The Downs
But though all these marks and signs, the memory and the ruins not only of our forefathers, but of those our saviours who drew us within the government of the Empire so that we are to-day what we are and not as they who knew not the Romans, make the Downs sacred to us, it is not only or chiefly for this that we love them or that in any thought of Southern England, when far away, it is these great hills which first come back into the mind and bring the tears to our eyes. We love them for themselves, for their beauty and their persistence certainly, but really because we have always known them and they more than any other thing here in the south remind us and are a symbol of our home. A man of South England must always have them in his heart
for every day of his childhood they have filled his eyes. And to-day more especially they stand as a sign and a symbol. For not only are they the first great hills which the Londoner sees, but they offer the nearest relief and repose from the modern torture and noise of that enormous place which has ceased to be a city and become a mere asylum of landless men. From the mean and crowded streets he seeks with an ever increasing eagerness the space of the Downs, from the noise and confusion and throng, this silence and this emptiness; from the breathless street, this free and nimble air, which is better than wine. And so to-day more than ever the Downs have come to stand as a symbol of an England half lost, which might seem to be passing away, but that is, as indeed these hills assure us, eternal and indestructible, the very England of our hearts, which cannot die. There are some doubtless who grumble at this invasion and are fearful lest even this last nobility should be destroyed by the multitude or this last sanctuary desecrated by the rapacity of the rich, or this last silence broken by the brutal noise of the motor car. But the Downs are too strong, they have seen too many civilisations pass away, and the men and the ages that built upon their hill-sides have become less than a dream in the morning. They remain. And is it nothing that in our day if a man hears a bird sing in a London street in spring it is of the Downs he thinks, if the wind comes over the gardens in some haggard suburb it is these hills which rise up in his mind, these hills, which stand there against the south, our very own from everlasting to everlasting.
But to possess the Downs at least as a symbol, to dream of them as a refuge, it is not necessary to know them in all their secret places, to have seen all their little forgotten homesteads, or to be able to recognise all their thousand steep tracks one from another.
For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the sky and the wind and the sun for companions. Therefore when I set out from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race- course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a road! In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island, Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering upon the horizon.
Now this road I followed passes westward out of Lewes and then turns swiftly north, climbing as it goes, under the Downs beyond Offham, turning west again under Mount Harry and so on past Courthouse Farm and Plumpton church, which stands lonely in a field to the north of the road, till suddenly by Westmaston church under Ditchling Beacon it turns north again towards the Weald and enters the very notable village of Ditchling. All that way is worth a king's ransom, for it gives you all the steepness of the Downs upon their steepest side, their sudden north escarpment, towering up over the Weald some seven hundred feet or more. On a spring morning early I know no way more joyful.
Ditchling Beacon itself stands some eight hundred and fifty feet above the sea and is the highest point in all the range of the South Downs, though it lacks the nobility of Chanctonbury. The earthworks here are irregular and not very well defined, but there is a fine dewpound to the east of the camp though perhaps this has not much antiquity, a seemingly older depression now dry in the north-west corner is rather an old rainwater ditch than a dewpound. Altogether it might seem that Ditchling Camp was rather a refuge for cattle than a military fortress.
Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber house, and the church of St Margaret's is not only interesting in itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs anywhere to be had from the Weald. It consists of a cruciform building of which the north transept and the north wall of the nave were rebuilt in the thirteenth century. The chancel, however, has some beautiful Early English work to show and the nave is rather plain Transitional. The eastern window and most of the windows in the nave are of the early Decorated period, the window in the south chancel aisle being somewhat later.
Something better than Ditchling church awaits the traveller at Clayton where the little church of St John the Baptist possesses a most interesting chancel arch, round and massive, that may well be Saxon. The chancel itself is of the thirteenth century with triple lancets at the western end with two heads, perhaps of a king and queen on the moulding. Here, too, on the south chancel wall is a fine brass of 1523 in which we see a priest holding chalice and wafer. In the nave are the remains of frescoes of the Last Judgment.
Right above Clayton rises Wolstanbury, a hill-top camp or circular work some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter. It is interesting because it is curiously and cleverly fortified, the rampart being built up below and outside the fosse, owing to the steepness of the hill. To the left are certain pits which may have been the site of dwellings; certainly many neolithic implements have been found here.
Below Wolstanbury which thrusts itself out into the Weald like a great headland nearly seven hundred feet in height, lies Pyecombe to the south-west. This little place which lies between the heights of Wolstanbury and Newtimber Hill is celebrated for two things, its shepherds' crooks and the Norman font of lead in the little church whose chancel arch is Norman too. You may see here even in so small a place, however, all the styles of England, for if the font and chancel arch are Norman, the lancets in the chancel are Early English, the double piscina is Decorated and the windows of the nave are Perpendicular while the pulpit is of the seventeenth century.
