famous picture "A Haven of Rest," though they were not the original of it. Then as the sun was setting I sought "mine inn."
CHAPTER IVDane Hill—Epitaphs—A wild bit of country—Ashdown Forest—Exploring—The use of maps—Curious inn signs—A Tudor home—The Devil's door—A medieval priest and guest house—Old-fashioned flowers—An ancient interior—Curious carvings—Roads in the old times—The window and hearth tax.Out of Horsted Keynes we followed a friendly lane that quickly dipped down into a deep and wooded valley and then rose steeply to Dane Hill, an elevated spot that probably derives its name from an early Danish camp, or from some forgotten battle taking place there during the Danish occupation; its commanding situation suggests it may have been a fortified post. Place-names, preserved through generations, often mark spots where some far-off and unrecorded event has taken place, and I am inclined to think Dane Hill is one of these. I hunted through several volumes of general and local history, but failed to find any mention of a battle there; sometimes, however, tradition is founded on fact, though one cannot accept any tradition as trustworthy; still, where probability and tradition go hand in hand, I am inclined to give ear to tradition. Some day perhaps some Archaeological Society may go digging about Dane Hill and make discoveries.Dane Hill is crowned by a fine, large church, not ancient, nor yet quite of recent days, for its stones have grown grey with years, however many or few those years may be. Access is afforded to the churchyard by some steps, and at the side of these stands a modern, tall-pillared, canopied cross; the carving and shaft of this are beautifully neat, a careful copy of old work, yet without even a hint of its spirit or vigour, it being all scraped and smoothed to a meaningless finish, as though any mark of handiwork was a thing to be ashamed of; the old monkish craftsmen knew their art better, for it is the human touch revealed upon it that gives meaning to the meaningless stone. There is no soul behind the modern workman's tool: how can we expect it when for long years we have been making a human machine of him? Look at his lifeless productions, however painstakingly carved, and compare them with the grotesque gargoyles that verily seem to breathe and to struggle of the medieval sculptor, or any other like work of his hands; the latter too was a creator, not a mere copyist. His creatures resemble nothing on earth or in water that has been as far as I know, yet they look like things that could live.Somehow the large churchyard looked strange to me, and for the moment I could not reason why; then suddenly I realised it was because there was not a gravestone in it, not even a grass-grown mound: did the people of the small hamlet never die? The harvest gathered in God's acre is generally so plentiful. Then I solved the mystery; onthe opposite side of the road I discovered a little cemetery hidden by trees and where the gravestones were many, each with its loving tribute to the underlying dead. To judge by the tombstone inscriptions in our churchyards, what paragons of perfection lie sleeping there, what saintly virtues they possessed! Would that I had met them in the flesh! Why always of yesterday and not of to-day? Small wonder that a little girl who had been reading similar eulogies asked her father, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Only once have I come upon an epitaph that might possibly bear an unkind interpretation, and this read, "He was ...," leaving the rest to be filled in by the imagination. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, according to Plutarch, "laid down a justly commended law that no man must speak ill of the dead," and wisely ordered, for the dead cannot defend themselves nor can have any say upon what is inscribed above their dust, excepting in those few instances when the living have written their own epitaphs, not always laudatory by the way, and one cannot but admire their candour. For example, there is the much-quoted one that Dr. Lloyd, a dean of St. Asaph (deceased 1663), wrote for himself, and it will bear quoting again:This is the epitaphOf the Dean of St. Asaph,Who, by keeping a tableBetter than he was able,Ran much into debtWhich is not paid yet.At Dane Hill we came upon a good main roadthat led us to a wild, open upland reaching far on either hand, a delightful bit of unsophisticated nature where the land is poor as land well can be, so poor that according to a local expression "it would make a crow cry to fly over it," yet beautiful in colour to look upon. A glorious stretch of wide and wild country bare to the sky and swept by all the winds that blow, and the absence of any bounding hedges or fences left the eye at liberty to rove over it unchecked to the furthermost horizon of distant hills "rolling in the blue," and to the fir-fringed heights ahead of Ashdown Forest darkly outlined against the sky. Glorious in colour with its masses of purple heather and golden gorse, and sweet was the odour of the gorse that came wafted to us on the soft west wind. All England is not tamed or cultivated, and I am thankful, in a scenic sense, that some portions of it, such as the moors and heaths, still resist the dominion of man, as they have done for ages past. Not so Cobbett, for thus he writes apparently of this very spot in hisRural Rides: "You cross Ashdown Forest ... verily the most villainously ugly spot I ever saw in England ... getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till at last you see some rising spots which instead of trees present you with some ragged, hideous rocks." But no land was beautiful in Cobbett's view, I take it, unless it would grow good wheat; he notices the rocks, "hideous" in his eyes, though romantic in others, but has not a word for the glowing gorse or purple heather that I presumed flourished there in his day, as now. What wasgorse or heather or their rich colours to him? You cannot eat gorse or heather; mere beauty he considered not, but a well-grown field of turnips sent him into raptures. Ashdown Forest climbing the hillside, though it only grows trees, is to me with its green glades, its groves of pine and their dim pillared recesses, as delightfully shady and as silent a retreat as the heart of man could desire, yet Cobbett deems it a "most villainously ugly spot." Let no one trust Cobbett'sRural Ridesas a touring guide. Nor by his own showing does he appear to have been a very gracious traveller, for thus he writes of one inn where he stopped the night and left the next morning early: "By making a great stir in rousing waiters and boots and maids, and leaving behind me the name of a 'noisy troublesome fellow,' I got clear." I read Cobbett'sRural Ridesin the hopes of gaining some information about scenery—and the only information I could gain was about the qualities, good or bad, of agricultural land. Now the titleRural Ridessuggests pleasant rovings, not lectures upon land and upon politics.We drove on to a spot right on the top of a hill overlooking Ashdown Forest, and there the road began a long and gradual descent, out of the sunshine into the green gloom of the woods. This descent we should have taken had we not espied a lonely byway to our left that appeared to keep on the high and open ground, so we chose the sunshine, the breezy upland, and the byway: a solitary signpost pointed down this with "West Hoathly" boldly displayed on its extended arm. Now West Hoathlywas but a name to us, but to West Hoathly we would go; we might make discoveries there—which we did.Writing of signposts reminds me that when touring in Somerset some years ago I asked my way of a man by the roadside, and he said to me, "Go straight on to the next parson; he will direct you." "The next parson," I exclaimed in astonishment; "whatever do you mean? I may not meet a parson for miles, or at all." "I see you don't understand," was the reply, "but us calls direction-posts parsons in these parts." "How is that?" I queried. "Well, I don't exactly know why, but us do." As I could glean nothing further I sought information elsewhere, and was fortunate enough to find a man who explained to me that "Some folks hereabouts calls direction-posts parsons, because they point the right way but don't go it. It's quite an old joke in these parts;" and he grinned as he repeated the joke to me. Old though it was I had not heard it before, though a Somerset clergyman to whom I told the story often had.A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon itremote from town or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me, travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude; then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200, covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom, Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and, to the vision, brought the distance so near.So, keeping still on the ridge of the hill, we came to West Hoathly standing high above the country around. Here we pulled up under the shelter of a yew-tree overhanging the churchyard, and opposite to a clean and creeper-covered little inn curiously entitled "The Cat"; and this reminds me that we observed some singular inn signs during the journey, and here are samples of a few of them: "The World turned upside Down," but unfortunately there were only those words on the signboard; I should have liked to see a pictured representation of the world shown thus. Then there was "The Devil's Elbow"—how did that originate, I wonder?—and "The Merry Mouth," showing a big mouth smiling a welcome on the sign; "The Labour in Vain" had pictured two white men endeavouring to scrub a black man white, truly a quaint idea. In Wales I noticed "The Aleppo Merchant," a sign I had not seen before, and of its significance I know nothing. "The End of the World" was realised by the world in flames; and there were others.AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.Strolling about the ancient village, I espied, on the further side of the churchyard, a grey old home of the Tudor time, so substantially built those long years ago that to-day it looks, but for the time-toning of its stones and the slight crumbling of one here and there, almost as perfect as when first finished. Its mullion windows are without the usual transomes, and do not seem to need them; their leaden lattice-panes gleamed, just then, cheerfully in the light. Windows are the eyes of a house, in their way as expressive as those of a human being. I like to see a clear eye and a bright window. The old home was retired behind a high and buttressed wall, and in the centre of the wall was an arched outer doorway.Somewhat back from the village streetStands the old-fashioned country seat.Its roof is of stone slates, the most lasting and the most lovely kind of roof imaginable, beautiful when new, and yet more beautiful when old; the stone slates in this case, as in every other I know, being carefully "sized down, the smaller ones to the top and the bigger towards the eaves, which gives one the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish's scales or a bird's feathers." There is no ornamentation at all about the building except some restrained carving at the top of the arched doorway in the garden wall; the charm of thebuilding lies in its simplicity and goodly proportions, perhaps also in the feeling of lastingness in that it seems fitted to still stand unhurt, as in the past, all the winds and storms of heaven for years uncounted, without a thought of repairs. A modern builder's "desirable residence" never gives me such an impression—indeed, it does not appear to me even "desirable." We seem to have lost all love of building simply, let alone honestly. We too often seek after striking effect and even quaintness, so as to challenge attention, if not admiration, to the loss of all repose and the sentiment of home; for a man's dwelling-place should be first of all to him a home.Once I knew a country squire who desired to build himself a house on a fresh and more healthy site than that in which he lived, so he employed an up-to-date architect, full of ideas, to design him one. In due course the architect placed the elevation of the proposed house before the squire. It was a most unrestful production of needless gables for the sake of gables, tortured stone, and meaningless carvings, in all styles and no style at all, but intended to be impressive and to please. The architect said he thought it original and that it would "look well in stone." "Good gracious," exclaimed the squire, "do you think I am going to take a chair and sit out-of-doors and look at my house? I want one to live in." "Those are the very words I said to him," the squire told me, adding, "I asked for a home, and he produced a nightmare!"Modest in size though that old Tudor home at West Hoathly is, yet it suggests a certain sense of importance, just because it is so well built, with no pretence about it; and what a charm those two words, "no pretence," in an age of pretence and shams, convey. Pretence is an undesirable quality that threatens to submerge us all some day unless we cast it off, realising the utter nonsense and snobbishness of it. Modesty is a thing above most others to be desired, though a famous American once declared that "in our free country a man can get on very well without it." I quite believe that. But you cannot, architecturally speaking, in an ancient land "put new wine into old wine skins" successfully, or with any sense of artistic fitness—the new wine of novelty, I mean; that is best left for fresh lands that have no traditions.I took a photograph of the old Tudor house from the churchyard, and there I got a-chatting with a man in a faded tweed suit who had watched my proceedings with apparent interest. I took him to be a local inhabitant, but to use an antiquary's favourite expression, "I could not quite sum him up," nor did he enlighten me as to who or what he was; but, after all, it was no affair of mine. At first he talked about the weather, by way of introduction, I presume, for it is a topic that never fails amongst country folk. I really do not know what they would do in dull places without the weather to praise or abuse; even the tramp, whose sole object is to beg, invariably first starts upon the weather, and so he feels his way."If you are interested in old places," said the stranger, "you should see the ancient priest-house a little lower down the road," pointing indefinitely into space. "It's well worth seeing; and you might like to take a glance at the church, it's very old too." I thanked him for the information. Then he led me to the porch and pointed out the oak door there that was grey, not dark, with age, begging me to notice the date upon it, marked in big studded nails, "March 31, 1626." "There's a Devil's door in the north wall; you might take a look at that now you're here, but it's built up," remarked my companion. "The Devil's door!" I