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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Brighton Road
+       The Classic Highway to the South
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2012 [EBook #38611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIGHTON ROAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+
+
+
+HISTORIES OF THE ROADS
+
+BY CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South.
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York.
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh.
+
+THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
+
+THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway.
+
+THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester.
+
+THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow.
+
+THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham.
+
+THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead.
+
+THE HASTINGS ROAD: And The "Happy Springs of Tunbridge."
+
+THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: London to Gloucester.
+
+THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: Gloucester to Milford
+Haven.
+
+THE NORWICH ROAD: An East Anglian Highway.
+
+THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD.
+
+THE EXETER ROAD: The West of England Highway.
+
+THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD.
+
+THE CAMBRIDGE, KING'S LYNX AND ELY ROAD.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE THE FOURTH. _From the painting by Sir Thomas
+Lawrence, R.A._]
+
+
+
+
+  _The_
+  BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+  The Classic Highway to the South
+
+  _By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
+
+  _Illustrated by the Author, and from old-time
+  Prints and Pictures_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  LONDON:
+  CECIL PALMER
+  OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C. 1
+
+
+
+
+  _First Published_ - 1892
+  _Second Edition_ - 1906
+  _Third and Revised Edition_ - 1922
+
+  Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & CO., LTD.,
+  53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
+  and 187, Fleet Street, London.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_Many years ago it occurred to this writer that it would be an interesting
+thing to write and illustrate a book on the Road to Brighton. The genesis
+of that thought has been forgotten, but the book was written and
+published, and has long been out of print. And there might have been the
+end of it, but that (from no preconceived plan) there has since been added
+a long series of books on others of our great highways, rendering
+imperative re-issues of the parent volume._
+
+_Two considerations have made that undertaking a matter of considerable
+difficulty, either of them sufficiently weighty. The first was that the
+original book was written at a time when the author had not arrived at a
+settled method; the second is found in the fact of the BRIGHTON ROAD being
+not only the best known of highways, but also the one most susceptible to
+change._
+
+_When it is remembered that motor-cars have come upon the roads since
+then, that innumerable sporting "records" in cycling, walking, and other
+forms of progression have since been made, and that in many other ways the
+road is different, it was seen that not merely a re-issue of the book, but
+a book almost entirely re-written and re-illustrated was required. This,
+then, is what was provided in a second edition, published in 1906. And now
+another, the third, is issued, bringing the story of this highway up to
+date._
+
+CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+_March, 1922._
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO BRIGHTON
+
+
+                                              MILES
+
+  Westminster Bridge (Surrey side) to--
+
+  St. Mark's Church, Kennington               1-1/2
+
+  Brixton Church                              3
+
+  Streatham                                   5-1/2
+
+  Norbury                                     6-3/4
+
+  Thornton Heath                              8
+
+  Croydon (Whitgift's Hospital)               9-1/2
+
+  Purley Corner                               12
+
+  Smitham Bottom                              13-1/2
+
+  Coulsdon Railway Station                    14-1/4
+
+  Merstham                                    17-3/4
+
+  Redhill (Market Hall)                       20-1/2
+
+  Horley ("Chequers")                         24
+
+  Povey Cross                                 25-3/4
+
+  Kimberham Bridge (Cross River Mole)         26
+
+  Lowfield Heath                              27
+
+  Crawley                                     29
+
+  Pease Pottage                               31-1/4
+
+  Hand Cross                                  33-1/2
+
+  Staplefield Common                          34-3/4
+
+  Slough Green                                36-1/4
+
+  Whiteman's Green                            37-1/4
+
+  Cuckfield                                   37-1/2
+
+  Ansty Cross                                 38
+
+  Bridge Farm (Cross River Adur)              40-1/4
+
+  St. John's Common                           40-3/4
+
+  "Friar's Oak" Inn                           42-3/4
+
+  Stonepound                                  43-1/2
+
+  Clayton                                     44-1/2
+
+  Pyecombe                                    45-1/2
+
+  Patcham                                     48
+
+  Withdean                                    48-3/4
+
+  Preston                                     49-3/4
+
+  Brighton (Aquarium)                         51-1/2
+
+
+THE SUTTON AND REIGATE ROUTE
+
+  St. Mark's, Kennington                       1-1/2
+
+  Tooting Broadway                             6
+
+  Mitcham                                      8-1/4
+
+  Sutton ("Greyhound")                        11
+
+  Tadworth                                    16
+
+  Lower Kingswood                             17
+
+  Reigate Hill                                19-1/4
+
+  Reigate (Town Hall)                         20-1/2
+
+  Woodhatch ("Old Angel")                     21-1/2
+
+  Povey Cross                                 26
+
+  Brighton                                    51-5/8
+
+
+THE BOLNEY AND HICKSTEAD ROUTE
+
+  Hand Cross                                  33-1/2
+
+  Bolney                                      39
+
+  Hickstead                                   40-1/2
+
+  Savers Common                               42
+
+  Newtimber                                   44-1/2
+
+  Pyecombe                                    45
+
+  Brighton                                    50-1/2
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+  George the Fourth                                  Frontispiece
+
+  Sketch-map showing Principal Routes to Brighton               4
+
+  Stage Waggon, 1808                                           13
+
+  The "Talbot" Inn Yard, Borough, about 1815                   17
+
+  Me and My Wife and Daughter                                  19
+
+  The "Duke of Beaufort" Coach starting from the "Bull
+  and Mouth" Office, Piccadilly Circus, 1826                   31
+
+  The "Age," 1829, starting from Castle Square, Brighton       35
+
+  Sir Charles Dance's Steam-carriage leaving London for
+  Brighton, 1833                                               39
+
+  The Brighton Day Mails crossing Hookwood Common, 1838        43
+
+  The "Age," 1852, crossing Ham Common                         47
+
+  The "Old Times," 1888                                        51
+
+  The "Comet," 1890                                            55
+
+  John Mayall, Junior, 1869                                    70
+
+  The Stock Exchange Walk: E. F. Broad at Horley               83
+
+  Miss M. Foster, paced by Motor Cycle, passing Coulsdon       86