Pyecombe is hard to reach from Clayton without a great climb over the Downs, but there is a way, though a muddy one, which turns due west out of the Brighton road where the railway crosses it. This leads one round the northern side of Wolstanbury (and this is the best way from which to visit the camp on the top) and so by a footpath past Newtimber Place, a moated Elizabethan house well hidden away among the trees west of the road to Hurstpierpoint.
From Pyecombe there is a delightful road winding in and out under the Downs about Newtimber Hill to Poynings. Poynings is, or should I say was, one of the loveliest, loneliest and most unspoiled villages to be found here under the Downs, but of late it has been accessible by railway from the Devil's Dyke and Brighton. Nothing, however, can spoil the beauty and interest of its church which is, I suppose, one of the earliest Perpendicular works in the county, built before 1368 by the third Baron de Poynings, some remains of whose old manor-house may still be found east of the churchyard. The church is a Greek cross with central tower, and is dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity. Everything in it is charming, especially the beautiful eastern window, the triple sedilia and the piscina; but the pulpit and altar rails are of the seventeenth century as is the great south window which once stood in Chichester Cathedral. The Poynings lie in the south transept, but their tombs have been defaced. The north transept is the Montagu Chapel; here in the window is some old glass in which we may see the Annunciation.
The Devil's Dyke, which stands right above Poynings, is a great trench in the Downs, dug according to the legend by the devil, whose genial intention it was to drown holy Sussex by letting in the sea. He was allowed from sunset to sunrise to work his will, but owing to the vigilance of those above who had Sussex particularly in their keeping, the cocks all began to crow long before the dawn, and the devil, thinking his time was spent, went off in a rage before he had completed his work. This would seem to prove what I have often suspected that the devil is as great a fool as he looks.
The camp above the Devil's Dyke is of the usual design of a hill-top fortress, the defence following the natural line of the hill, the look-out having been apparently upon the north-west, whence a remarkably extensive view is to be had both over the Weald and the Downs. But as no water would seem to have been conserved here it is difficult to believe that this camp was ever a permanent fortress which only a very large number of people could have defended. Nevertheless a great number of neolithic implements have been found there.
From Poynings in full view of Chanctonbury the beautiful road runs all the way at the foot of the Downs to that great gap through which the Adur seeks the sea, and which of old was guarded by Bramber Castle. On the way it passes through the loveliest of villages, to wit, Edburton, where in the Early English church of St Andrew is the second of the three Norman fonts of lead within this county. The church is altogether interesting, for if it is for the most part of the thirteenth century, it has a charming Decorated eastern window and it is said that Archbishop Laud himself presented the pulpit and altar rails. What the two low side windows were for I know not, but the chapel on the north was dedicated in honour of St Catherine of Alexandria.
It was already dusk when I came out of Edburton church, the late dusk of a day in early May; and so, liking the place passing well, I determined to sleep there and soon found a hospitable cottage. In the morning I liked the place better still, and remembering the "tarmac" and the sophistication (alas!) of Steyning, I decided to stay where I was two or three days and to visit thence a place in the Weald it had long been my desire to see. And so having made up my mind, before nine o'clock I set out on my way.
THE WEALD
There can be no one who has stood upon one of the great heights of the Downs north and south, upon Ditchling Beacon, Chanctonbury or Leith Hill, who, looking across the Weald, has not wondered what this country, lying between the two great chalk ranges, might be, what is its nature and its history and what part it has played in the great story of England. For even to the superficial onlooker it seems to differ essentially not only from the great chalk Downs upon which he stands, but from any other part of England known to him. It lies, thickly sprinkled with scattered and isolated woodlands, a mighty trench between the heights, not a vast plain but an uneven lowland diversified by higher land but without true hills, and roughly divided west and east into two parts by a great ridge known by various names, but in its greater part called the Forest, St Leonard's Forest, Ashdown Forest, Dallington Forest, and so forth. This country which we know as the Weald is obviously bounded north and south by the Downs which enclose it, as they do, too, upon the west, where between Winchester and Petersfield and Selborne the two ranges narrow and meet. Thence, indeed, the Weald spreads eastward in an ever widening delta till it is lost in the marshes and the sea.
Such is the aspect of this great country as we see it to-day from any of the heights north and south of it; but what is its true character and what is its history?
We hear of it first under a Saxon name, Andredeswald, whence we get our name of the Weald, and we find it always spoken of not only by the Saxons, but by the Romans before them as an obstacle, though not, it would seem, an insurmountable one. It was, in fact, a wild forest country of clay containing much woodland, everywhere covered with scrub, and traversed by various sleepy and shallow streams. That it was difficult to cross we have Roman evidence; that it was a secure hiding- place we know from the Saxons; but as we look upon it to-day neither of these historic facts is self-evident, and therefore a curious myth has grown up with regard to the Weald; and the historian, seeking to explain what is not to be understood without time and trouble and experience, tells us that the Weald was once an impenetrable forest, a whole great woodland and undergrowth so thick that no man might cross it without danger. Such an assertion is merely an attempt on the part of men, who do not know the Weald, to explain the facts of which I have spoken, namely, that the Weald appears as an obstacle in our early history, though not insurmountable, and that it continually offered a secure hiding-place and refuge to the fugitive.