exclaimed. "I never heard of such a thing. Surely the Devil does not go to church?" I was puzzled; I asked for enlightenment. "Well, you see," came the reply, "it's certainly not everybody nowadays who is aware of the fact, but in past times there used to be a small doorway on the north side of churches to let the Devil out when a child was baptized, and it was always kept open on such an occasion; but that's an ancient superstition." I was anxious to learn more about it. The stranger had become interesting, and I wished to chat longer with him; but he suddenly exclaimed, "I must be really getting home or the missus will wonder whatever has become of me. I promised to be home ten minutes ago; it don't do to offend my missus"—and I thought he laid a special and meaning emphasis on "my"; so he bade me a polite good-day and hurried off. He was a meek-looking man. I hope he did not get a scolding for the time he took talkingto me. I wished his missus had been away from home that day, for I was anxious to learn more about the Devil's door; my curiosity was aroused. That call of the missus was most provoking. I nearly followed the stranger home to glean what further information on the way I could, but I thought he might not care for my company under the circumstances. Thus the traveller in out-of-the-way places picks up forgotten facts or fables, surprising traditions, and odd bits of local lore; but the chaff has to be winnowed from the corn.On my return home I hunted in every likely book for any information upon the Devil's doorway, but found no allusion to the subject. I sought out several parsons, presuming that one of them would surely be able to throw some light on the matter; but they all declared that they had never heard of such a thing, so I began to think that the stranger had made a fool of me, and that I was myself a fool to be so easily taken in. Yet when I recalled the stranger's face, it had an honest look; he seemed hardly a man to invent so poor a joke, and, provided it was a joke, I failed to see the humour of it. Then one day afterwards, when chatting with a learned antiquary, I suddenly remembered about the Devil's door; so I mentioned the tale about it I had been told, and he confirmed the truth of it. "Such doors in churches were quite common, if not universal, long ago," he said; "they were always on the north or Devil's side of the church, and may still be found in many churches, though their purport has long been forgotten. I even remember a certainparson who, only twenty odd years past, insisted on having this door kept wide open during a christening, so as to afford a ready escape for the Devil, who was supposed to be driven out of the child." Curiously enough, after making so many vain inquiries on the subject, I found friends to whom the former existence and use of the Devil's door was quite well known.Leaving the church I went down the village street to inspect the ancient priest-house. This proved to be a long, low, half-timber building; its roof was of stone slates, as most roofs of the period were; the house has manifestly been restored at some recent time, though carefully restored backwards, as far as I could judge, to the intention of the original builder. Unfortunately my photograph, here reproduced, gives no hint of the bloom of age that is upon it, or of the subtle curves of the weather-bleached timber caused by the stress of time. I have found in photographing many an ancient building, unless its walls are actually broken and decayed away, how little the photograph realises its antiquity. In my photograph of Boarstall Tower (that we shall come to later on), in spite of the years the tower has stood, and in spite of the battering of two sieges it has undergone, the ancient structure, hoary with the antiquity of over five centuries, looks almost as though the builder had but lately completed his work.The approach to the priest-house was by a stone-flagged footway across a garden gay and sweet-scented with old-fashioned flowers. "Scents are the souls of flowers," says an old writer whose name I have forgotten: if only these hardy, old-fashioned flowers were rare and difficult to grow, how we should prize them for their charm of colour and their sweetness, both so happily combined! But the modern highly-paid gardener despises them as common: well, the uncultivated foxglove is common enough flourishing in neglected spots, yet no pampered hothouse flower seems half so graceful, stately, or pleasing to my eye.A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.The door of the house was of oak and nail-studded, and there was a quaintly-shaped iron knocker on it of some antiquity; a gentle tap or two of this brought an old woman to me. "Could I see the house?" I queried. "Why, certainly," she replied; "that's what I be here for, to show it to any one, and to take care of it. I'm only too pleased to see a visitor, I don't see many; it be a bit dull living here alone, it makes me feel almost silly like at times. Come in, please." Fortune was kind; I hardly expected to see over the place, and I found not only ready admission but a guide at my service. The old body proved intelligent but talkative; she told me one thing after another about the place and its history in such breathless succession that I scarce could follow her; I begged for a little time just to jot down a note or two, but as soon as I started to do this she recommenced prattling harder than ever. I think I never before met a woman capable of getting in so many words to the minute, though I have met many very capable ones in that respect. The worst of it was, she had really much of interest to relate, but so eager and inso much haste was she to relate it that I could only secure stray items out of her hurricane of abundance. She had the history of the old place by heart, and was learnedly—would only that she had been leisurely—informative about its contents.First I was shown the living-room, or ancient kitchen, a picturesquely antique apartment with its low black-beamed ceiling, its red brick floor, its recessed lattice window, its door that opened with a wooden latch, its wide stone hearth fireplace, with andirons in position and logs of wood laid between them ready for the burning, not to forget the chimney crane with an iron pot suspended from it, nor the brick oven by the side for the baking of bread—and what superlatively excellent bread those old brick ovens produced! In some things we have progressed backwards, and one of these is the making and baking of bread. The iron fire-back, I noticed, had the royal arms cast in bold relief upon it, but in place of the unicorn was the Elizabethan griffin, and on the quarterings of the shield (I believe that is the correct heraldic expression) were only the three lions of England and the fleurs-de-lis of France, each repeated diagonally. On the big oak beam above the fireplace were carved sundry curious devices; they were but meaningless hieroglyphics to me, and the old body confessed that no one had been able to make anything of them; possibly they were "invented out of the carver's brain," with no other thought than to while away a dull hour or two.A good deal of what the old body told me might have been told to the winds for aught I couldremember or make note of; even an American tourist devoting ten whole days "to do" England in somehow, and allowing out of this twenty minutes for Westminster Abbey, could not have complained of such a guide delaying him. Not that all, or even the majority of Americans are like this, for I have met many cultured Americans seeing the old country every whit as leisurely as I. Indeed, I knew an American party who came over to take a motoring tour through England, and were so fascinated by a remote English village they chanced upon, besides finding there a really comfortable, old-fashioned inn, that the party, with one consent, stopped a whole week in that village, contentedly exploring the country around; and one of the party wrote me afterwards that she had never spent such a pleasant or a profitable week in her life, and she thought she might safely say the same of the rest.Of the hurried notes I managed to make about the priest-house at the time, and those I set down from memory afterwards, I gathered that it was built not later than 1350, possibly earlier. Originally there was a large hall heated by a fire on a raised stone set in the centre, the smoke of which escaped through a hole in the roof, and the old plaster of the roof still shows the blackening caused by the smoke. At either end of the hall were doors leading to offices, the sleeping-rooms being above these. Such was its simple plan. About 1522 the present chimney was built on the site of the ancient open fire, and the hall divided into two compartments "as you now see it." "And how do you know allthis?" queried I, when I could get a word in. "Well, you see, sir, at different times members of Archaeological Societies have been over to examine the building, and I always went over with them, and so I learnt a lot about it. The house was originally built by the Prior of Lewes as a hospital for invalid priests, and it also served the purpose of a guest-house for stray travellers; the roads in these parts were then but rough tracks through wild forests, full of wild beasts, they tell me. In the chimney a hiding hole was discovered, but it was only three feet square, and as a man could not get into it, it is supposed it was for hiding treasures, or perhaps books."The old house was full of ancient furniture and of odds and ends of curious things that served our ancestors. I remember there was a steel striker and a flint with a tinder-box; I tried my prentice hand with these, and after several attempts at last obtained a light, but with difficulty; it must have been trying and tedious work using this steel, flint, and tinder-box on a cold winter's morning. Little wonder so many houses in past times had their fires piled up at night so that they might keep in till the morning, when the smouldering ashes readily caused the fresh fuel put on them to become ignited. At one old manor-house I went over some years back, I was informed that the fire in the hall had not been out for two centuries; even in summer it was kept alight, day and night, for the walls of that house were thick, and the hall was only pleasantly warm on the fine August noon when I was there.A friend of mine told me that in 1908 he discovered a cottage at Huckaback, Castleton, Yorkshire, where the turf fire had not been out for sixty-eight years.Upstairs in the priest-house we noticed that the internal partitions were of wattle and daub; the daub, the old body said, consisting of pond slime combined with cow hair and chipped straw: pond slime does not sound nice, but the daub was lasting, to which fact my eye and the touch of my hand bore testimony. Then hanging on the walls we observed two parchment deeds framed, one being the original lease from "The Pryor of Lewes to T. Browne of Westhotheleigh, of the Parsonage House and barn." This was dated "9th yeare of Henry VIII." It did not escape my notice that, even so far back, this Brown rejoiced in an added "e." The other had two red seals attached, and related to the conveying of "the Rectory and Church of Westhotheley lately granted by Henry VIII. for her lyfe to Lady Anne Cleve." This was dated "Jan. 21st. 2nd of Elizabeth, 1560." The lettering of both of these documents was as clear and as black as the day they were written, and so quite easy to read, more so than many a modern letter I receive. The world has revolved countless times on its axis since the date of those deeds; but the writing of to-day is not so good as it was then, not even typewriting.On the ceiling of one of the top rooms is a Dedication Cross, deeply cut, showing the religious nature of the house; also we noticed there, put on one side, some fine oak carving which I learntformerly formed part of the chancel screen of the village church, it being torn down by the Puritans, who destroyed, or made a clearance of, "all carvings, images, and decorations" they found in the sacred edifice; and a rare clearance they appear to have made at West Hoathly. Besides this there was a large board showing signs of weathering, and plainly painted on it was "Cheese Room." "That," explained the guide, "did not belong to this place, but to a farmhouse near by. It is a relic of the window-tax days, when a window, used purely for trade purposes, was free of the tax, provided a notice of its use was placed above it. That is one of those notices. Possibly you may not have seen such a thing before." I had not. Indeed, I had almost forgotten that there had ever been such an iniquitous tax (and that there was a hearth-tax also), and was quite unaware of any such an exemption from it. I was always learning something on the road.Very interesting is the old priest-house at West Hoathly, the more so because it is not bare, but supplied with ancient, though not the original, furniture in keeping with the place, and with domestic appliances that were used in days remote. On my return home I sought for particulars of this house in two or three modern guide-books to the county, but could find no mention of it, although the church was briefly noticed, which shows that guide-book compilers miss many interesting features by the way, to the discovery of which the traveller must trust to his own devices; and do we not take a special personal pride and a greater delight in the good things thatwe discover for ourselves, than in those we first read of, or are told about? Much of the charm of a journey lies in making these discoveries, and in the delightful state of expectancy of mind knowing not what each day, or even hour, may reveal.
Dane Hill—Epitaphs—A wild bit of country—Ashdown Forest—Exploring—The use of maps—Curious inn signs—A Tudor home—The Devil's door—A medieval priest and guest house—Old-fashioned flowers—An ancient interior—Curious carvings—Roads in the old times—The window and hearth tax.
Out of Horsted Keynes we followed a friendly lane that quickly dipped down into a deep and wooded valley and then rose steeply to Dane Hill, an elevated spot that probably derives its name from an early Danish camp, or from some forgotten battle taking place there during the Danish occupation; its commanding situation suggests it may have been a fortified post. Place-names, preserved through generations, often mark spots where some far-off and unrecorded event has taken place, and I am inclined to think Dane Hill is one of these. I hunted through several volumes of general and local history, but failed to find any mention of a battle there; sometimes, however, tradition is founded on fact, though one cannot accept any tradition as trustworthy; still, where probability and tradition go hand in hand, I am inclined to give ear to tradition. Some day perhaps some Archaeological Society may go digging about Dane Hill and make discoveries.