+
+  Kennington Gate: Derby Day, 1839                             95
+
+  Streatham Common                                            101
+
+  Streatham                                                   107
+
+  The Dining Hall, Whitgift Hospital                          111
+
+  The Chapel, Hospital of the Holy Trinity                    113
+
+  Croydon Town Hall                                           120
+
+  Chipstead Church                                            135
+
+  Merstham                                                    139
+
+  Gatton Hall and "Town Hall"                                 144
+
+  The Switchback Road, Earlswood Common                       148
+
+  Thunderfield Castle                                         150
+
+  The "Chequers," Horley                                      151
+
+  The "Six Bells," Horley                                     153
+
+  The "Cock," Sutton, 1789                                    157
+
+  Kingswood Warren                                            162
+
+  The Suspension Bridge, Reigate Hill                         163
+
+  The Tunnel, Reigate                                         167
+
+  Tablet, Batswing Cottages                                   172
+
+  The Floods at Horley                                        174
+
+  Charlwood                                                   176
+
+  A Corner in Newdigate Church                                177
+
+  On the Road to Newdigate                                    179
+
+  Ifield Mill Pond                                            180
+
+  Crawley: Looking South                                      183
+
+  Crawley, 1789                                               185
+
+  An Old Cottage at Crawley                                   188
+
+  The "George," Crawley                                       189
+
+  Sculptured Emblem of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Church       191
+
+  Pease Pottage                                               197
+
+  The "Red Lion," Hand Cross                                  201
+
+  Cuckfield, 1789                                             203
+
+  The Road out of Cuckfield                                   207
+
+  Cuckfield Place                                             210
+
+  The Clock-Tower and Haunted Avenue, Cuckfield Place         211
+
+  Harrison Ainsworth                                          213
+
+  Old Sussex Fireback, Ridden's Farm                          223
+
+  Jacob's Post                                                224
+
+  Clayton Tunnel                                              233
+
+  Clayton Church and the South Downs                          235
+
+  The Ruins of Slaugham Place                                 239
+
+  The Entrance: Ruins of Slaugham Place                       241
+
+  Bolney                                                      243
+
+  From a Brass at Slaugham                                    244
+
+  Hickstead Place                                             245
+
+  Newtimber Place                                             247
+
+  Pyecombe: Junction of the Roads                             249
+
+  Patcham                                                     251
+
+  Old Dovecot, Patcham                                        254
+
+  Preston Viaduct: Entrance to Brighton                       256
+
+  The Pavilion                                                259
+
+  The Cliffs, Brighthelmstone, 1789                           263
+
+  Dr. Richard Russell                                         265
+
+  St. Nicholas, the old Parish Church of Brighthelmstone      269
+
+  The Aquarium, before destruction of the Chain Pier          271
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The road to Brighton--the main route, pre-eminently _the_ road--is
+measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium. It
+goes by Croydon, Redhill, Horley, Crawley, and Cuckfield, and is (or is
+supposed to be) 51-1/2 miles in length. Of this prime route--the classic
+way--there are several longer or shorter variations, of which the way
+through Clapham, Mitcham, Sutton, and Reigate, to Povey Cross is the
+chief. The modern "record" route is the first of these two, so far as Hand
+Cross, where it branches off and, instead of going through Cuckfield,
+proceeds to Brighton by way of Hickstead and Bolney, avoiding Clayton Hill
+and rejoining the initial route at Pyecombe.
+
+[Sidenote: VARIOUS ROUTES]
+
+The oldest road to Brighton is now but little used. It is not to be
+indicated in few words, but may be taken as the line of road from London
+Bridge, along the Kennington Road, to Brixton, Croydon, Godstone Green,
+Tilburstow Hill, Blindley Heath, East Grinstead, Maresfield, Uckfield, and
+Lewes; some fifty-nine miles. This is without doubt the most picturesque
+route. A circuitous way, travelled by some coaches was by Ewell,
+Leatherhead, Dorking, Horsham, and Mockbridge (doubtless, bearing in mind
+the ancient mires of Sussex, originally "Muckbridge"), and was 57-1/2
+miles in length. An extension of this route lay from Horsham through
+Steyning, bringing up the total mileage to sixty-one miles three furlongs.
+
+This multiplicity of ways meant that, in the variety of winding lanes
+which led to the Sussex coast, long before the fisher village of
+Brighthelmstone became that fashionable resort, Brighton, there were
+places on the way quite as important to the old waggoners and carriers as
+anything at the end of the journey. They set out the direction, and roads,
+when they began to be improved, were often merely the old routes widened,
+straightened, and metalled. They were kept very largely to the old lines,
+and it was not until quite late in the history of Brighton that the
+present "record" route in its entirety existed at all.
+
+Among the many isolated roads made or improved, which did not in the
+beginning contemplate getting to Brighton at all, the pride of place
+certainly belongs to the ten miles between Reigate and Crawley, originally
+made as a causeway for horsemen, and guarded by posts, so that wheeled
+traffic could not pass. This was constructed under the Act 8th William
+III., 1696, and was the first new road made in Surrey since the time of
+the Romans.
+
+It remained as a causeway until 1755, when it was widened and thrown open
+to all traffic, on paying toll. It was not only the first road to be made,
+but the last to maintain toll-gates on the way to Brighton, the Reigate
+Turnpike Trust expiring on the midnight of October 31st, 1881, from which
+time the Brighton Road became free throughout.
+
+Meanwhile, the road from London to Croydon was repaired in 1718; and at
+the same time the road from London to Sutton was declared to be "dangerous
+to all persons, horses, and other cattle," and almost impassable during
+five months of the year, and was therefore repaired, and toll-gates set up
+along it.
+
+Between 1730 and 1740 Westminster Bridge was building, and the roads in
+South London, including the Westminster Bridge Road and the Kennington
+Road, were being made. In 1755 the road (about ten miles) across the
+heaths and downs from Sutton to Reigate, was authorised, and in 1770 the
+Act was passed for widening and repairing the lanes from Povey Cross to
+County Oak and Brighthelmstone, by Cuckfield. By this time, it will be
+seen, Brighton had begun to be the goal of these improvements.
+
+The New Chapel and Copthorne road, on the East Grinstead route, was
+constructed under the Act of 1770, the route across St. John's Common and
+Burgess Hill remodelled in 1780, and the road from South Croydon to
+Smitham Bottom, Merstham, and Reigate was engineered out of the narrow
+lanes formerly existing on that line in 1807-8, being opened, "at present
+toll-free," June 4th. 1808.