The Weald as it appears to us first, is the secure home of those who first smelted the ironstone in which it abounds, and as such it remained during many ages. But the two main facts about it which help to explain everything in its history are first that it consisted for the most part of clay, and secondly that it was everywhere ill watered. Let us consider these things.
The Weald, even as we see it to-day, tilled and cultivated and tended though it be, remains largely a country of scattered woodland, very thickly wooded, indeed, as seen in a glance from any height of the Downs, but revealing itself, as we traverse it, as a country of isolated woods, often of oak, and with here and there the remains of a wild and rough moorland country, of which, as we may think, in the Roman times, it, for the most part, consisted. It later possessed some six forests properly so called, but itself was never a legal forest nor in any sense of the words an impenetrable wood. It always possessed homesteads, farms and steadings, but almost nowhere within it was there a great or populous town; men lived there it is true, but always in a sort of isolation. And this was so not because the Weald was an impassable forest of woodland and undergrowth—it was never that; but because of its scarcity of water or more accurately its uncertainty of water and its soil, the Wealden clay. The state of affairs anciently obtaining in the Weald does not fundamentally differ from what obtains to-day, and in a word it was and is this: in dry weather there is no water, but the going is good; in wet weather there is plenty of water, but the going is impossible. Of course, these conditions have in modern times been modified by the building of roads and the sinking of wells and the better embankment and preservation of the rivers, but in Roman times, as later, the Weald was an obstacle because it was difficult, though never impossible, to cross on account of the badness of the going or the lack of water. It was a secure hiding-place for such a fugitive as a Saxon king because he could not be pursued by an army; he himself with a few followers could move from steading to steading and enjoy a certain amount of state, but a pursuing army would have perished.
Evidence in support of this explanation of the secret and character of the Weald is not far to seek. The Weald lay between the Channel and its ports, that is to say, the entries into England from the continent, and the Thames valley; it was then an obstacle that had to be overcome. Had it been merely a great woodland forest, it would not have troubled the Romans who would merely have driven a great road through it. But the Romans had more to face than an impenetrable woodland or the roughness of the country; they had to overcome the lack of water, and therefore in the Weald their day's march of some twelve miles was pressed to double its normal length. The French armies, according to Mr Belloc, do exactly the same thing in the Plain of Chalons to-day. And indeed a man may see for himself, even yet, what exactly the Weald was if in summer he will cross it by any of the winding byways that often become good roads for a mile or so and then lapse again into lanes or footpaths. Let him follow one of these afoot and drink only by the wayside. And then in winter let him follow the same tracks if he can. He will find plenty of water, but his feet will be heavy with clay. For an army or even a regiment to go as he goes would be almost impossible, and this not because of the woodland or undergrowth, but because of the lack of water, the lack of towns or large villages and the clay underfoot.
Such then was the nature of the barrier which lay between the ports of the Channel and the valley of the Thames. The Weald was indeed inhuman, and this helps to explain why it was not only a barrier but a refuge.
We read in the rude chronicle of the Saxons of two men who sought refuge in the Weald, in the seventh and eighth centuries. The first of the three was Caedwalla, (659?-689) a young man of great energy, according to Bede, and probably a dangerous aspirant to the West-Saxon throne. At any rate he was exiled from Wessex and he took refuge with his followers in the forest of Anderida, that is to say in the Weald. There about 681 he met St Wilfrid who had fled, too, from the West Saxon kingdom. Wilfrid was busy converting the South Saxons, and Caedwalla, going from steading to steading with his followers, saved from any considerable pursuit by the nature of the country, became great friends with him. This, however, did not prevent him in 685 from ravaging Sussex, slaying the South Saxon king and at last succeeding his old enemy Centwine upon the West Saxon throne. Caedwalla, after conquering the Isle of Wight and putting to death the two sons of King Arvaldus, having allowed them first to be baptised, was himself converted, and to such purpose that he laid down his crown, went on pilgrimage to Rome, and was baptised under the name of Peter, by the Pope, on the vigil of Easter 689. He died, however, before Domenica in albis, and was buried in Old St Peter's, nor was he the only English king that lay there.
All this came out of the Weald; but it is most significant for us because it allows us to understand the nature of this refuge and what it offered in the way of safety to an exile.