Dane Hill is crowned by a fine, large church, not ancient, nor yet quite of recent days, for its stones have grown grey with years, however many or few those years may be. Access is afforded to the churchyard by some steps, and at the side of these stands a modern, tall-pillared, canopied cross; the carving and shaft of this are beautifully neat, a careful copy of old work, yet without even a hint of its spirit or vigour, it being all scraped and smoothed to a meaningless finish, as though any mark of handiwork was a thing to be ashamed of; the old monkish craftsmen knew their art better, for it is the human touch revealed upon it that gives meaning to the meaningless stone. There is no soul behind the modern workman's tool: how can we expect it when for long years we have been making a human machine of him? Look at his lifeless productions, however painstakingly carved, and compare them with the grotesque gargoyles that verily seem to breathe and to struggle of the medieval sculptor, or any other like work of his hands; the latter too was a creator, not a mere copyist. His creatures resemble nothing on earth or in water that has been as far as I know, yet they look like things that could live.
Somehow the large churchyard looked strange to me, and for the moment I could not reason why; then suddenly I realised it was because there was not a gravestone in it, not even a grass-grown mound: did the people of the small hamlet never die? The harvest gathered in God's acre is generally so plentiful. Then I solved the mystery; onthe opposite side of the road I discovered a little cemetery hidden by trees and where the gravestones were many, each with its loving tribute to the underlying dead. To judge by the tombstone inscriptions in our churchyards, what paragons of perfection lie sleeping there, what saintly virtues they possessed! Would that I had met them in the flesh! Why always of yesterday and not of to-day? Small wonder that a little girl who had been reading similar eulogies asked her father, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Only once have I come upon an epitaph that might possibly bear an unkind interpretation, and this read, "He was ...," leaving the rest to be filled in by the imagination. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, according to Plutarch, "laid down a justly commended law that no man must speak ill of the dead," and wisely ordered, for the dead cannot defend themselves nor can have any say upon what is inscribed above their dust, excepting in those few instances when the living have written their own epitaphs, not always laudatory by the way, and one cannot but admire their candour. For example, there is the much-quoted one that Dr. Lloyd, a dean of St. Asaph (deceased 1663), wrote for himself, and it will bear quoting again:
This is the epitaphOf the Dean of St. Asaph,Who, by keeping a tableBetter than he was able,Ran much into debtWhich is not paid yet.
At Dane Hill we came upon a good main roadthat led us to a wild, open upland reaching far on either hand, a delightful bit of unsophisticated nature where the land is poor as land well can be, so poor that according to a local expression "it would make a crow cry to fly over it," yet beautiful in colour to look upon. A glorious stretch of wide and wild country bare to the sky and swept by all the winds that blow, and the absence of any bounding hedges or fences left the eye at liberty to rove over it unchecked to the furthermost horizon of distant hills "rolling in the blue," and to the fir-fringed heights ahead of Ashdown Forest darkly outlined against the sky. Glorious in colour with its masses of purple heather and golden gorse, and sweet was the odour of the gorse that came wafted to us on the soft west wind. All England is not tamed or cultivated, and I am thankful, in a scenic sense, that some portions of it, such as the moors and heaths, still resist the dominion of man, as they have done for ages past. Not so Cobbett, for thus he writes apparently of this very spot in hisRural Rides: "You cross Ashdown Forest ... verily the most villainously ugly spot I ever saw in England ... getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till at last you see some rising spots which instead of trees present you with some ragged, hideous rocks." But no land was beautiful in Cobbett's view, I take it, unless it would grow good wheat; he notices the rocks, "hideous" in his eyes, though romantic in others, but has not a word for the glowing gorse or purple heather that I presumed flourished there in his day, as now. What wasgorse or heather or their rich colours to him? You cannot eat gorse or heather; mere beauty he considered not, but a well-grown field of turnips sent him into raptures. Ashdown Forest climbing the hillside, though it only grows trees, is to me with its green glades, its groves of pine and their dim pillared recesses, as delightfully shady and as silent a retreat as the heart of man could desire, yet Cobbett deems it a "most villainously ugly spot." Let no one trust Cobbett'sRural Ridesas a touring guide. Nor by his own showing does he appear to have been a very gracious traveller, for thus he writes of one inn where he stopped the night and left the next morning early: "By making a great stir in rousing waiters and boots and maids, and leaving behind me the name of a 'noisy troublesome fellow,' I got clear." I read Cobbett'sRural Ridesin the hopes of gaining some information about scenery—and the only information I could gain was about the qualities, good or bad, of agricultural land. Now the titleRural Ridessuggests pleasant rovings, not lectures upon land and upon politics.
We drove on to a spot right on the top of a hill overlooking Ashdown Forest, and there the road began a long and gradual descent, out of the sunshine into the green gloom of the woods. This descent we should have taken had we not espied a lonely byway to our left that appeared to keep on the high and open ground, so we chose the sunshine, the breezy upland, and the byway: a solitary signpost pointed down this with "West Hoathly" boldly displayed on its extended arm. Now West Hoathlywas but a name to us, but to West Hoathly we would go; we might make discoveries there—which we did.
Writing of signposts reminds me that when touring in Somerset some years ago I asked my way of a man by the roadside, and he said to me, "Go straight on to the next parson; he will direct you." "The next parson," I exclaimed in astonishment; "whatever do you mean? I may not meet a parson for miles, or at all." "I see you don't understand," was the reply, "but us calls direction-posts parsons in these parts." "How is that?" I queried. "Well, I don't exactly know why, but us do." As I could glean nothing further I sought information elsewhere, and was fortunate enough to find a man who explained to me that "Some folks hereabouts calls direction-posts parsons, because they point the right way but don't go it. It's quite an old joke in these parts;" and he grinned as he repeated the joke to me. Old though it was I had not heard it before, though a Somerset clergyman to whom I told the story often had.
A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon itremote from town or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me, travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude; then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200, covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom, Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.
Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and, to the vision, brought the distance so near.
So, keeping still on the ridge of the hill, we came to West Hoathly standing high above the country around. Here we pulled up under the shelter of a yew-tree overhanging the churchyard, and opposite to a clean and creeper-covered little inn curiously entitled "The Cat"; and this reminds me that we observed some singular inn signs during the journey, and here are samples of a few of them: "The World turned upside Down," but unfortunately there were only those words on the signboard; I should have liked to see a pictured representation of the world shown thus. Then there was "The Devil's Elbow"—how did that originate, I wonder?—and "The Merry Mouth," showing a big mouth smiling a welcome on the sign; "The Labour in Vain" had pictured two white men endeavouring to scrub a black man white, truly a quaint idea. In Wales I noticed "The Aleppo Merchant," a sign I had not seen before, and of its significance I know nothing. "The End of the World" was realised by the world in flames; and there were others.
AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.
AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.
AN OLD TUDOR HOME, WEST HOATHLY.
Strolling about the ancient village, I espied, on the further side of the churchyard, a grey old home of the Tudor time, so substantially built those long years ago that to-day it looks, but for the time-toning of its stones and the slight crumbling of one here and there, almost as perfect as when first finished. Its mullion windows are without the usual transomes, and do not seem to need them; their leaden lattice-panes gleamed, just then, cheerfully in the light. Windows are the eyes of a house, in their way as expressive as those of a human being. I like to see a clear eye and a bright window. The old home was retired behind a high and buttressed wall, and in the centre of the wall was an arched outer doorway.
Somewhat back from the village streetStands the old-fashioned country seat.
Its roof is of stone slates, the most lasting and the most lovely kind of roof imaginable, beautiful when new, and yet more beautiful when old; the stone slates in this case, as in every other I know, being carefully "sized down, the smaller ones to the top and the bigger towards the eaves, which gives one the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish's scales or a bird's feathers." There is no ornamentation at all about the building except some restrained carving at the top of the arched doorway in the garden wall; the charm of thebuilding lies in its simplicity and goodly proportions, perhaps also in the feeling of lastingness in that it seems fitted to still stand unhurt, as in the past, all the winds and storms of heaven for years uncounted, without a thought of repairs. A modern builder's "desirable residence" never gives me such an impression—indeed, it does not appear to me even "desirable." We seem to have lost all love of building simply, let alone honestly. We too often seek after striking effect and even quaintness, so as to challenge attention, if not admiration, to the loss of all repose and the sentiment of home; for a man's dwelling-place should be first of all to him a home.
Once I knew a country squire who desired to build himself a house on a fresh and more healthy site than that in which he lived, so he employed an up-to-date architect, full of ideas, to design him one. In due course the architect placed the elevation of the proposed house before the squire. It was a most unrestful production of needless gables for the sake of gables, tortured stone, and meaningless carvings, in all styles and no style at all, but intended to be impressive and to please. The architect said he thought it original and that it would "look well in stone." "Good gracious," exclaimed the squire, "do you think I am going to take a chair and sit out-of-doors and look at my house? I want one to live in." "Those are the very words I said to him," the squire told me, adding, "I asked for a home, and he produced a nightmare!"
Modest in size though that old Tudor home at West Hoathly is, yet it suggests a certain sense of importance, just because it is so well built, with no pretence about it; and what a charm those two words, "no pretence," in an age of pretence and shams, convey. Pretence is an undesirable quality that threatens to submerge us all some day unless we cast it off, realising the utter nonsense and snobbishness of it. Modesty is a thing above most others to be desired, though a famous American once declared that "in our free country a man can get on very well without it." I quite believe that. But you cannot, architecturally speaking, in an ancient land "put new wine into old wine skins" successfully, or with any sense of artistic fitness—the new wine of novelty, I mean; that is best left for fresh lands that have no traditions.
I took a photograph of the old Tudor house from the churchyard, and there I got a-chatting with a man in a faded tweed suit who had watched my proceedings with apparent interest. I took him to be a local inhabitant, but to use an antiquary's favourite expression, "I could not quite sum him up," nor did he enlighten me as to who or what he was; but, after all, it was no affair of mine. At first he talked about the weather, by way of introduction, I presume, for it is a topic that never fails amongst country folk. I really do not know what they would do in dull places without the weather to praise or abuse; even the tramp, whose sole object is to beg, invariably first starts upon the weather, and so he feels his way.
"If you are interested in old places," said the stranger, "you should see the ancient priest-house a little lower down the road," pointing indefinitely into space. "It's well worth seeing; and you might like to take a glance at the church, it's very old too." I thanked him for the information. Then he led me to the porch and pointed out the oak door there that was grey, not dark, with age, begging me to notice the date upon it, marked in big studded nails, "March 31, 1626." "There's a Devil's door in the north wall; you might take a look at that now you're here, but it's built up," remarked my companion. "The Devil's door!" I exclaimed. "I never heard of such a thing. Surely the Devil does not go to church?" I was puzzled; I asked for enlightenment. "Well, you see," came the reply, "it's certainly not everybody nowadays who is aware of the fact, but in past times there used to be a small doorway on the north side of churches to let the Devil out when a child was baptized, and it was always kept open on such an occasion; but that's an ancient superstition." I was anxious to learn more about it. The stranger had become interesting, and I wished to chat longer with him; but he suddenly exclaimed, "I must be really getting home or the missus will wonder whatever has become of me. I promised to be home ten minutes ago; it don't do to offend my missus"—and I thought he laid a special and meaning emphasis on "my"; so he bade me a polite good-day and hurried off. He was a meek-looking man. I hope he did not get a scolding for the time he took talkingto me. I wished his missus had been away from home that day, for I was anxious to learn more about the Devil's door; my curiosity was aroused. That call of the missus was most provoking. I nearly followed the stranger home to glean what further information on the way I could, but I thought he might not care for my company under the circumstances. Thus the traveller in out-of-the-way places picks up forgotten facts or fables, surprising traditions, and odd bits of local lore; but the chaff has to be winnowed from the corn.