+
+In 1813 the Bolney and Hickstead road, between Hand Cross and Pyecombe,
+was opened, and in 1816 the slip-road, avoiding Reigate, through Redhill,
+to Povey Cross. Finally, sixty yards were saved on the Reigate route by
+the cutting of the tunnel under Reigate Castle, in 1823. In this way the
+Brighton road, on its several branches, grew to be what it is now.
+
+The Brighton Road, it has already been said, is measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, which is the proper starting-point for
+record-makers and breakers; but it has as many beginnings as Homer had
+birthplaces. Modern coaches and motor-car services set out from the
+barrack-like hotels of Northumberland Avenue, or other central points, and
+the old carriers came to and went from the Borough High Street; but the
+Corinthian starting-point in the brave old days of the Regency and of
+George the Fourth was the "White Horse Cellar"--Hatchett's "White Horse
+Cellar"--in Piccadilly. There, any day throughout the year, the knowing
+ones were gathered--with those green goslings who wished to be thought
+knowing--exchanging the latest scandal and sporting gossip of the road,
+and rooking and being rooked; the high-coloured, full-blooded ancestors of
+the present generation, which looks upon them as a quite different order
+of beings, and can scarce believe in the reality of those full habits,
+those port-wine countenances, those florid garments that were
+characteristic of the age.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH-MAP SHOWING PRINCIPAL ROUTES TO BRIGHTON.]
+
+No one now starts from the "White Horse Cellar," for the excellent reason
+that it does not now exist. The original "Cellar" was a queer place.
+Figure to yourself a basement room, with sanded floor, and an odour like
+that of a wine-vault, crowded with Regency bucks drinking or discussing
+huge beef-steaks.
+
+It was situated on the south side of Piccadilly, where the Hotel Ritz now
+stands, and is first mentioned in 1720, when it was given its name by
+Williams, the landlord, in compliment to the House of Hanover, the
+newly-established Royal House of Great Britain, whose cognizance was a
+white horse. Abraham Hatchett first made the Cellar famous, both as a
+boozing-ken and a coach-office, and removed it to the opposite side of the
+street, where, as "Hatchett's Hotel and White Horse Cellar." it remained
+until 1884, when the present "Albemarle" arose on its site, with a "White
+Horse" restaurant in the basement.
+
+[Sidenote: SPORTSMEN]
+
+What Piccadilly and the neighbourhood of the "White Horse Cellar" were
+like in the times of Tom and Jerry, we may easily discover from the
+contemporary pages of "Real Life in London," written by one "Bob Tallyho,"
+recounting the adventures of himself and "Tom Dashall." A prize-fight was
+to be held on Copthorne Common between Jack Randall, "the
+Nonpareil"--called in the pronunciation of that time the "Nunparell"--and
+Martin, endeared to "the Fancy" as the "Master of the Rolls."[1]
+Naturally, the roads were thronged, and "Piccadilly was all in
+motion--coaches, carts, gigs, tilburies, whiskies, buggies, dogcarts,
+sociables, dennets, curricles, and sulkies were passing in rapid
+succession, intermingled with tax-carts and waggons decorated with laurel,
+conveying company of the most varied description. Here was to be seen the
+dashing _Corinthian_ tickling up his _tits_, and his _bang-up set-out_ of
+_blood and bone_, giving the go-by to a _heavy drag_ laden with eight
+brawny, bull-faced blades, smoking their way down behind a skeleton of a
+horse, to whom, in all probability, a good feed of corn would have been a
+luxury; _pattering_ among themselves, occasionally _chaffing_ the more
+elevated drivers by whom they were surrounded, and pushing forward their
+nags with all the ardour of a British merchant intent upon disposing of a
+valuable cargo of foreign goods on 'Change. There was a waggon full of
+_all sorts_ upon the _lark_, succeeded by a _donkey-cart_ with four
+insides: but _Neddy_, not liking his burthen, stopped short in the way of
+a dandy, whose horse's head, coming plump up to the back of the crazy
+vehicle at the moment of its stoppage, threw the rider into the arms of a
+dustman, who, hugging his _customer_ with the determined grasp of a bear,
+swore, d--n his eyes, he had saved his life, and he expected he would
+stand something handsome for the Gemmen all round, for if he had not
+pitched into their cart he would certainly have broke his neck; which
+being complied with, though reluctantly, he regained his saddle, and
+proceeded a little more cautiously along the remainder of the road, while
+groups of pedestrians of all ranks and appearances lined each side."
+
+On their way they pass Hyde Park Corner, where they encounter one of a
+notorious trio of brothers, friends of the Prince Regent and companions of
+his in every sort of excess--the Barrymores, to wit, named severally
+Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate, the last of this unholy trinity so
+called because of his chronic limping; the two others' titles, taken with
+the characters of their bearers, are self-explanatory.
+
+Dashall points his lordship out to his companion, who is new to London
+life, and requires such explanations.
+
+[Sidenote: LORD CRIPPLEGATE]
+
+"The driver of that tilbury," says he, "is the celebrated Lord
+Cripplegate,[2] with his usual equipage; his blue cloak with a scarlet
+lining hanging loosely over the vehicle gives an air of importance to his
+appearance, and he is always attended by that boy, who has been
+denominated his Cupid: he is a nobleman by birth, a gentleman by courtesy
+(oh, witty Dashall!), and a gamester by profession. He exhausted a large
+estate upon _odd and even_, _seven's the main_, etc., till, having lost
+sight of the _main chance_, he found it necessary to curtail his
+establishment and enliven his prospects by exchanging a first floor for a
+second, without an opportunity of ascertaining whether or not these
+alterations were best suited to his high notions or exalted taste; from
+which, in a short time, he was induced, either by inclination or
+necessity, to take a small lodging in an obscure street, and to sport a
+gig and one horse, instead of a curricle and pair, though in former times
+he used to drive four-in-hand, and was acknowledged to be an excellent
+whip. He still, however, possessed money enough to collect together a
+large quantity of halfpence, which in his hours of relaxation he managed
+to turn to good account by the following stratagem:--He distributed his
+halfpence on the floor of his little parlour in straight lines, and
+ascertained how many it would require to cover it. Having thus prepared
+himself, he invited some wealthy spendthrifts (with whom he still had the
+power of associating) to sup with him, and he welcomed them to his
+habitation with much cordiality. The glass circulated freely, and each
+recounted his gaming or amorous adventures till a late hour, when, the
+effects of the bottle becoming visible, he proposed, as a momentary
+suggestion, to name how many halfpence, laid side by side, would carpet
+the floor, and offered to lay a large wager that he would guess the
+nearest.