This is confirmed by the experience of Sigebert, King of the West Saxons. He, too, first took refuge in the Weald when deposed by his witan. He fled away and was pursued, we read, by Cynewulf, so that he took refuge in the forest of Andred where he was safe from pursuit by many men, being killed at last at Privet near Petersfield in Hampshire by a swineherd in revenge for his master's death. Such then was the nature of the Weald and such fundamentally it remains, a stubborn and really untameable country, even to-day not truly humanised, still largely empty of towns and villages but scattered with isolated farms and steadings. And the essential inhumanity of the true heart of the Weald is borne out by the scarcity of religious houses there. Only the little Priory of Rusper, a small Benedictine nunnery perhaps founded by one of the De Braose family before the end of the twelfth century, and the small Benedictine nunnery of Easebourne founded in the thirteenth century may be said to belong to the true Weald; of the others, such as the Abbey of Robertsbridge, the Priories of Michelham and Shulbred, the Abbeys of Otham, Bayham, and Dureford not one is really old or stands really within the true Weald. Nor are they of very much importance. The greatest of these houses was the Cistercian Abbey of Robertsbridge founded in 1176 by Alfred de St Martin, Sheriff of the rape of Hastings, within which the abbey stood, really upon the last of the forest ridge towards the Level of Pevensey. It is true that this abbey played a considerable part in history during the first years of its existence; for it was the Abbot of Robertsbridge who set out with the Abbot of Boxley to search for Coeur de Lion in 1192 and who found him in Bavaria, and we find the Abbot of Robertsbridge employed more than once again as an ambassador; but its fame soon dwindled, and though it escaped the first suppression and indeed survived till 1538 it could boast then of but eight brethren.
The Weald of Sussex, North Of Lewes
The only other houses as old as Robertsbridge are those of Otham and Dureford, houses of Premonstratensian Canons, neither in the heart of the Weald, and both dating from the twelfth century. The other religious houses, Michelham and Shulbred of the Augustinian Canons, Easebourne of Augustinian nuns and Bayham the successor of Otham, all date from the thirteenth century, and indeed no more belong to the true Weald than do the rest. It is, in fact, only to-day that a great monastery stands in the heart of the Weald, and of all wonderful things that is a Carthusian House of the like of which Pre-reformation England boasted but twelve, and Sussex none at all.
It was one day as I came over the Adur by Moat Farm that I became aware of this great establishment, for there suddenly, as I turned a corner, by the Lord, the road was full of Carthusian monks all in their white habits, a sight as marvellous as delightful once more upon an English road. And so I found my way to the great house of St Hugh at Parkminster.
One should learn to be astonished at nothing in England of my heart, for it will beggar one's admiration. But Carthusians! Was it not this Order which Henry II. had brought into England as part of his penance for the murder of St Thomas? Was it not this Order which had first been established in my own Somerset, and alone of all Orders in England by a Saint, and which there at Witham and at Hinton, still so fair and lovely, built its first two houses in England, of which all told there were but twelve? Was it not this Order that had faced and outfaced Henry Tudor to the last so that the monks of the London Charterhouse were burnt at the stake at Tyburn?
Well is this monastery dedicated in honour of St Hugh. And if you do not know why let me write it here. It is well known that after the murder of St Thomas and Henry II.'s public repentance for his part in all that evil, Pope Alexander III. gave him for penance a crusade of three years in the Holy Land, but when that was found not to be convenient he commuted it for the building of three monasteries of which one was to be Carthusian, for the Carthusians at that time had no house in England. This Order had been founded at Grenoble in 1086 by St Bruno, who had been sent by St. Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, to a desert spot in the Alps 14,000 feet above the sea. There St Bruno founded his monastery known as the Grande Chartreuse. His monks were hermit monks, each had, as each has still, his own little dwelling. The Order, which has never been reformed—Cartusia nunquam reformata Quia nunquam deformata—and has uniformly followed the Rule approved by Pope Innocent XI., recognises three classes of brethren, the fathers, the conversi or lay brethren, and nuns. Each house is governed by a Prior and each monk lives, as I have said, in a separate dwelling of five little rooms and a tiny cloister, or rather ambulatory, facing a little garden. His food is given him through a hatch at the foot of the stairs leading to his rooms. He attends Mass in Choir, Matins and Vespers too, but the other Hours are said in his cell. As the Carthusians were when they first came into England so they are to-day.
But it is not in honour of St Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, that the monastery at Parkminster is dedicated, but of quite another saint.
When Henry II. set out to found a Carthusian house in England in obedience to the Pope, the place he chose for it was Witham in Selwood, a solitude, for the Rule of the Order demanded it, and that is also why we have this monastery in the Weald to-day. It bears witness as nothing else could do to-day, perhaps, to the true character of the Weald.