On my return home I hunted in every likely book for any information upon the Devil's doorway, but found no allusion to the subject. I sought out several parsons, presuming that one of them would surely be able to throw some light on the matter; but they all declared that they had never heard of such a thing, so I began to think that the stranger had made a fool of me, and that I was myself a fool to be so easily taken in. Yet when I recalled the stranger's face, it had an honest look; he seemed hardly a man to invent so poor a joke, and, provided it was a joke, I failed to see the humour of it. Then one day afterwards, when chatting with a learned antiquary, I suddenly remembered about the Devil's door; so I mentioned the tale about it I had been told, and he confirmed the truth of it. "Such doors in churches were quite common, if not universal, long ago," he said; "they were always on the north or Devil's side of the church, and may still be found in many churches, though their purport has long been forgotten. I even remember a certainparson who, only twenty odd years past, insisted on having this door kept wide open during a christening, so as to afford a ready escape for the Devil, who was supposed to be driven out of the child." Curiously enough, after making so many vain inquiries on the subject, I found friends to whom the former existence and use of the Devil's door was quite well known.
Leaving the church I went down the village street to inspect the ancient priest-house. This proved to be a long, low, half-timber building; its roof was of stone slates, as most roofs of the period were; the house has manifestly been restored at some recent time, though carefully restored backwards, as far as I could judge, to the intention of the original builder. Unfortunately my photograph, here reproduced, gives no hint of the bloom of age that is upon it, or of the subtle curves of the weather-bleached timber caused by the stress of time. I have found in photographing many an ancient building, unless its walls are actually broken and decayed away, how little the photograph realises its antiquity. In my photograph of Boarstall Tower (that we shall come to later on), in spite of the years the tower has stood, and in spite of the battering of two sieges it has undergone, the ancient structure, hoary with the antiquity of over five centuries, looks almost as though the builder had but lately completed his work.
The approach to the priest-house was by a stone-flagged footway across a garden gay and sweet-scented with old-fashioned flowers. "Scents are the souls of flowers," says an old writer whose name I have forgotten: if only these hardy, old-fashioned flowers were rare and difficult to grow, how we should prize them for their charm of colour and their sweetness, both so happily combined! But the modern highly-paid gardener despises them as common: well, the uncultivated foxglove is common enough flourishing in neglected spots, yet no pampered hothouse flower seems half so graceful, stately, or pleasing to my eye.
A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.
A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.
A PRE-REFORMATION PRIEST-HOUSE, WEST HOATHLY.
The door of the house was of oak and nail-studded, and there was a quaintly-shaped iron knocker on it of some antiquity; a gentle tap or two of this brought an old woman to me. "Could I see the house?" I queried. "Why, certainly," she replied; "that's what I be here for, to show it to any one, and to take care of it. I'm only too pleased to see a visitor, I don't see many; it be a bit dull living here alone, it makes me feel almost silly like at times. Come in, please." Fortune was kind; I hardly expected to see over the place, and I found not only ready admission but a guide at my service. The old body proved intelligent but talkative; she told me one thing after another about the place and its history in such breathless succession that I scarce could follow her; I begged for a little time just to jot down a note or two, but as soon as I started to do this she recommenced prattling harder than ever. I think I never before met a woman capable of getting in so many words to the minute, though I have met many very capable ones in that respect. The worst of it was, she had really much of interest to relate, but so eager and inso much haste was she to relate it that I could only secure stray items out of her hurricane of abundance. She had the history of the old place by heart, and was learnedly—would only that she had been leisurely—informative about its contents.
First I was shown the living-room, or ancient kitchen, a picturesquely antique apartment with its low black-beamed ceiling, its red brick floor, its recessed lattice window, its door that opened with a wooden latch, its wide stone hearth fireplace, with andirons in position and logs of wood laid between them ready for the burning, not to forget the chimney crane with an iron pot suspended from it, nor the brick oven by the side for the baking of bread—and what superlatively excellent bread those old brick ovens produced! In some things we have progressed backwards, and one of these is the making and baking of bread. The iron fire-back, I noticed, had the royal arms cast in bold relief upon it, but in place of the unicorn was the Elizabethan griffin, and on the quarterings of the shield (I believe that is the correct heraldic expression) were only the three lions of England and the fleurs-de-lis of France, each repeated diagonally. On the big oak beam above the fireplace were carved sundry curious devices; they were but meaningless hieroglyphics to me, and the old body confessed that no one had been able to make anything of them; possibly they were "invented out of the carver's brain," with no other thought than to while away a dull hour or two.
A good deal of what the old body told me might have been told to the winds for aught I couldremember or make note of; even an American tourist devoting ten whole days "to do" England in somehow, and allowing out of this twenty minutes for Westminster Abbey, could not have complained of such a guide delaying him. Not that all, or even the majority of Americans are like this, for I have met many cultured Americans seeing the old country every whit as leisurely as I. Indeed, I knew an American party who came over to take a motoring tour through England, and were so fascinated by a remote English village they chanced upon, besides finding there a really comfortable, old-fashioned inn, that the party, with one consent, stopped a whole week in that village, contentedly exploring the country around; and one of the party wrote me afterwards that she had never spent such a pleasant or a profitable week in her life, and she thought she might safely say the same of the rest.
Of the hurried notes I managed to make about the priest-house at the time, and those I set down from memory afterwards, I gathered that it was built not later than 1350, possibly earlier. Originally there was a large hall heated by a fire on a raised stone set in the centre, the smoke of which escaped through a hole in the roof, and the old plaster of the roof still shows the blackening caused by the smoke. At either end of the hall were doors leading to offices, the sleeping-rooms being above these. Such was its simple plan. About 1522 the present chimney was built on the site of the ancient open fire, and the hall divided into two compartments "as you now see it." "And how do you know allthis?" queried I, when I could get a word in. "Well, you see, sir, at different times members of Archaeological Societies have been over to examine the building, and I always went over with them, and so I learnt a lot about it. The house was originally built by the Prior of Lewes as a hospital for invalid priests, and it also served the purpose of a guest-house for stray travellers; the roads in these parts were then but rough tracks through wild forests, full of wild beasts, they tell me. In the chimney a hiding hole was discovered, but it was only three feet square, and as a man could not get into it, it is supposed it was for hiding treasures, or perhaps books."
The old house was full of ancient furniture and of odds and ends of curious things that served our ancestors. I remember there was a steel striker and a flint with a tinder-box; I tried my prentice hand with these, and after several attempts at last obtained a light, but with difficulty; it must have been trying and tedious work using this steel, flint, and tinder-box on a cold winter's morning. Little wonder so many houses in past times had their fires piled up at night so that they might keep in till the morning, when the smouldering ashes readily caused the fresh fuel put on them to become ignited. At one old manor-house I went over some years back, I was informed that the fire in the hall had not been out for two centuries; even in summer it was kept alight, day and night, for the walls of that house were thick, and the hall was only pleasantly warm on the fine August noon when I was there.A friend of mine told me that in 1908 he discovered a cottage at Huckaback, Castleton, Yorkshire, where the turf fire had not been out for sixty-eight years.
Upstairs in the priest-house we noticed that the internal partitions were of wattle and daub; the daub, the old body said, consisting of pond slime combined with cow hair and chipped straw: pond slime does not sound nice, but the daub was lasting, to which fact my eye and the touch of my hand bore testimony. Then hanging on the walls we observed two parchment deeds framed, one being the original lease from "The Pryor of Lewes to T. Browne of Westhotheleigh, of the Parsonage House and barn." This was dated "9th yeare of Henry VIII." It did not escape my notice that, even so far back, this Brown rejoiced in an added "e." The other had two red seals attached, and related to the conveying of "the Rectory and Church of Westhotheley lately granted by Henry VIII. for her lyfe to Lady Anne Cleve." This was dated "Jan. 21st. 2nd of Elizabeth, 1560." The lettering of both of these documents was as clear and as black as the day they were written, and so quite easy to read, more so than many a modern letter I receive. The world has revolved countless times on its axis since the date of those deeds; but the writing of to-day is not so good as it was then, not even typewriting.
On the ceiling of one of the top rooms is a Dedication Cross, deeply cut, showing the religious nature of the house; also we noticed there, put on one side, some fine oak carving which I learntformerly formed part of the chancel screen of the village church, it being torn down by the Puritans, who destroyed, or made a clearance of, "all carvings, images, and decorations" they found in the sacred edifice; and a rare clearance they appear to have made at West Hoathly. Besides this there was a large board showing signs of weathering, and plainly painted on it was "Cheese Room." "That," explained the guide, "did not belong to this place, but to a farmhouse near by. It is a relic of the window-tax days, when a window, used purely for trade purposes, was free of the tax, provided a notice of its use was placed above it. That is one of those notices. Possibly you may not have seen such a thing before." I had not. Indeed, I had almost forgotten that there had ever been such an iniquitous tax (and that there was a hearth-tax also), and was quite unaware of any such an exemption from it. I was always learning something on the road.
Very interesting is the old priest-house at West Hoathly, the more so because it is not bare, but supplied with ancient, though not the original, furniture in keeping with the place, and with domestic appliances that were used in days remote. On my return home I sought for particulars of this house in two or three modern guide-books to the county, but could find no mention of it, although the church was briefly noticed, which shows that guide-book compilers miss many interesting features by the way, to the discovery of which the traveller must trust to his own devices; and do we not take a special personal pride and a greater delight in the good things thatwe discover for ourselves, than in those we first read of, or are told about? Much of the charm of a journey lies in making these discoveries, and in the delightful state of expectancy of mind knowing not what each day, or even hour, may reveal.