+
+"'Done! done!' was echoed round the room. Every one made a deposit of
+£100, and every one made a guess, equally certain of success; and his
+lordship declaring he had a large stock of halfpence by him, though
+perhaps not enough, the experiment was to be tried immediately. 'Twas an
+excellent hit!
+
+"The room was cleared; to it they went; the halfpence were arranged rank
+and file in military order, when it appeared that his lordship had
+certainly guessed (as well he might) nearest to the number. The
+consequence was an immediate alteration of his lordship's residence and
+appearance: he got one step in the world by it. He gave up his second-hand
+gig for one warranted new; and a change in his vehicle may pretty
+generally be considered as the barometer of his pocket."
+
+And so, with these piquant biographical remarks, they betook themselves
+along the road in the early morning, passing on their way many curious
+itinerants, whose trades have changed and decayed, and are now become
+nothing but a dim and misty memory; as, for instance, the sellers of warm
+"salop," the forerunners of the early coffee-stalls of our own day.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never,
+while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be
+dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either
+end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a _Via Regia_.
+It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton,
+and until the last--for close upon forty-eight years--it retained his
+affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when
+we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I
+have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the
+courtly Lawrence, in this book.
+
+The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his
+upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can
+mould the world to their own form.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PRINCE]
+
+The character of George the Fourth has been the theme of writers upon
+history and sociology, of essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without
+number, and most of them have pictured him in very dark colours indeed.
+But Horace Walpole, perhaps the clearest-headed of this company, shows in
+his "Last Journals" that from his boyhood the Prince was governed in the
+stupidest way--in a manner, indeed, but too well fitted to spoil a spirit
+so high and so impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his.
+
+He proves what we may abundantly learn from other sources, that the
+narrow-minded and obstinate George the Third, petty and parochial in
+public and in private, was jealous of his son's superior parts, and
+endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of seclusion and
+inadequate training. It was impossible for such a father to appreciate
+either the qualities or the defects of such a son. "The uncommunicative
+selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him to domestic
+virtues," says Walpole, and adds, "Nothing could equal the King's
+attention to seclude his son and protract his nonage. It went so absurdly
+far that he was made to wear a shirt with a frilled collar like that of
+babies. He one day took hold of his collar and said to a domestic, 'See
+how I am treated!'"
+
+The Duke of Montagu, too, was charged with the education of the Prince,
+and "he was utterly incapable of giving him any kind of instruction....
+The Prince was so good-natured, but so uninformed, that he often said, 'I
+wish anybody would tell me what I ought to do; nobody gives me any
+instruction for my conduct.'" The absolute poverty of the instruction
+afforded him, the false and narrow ways of the royal household, and the
+evil example and low companionship of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland,
+did much to spoil the Prince.
+
+To quote Walpole again: "It made men smile to find that in the palace of
+piety and pride his Royal Highness had learnt nothing but the dialect of
+footmen and grooms.... He drunk hard, swore, and passed every night in[3]
+...; such were the fruits of his being locked up in the palace of piety."
+
+He proved, too, an intractable and undutiful son; but that was the result
+to be expected, and we cannot join Thackeray in his sentimental snivel
+over George the Third.
+
+He was a faithless husband, but his wife was impossible, and even the mob
+who supported her quailed when the Marquis of Anglesey, baited in front of
+his house and compelled to drink her health, did so with the bitter rider,
+"And may all your wives be like her!"
+
+All high-spirited young England flocked to the side of the Prince of
+Wales. He was the Grand Master of Corinthianism and Tom-and-Jerryism. It
+was he who peopled these roads with a numerous and brilliant concourse of
+whirling travellers, where before had been only infrequent plodders amidst
+the Sussex sloughs. To his princely presence, radiant by the Old Steyne,
+hasted all manner of people; prince and prizefighter, statesman and
+nobleman; beauties noble and ignoble, and all who _lived_ their lives.
+There he made incautious guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy
+he called "Diabolino," and then exposed them in embarrassing situations;
+and there--let us remember it--he entertained, and was the beneficent
+patron of, the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The
+_Zeitgeist_ (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was personified in, and
+radiated from him. He was the First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in
+the perspective of a hundred years or so, something more: the type and
+exemplar of an age.
+
+He should have been endowed with perennial youth, but even his splendid
+vitality faded at last, and he grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a "fat
+Adonis of fifty," and was flung into prison for it; and prison is a
+fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see a misdemeanour in
+those misfortunes. No one who could help it would be fat, or fifty.
+Besides, to accuse one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon
+all: it is an accompaniment of royalty.
+
+Thackeray denounced his wig; but there is a prejudice in favour of flowing
+locks, and the King gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for
+being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig; and it seems a curious code of
+morality that would have it so; for although we may not all lose our hair
+nor grow fat, we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and pass
+the grand climacteric.
+
+There has been too much abuse of the Regency times. Where modern
+moralists, folded within their little sheep-walks from observation of the
+real world, mistake is in comparing those times with these, to the
+disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of life in the round, and
+seeing it only in the flat, cannot predicate what exists on the other
+side. To them there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the
+poet, _are_ what they seem, and nothing else.
+
+They lash the manners of the Regency, and think they are dealing out
+punishment to a bygone state of things; but human nature is the same in
+all centuries. The fact is so obvious that one is ashamed to state it. The
+Regency was a terrible time for gambling; but Tranby Croft had a similar
+repute when Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales. Bridge is a fine game,
+and what, think you, supports the evening newspapers? The news? Certainly:
+the Betting News. Cock-fighting was a brutal sport, and is now illegal,
+but is it dead? Oh dear, no. Virtue was not general in the picturesque
+times of George the Fourth. Is it now? Study the Cause Lists of the
+Divorce Courts. Worse offences are still punished by law, but are later
+condoned or explained by Society as an eccentricity. Society a hundred
+years ago did not plumb such depths.