Witham, it is true, was not so desolate as the Grande Chartreuse, but it was in the heart of the Forest, far from the abode of men. Even to- day Witham is not easy to reach by road. This house, thus founded did not flourish; whether the place was too hard for the monks, or whether there was some other cause we know not, but the first two priors, though both from the Grande Chartreuse, failed to establish it. Then King Henry was advised to beg of the mother-house her great and shining light, Hugh of Avalon, not of Avalon in England, but of Avalon in Burgundy. He was successful in his request. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, his ambassador, then in the Alps, was able to bring Hugh home with him, though the loss of that "most sweet presence," as the Prior declared, widowed his house; and Hugh came to England and to Witham and was received as "an angel of the Lord." It is in honour of this great and holy man, later Bishop of Lincoln and known as St Hugh of Avalon, that the Carthusian monastery of Parkminster is dedicated. I have here no room to speak of him, the true founder of the Order in England, of his holy, brave and laborious life in Selwood or of his rule there of ten years. He is forgotten even at Witham and his name no longer, alas, means anything to us whom he served. Only the Carthusians have not forgotten, and to the keeping of no other saint in the Calendar could they so honourably have entrusted their new house.
This monastery, founded in the Weald, upon October 17, 1877, is a great, if not a beautiful, pile of buildings, and is, in fact, one of the largest houses of the Order in the world. The visitor rings at the gate, and is admitted by a lay-brother dressed in the beautiful white habit, caught about the waist by a leathern girdle from which a rosary hangs. Upon his feet are rough shoes and his head is shorn but he greets you with a smile of welcome and leads you into a large quadrangle, where before you is the great Romanesque church with a chapel upon one side and the refectory upon the other, and all about are cloisters. Here over the entrance to the church is a statue of St Hugh. Within, the church is divided by a screen into two parts, the choir for the Fathers, the nave for the lay-brothers. Over the screen is a rood, and beneath, two altars, dedicated in honour of St John the Baptist, who went into the desert, and St Bruno, the founder of the Order. From the church one is led to the Chapter House, in which there stands an altar and Crucifix, and there upon the walls are depicted scenes from the martyrdom of the London Carthusians in the time of Henry VIII. From the Chapter House one is led to the Chapel of the Relics, where there is a beautiful silver reliquary that belonged to the English Carthusians before the Reformation, and in it is a relic of St Thomas of Canterbury. Here, too, is the stole of St Hugh and a bone of St Bruno.
The monastery proper lies behind the church, where a vast quadrangle, the Great Cloister, some three acres in extent, opens out, surrounded on three sides by the little houses of the monks, with the graveyard in the midst. Here the monks live, and are buried without coffin or shroud in their white habits, the hood drawn over the face. The cells are delightful to look upon, "a solitude within a solitude"; each consists of five rooms, two below and three above, reached by a staircase, the whole approached from a passage closed by a door giving on to the Great Cloister. Here live and pray some thirty-six monks, with a like number of conversi or lay-brothers.
I do not know in all England a place more peaceful than this one, more solemn and salutary to visit in the confusion of our modern life. Here is one of the lightning conductors that preserves the modern world from the wrath of God. Let others think as they will, for me the monastery of St Hugh in the Weald is holy ground.
And at any rate, even though you may not agree with me so far, in this at least I shall carry you with me, when I say that this monastery, and especially because it is Carthusian, bears out the old character of the Weald and endorses it. I have said the Weald was ever a wild and inhuman place where only few men could go together, without great towns and with only infrequent villages; not a thick or impenetrable woodland but a difficult and a lonely country sparsely scattered with steadings. Well, it is such places that the Carthusians have ever sought out for their houses, such was Witham and such was the Grande Chartreuse also. That a Carthusian monastery should have been founded to-day in the midst of the Weald proves, if anything can, that it has not yet wholly lost its character.
TO ARUNDEL AND CHICHESTER
From my little quiet retreat at Edburton, I set out one May morning to follow the road under the Downs, through Steyning for Arundel and Chichester, because it is one of the fairest ways in all the world, and, rightly understood, one of the most interesting. And to begin with, I found myself crossing one of those gaps in the South Downs, each of which is held by a castle. The one I now crossed was that made by the Adur, and it was held by the Castle of Bramber.
Now Bramber, merely beautiful to-day, must in the old times always have been of importance, for it holds an easy road through the rampart of the Downs, one of the great highways into Normandy, because of the harbour of Shoreham at the mouth of the Adur, one of the principal ports upon this coast. Of immemorial antiquity, the harbour of Shoreham, first of Old Shoreham, perhaps the Roman Portus Adurni, and then when that silted up of New, has played always a great part in the history of South England. That the Romans knew and used it is certain. It was probably here that the Saxon Ella and his three sons Cymne, Cissa, and Wlencing, landed in 477, and it is not likely that it was neglected by the Normans, who, in fact, built here a very noble cruciform church, dark and solemn, indeed, rather a fortress than a church. It was at Shoreham certainly that John landed when he returned to England to make himself king after the death of Coeur de Lion, and we may gather some idea of the real importance of the port from the fact that it furnished Edward III. with twenty-six ships for his fleet in 1346. Thereafter the place declined, but history repeated itself when Charles II., in flight in 1651 and anxious to reach the French coast, set out from Shoreham and landed at Fécamp. Shoreham thus was an important way in and out of England, but the road by which it lived was not in its keeping at all, but in the power of the Castle of Bramber which dominated and held it on the north side of the Downs, where it issued out of the pass or gap made by the Adur.