CHAPTER V"Great-upon-Little"—The woods of Sussex—A maze of lanes—Frensham Pond—A holiday haunt—The legend of the shivering reeds—Rural inns—Roughing it (?)—Waverley Abbey—The monks of old—The sites of abbeys—Quiet country towns—Stocks and whipping-post—A curious font—"A haven of rest."About a mile from West Hoathly, on the way we took, we were told of a local "lion" in the shape of a huge rock, firmly balanced on a very small one, which together have earned the title of "Great-upon-Little." The great top rock looks insecure enough, and as though a push of the hand would almost send it over. This curious rock stands in a romantic and deeply wooded glen some half a mile or so from the main road, and many other strangely shaped rocks are to be found there; shapes manifestly due to the erosion of the softer stone leaving the harder portions to stand out more or less prominently. To one who has beheld the wonderful rock formations of the Yellowstone Valley in America, this "Great-upon-Little" may appear but a trivial thing; still, in its way it is striking. But it was the rock-girt glen with its green woods, a glen steeply winding down the rough hillside, that charmed me infinitely more than this natural freak—averitable fairies' glen that would have made the fortune of any watering-place were it only near to it. Cobbett in hisRural Ridesthus discourses about this rock in his own peculiar way: "At this place there is a rock which they call 'Big-upon-Little,' that is to say, a rock upon another, the top one being longer and wider than the top of the one it lies on. This big rock is no trifling concern, being as big, perhaps, as a not very small house. How, then, came this big upon little? What lifted up the big? It balances itself naturally enough, but what tossed it up? I do not like to pay a parson for teaching me while I have God's own Word to teach me; but if any parson will tell me how big came upon little, I do not know that I shall grudge him a trifle. And if he cannot tell me this; if he say, 'All that we have to do is to admire and adore,' then I tell him that I can admire and adore without his aid, and that I will keep my money in my pocket." Which shows, however clever an agriculturist he may have been, Cobbett was woefully ignorant of geology, whilst little he cared for scenery. The reading of hisRides, allowing for much skipping, was a wearisome task to me, and glad was I when I came to the end of the book. After this dose of Cobbett and his grumblings, I had to take a course of genial Charles Lamb to put me in good humour again.Our road now took us by shadowy forests, which afforded us some shelter from the quiet rain which began to fall, and here and there we glimpsed, half drowned in foliage, a lowly cottage, with its film ofascending smoke, and now and then we caught a warm and fragrant whiff of burning wood that contrasted pleasantly with the cool scent of the many trees, their leaves rain-washed and shining. So we drove on through woods and woods again, with here and there a bit of wild waste, a patch of pasture, or a furrowed field, and here and there the gleam of water—driving first this way, then that, as it took our fancy. Some ways were wide and good, and some were narrow and bad, but the country had a remote and pleasant look; so with the roads I had no quarrel. The scenery concerns me more than the road. I never hesitate to desert the smooth highway for the rough and winding lane if the latter appear the more attractive. My mind is set on exploring, on seeking out odd nooks and corners, not on rushing from one town to another, though, when the highway suits my humour, along it I go contentedly enough.So we drove on till we came to a more open country of meadows and tilled fields and stray farmsteads, but with woods beyond again, and over these a peep of distant hills with misty clouds upon them. A mellow, home-like land it was, where wandering streams kept fresh the greenery of the fields, and ancient footpaths wound in and out, and tangled hedges that so beautify the land, though they show poor husbandry, bordered the roadside on either hand. Then we struck upon a fair main road, though there was little traffic on it; in time the road forked in two, and at the fork a signpost pointed with one arm the way "To Guildford," and withthe other arm the way "To Godalming." We chose the road to Godalming because it looked the more inviting. Now we passed other woods that climbed the low hills to our right, then we began to climb the hills ourselves, to descend again into the valley on the other side; so on through a rough country, dotted with pleasant homes, both old and new, we reached the long-streeted town of Godalming. I had an idea—how I came by it I cannot say—that Godalming was a pleasant and a picturesque town; my drive through it effectually got rid of that idea. I saw nothing pleasant or picturesque about it, even allowing for the determined and depressing drizzle that dulled the outlook. Perhaps I saw things crookedly that day, but to me, certainly, Godalming looked a one-streeted affair of commonplace houses and shops, with not a feature amongst the lot worth noticing, not even its old market-house.The road we took out of the town chanced to be the famous Portsmouth road, much favoured by motorists and other vehicular traffic, and not caring for so much company, in due course we took a by-road to our right without a thought as to where it might lead. We soon got into a tangle of narrow, signpostless lanes; so narrow in one part, indeed, became our way that our hood actually at times brushed the hedges on either side, a lane where almost "two barrows might tremble when they meet." Indeed, had we met any cart, conveyance, or another motor I cannot imagine what we should have done, but we met nothing; for miles the tangle of lanes appeared to be endless, one as narrow asthe other; then at last I espied a cottage and got down to ask where the lane led, for I felt like a man in a maze. Thrice I rapped loudly at the cottage door before I got an answer; then at the third emphatic rap an old woman appeared. "I be hard o' hearing," she remarked, by way of apology for her long coming. "The lane do lead to the pond. It's only about a mile farther on." "To the pond!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "What pond? We don't want to go to a pond!" "Why,thepond, to be sure," responded she; "but I've left my baking." And that was all I could get out of her, for, doubtless anxious about her baking, she rushed incontinently indoors and left me wondering. I could only presume that we were driving to a village pond, with the uncomfortable idea that there the narrow lane might end. There was nothing to do but to drive on—there was no space to turn; for miles we had not seen a soul, so unfrequented are some of the byways of populous England, but at last a man actually appeared trudging along the road. To him I repeated my query, and got the same reply!—"To the pond"—adding, "It be only a bit farther on." I was more puzzled than ever. "What pond?" asked I. "Why, Frensham Pond, to be sure." Then it dawned upon me that a friend of mine had spoken of Frensham Pond, to which he frequently went a-fishing, and where he told me was a good inn—"the very place for a quiet holiday," and he was an artist not likely to speak favourably of a spot that had no scenic attractions.Right glad were we to escape from the narrowlane and to find ourselves at Frensham Pond, where the road widened out beside the still water, and where the little balconied inn my friend had told me about stood facing it. Now Frensham Pond is a large and beautiful sheet of water over a hundred acres in extent, and to go round it means a good three miles' walk, so the term pond is somewhat of a misnomer; "mere," I think, would be a better and less misleading title, more picturesque besides. A good deal depends on a name; at least one does expect a pleasant spot to bear a pleasant name: now "pond" is not one to conjure with.It was raining again, so we pulled up under the shelter of a spreading tree opposite the hotel, whereupon the landlord appeared at the door and invited me within; but I explained that I was only halting there, as I thought the shower would soon be over, and I wished to admire the view. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, so what need had I of an inn? "It's a lovely spot," the landlord remarked, and as I looked over the little lonely lake with its near background of pines, of heathery hills beyond these, and nothing else in view, I fully agreed with him. Even in the rain the prospect pleased me; there was an individuality about it, it was fresh to my eye, nothing quite like it had I seen before. "You really should make up your mind to stop here," the landlord continued, doubtless with an eye to business. "There's fine fishing in the pond, and a boat at your service; there's plenty of big pike and perch that are willing to be caught"—which was very kind of the fish; I have not found them so obliging in otherparts. There was a man in a boat on the water getting wet, but catching nothing, as far as I could make out, unless it were a cold. It seemed poor sport to me to sit thus patiently in a boat with the rain coming down, watching for the bob of a float on the chance of catching a fish not worth eating. Fly-fishing is quite another story. When you wander along the banks of some fair mountain river or stream, even if you have poor sport, you have a pleasant ramble over rock and boulder and amongst pleasant scenes; moreover, your time is ever agreeably occupied in casting your flies and watching them dance on the running water till comes a splash, a tug, and a tasteful trout good to look at, good to eat, and worth the basketing!Suddenly the rain stopped, the grey clouds vanished, the sun shone forth again out of a sky as blue as the summer sea; the erst leaden lake looked like molten gold, the hills became a burning purple, but the dark pines seemed darker still by the contrast with the brightness around. What wind there was had dropped, but all the reeds were quivering, and I thought of the legend of the shivering reeds.Leaving Frensham—where, by the way, in the tower of its church is preserved an ancient copper cauldron that tradition asserts once belonged to Mother Ludlam, a reputed local witch—we drove by devious roads through a sandy and heathery land, and into pine woods, the resinous odours of which filled pleasantly the air. We passed one or two lonely little inns on our way. To me a picturesque, though little regarded, feature of the roadside is the cosy country inn of the class that rises superior to the public-house but is less pretentious than an hotel, where I have found, during my old tramping days, humble doubtless, but sufficiently comfortable quarters, and where I got in touch with the simple and friendly country folk, and so could learn how the world treated them, and what they thought of it, and their ideas in general. The only way to do this is to mix with the country folk on their own ground, and clad in a suit of homely tweed, with often muddy boots, I was not looked upon as a superior person, so the talk I listened to was not curbed; only perhaps at times my speech, I feared, might betray me, for I could in no way manage the country accent, but I spoke little, whilst my ears did me silent service.Imagination fondly stoops to traceThe parlour splendours of that festive place;The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door."A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."Dear old Izaak Walton called such an inn "a good honest ale-house," and that title takes my fancy. "I'll now lead you to a good honest ale-house," says that rare old angler, "where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck upon the walls.... Come, hostess, where are you? Is supper ready?... Be as quick as you can, for I believe we are all very hungry." That is the sort of inn for me; I do not desire luxury when I go a-touring. The more homely my hostelry the more to my taste, so longas I find cleanliness, civility, and reasonable comfort thereat. I even enjoy what some people might term "roughing it" at times; in truth I have spent many delightful red-letter days (some of the most healthful and enjoyable I have ever spent) "roughing it" in a log-hut on the wild far-off Californian mountains, and there I found a wealthy and a titled Englishman doing the same thing, purely for the pleasure of it. If in some remote parts and on rare occasions I was doubtful as to the cleanliness of my inn, I made a point of not unpacking the car before I had sampled the landlord and the accommodation offered. I am glad to say that never once, on this journey, did I find the inn I selected fail to satisfy my modest requirements.Loitering along we came at the foot of a long hill, passing first through gloomy woods, to a spot low down where the indolent winding Wey widened out into a quiet, clear-watered pool, and all around were pine-clad hills; an old water-mill and one or two ancient cottages completed the scene, just serving to humanise it and nothing more. It was a lovely spot, and there we pulled up to enjoy its beauties at our leisure. I know no other country in the wide world with spots so peace-bestowing as, here and there, one finds in England, and to come upon them unawares intensifies the charm of them; I cannot think of a word that precisely defines their special character, but "benign" is not far out.Then I consulted the map and traced on it the river's course, and so made out, roughly, where we were, and it chanced I noticed on the map"Waverley Abbey" marked apparently near by. Now I had a dim recollection, but nothing more, that there was such an abbey, ruined of course, somewhere in England, but as to where it stood I had not given a thought up till that moment; if I had to hazard a guess as to its location, I am afraid I should have guessed Yorkshire, though the fact came back to me that Waverley Abbey suggested to Scott the title of one of his famous novels. Ivinghoe in Bucks is also credited with having given him the slightly altered title ofIvanhoe. Rumour asserts that his attention was called to the uncommon name by the local rhyme:Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe,Hampden of Hampden did forego,For striking ye Prynce a blow,Glad that he might escape it so."Ye Prynce" was the Black Prince, and Hampden an ancestor of John Hampden, so tradition says, and the blow was given over a dispute about a game of racquets that Hampden lost. I love these old local rhymes and sayings that the inquiring traveller so often comes upon, for they frequently relate to past historical or traditional happenings that have been wholly or half forgotten, and are only otherwise to be