+
+In short, behind the surface of things, the Regency riot not only exists,
+but is outdone, and Tom and Jerry, could they return, would find
+themselves very dull dogs indeed. It is all the doing of the middle
+classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the
+middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at
+Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed;
+but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper
+and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is--or they
+are--more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a
+power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other
+classes above and below.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+[Sidenote: SOCIETY: THEN AND NOW]
+
+The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it
+then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in
+1681. In De Laune's "Present State of Great Britain," published in that
+year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in
+and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from
+"Bredhempstone" to the "Queen's Head," Southwark, on Wednesdays, and,
+setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which
+was remarkably good travelling for a carrier's waggon in the seventeenth
+century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far
+as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road.
+It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of "New Remarks on London,"
+published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At
+that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the "Talbot," in the Borough
+High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the "Talbot" and the "George." In
+the summer of 1745 the "Flying Machine" left the "Old Ship,"
+Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening.
+
+But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the
+widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in _The Lewes Journal_ of December
+8th that she was continuing the business:
+
+    THOMAS SMITH, the OLD LEWES CARRIER, being dead, THE BUSINESS IS NOW
+    CONTINUED BY HIS WIDOW, MARY SMITH, who gets into the "George Inn," in
+    the Borough, Southwark, EVERY WEDNESDAY in the afternoon, and sets out
+    for Lewes EVERY THURSDAY morning by eight o'clock, and brings Goods
+    and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick and all places
+    adjacent at reasonable rates.
+
+        Performed (_if God permit_) by
+          MARY SMITH.
+
+We may perceive by these early records that the real original way down to
+the Sussex coast was by the Croydon, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes
+route, and that its outlet must have been Newhaven, which, despite its
+name, is so very ancient a place, and was a port and harbour when
+Brighthelmstone was but a fisher-village.
+
+[Illustration: STAGE WAGGON, 1808. _From a contemporary drawing._]
+
+That is the only glimpse we get of the widow Smith and her waggon; but the
+"George Inn, in the Borough," that she "got into," is still in the
+Borough High Street. It is a fine and flourishing remnant of an ancient
+galleried hostelry of the time of Chaucer, and it is characteristic of the
+continuity of English social, as well as political history that, although
+waggons and coaches no longer come to or set out from the "George," its
+spacious yard is now a railway receiving-office for goods, where the
+railway vans, those descendants of the stage-waggon, thunderously come and
+go all day.
+
+It will be observed that the traffic in those days went to and from
+Southwark, which was then the great business centre for the carriers. Not
+yet was the Brighton road measured from Westminster Bridge, for the
+adequate reason that there was no bridge at Westminster until 1749: only
+the ferry from the Horseferry Road to Lambeth.
+
+Widow Smith's waggon halted at Lewes, and it is not until ten years later
+than the date of her advertisement that we hear of the Brighthelmstone
+conveyance. The first was that announced by the pioneer, James Batchelor,
+in _The Sussex Weekly Advertiser_, May 12th, 1756:
+
+    NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the LEWES ONE DAY STAGE COACH or CHAISE
+    sets out from the Talbot Inn, in the Borough, on Saturday next, the
+    19th instant.
+
+    When likewise the Brighthelmstone Stage begins.
+
+        Performed (_if God permit_) by
+          JAMES BATCHELOR.
+
+The "Talbot" inn, which stood on the site of the ancient "Tabard," of
+Chaucerian renown, disappeared from the Borough High Street in 1870. What
+its picturesque yard was like in 1815, with the waggons of the Sussex
+carriers, let the illustration tell.
+
+Let us halt awhile, to admire the courage of those coaching and waggoning
+pioneers who, in the days before "the sea-side" had been invented, and few
+people travelled, dared the awful roads for what must then have been a
+precarious business. Sussex roads in especial had a most unenviable name
+for miriness, and wheeled traffic was so difficult that for many years
+after this period the farmers and others continued to take their womenkind
+about in the pillion fashion here caricatured by Henry Bunbury.
+
+[Sidenote: SUSSEX ROADS]
+
+Horace Walpole, indeed, travelling in Sussex in 1749, visiting Arundel and
+Cowdray, acquired a too intimate acquaintance with their phenomenal depth
+of mud and ruts, inasmuch as he--finicking little gentleman--was compelled
+to alight precipitately from his overturned chaise, and to foot it like
+any common fellow. One quite pities his daintiness in the narration of his
+sorrows, picturesquely set forth by that accomplished letter-writer
+arrived home to the safe seclusion of Strawberry Hill. He writes to George
+Montagu, and dates August 26th, 1749:
+
+"Mr. Chute and I returned from our expedition miraculously well,
+considering all our distresses. If you love good roads, conveniences, good
+inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into
+Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole
+county has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George
+the Second was the first monarch of the East Angles. Coaches grow there no
+more than balm and spices: we were forced to drop our post-chaise, that
+resembled nothing so much as harlequin's calash, which was occasionally a
+chaise or a baker's cart. We journeyed over alpine mountains" (Walpole,
+you will observe, was, equally with the evening journalist of these happy
+times, not unaccustomed to exaggerate) "drenched in clouds, and thought of
+harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the
+morning clouds, and was so glad to hear the _aqua vitæ_ man crying a
+dram.... I have set up my staff, and finished my pilgrimages for this
+year. Sussex is a great damper of curiosity."
+
+Thus he prattles on, delightfully describing the peculiarities of the
+several places he visited with this Mr. Chute, "whom," says he, "I have
+created _Strawberry King-at-Arms_." One wonders what that mute, inglorious
+Chute thought of it all; if he was as disgusted with Sussex sloughs and
+moist unpleasant "mountains" as his garrulous companion. Chute suffered in
+silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper did not induce in _him_ a
+fury of composition; and so we shall never know what he endured.
+
+Then the pedantic Doctor John Burton, who journeyed into Sussex in 1751,
+had no less unfortunate acquaintance with these miry ways than our
+_dilettante_ of Strawberry Hill. To those who have small Latin and less
+Greek, this traveller's tale must ever remain a sealed book; for it is in
+those languages that he records his views upon ways and means, and men and
+manners, in Sussex. As thus, for example:
+
+"I fell immediately upon all that was most bad, upon a land desolate and
+muddy, whether inhabited by men or beasts a stranger could not easily
+distinguish, and upon roads which were, to explain concisely what is most
+abominable, Sussexian. No one would imagine them to be intended for the
+people and the public, but rather the byways of individuals, or, more
+truly, the tracks of cattle-drivers; for everywhere the usual footmarks of
+oxen appeared, and we too, who were on horseback, going along zigzag,
+almost like oxen at plough, advanced as if we were turning back, while we
+followed out all the twists of the roads.... My friend, I will set before
+you a kind of problem in the manner of Aristotle:--Why comes it that the
+oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals(!) are so long-legged in
+Sussex? Can it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much
+mud by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles become stretched, as
+it were, and the bones lengthened?"