Bramber Castle stands upon a headland thrust out into the valley and the Weald in the very mouth of the pass; and even in its ruin, only an old gateway tower and a fragment of the lofty barbican in which is a Norman window remain. It is easy to understand how important and how strong it must once have been. Indeed, Norman though these remains are, it was by no means the Normans who first fortified this promontory and held this pass. It is probable that the Castle of Bramber occupies the site of a Roman Castellum and a Saxon fortress, some say a palace of the Saxon kings. After the Conquest the castle came into the hands of the great William de Braose, lord of Braose, near Falaise in Normandy, who received such great estates in England from the Conqueror. He fixed his seat, however, here at Bramber, and built or rebuilt the Castle which became the greatest fortress in his possession. Later, by marriage, it passed to the Mowbrays, and from them descended to the Dukes of Norfolk, the present Duke, indeed, still holding it. It is, however, of William de Braose we think in Bramber; for he not only built the great Castle which gives its character to the place even to-day, but the church of St Nicholas also, under the Castle, of which the nave and tower of his time only remain. He built it indeed as a chapel to his Castle, and to serve it he founded there a small college of secular canons under a dean, and endowed it with the church of Beeding and many tithes, among them those of Shoreham. But about 1080 William de Braose seems to have repented of what he had done, for he then granted to the Abbey of St Florent in Saumur the reversion of the church of St Nicholas here, when the last of the canons then living in his college at Beeding should have died. It was thus that the Abbey of St Florent came to establish a Priory at Beeding, or Sele as the monks called it, and this about 1096; and William's son Philip confirmed them in his father's gifts, and before the end of the twelfth century this alien priory possessed the churches of Sele, Bramber, Washington, Old Shoreham and New, to say nothing of the little chapel of St Peter on the old bridge between Bramber and Beeding.
This old bridge over the Adur is worth notice, for it is said to have been first established by the Romans upon a road of theirs that ran under the north escarpment of the Downs from Dover to Winchester. Certain Roman remains have indeed been found there, and the chapel of St Peterde veteri pontewas doubtless founded in order to guard it and keep it open and in order.
Evil days fell upon the Priory with the rise of nationalism and the wars of the fourteenth century. Like every other alien house it came under suspicion of spying, and being near the coast, indeed, at the very threshold of an important gate, it was seized by the Crown. At last, in 1396, Richard II. permitted it to naturalise itself, and its only connection thereafter with St Florent was the payment of a small annual tribute. But the misfortunes of the Priory were not over. For sixty years or more all went well, but in 1459 the Bishop of Winchester bought the patronage of the place from the Duke of Norfolk, and won leave from the Pope and the Bishop of Chichester to suppress it and appropriate it to his new College of St Mary Magdalen in Oxford. The suppression, however, was not to take effect till the last monk then living should die, and this came to pass in 1480. For thirteen years the Priory was unoccupied, and then in 1493 the Fellows of Magdalen allowed the Carmelite Friars of Shoreham to use the place, their own house in Shoreham having been engulfed by the sea. These White Friars were the poorest in all Sussex; so poor were they that they failed even to maintain themselves at Sele. In July 1538, when the Bishop of Dover came to visit the place, he found "neither friar nor secular, but the doors open ... and none to serve God." Such was the end of the house William de Braose had built in the first years of the Conquest. What remains of it will be found in the church of St Peter in Upper Beeding, an Early English building of no great interest save that it contains many carved stones from the Priory, a window and a door also from the same house, upon the site of which the vicarage now stands.
William de Braose, who made Bramber his chief seat, must have had an enormous influence upon building in this neighbourhood, which abounds in Norman churches such as those of Botolphs and Coombes, to say nothing of those at Shoreham Old and New; but he was by no means the only renewer of life here.
The most beautiful thing in the still beautiful village of Steyning is the great church of St Andrew, but with this the Lord of Bramber has nothing to do; the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp rebuilt this noble sanctuary, but its foundation is said to be due to an English saint, St Cuthman, who, having been a shepherd boy, upon his father's death came out of the west into Sussex bearing his mother, who was crippled, in a kind of barrow which he dragged by a cord. A thousand queer stories are told of him as he went on his way, happily enough it seems, until he came to Steyning, where the cord of his barrow broke. There he built a hut for his mother, and constructed a little church of timber and wattles in which at last he was buried. In his life he had performed divers miracles so that his grave became a place of pilgrimage, and it is said to have been about this shrine that the village and church of Steyning grew up. It remained a holy place, and Ethelwolf, the father of Alfred, is said to have been buried there, his body later being removed to Winchester.