found in odd musty volumes that no one cares to read.We stopped the car in a sheltered corner not far from the lodge entrance to a pleasant park, and seeing no one around I ventured to ask at the lodge the whereabouts of the abbey. "You're close to it," responded the young woman, who promptly andcivilly came at my call; "it's only a short walk across the fields." Moreover, she came outside and pointed me out the way, bidding me keep to the path by the river till I came to a bridge, "then to your left you will see the ruins." Clearer instructions could no one give, and so I found the abbey. Pleasant indeed was the short stroll to it by the side of the lazy river, with the greenest of green meadows on one hand so soft to the tread, and wide spreading trees on the other that threw "tangles of light and shadow below." So listlessly the water flowed it hardly seemed to flow at all; manifestly the river was loth to leave so fair a spot to join the stormy sea, and fain would linger there in peace. I think it was Wordsworth who first endowed Nature with a living personality.Of Waverley's once stately pile little now is left but crumbling walls and vacant archways; still, its low, roofless remains cover much ground, a fact that attests its former size and glory. The quiet country around, I imagine, has not changed noticeably, if at all, since the abbey stood proudly there in its prime—to stand, as the early builders doubtless thought, till the Day of Doom; but the future was not at their command. As in the past the placid river flows by it without a murmur, the hills beyond rise boldly to the sky, the luscious meadows round about are the same luscious meadows that the old monks trod; but their erst lordly edifice is mostly dust, its stones having been basely used for other buildings, and for a long while to make and mend the roads; still, the country looks as green and fresh as ever, its youthrenewed by every recurring summer. I can recall no spot of which so poignantly and so pregnantly may be said, "Sic transit gloria mundi."An almost saintly silence brooded there; I heard neither stir of leaf nor song of bird, nor caught I sight of any living thing to break the solitude. It was as though the monks had laid a spell of profound peace over all, a spell unbroken yet—and may it never be!A region of repose it seems,A place of slumber and of dreams,Remote among the wooded hills.The peace-bestowing silence and restful solitude of the spot will linger with me as long as my memory lasts. Great must have been the temptation, in a troublous age, to be a monk, so to escape from all the turmoil of it, and to live at peace and at ease in some such earthly paradise. Many a world-weary man to-day well might sigh for such a harbour of rest.Truly those monks of old had an eye for pleasant places; they built "in fair grounds," as the sites of their many abbeys prove. Father Gonzague, Prior of Storrington, puts it: "Some were built in the valley by the running stream, or on the jutting hill, overhanging the river bank, like St. Agatha's and Eggleston in Yorkshire; others close on the seashore, within hearing of the perpetual cadence of the waves, like Torre, the wealthiest of the English houses in Devonshire, on a spot the charm of which is not easily surpassed, backed by hills and uplands, with just room enough on the plain for the noblechurch, the monastery and its outbuildings, its gardens, its fish ponds, and its mill; or again among the deep and narrow dales of Derbyshire; or the gentle swell of the Kentish hills; in the forest land of Nottinghamshire, like Welbeck; or else in remote and wild retreats, speaking of penance and detachment, like the Abbey of Magdalen's Vale at Shap, in Westmoreland." Then there are others in situations quite as romantic and as gracious: there is Tintern by the winding Wye, Bolton by the tumbling Wharfe, Fountains sheltered amongst the woods, Rievaulx amongst the hills, Llanthony lone amongst the mountains, Cleeve secluded in the "Vale of Flowers," and many another—all in well-favoured spots and tranquil ones in ancient days, and some, like Waverley, as tranquil now.A better judge of scenery than the monk of old there could not be; where stood his abbey there was a pleasant land, well watered, overflowing with beauty, and not seldom "overflowing with milk and honey" too. If one could trust that rare romancer Time, the monks were a jovial lot—"peace to their ashes"—reaping where they had not sown, and garnering where they had not toiled; making sure of heaven above whilst also making sure of the good things of the world below, ay, and enjoying them to the full as much as any sinner. To make the best of both worlds, especially this one, that was their motto, and they lived up to it. Of the modern monks that I have seen, one half look fat and lazy, the other half lean and sour, with an aspect of piety that would not have disgraced the strictest Puritan.But I know not if one can fairly judge of the old by the new. "Tempora mutantur," and possibly monks with them, and this is all that need be said.Of the scant abbey ruins the only portion not wholly exposed to the weather is what looks like the crypt, with its fine and delicate Early English pillars and groined roof; but it has a fireplace, and from a label attached to its walls I learned it was the "Layman's Refectory." The rest of the ruins are roofless, and it is difficult to make out, with any certainty, even the site of the church—at least I found it so. On the greensward I noticed, level with the ground surface, a stone coffin vacant and exposed to the sky, presumably discovered there and left undisturbed save for the removal of its covering; this was hollowed out to the shape of a body, with a place for the head; probably it belonged to one of the stately abbots' dust and ashes long years ago, but the interior of the stone still preserves the chisel marks of the ancient mason, as sharp almost to-day as when first made. Somehow those marks so old, yet so clear, that but for the time-stains upon them might be of recent date, bridged over the centuries and brought the past quite close to me.Leaving the old abbey to its peaceful seclusion, we once more resumed our way and soon found ourselves at Farnham, far famed for its castle and its ancient coaching hostelry—"The Bush," to wit—and possibly also for hops and ale, but of these I am not so sure. "The Bush," says Thackeray in hisVirginians, "is a famous inn which has stood in Farnham town for these three hundred years."But why I refer to this old house, in passing, is that its sign is the oldest of signs, which, in ancient days, consisted simply of a bush hung out at the end of a pole to show that wine, or ale, was sold there. Hence doubtless the saying of Shakespeare, "Good wine needs no bush."After Farnham we struck the Winchester highway, dusty with much traffic at the time, so to escape both the traffic and the dust we took the first lane we came to—a lane that led past hop-gardens, up hill and down again; next winding round a well-wooded park it brought us to the little out-of-the-world village of Crondall, where I noticed one or two quaint half-timber houses of sufficient charm to cause me to stop and sketch them. Then after a short stretch of tree-bordered road we arrived at Odiham, a sleepy, sunny, wide-streeted town to which "no noisy railway speeds"; perhaps because of this it retains unhurt so much of its past-time naturalness. On a previous journey we had driven through Odiham, without however stopping, even though it pleased us, but we reached it by a different way. There is often a great deal in the first impression of a place, and this frequently depends upon how you approach it. No doubt there is a certain charm in the first view of fresh places, when such places possess the power to please and present themselves under favourable aspects, but it is wisdom not to linger in them overlong lest the eye should discover imperfections, so their poetry lose much of its glamour, or wholly vanish like a dream that has passed.Before, when at Odiham, the "George" inn there, facing the roadway with its cheerful front and projecting sign, attracted my attention: a typical old coaching hostelry that looks as though it had seen more prosperous days, yet it had not retired from business but kept open wide its doors, bravely facing changed circumstances. "Posting House" in letters large is still boldly displayed on its front, but its posting is done to-day by the landlord's motor-car!Paterson's Roads, the Bradshaw of our ancestors, mentions the "George" as the inn of the place, and nearly every old roadside inn one comes across still retains the very title given to it in that rare eighteenth and early nineteenth-century road-book, according to which of its many editions one consults.Now being, by chance, at Odiham again, I thought I would put up at the "George" and sample its entertainment. Quarters in the real country best please me, but they do not always materialise; next I prefer a modest hostelry in some quiet little town, and here I had my desire. So beneath the sign of the "George" I slept that night, and there I found a pleasant garden in the rear, good fare of the simple sort, much civility, and a most moderate bill; so, when next morning I departed, I left it with my blessing. I discovered that the inn was, unfortunately, for sale; it may have been sold by now. I can only trust that the old house may fall into the hands of worthy successors, and that it will, for as long as it stands, and long may that be, retain its good old name; for itmust be remembered it is the landlord makes the inn.Does not Alonzo of Aragon say that the recommendations of age are "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read"? and I should like to add old inns to rest at, and by preference those inns of the candle or lamp, mahogany or oak furniture, and wood-fire-on-the-hearth period, and these, the Fates be praised, are still to be found by the diligent searcher, and when found the wise traveller will not tell everybody about them. In this respect selfishness is a virtue, a moral obligation for the benefit of other quiet-loving travellers; for it is so easy to convert the old into the new, but the new cannot be converted into the old. I was tempted to photograph one of these ancient little inns I chanced upon, on account of its artistic signboard, for it is rare to meet with such artistic creations, though a few may be found to delight the eye of the wayfarer. My photograph, here reproduced, will show the skilful and effective painting of this signboard.Having still an hour or two of daylight left, I took a stroll round the little town; it did not take me long; then I came to the church, and in the roadway before it I discovered, carefully roofed over, its ancient stocks and whipping-post; evidently the Odiham people prize these relics of "the good" or bad "old days." Then I took a glance within the church, where I found much to interest me; there I noticed seven old brasses in an excellent state of preservation—for old brasses—and these were kept both bright and clean; they were fixed against the south wall all in close order, being doubtless removed from the floor at some former restoration. Though removed thus from their proper place over the dust they commemorate, and where they should rightly be, they certainly are seen to better advantage where they are—and their dead owners are not far off. All the brasses but two happily retain their inscriptions; the earliest bears date of 1400; one to a priest in his vestments that of 1498; and there is one to a man in armour, roughly but effectively engraved. The piscina, I noticed, had an ornamented pillar support; I do not remember having seen such an arrangement before. I noticed also the finely carved Elizabethan or Jacobean pulpit, and besides, a thing you seldom nowadays see in churches, an oak gallery, of considerable antiquity, upheld by stout oak posts. Then I became aware that I was not alone in the building, for I heard quiet footsteps, and looking round observed a man at the font, apparently examining it with considerable interest, so too I needs must go and examine it. Said the stranger to me, "This is a curious font and a very ancient one." "It certainly looks it," I replied. "Perhaps you may not know," he continued, "but it possesses a peculiar feature only to be found in one other font in England, and that is at Youlgrave in Derbyshire. Permit me to point out to you the cup-like projection on the top; this is provided to drain back into the basin any drops of water that might be accidentally spilt at a christening." Some people delight to be informing, but the information they impart depends for its value on their special knowledge of special subjects. I observed that the stranger was carefully consulting a handbook when I approached him, which he put away in his pocket, and I thought to myself possibly the stranger has just read up about the font in that book, and is merely imparting to me second-hand information gleaned from it just for the self-importance of imparting it, and to show his cleverness. I might have done him an injustice, but he spoke in a manner so authoritative as to challenge criticism. Anyway I have not the implicit faith in handbooks most people have, for more than once I have found them wrong in facts beyond dispute. So I have examined for myself the "curious" projection, being a bit of an archaeologist, though not a learned one, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing curious about it, and that it had merely been intended to receive a hinge for a font cover. But such an explanation is perhaps too simple to be satisfactory to certain minds to which only the singular or mysterious appeals.AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."Round the top of the font runs a much-worn inscription in long Lombardic, or other early lettering, of which I could make nothing; no more could the stranger, but he made excuse that the light was very poor; so it was. "If we only had a guide-book," I said suggestively, but he failed to take the hint.Leaving the church I noticed some picturesque alms-houses adjoining its quiet "God's Acre," built of brick but grey with age, of one story, uneven-roofed, with shapely chimney-stacks, whichhouses with their enclosed garden, full of flowers—and weeds—reminded me of Walker's famous picture "A Haven of Rest," though they were not the original of it. Then as the sun was setting I sought "mine inn."
"Great-upon-Little"—The woods of Sussex—A maze of lanes—Frensham Pond—A holiday haunt—The legend of the shivering reeds—Rural inns—Roughing it (?)—Waverley Abbey—The monks of old—The sites of abbeys—Quiet country towns—Stocks and whipping-post—A curious font—"A haven of rest."