+
+A doleful tale. Presently he arrives at the conclusion that the peasantry
+"do not concern themselves with literature or philosophy, for they
+consider the pursuit of such things to be only idling," which is not so
+very remarkable a trait, after all, in the character of an agricultural
+people.
+
+[Illustration: THE "TALBOT" INN YARD. BOROUGH, ABOUT 1815. _From an old
+drawing._]
+
+Our author eventually, notwithstanding the terrible roads, arrived at
+Brighthelmstone, by way of Lewes, "just as day was fading." It was, so he
+says, "a village on the sea-coast; lying in a valley gradually sloping,
+and yet deep. It is not, indeed, contemptible as to size, for it is
+thronged with people, though the inhabitants are mostly very needy and
+wretched in their mode of living, occupied in the employment of fishing,
+robust in their bodies, laborious, and skilled in all nautical crafts,
+and, as it is said, terrible cheats of the custom-house officers." As who,
+indeed, is not, allowing the opportunity?
+
+Batchelor, the pioneer of Brighton coaching, continued his enterprise in
+1757, and with the coming of spring, and the drying of the roads, his
+coaches, which had been laid up in the winter, after the usual custom of
+those times, were plying again. In May he advertised, "for the convenience
+of country gentlemen, etc.," his London, Lewes, and Brighthelmstone
+stage-coach, which performed the journey of fifty-eight miles in two days;
+and exclusive persons, who preferred to travel alone, might have
+post-chaises of him.
+
+[Sidenote: EARLY COACHING]
+
+Brighthelmstone had in the meanwhile sprung into notice. The health-giving
+qualities of its sea air, and the then "strange new eccentricity" of
+sea-bathing, advocated from 1750 by Dr. Richard Russell, had already given
+it something of a vogue among wealthy invalids, and the growing traffic
+was worth competing for. Competitors therefore sprang up to share
+Batchelor's business. Most of them merely added stage-coaches like his,
+but in May, 1762, a certain "J. Tubb," in partnership with "S. Brawne,"
+started a very superior conveyance, going from London one day and
+returning from Brighthelmstone the next. This was the:
+
+    LEWES and BRIGHTELMSTONE new FLYING MACHINE (by Uckfield), hung on
+    steel springs, very neat and commodious, to carry FOUR PASSENGERS,
+    sets out from the Golden Cross Inn, Charing Cross, on Monday, the 7th
+    of June, at six o'clock in the morning, and will continue MONDAY'S,
+    WEDNESDAY'S, and FRIDAY'S to the White Hart, at Lewes, and the Castle,
+    at Brightelmstone, where regular Books are kept for entering
+    passenger's and parcels; will return to London TUESDAY'S, THURSDAY'S,
+    and SATURDAY'S Each Inside Passenger to Lewes, Thirteen Shillings; to
+    Brighthelmstone, Sixteen; to be allowed Fourteen Pound Weight for
+    Luggage, all above to pay One Penny per Pound; half the fare to be
+    paid at Booking, the other at entering the machine. Children in Lap
+    and Outside Passengers to pay half-price.
+
+        Performed by J. TUBB.
+                     S. BRAWNE.
+
+[Illustration: ME AND MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER. _From a caricature by Henry
+Bunbury._]
+
+Batchelor saw with dismay this coach performing the whole journey in one
+day, while his took two. But he determined to be as good a man as his
+opponent, if not even a better, and started the next week, at identical
+fares, "a new large FLYING CHARIOT, with a Box and four horses (by
+Chailey) to carry two Passengers only, except three should desire to go
+together." The better to crush the presumptuous Tubb, he later on reduced
+his fares. Then ensued a diverting, if by no means edifying, war of
+advertisements; for Tubb, unwilling to be outdone, inserted the following
+in _The Lewes Journal_, November, 1762:
+
+    THIS IS TO INFORM THE PUBLIC that, on Monday, the 1st of November
+    instant, the LEWES and BRIGHTHELMSTON FLYING MACHINE began going in
+    _one day_, and continues twice a week during the Winter Season to
+    Lewes only; sets out from the White Hart, at Lewes, MONDAYS and
+    THURSDAYS at Six o'clock in the Morning, and returns from the Golden
+    Cross, at Charing Cross, TUESDAYS and SATURDAYS, at the same hour.
+
+        Performed by J. TUBB.
+
+    N.B.--Gentlemen, Ladies, and others, are desired to look narrowly into
+    the Meanness and Design of the other Flying Machine to Lewes and
+    Brighthelmston, in lowering his prices, whether 'tis thro' conscience
+    or an endeavour to suppress me. If the former is the case, think how
+    you have been used for a great number of years, when he engrossed the
+    whole to himself, and kept you two days upon the road, going fifty
+    miles. If the latter, and he should be lucky enough to succeed in it,
+    judge whether he wont return to his old prices, when you cannot help
+    yourselves, and use you as formerly. As I have, then, been the remover
+    of this obstacle, which you have all granted by your great
+    encouragement to me hitherto, I, therefore, hope for the continuance
+    of your favours, which will entirely frustrate the deep-laid schemes
+    of my great opponent, and lay a lasting obligation on,--Your very
+    humble Servant,
+
+        J. TUBB.