That the place was of some sort of importance would seem to be evident, for we find Edward the Confessor, granting the manor and churches of Steyning to the Benedictines of Fécamp, Harold taking it from them, and the Conqueror restoring it. Two churches at Steyning are spoken of in the Domesday Survey, and it has been thought that the second of these is really that at Warminghurst. But we find a church in Steyning in the thirteenth century served by secular canons. This was, however, in all probability the church of St Andrew we know, which in 1290 was a royal free chapel answerable neither to the Archbishop nor to the Bishop of Chichester, but to the Abbot of Fécamp only. The College of Canons had by then, if indeed it ever served this church, been dissolved. At the suppression of the alien priories in the fifteenth century Steyning passed to the new Abbey of Sion.
There can be no doubt that the church we have at Steyning is due to the Benedictines of Fécamp, and it is one of the noblest buildings in the county. Of the earlier church they built here much would seem to remain, the rudely carved arches at the eastern end of the aisles, the Norman window on the north, and much of the aisle walls. This church was probably cruciform and may have been larger than that we now see. It was rebuilt again by the monks in the middle of the twelfth century, when the great chancel arch we have, the beautiful nave arcades and clerestory were built, with the fine mouldings and capitals and dog-tooth ornament. The font, too, would seem to be of about this time. The tower only dates from the sixteenth century, and the chancel is modern.
Now Steyning lies under Chanctonbury, but I resisted the temptation to spend the afternoon in the old camp there looking over the "blue goodness of the weald," for I wished especially to visit the church of Wiston, and to see, if I might, Wiston House, which Sir Thomas Shirley built about 1576, and where those three brothers were born who astonished not only Sussex and all England, but Rome itself and the Pope by their marvellous daring and adventures.
The old manor house is delightfully situated in its beautiful park under the dark height of Chanctonbury, and though much altered, retains on the whole its fine Elizabethan character. The manor originally belonged to the De Braose, from whom it passed by marriage to the Shirleys. In the church, a small Decorated building, there is a fine brass of 1426 to Sir John de Braose, on which over and over again we read Jesu Mercy: this in the south chapel. His little son is buried under an arch on the north, where there is a curious effigy of him. The first Shirley, whose monument we find here, though only in part, is that of Sir Richard, who died in 1540; but it was Sir Thomas, who also has his monument, that built Wiston and was the father of those three remarkable sons. He was the great-grandson of Ralph Shirley of Wiston, and the son of William Shirley, who died in 1551. Till his time the family had of course been Catholic; it was he who first abandoned the Faith; perhaps it was this spirit of adventure so unfortunate in him which descended to that famous "leash of brethren" and drove them out upon their adventures. The least remarkable and the most unfortunate of these sons of his was the eldest, Thomas, whose life, however, as a soldier and freebooter, both on shore in the Low Countries and at sea, is sufficiently full of adventure to satisfy anyone. He came, however, to utter grief at last, and had to sell Wiston, retiring to the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1630.
It was his brother Anthony who really made the Shirleys famous. He had graduated at Oxford in 1581, and having, as he said, "acquired those learnings which were fit for a gentleman's ornament," he went to the Low Countries with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was present at the battle of Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney fell. In 1591 he was in Normandy with the Earl of Essex, whom he devotedly followed, in support of Henry of Navarre, who made him a knight of St Michael. For accepting a foreign knighthood without her leave, Elizabeth locked him up in the Fleet, and only let him out when he promised to retire from the Order. This he actually did, but his title stuck to him, and he was always known as Sir Anthony. He then married Elizabeth Devereux, a first cousin of his patron, the Earl of Essex; but the marriage was unfortunate; he could not abide his wife, and in order to "occupy his mind from thinking of her vainest words," in 1595 he fitted out with Essex's aid and his father's a buccaneering expedition to the Gulf of Guinea. But in something less than two years after the most amazing adventures he came home to Wiston under the Downs, "alive but poor," and with his passion for adventure in nowise abated. In 1597 he accompanied Essex on the "Islands voyage," but, seeking more paying adventure, in the winter of 1598 he consented at Essex's suggestion to lead a little company of English adventurers to assist Cesare D'Este to regain his Duchy of Ferrara, then in the hands of the Pope. He set forth, but upon reaching Venice found that Cesare had submitted. Again he was out of employment; but it was upon the quays of Venice that he conceived the most astonishing enterprise that even an Englishman has ever undertaken. He proposed to set out for Persia with the object of persuading the Shah to ally himself with Christendom against the Turk, and hoped also to establish commercial relations between England and Persia. Upon this astonishing Crusade he left Venice with his brother Robert and twenty-five Englishmen disappointed of a row in Ferrara, on May 29, 1599, for Constantinople. Thence he went on to Aleppo, and so down the Euphrates, to Babylon, to Isapahan and Kazveen, where he met the Shah Abbas the Great. There, thanks to the Shah's two Christian wives, he had a good reception; the rank of Prince was conferred upon him, and he won the concession, for all Christians, of the right, not only