About a mile from West Hoathly, on the way we took, we were told of a local "lion" in the shape of a huge rock, firmly balanced on a very small one, which together have earned the title of "Great-upon-Little." The great top rock looks insecure enough, and as though a push of the hand would almost send it over. This curious rock stands in a romantic and deeply wooded glen some half a mile or so from the main road, and many other strangely shaped rocks are to be found there; shapes manifestly due to the erosion of the softer stone leaving the harder portions to stand out more or less prominently. To one who has beheld the wonderful rock formations of the Yellowstone Valley in America, this "Great-upon-Little" may appear but a trivial thing; still, in its way it is striking. But it was the rock-girt glen with its green woods, a glen steeply winding down the rough hillside, that charmed me infinitely more than this natural freak—averitable fairies' glen that would have made the fortune of any watering-place were it only near to it. Cobbett in hisRural Ridesthus discourses about this rock in his own peculiar way: "At this place there is a rock which they call 'Big-upon-Little,' that is to say, a rock upon another, the top one being longer and wider than the top of the one it lies on. This big rock is no trifling concern, being as big, perhaps, as a not very small house. How, then, came this big upon little? What lifted up the big? It balances itself naturally enough, but what tossed it up? I do not like to pay a parson for teaching me while I have God's own Word to teach me; but if any parson will tell me how big came upon little, I do not know that I shall grudge him a trifle. And if he cannot tell me this; if he say, 'All that we have to do is to admire and adore,' then I tell him that I can admire and adore without his aid, and that I will keep my money in my pocket." Which shows, however clever an agriculturist he may have been, Cobbett was woefully ignorant of geology, whilst little he cared for scenery. The reading of hisRides, allowing for much skipping, was a wearisome task to me, and glad was I when I came to the end of the book. After this dose of Cobbett and his grumblings, I had to take a course of genial Charles Lamb to put me in good humour again.
Our road now took us by shadowy forests, which afforded us some shelter from the quiet rain which began to fall, and here and there we glimpsed, half drowned in foliage, a lowly cottage, with its film ofascending smoke, and now and then we caught a warm and fragrant whiff of burning wood that contrasted pleasantly with the cool scent of the many trees, their leaves rain-washed and shining. So we drove on through woods and woods again, with here and there a bit of wild waste, a patch of pasture, or a furrowed field, and here and there the gleam of water—driving first this way, then that, as it took our fancy. Some ways were wide and good, and some were narrow and bad, but the country had a remote and pleasant look; so with the roads I had no quarrel. The scenery concerns me more than the road. I never hesitate to desert the smooth highway for the rough and winding lane if the latter appear the more attractive. My mind is set on exploring, on seeking out odd nooks and corners, not on rushing from one town to another, though, when the highway suits my humour, along it I go contentedly enough.
So we drove on till we came to a more open country of meadows and tilled fields and stray farmsteads, but with woods beyond again, and over these a peep of distant hills with misty clouds upon them. A mellow, home-like land it was, where wandering streams kept fresh the greenery of the fields, and ancient footpaths wound in and out, and tangled hedges that so beautify the land, though they show poor husbandry, bordered the roadside on either hand. Then we struck upon a fair main road, though there was little traffic on it; in time the road forked in two, and at the fork a signpost pointed with one arm the way "To Guildford," and withthe other arm the way "To Godalming." We chose the road to Godalming because it looked the more inviting. Now we passed other woods that climbed the low hills to our right, then we began to climb the hills ourselves, to descend again into the valley on the other side; so on through a rough country, dotted with pleasant homes, both old and new, we reached the long-streeted town of Godalming. I had an idea—how I came by it I cannot say—that Godalming was a pleasant and a picturesque town; my drive through it effectually got rid of that idea. I saw nothing pleasant or picturesque about it, even allowing for the determined and depressing drizzle that dulled the outlook. Perhaps I saw things crookedly that day, but to me, certainly, Godalming looked a one-streeted affair of commonplace houses and shops, with not a feature amongst the lot worth noticing, not even its old market-house.
The road we took out of the town chanced to be the famous Portsmouth road, much favoured by motorists and other vehicular traffic, and not caring for so much company, in due course we took a by-road to our right without a thought as to where it might lead. We soon got into a tangle of narrow, signpostless lanes; so narrow in one part, indeed, became our way that our hood actually at times brushed the hedges on either side, a lane where almost "two barrows might tremble when they meet." Indeed, had we met any cart, conveyance, or another motor I cannot imagine what we should have done, but we met nothing; for miles the tangle of lanes appeared to be endless, one as narrow asthe other; then at last I espied a cottage and got down to ask where the lane led, for I felt like a man in a maze. Thrice I rapped loudly at the cottage door before I got an answer; then at the third emphatic rap an old woman appeared. "I be hard o' hearing," she remarked, by way of apology for her long coming. "The lane do lead to the pond. It's only about a mile farther on." "To the pond!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "What pond? We don't want to go to a pond!" "Why,thepond, to be sure," responded she; "but I've left my baking." And that was all I could get out of her, for, doubtless anxious about her baking, she rushed incontinently indoors and left me wondering. I could only presume that we were driving to a village pond, with the uncomfortable idea that there the narrow lane might end. There was nothing to do but to drive on—there was no space to turn; for miles we had not seen a soul, so unfrequented are some of the byways of populous England, but at last a man actually appeared trudging along the road. To him I repeated my query, and got the same reply!—"To the pond"—adding, "It be only a bit farther on." I was more puzzled than ever. "What pond?" asked I. "Why, Frensham Pond, to be sure." Then it dawned upon me that a friend of mine had spoken of Frensham Pond, to which he frequently went a-fishing, and where he told me was a good inn—"the very place for a quiet holiday," and he was an artist not likely to speak favourably of a spot that had no scenic attractions.
Right glad were we to escape from the narrowlane and to find ourselves at Frensham Pond, where the road widened out beside the still water, and where the little balconied inn my friend had told me about stood facing it. Now Frensham Pond is a large and beautiful sheet of water over a hundred acres in extent, and to go round it means a good three miles' walk, so the term pond is somewhat of a misnomer; "mere," I think, would be a better and less misleading title, more picturesque besides. A good deal depends on a name; at least one does expect a pleasant spot to bear a pleasant name: now "pond" is not one to conjure with.
It was raining again, so we pulled up under the shelter of a spreading tree opposite the hotel, whereupon the landlord appeared at the door and invited me within; but I explained that I was only halting there, as I thought the shower would soon be over, and I wished to admire the view. I was neither hungry nor thirsty, so what need had I of an inn? "It's a lovely spot," the landlord remarked, and as I looked over the little lonely lake with its near background of pines, of heathery hills beyond these, and nothing else in view, I fully agreed with him. Even in the rain the prospect pleased me; there was an individuality about it, it was fresh to my eye, nothing quite like it had I seen before. "You really should make up your mind to stop here," the landlord continued, doubtless with an eye to business. "There's fine fishing in the pond, and a boat at your service; there's plenty of big pike and perch that are willing to be caught"—which was very kind of the fish; I have not found them so obliging in otherparts. There was a man in a boat on the water getting wet, but catching nothing, as far as I could make out, unless it were a cold. It seemed poor sport to me to sit thus patiently in a boat with the rain coming down, watching for the bob of a float on the chance of catching a fish not worth eating. Fly-fishing is quite another story. When you wander along the banks of some fair mountain river or stream, even if you have poor sport, you have a pleasant ramble over rock and boulder and amongst pleasant scenes; moreover, your time is ever agreeably occupied in casting your flies and watching them dance on the running water till comes a splash, a tug, and a tasteful trout good to look at, good to eat, and worth the basketing!
Suddenly the rain stopped, the grey clouds vanished, the sun shone forth again out of a sky as blue as the summer sea; the erst leaden lake looked like molten gold, the hills became a burning purple, but the dark pines seemed darker still by the contrast with the brightness around. What wind there was had dropped, but all the reeds were quivering, and I thought of the legend of the shivering reeds.
Leaving Frensham—where, by the way, in the tower of its church is preserved an ancient copper cauldron that tradition asserts once belonged to Mother Ludlam, a reputed local witch—we drove by devious roads through a sandy and heathery land, and into pine woods, the resinous odours of which filled pleasantly the air. We passed one or two lonely little inns on our way. To me a picturesque, though little regarded, feature of the roadside is the cosy country inn of the class that rises superior to the public-house but is less pretentious than an hotel, where I have found, during my old tramping days, humble doubtless, but sufficiently comfortable quarters, and where I got in touch with the simple and friendly country folk, and so could learn how the world treated them, and what they thought of it, and their ideas in general. The only way to do this is to mix with the country folk on their own ground, and clad in a suit of homely tweed, with often muddy boots, I was not looked upon as a superior person, so the talk I listened to was not curbed; only perhaps at times my speech, I feared, might betray me, for I could in no way manage the country accent, but I spoke little, whilst my ears did me silent service.
Imagination fondly stoops to traceThe parlour splendours of that festive place;The whitewash'd wall, the nicely sanded floor,The varnish'd clock that click'd behind the door.
"A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."
"A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."
"A GOOD HONEST ALEHOUSE."
Dear old Izaak Walton called such an inn "a good honest ale-house," and that title takes my fancy. "I'll now lead you to a good honest ale-house," says that rare old angler, "where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck upon the walls.... Come, hostess, where are you? Is supper ready?... Be as quick as you can, for I believe we are all very hungry." That is the sort of inn for me; I do not desire luxury when I go a-touring. The more homely my hostelry the more to my taste, so longas I find cleanliness, civility, and reasonable comfort thereat. I even enjoy what some people might term "roughing it" at times; in truth I have spent many delightful red-letter days (some of the most healthful and enjoyable I have ever spent) "roughing it" in a log-hut on the wild far-off Californian mountains, and there I found a wealthy and a titled Englishman doing the same thing, purely for the pleasure of it. If in some remote parts and on rare occasions I was doubtful as to the cleanliness of my inn, I made a point of not unpacking the car before I had sampled the landlord and the accommodation offered. I am glad to say that never once, on this journey, did I find the inn I selected fail to satisfy my modest requirements.
Loitering along we came at the foot of a long hill, passing first through gloomy woods, to a spot low down where the indolent winding Wey widened out into a quiet, clear-watered pool, and all around were pine-clad hills; an old water-mill and one or two ancient cottages completed the scene, just serving to humanise it and nothing more. It was a lovely spot, and there we pulled up to enjoy its beauties at our leisure. I know no other country in the wide world with spots so peace-bestowing as, here and there, one finds in England, and to come upon them unawares intensifies the charm of them; I cannot think of a word that precisely defines their special character, but "benign" is not far out.
Then I consulted the map and traced on it the river's course, and so made out, roughly, where we were, and it chanced I noticed on the map"Waverley Abbey" marked apparently near by. Now I had a dim recollection, but nothing more, that there was such an abbey, ruined of course, somewhere in England, but as to where it stood I had not given a thought up till that moment; if I had to hazard a guess as to its location, I am afraid I should have guessed Yorkshire, though the fact came back to me that Waverley Abbey suggested to Scott the title of one of his famous novels. Ivinghoe in Bucks is also credited with having given him the slightly altered title ofIvanhoe. Rumour asserts that his attention was called to the uncommon name by the local rhyme:
Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe,Hampden of Hampden did forego,For striking ye Prynce a blow,Glad that he might escape it so.
"Ye Prynce" was the Black Prince, and Hampden an ancestor of John Hampden, so tradition says, and the blow was given over a dispute about a game of racquets that Hampden lost. I love these old local rhymes and sayings that the inquiring traveller so often comes upon, for they frequently relate to past historical or traditional happenings that have been wholly or half forgotten, and are only otherwise to be found in odd musty volumes that no one cares to read.