+
+To this replies Batchelor, possessed with an idea of vested interests
+pertaining to himself:
+
+    WHEREAS, Mr. TUBB, by an Advertisement in this paper of Monday last,
+    has thought fit to cast some invidious Reflections upon me, in respect
+    of the lowering my Prices and being two days upon the Road, with other
+    low insinuations, I beg leave to submit the following matters to the
+    calm Consideration of the Gentlemen, Ladies, and other Passengers, of
+    what Degree soever, who have been pleased to favour me, viz.:
+
+    That our Family first set up the Stage Coach from London to Lewes, and
+    have continued it for a long Series of Years, from Father to Son and
+    other Branches of the same Race, and that even before the Turnpikes on
+    the Lewes Road were erected they drove their Stage, in the Summer
+    Season, in one day, and have continued to do ever since, and now in
+    the Winter Season twice in the week. And it is likewise to be
+    considered that many aged and infirm Persons, who did not chuse to
+    rise early in the Morning, were very desirous to be two Days on the
+    Road for their own Ease and Conveniency, therefore there was no
+    obstacle to be removed. And as to lowering my prices, let every one
+    judge whether, when an old Servant of the Country perceives an
+    Endeavour to suppress and supplant him in his Business, he is not well
+    justified in taking all measures in his Power for his own Security,
+    and even to oppose an unfair Adversary as far as he can. 'Tis,
+    therefore, hoped that the descendants of your very ancient Servants
+    will still meet with your farther Encouragement, and leave the Schemes
+    of our little Opponent to their proper Deserts.--I am, Your old and
+    present most obedient Servant,
+
+        J. BATCHELOR.
+
+    _December 13, 1762._
+
+The rivals both kept to the road until the death of Batchelor, in 1766,
+when his business was sold to Tubb, who took into partnership a Mr. Davis.
+Together they started, in 1767, the first service of a daily coach in the
+"Lewes and Brighthelmstone Flys," each carrying four passengers, one to
+London and one to Brighton every day.
+
+Tubb and Davis had in 1770 one "machine" and one waggon on this road, fare
+by "machine" 14_s._ The machine ran daily to and from London, starting at
+five o'clock in the morning. The waggon was three days on the road.
+Another machine was also running, but with the coming of winter these
+machines performed only three double journeys each a week.
+
+In 1777 another stage-waggon was started by "Lashmar & Co." It loitered
+between the "King's Head," Southwark, and the "King's Head," Brighton,
+starting from London every Tuesday at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m., and
+reaching its destination on Thursday afternoons.
+
+On May 31st, 1784, Tubb and Davis put a "light post-coach" on the road,
+running to Brighton one day returning to London the next, in addition to
+their already running "machine" and "post-coach." This new conveyance
+presumably made good time, four "insides" only being carried.
+
+[Sidenote: GROWTH OF COACHING]
+
+Four years later, when Brighton's sun of splendour was rising, there were
+on the road between London and the sea three "machines," three light
+post-coaches, two coaches, and two stage-waggons. Tubb now disappears, and
+his firm becomes Davis & Co. Other proprietors were Ibberson & Co.,
+Bradford & Co., and Mr. Wesson.
+
+On May 1st, 1791, the first Brighton Mail coach was established. It was a
+two-horse affair, running by Lewes and East Grinstead, and taking twelve
+hours to perform the journey. It was not well supported by the public, and
+as the Post Office would not pay the contractors a higher mileage, it was
+at some uncertain period withdrawn.
+
+About 1796 coach offices were opened in Brighton for the sole despatch of
+coaching business, the time having passed away for the old custom of
+starting from inns. Now, too, were different tales to tell of these roads,
+after the Pavilion had been set in course of building. Royalty and the
+Court could not endure to travel upon such evil tracks as had hitherto
+been the lot of travellers to Brighthelmstone. Presently, instead of a
+dearth of roads and a plethora of ruts, there became a choice of good
+highways and a plenty of travellers upon them.
+
+Numerous coaches ran to meet the demands of the travelling public, and
+these continually increased in number and improved in speed. About this
+time first appear the firms of Henwood, Crossweller, Cuddington, Pockney &
+Harding, whose office was at No. 44, East Street: and Boulton, Tilt,
+Hicks, Baulcomb & Co., at No. 1, North Street. The most remarkable thing,
+to my mind, about those companies is their long-winded names. In addition
+to the old service, there ran a "night post-coach" on alternate nights,
+starting at 10 p.m. in the season. One then went to or from London
+generally in "about" eleven hours, if all went well. If you could afford
+only a ride in the stage-waggon, why then you were carried the distance by
+the accelerated (!) waggons of this line in two days and one night.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Erredge, the historian of Brighton, tells something of the social side of
+Brighton Road coaching at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social
+indeed, as you shall see:
+
+"In 1801 two pair-horse coaches ran between London and Brighton on
+alternate days, one up, the other down, driven by Messrs. Crossweller and
+Hine. The progress of these coaches was amusing. The one from London left
+the Blossoms Inn, Lawrence Lane, at 7 a.m., the passengers breaking their
+fast at the Cock, Sutton, at 9. The next stoppage for the purpose of
+refreshment was at the Tangier, Banstead Downs--a rural little spot,
+famous for its elderberry wine, which used to be brought from the cottage
+'roking hot,' and on a cold wintry morning few refused to partake of it.
+George IV. invariably stopped here and took a glass from the hand of Miss
+Jeal as he sat in his carriage. The important business of luncheon took
+place at Reigate, where sufficient time was allowed the passengers to view
+the Baron's Cave, where, it is said, the barons assembled the night
+previous to their meeting King John at Runymeade. The grand halt for
+dinner was made at Staplefield Common, celebrated for its famous black
+cherry-trees, under the branches of which, when the fruit was ripe, the
+coaches were allowed to draw up and the passengers to partake of its
+tempting produce. The hostess of the hostelry here was famed for her
+rabbit-puddings, which, hot, were always waiting the arrival of the coach,
+and to which the travellers never failed to do such ample justice, that
+ordinarily they found it quite impossible to leave at the hour appointed;
+so grogs, pipes, and ale were ordered in, and, to use the language of the
+fraternity, 'not a wheel wagged' for two hours. Handcross was a little
+resting-place, celebrated for its 'neat' liquors, the landlord of the inn
+standing, bottle in hand, at the door. He and several other bonifaces at
+Friars' Oak, etc., had the reputation of being on pretty good terms with
+the smugglers who carried on their operations with such audacity along the
+Sussex coast.
+
+"After walking up Clayton Hill, a cup of tea was sometimes found to be
+necessary at Patcham, after which Brighton was safely reached at 7 p.m. It
+must be understood that it was the custom for the passengers to walk up
+all the hills, and even sometimes in heavy weather to give a push behind
+to assist the jaded horses."