to trade freely, but to practise their religion in Persia. For five months he remained at the court of the Shah, and then returned to Europe as his ambassador to invite all Christian powers to ally themselves with Persia against the Turk. He went first to Moscow, where he was, however, treated with contempt, as was his mission. He went to Prague and was well received. At last, in 1601, after visiting Nuremberg, Augsburg, Munich, Innsbruck, and Trent, he arrived in Rome, and, professing enthusiasm for the Faith his father had repudiated, was well received. The truth was, he was in grave money difficulties, and indeed in 1603 was arrested by the Venetians and imprisoned "in a certain obscure island near unto Scio." The English Government, however, came to his aid and obtained his release, but refused him permission to return to England. He went to Prague, and thence on the business of the Emperor to Morocco. There he was received in great state and remained five months. Before leaving, however, he released certain Portuguese whom he found in slavery, and sailed with them for Lisbon, where he hoped to reimburse himself for their ransom. In this he was disappointed, so on he went to Madrid, where he was made very much of and promised the Order of Sant'Iago. In the service now of Spain, he went to Naples in 1607, after a visit to the Emperor at Prague where he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. He seems to have travelled considerably in Southern Italy, and after a brief visit, to obtain money, to Madrid, set out for Sicily in command of a fleet to attack the Moors and Turks. He achieved nothing and was dismissed. In 1611 he appeared again in Madrid in utter poverty, but the King took compassion upon him and gave him a pension, and in Madrid he remained writing an account of his adventures till he died in beggary. The English ambassador notes in 1619, "The poor man sometimes comes to my house and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince." It might indeed seem a long road from Wiston under the Downs to the Gulf of Guinea, the Quays of Venice, Constantinople, the Euphrates, Babylon, Moscow, Prague, Rome, and Morocco, to die at last a beggar in purse, but in heart a great Prince in Madrid.
Now, when I had been reminded of all this, I was directed to visit Buncton Chapel to the north of Wiston Park, where I found indeed some Norman work in the nave and chancel arch. And so I went on my way through the failing afternoon by that beautiful road within sight of the high Downs to the Washington Inn, where I slept, for it is a quiet place not to be passed by.
And on the morrow I went on my way, still through as fair a country as is to be found in all South England, through Storrington, and so by way of Parham Park, with its noble Elizabethan house and little church with the last leaden font in Sussex, a work of the fourteenth century, to Amberley in the meads of the Arun, a dear and beautiful place.
Amberley boasts a Castle and stands right in the mouth of one of those gaps in the Downs as Bramber does, the gap of the Arun, and it might well be thought that Amberley held this pass. As a fact she did not. That gap is held by Arundel; the Castle at Amberley was a palace of the Bishop of Chichester, granted to the Bishop of Selsey long before the Conquest; it was only castellated in the fourteenth century. It is none the less an interesting ruin, very picturesque, with remains of a chapel, while the beautiful house built within the castle walls early in the sixteenth century is altogether lovely. And as for the church, I can never hope to tell of all its interest and beauty. Certainly a Norman church once stood here, of which the nave of that we see was part, as was the very noble chancel arch; but the chancel itself, the south aisle, and the tower are of the thirteenth century, while the south door is very early Decorated, most beautifully carved. There is not surely in all Sussex a more delightful spot than this lying so quietly in the meads, with its beautiful church, its ruined castle, and fine old Elizabethan house, where Arun bends slowly and lazily towards the Downs and the sea.
It was with real regret that on that May morning I left Amberley, turning often to look back at it, and last from the great seven-arched bridge over the Arun, whence one may look down stream upon the wooded slopes of Arundel Park. Then I went on up the road that winds through the steep village of Houghton swiftly up on to the Downs, wooded here very nobly, and so at the top of Rewell Hill I turned to the left and made my way through the noble park to the little town of Arundel.
Now I cannot say why, but in spite of its seduction, which is full of splendour, of its noble history and great buildings, I have never been able to love Arundel. One is there always I feel too much in the shadow of that mighty Castle which for the most part is not old at all, too much in the power of that great new church that surely was never built by English hands, which has altogether blotted out the older sanctuary, and which, Catholic though it be, has never won my affection. Arundel itself is all in the shadow of these two things, each of which is too big for it, too heavy for free laughter and light- heartedness. So it seems to me.
All I can find in Arundel that pleases me lies in the little town itself, and in the old church of which one half, the chancel, has been closed to all who do not hold the Duke's written permission to enter it—as though the house of God, even though it be the property of a Catholic duke, were not by nature as it were free to all. And so there is a kind of sorrowfulness about Arundel that spoils my pleasure in it, yes, even in the very noble remains of the old Castle that are hidden away within the sham Gothic affair of 1791. Even in the beautiful old church, of which one half is closed, even in the steep little town which might have been as gay as Rye, I felt, overwhelmed by the new Castle and the new church, neither of which has any antiquity, tradition, or beauty.