We stopped the car in a sheltered corner not far from the lodge entrance to a pleasant park, and seeing no one around I ventured to ask at the lodge the whereabouts of the abbey. "You're close to it," responded the young woman, who promptly andcivilly came at my call; "it's only a short walk across the fields." Moreover, she came outside and pointed me out the way, bidding me keep to the path by the river till I came to a bridge, "then to your left you will see the ruins." Clearer instructions could no one give, and so I found the abbey. Pleasant indeed was the short stroll to it by the side of the lazy river, with the greenest of green meadows on one hand so soft to the tread, and wide spreading trees on the other that threw "tangles of light and shadow below." So listlessly the water flowed it hardly seemed to flow at all; manifestly the river was loth to leave so fair a spot to join the stormy sea, and fain would linger there in peace. I think it was Wordsworth who first endowed Nature with a living personality.
Of Waverley's once stately pile little now is left but crumbling walls and vacant archways; still, its low, roofless remains cover much ground, a fact that attests its former size and glory. The quiet country around, I imagine, has not changed noticeably, if at all, since the abbey stood proudly there in its prime—to stand, as the early builders doubtless thought, till the Day of Doom; but the future was not at their command. As in the past the placid river flows by it without a murmur, the hills beyond rise boldly to the sky, the luscious meadows round about are the same luscious meadows that the old monks trod; but their erst lordly edifice is mostly dust, its stones having been basely used for other buildings, and for a long while to make and mend the roads; still, the country looks as green and fresh as ever, its youthrenewed by every recurring summer. I can recall no spot of which so poignantly and so pregnantly may be said, "Sic transit gloria mundi."
An almost saintly silence brooded there; I heard neither stir of leaf nor song of bird, nor caught I sight of any living thing to break the solitude. It was as though the monks had laid a spell of profound peace over all, a spell unbroken yet—and may it never be!
A region of repose it seems,A place of slumber and of dreams,Remote among the wooded hills.
The peace-bestowing silence and restful solitude of the spot will linger with me as long as my memory lasts. Great must have been the temptation, in a troublous age, to be a monk, so to escape from all the turmoil of it, and to live at peace and at ease in some such earthly paradise. Many a world-weary man to-day well might sigh for such a harbour of rest.
Truly those monks of old had an eye for pleasant places; they built "in fair grounds," as the sites of their many abbeys prove. Father Gonzague, Prior of Storrington, puts it: "Some were built in the valley by the running stream, or on the jutting hill, overhanging the river bank, like St. Agatha's and Eggleston in Yorkshire; others close on the seashore, within hearing of the perpetual cadence of the waves, like Torre, the wealthiest of the English houses in Devonshire, on a spot the charm of which is not easily surpassed, backed by hills and uplands, with just room enough on the plain for the noblechurch, the monastery and its outbuildings, its gardens, its fish ponds, and its mill; or again among the deep and narrow dales of Derbyshire; or the gentle swell of the Kentish hills; in the forest land of Nottinghamshire, like Welbeck; or else in remote and wild retreats, speaking of penance and detachment, like the Abbey of Magdalen's Vale at Shap, in Westmoreland." Then there are others in situations quite as romantic and as gracious: there is Tintern by the winding Wye, Bolton by the tumbling Wharfe, Fountains sheltered amongst the woods, Rievaulx amongst the hills, Llanthony lone amongst the mountains, Cleeve secluded in the "Vale of Flowers," and many another—all in well-favoured spots and tranquil ones in ancient days, and some, like Waverley, as tranquil now.
A better judge of scenery than the monk of old there could not be; where stood his abbey there was a pleasant land, well watered, overflowing with beauty, and not seldom "overflowing with milk and honey" too. If one could trust that rare romancer Time, the monks were a jovial lot—"peace to their ashes"—reaping where they had not sown, and garnering where they had not toiled; making sure of heaven above whilst also making sure of the good things of the world below, ay, and enjoying them to the full as much as any sinner. To make the best of both worlds, especially this one, that was their motto, and they lived up to it. Of the modern monks that I have seen, one half look fat and lazy, the other half lean and sour, with an aspect of piety that would not have disgraced the strictest Puritan.But I know not if one can fairly judge of the old by the new. "Tempora mutantur," and possibly monks with them, and this is all that need be said.
Of the scant abbey ruins the only portion not wholly exposed to the weather is what looks like the crypt, with its fine and delicate Early English pillars and groined roof; but it has a fireplace, and from a label attached to its walls I learned it was the "Layman's Refectory." The rest of the ruins are roofless, and it is difficult to make out, with any certainty, even the site of the church—at least I found it so. On the greensward I noticed, level with the ground surface, a stone coffin vacant and exposed to the sky, presumably discovered there and left undisturbed save for the removal of its covering; this was hollowed out to the shape of a body, with a place for the head; probably it belonged to one of the stately abbots' dust and ashes long years ago, but the interior of the stone still preserves the chisel marks of the ancient mason, as sharp almost to-day as when first made. Somehow those marks so old, yet so clear, that but for the time-stains upon them might be of recent date, bridged over the centuries and brought the past quite close to me.
Leaving the old abbey to its peaceful seclusion, we once more resumed our way and soon found ourselves at Farnham, far famed for its castle and its ancient coaching hostelry—"The Bush," to wit—and possibly also for hops and ale, but of these I am not so sure. "The Bush," says Thackeray in hisVirginians, "is a famous inn which has stood in Farnham town for these three hundred years."But why I refer to this old house, in passing, is that its sign is the oldest of signs, which, in ancient days, consisted simply of a bush hung out at the end of a pole to show that wine, or ale, was sold there. Hence doubtless the saying of Shakespeare, "Good wine needs no bush."
After Farnham we struck the Winchester highway, dusty with much traffic at the time, so to escape both the traffic and the dust we took the first lane we came to—a lane that led past hop-gardens, up hill and down again; next winding round a well-wooded park it brought us to the little out-of-the-world village of Crondall, where I noticed one or two quaint half-timber houses of sufficient charm to cause me to stop and sketch them. Then after a short stretch of tree-bordered road we arrived at Odiham, a sleepy, sunny, wide-streeted town to which "no noisy railway speeds"; perhaps because of this it retains unhurt so much of its past-time naturalness. On a previous journey we had driven through Odiham, without however stopping, even though it pleased us, but we reached it by a different way. There is often a great deal in the first impression of a place, and this frequently depends upon how you approach it. No doubt there is a certain charm in the first view of fresh places, when such places possess the power to please and present themselves under favourable aspects, but it is wisdom not to linger in them overlong lest the eye should discover imperfections, so their poetry lose much of its glamour, or wholly vanish like a dream that has passed.
Before, when at Odiham, the "George" inn there, facing the roadway with its cheerful front and projecting sign, attracted my attention: a typical old coaching hostelry that looks as though it had seen more prosperous days, yet it had not retired from business but kept open wide its doors, bravely facing changed circumstances. "Posting House" in letters large is still boldly displayed on its front, but its posting is done to-day by the landlord's motor-car!Paterson's Roads, the Bradshaw of our ancestors, mentions the "George" as the inn of the place, and nearly every old roadside inn one comes across still retains the very title given to it in that rare eighteenth and early nineteenth-century road-book, according to which of its many editions one consults.
Now being, by chance, at Odiham again, I thought I would put up at the "George" and sample its entertainment. Quarters in the real country best please me, but they do not always materialise; next I prefer a modest hostelry in some quiet little town, and here I had my desire. So beneath the sign of the "George" I slept that night, and there I found a pleasant garden in the rear, good fare of the simple sort, much civility, and a most moderate bill; so, when next morning I departed, I left it with my blessing. I discovered that the inn was, unfortunately, for sale; it may have been sold by now. I can only trust that the old house may fall into the hands of worthy successors, and that it will, for as long as it stands, and long may that be, retain its good old name; for itmust be remembered it is the landlord makes the inn.
Does not Alonzo of Aragon say that the recommendations of age are "old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read"? and I should like to add old inns to rest at, and by preference those inns of the candle or lamp, mahogany or oak furniture, and wood-fire-on-the-hearth period, and these, the Fates be praised, are still to be found by the diligent searcher, and when found the wise traveller will not tell everybody about them. In this respect selfishness is a virtue, a moral obligation for the benefit of other quiet-loving travellers; for it is so easy to convert the old into the new, but the new cannot be converted into the old. I was tempted to photograph one of these ancient little inns I chanced upon, on account of its artistic signboard, for it is rare to meet with such artistic creations, though a few may be found to delight the eye of the wayfarer. My photograph, here reproduced, will show the skilful and effective painting of this signboard.
Having still an hour or two of daylight left, I took a stroll round the little town; it did not take me long; then I came to the church, and in the roadway before it I discovered, carefully roofed over, its ancient stocks and whipping-post; evidently the Odiham people prize these relics of "the good" or bad "old days." Then I took a glance within the church, where I found much to interest me; there I noticed seven old brasses in an excellent state of preservation—for old brasses—and these were kept both bright and clean; they were fixed against the south wall all in close order, being doubtless removed from the floor at some former restoration. Though removed thus from their proper place over the dust they commemorate, and where they should rightly be, they certainly are seen to better advantage where they are—and their dead owners are not far off. All the brasses but two happily retain their inscriptions; the earliest bears date of 1400; one to a priest in his vestments that of 1498; and there is one to a man in armour, roughly but effectively engraved. The piscina, I noticed, had an ornamented pillar support; I do not remember having seen such an arrangement before. I noticed also the finely carved Elizabethan or Jacobean pulpit, and besides, a thing you seldom nowadays see in churches, an oak gallery, of considerable antiquity, upheld by stout oak posts. Then I became aware that I was not alone in the building, for I heard quiet footsteps, and looking round observed a man at the font, apparently examining it with considerable interest, so too I needs must go and examine it. Said the stranger to me, "This is a curious font and a very ancient one." "It certainly looks it," I replied. "Perhaps you may not know," he continued, "but it possesses a peculiar feature only to be found in one other font in England, and that is at Youlgrave in Derbyshire. Permit me to point out to you the cup-like projection on the top; this is provided to drain back into the basin any drops of water that might be accidentally spilt at a christening." Some people delight to be informing, but the information they impart depends for its value on their special knowledge of special subjects. I observed that the stranger was carefully consulting a handbook when I approached him, which he put away in his pocket, and I thought to myself possibly the stranger has just read up about the font in that book, and is merely imparting to me second-hand information gleaned from it just for the self-importance of imparting it, and to show his cleverness. I might have done him an injustice, but he spoke in a manner so authoritative as to challenge criticism. Anyway I have not the implicit faith in handbooks most people have, for more than once I have found them wrong in facts beyond dispute. So I have examined for myself the "curious" projection, being a bit of an archaeologist, though not a learned one, and came to the conclusion that there was nothing curious about it, and that it had merely been intended to receive a hinge for a font cover. But such an explanation is perhaps too simple to be satisfactory to certain minds to which only the singular or mysterious appeals.
AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."
AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."
AT "THE QUEEN'S HEAD."
Round the top of the font runs a much-worn inscription in long Lombardic, or other early lettering, of which I could make nothing; no more could the stranger, but he made excuse that the light was very poor; so it was. "If we only had a guide-book," I said suggestively, but he failed to take the hint.
Leaving the church I noticed some picturesque alms-houses adjoining its quiet "God's Acre," built of brick but grey with age, of one story, uneven-roofed, with shapely chimney-stacks, whichhouses with their enclosed garden, full of flowers—and weeds—reminded me of Walker's famous picture "A Haven of Rest," though they were not the original of it. Then as the sun was setting I sought "mine inn."