+
+[Sidenote: COMPETITION]
+
+But it was not always so ideal or so idyllic. That there were discomforts
+and accidents is evident from the wordy warfare of advertisements that
+followed upon the starting of the Royal Brighton Four Horse Company in
+1802. As a competitor with older firms, it seems to have aroused much
+jealousy and slander, if we may believe the following contemporary
+advertisement:
+
+    THE ROYAL BRIGHTON Four Horse Coach Company beg leave to return their
+    sincere thanks to their Friends and the Public in general for the very
+    liberal support they have experienced since the starting of their
+    Coaches, and assure them it will always be their greatest study to
+    have their Coaches safe, with good Horses and sober careful Coachmen.
+
+    They likewise wish to rectify a report in circulation of their Coach
+    having been overturned on Monday last, by which a gentleman's leg was
+    broken, &c., no such thing having ever happened to either of their
+    Coaches. The Fact is it was one of the BLUE COACHES instead of the
+    Royal New Coach.
+
+    As several mistakes have happened, of their friends being BOOKED at
+    other Coach offices, they are requested to book themselves at the
+    ROYAL NEW COACH OFFICE, CATHERINE'S HEAD, 47, East Street.
+
+The coaching business grew rapidly, and in an advertisement offering for
+sale a portion of the coaching business at No. 1, North Street, it was
+stated that the annual returns of this firm were more than £12,000 per
+annum, yielding from Christmas, 1794, to Christmas, 1808, seven and a
+half per cent. on the capital invested, besides purchasing the interest of
+four of the partners in the concern. In this last year two new businesses
+were started, those of Waldegrave & Co., and Pattenden & Co. Fares now
+ruled high--23_s._ inside; 13_s._ outside.
+
+The year 1809 marked the beginning of a new and strenuous coaching era on
+this road. Then Crossweller & Co. commenced to run their "morning and
+night" coaches, and William "Miller" Bradford formed his company. This was
+an association of twelve members, contributing £100 each, for the purpose
+of establishing a "double" coach--that is to say, one up and one down,
+each day. The idea was to "lick creation" on the Brighton Road by
+accelerating the speed, and to this end they acquired some forty-five
+horses then sold out of the Inniskilling Dragoons, at that time stationed
+at Brighton. On May Day, 1810, the Brighton Mail was re-established. These
+"Royal Night Mail Coaches" as they were grandiloquently announced, were
+started by arrangement with the Postmaster-General. The speed, although
+much improved, was not yet so very great, eight hours being occupied on
+the way, although these coaches went by what was then the new cut _via_
+Croydon. Like the Dover. Hastings, and Portsmouth mails, the Brighton Mail
+was two-horsed. It ran to and from the "Blossoms" Inn, Lawrence Lane,
+Cheapside, and never attained a better performance than 7 hours 20
+minutes, a speed of 7-1/2 miles an hour. It had, however, _this_
+distinction, if it may so be called: it was the slowest mail in the
+kingdom.
+
+It was on June 25th, 1810, that an accident befell Waldegrave's
+"Accommodation" coach on its up journey. Near Brixton Causeway its hind
+wheels collapsed, owing to the heavy weight of the loaded vehicle. By one
+of those strange chances when truth appears stranger than fiction, there
+chanced to be a farmer's waggon passing the coach at the instant of its
+overturning. Into it were shot the "outsiders," fortunate in this
+comparatively easy fall. Still, shocks and bruises were not few, and one
+gentleman had his thigh broken.
+
+[Sidenote: A COACH ROBBERY]
+
+By June, 1811, traffic had so increased that there were then no fewer than
+twenty-eight coaches running between Brighton and London. On February 5th
+in the following year occurred the only great road robbery known on this
+road. This was the theft from the "Blue" coach of a package of bank-notes
+representing a sum of between three and four thousand pounds sterling.
+Crosswellers were proprietors of the coach, and from them Messrs. Brown,
+Lashmar & West, of the Brighton Union Bank, had hired a box beneath the
+seat for the conveyance of remittances to and from London. On this day the
+Bank's London correspondents placed these notes in the box for
+transmission to London, but on arrival the box was found to have been
+broken open and the notes all stolen. It would seem that a carefully
+planned conspiracy had been entered into by several persons, who must have
+had a thorough knowledge of the means by which the Union Bank sent and
+received money to and from the metropolis. On this morning six persons
+were booked for inside places. Of this number two only made an
+appearance--a gentleman and a lady. Two gentlemen were picked up as the
+coach proceeded. The lady was taken suddenly ill when Sutton was reached,
+and she and her husband were left at the inn there. When the coach arrived
+at Reigate the two remaining passengers went to inquire for a friend.
+Returning shortly, they told the coachman that the friend whom they had
+supposed to be at Brighton had returned to town, therefore it was of no
+use proceeding further.
+
+Thus the coachman and guard had the remainder of the journey to
+themselves, while the cash-box, as was discovered at the journey's end,
+was minus its cash. A reward of £300 was immediately offered for
+information that would lead to recovery of the notes. This was
+subsequently altered to an offer of 100 guineas for information of the
+offender, in addition to £300 upon recovery of the total amount, or "ten
+per cent. upon the amount of so much thereof as shall be recovered." No
+reward money was ever paid, for the notes were never recovered, and the
+thieves escaped with their booty.
+
+In 1813 the "Defiance" was started, to run to and from Brighton and London
+in the daytime, each way six hours. This produced the rival "Eclipse,"
+which belied the suggestion of its name and did not eclipse, but only
+equalled, the performance of its model. But competition had now grown very
+severe, and fares in consequence were reduced to--inside, ten shillings;
+outside, five shillings. Indeed, in 1816, a number of Jews started a coach
+to run from London to Brighton in six hours: or, failing to keep time, to
+forfeit all fares. Needless to say, under such Hebrew management, and with
+that liability, it was punctuality itself; but Nemesis awaited it, in the
+shape of an information laid for furious driving.
+
+The Mail, meanwhile, maintained its ancient pace of a little over six
+miles an hour--a dignified, no-hurry, governmental rate of progression.
+There was, in fact, no need for the Brighton Mail to make speed, for the
+road from the General Post Office is only fifty-three miles in length, and
+all the night and the early morning, from eight o'clock until five or six
+o'clock a.m., lay before it.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+We come now to the "Era of the Amateur," who not only flourished
+pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on
+it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence
+almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became "the thing" to
+drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition,
+there arose that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur
+Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by
+Corinthian gambols, and taking to the one trade on earth at which he could
+earn a wage. That is why the Golden Age of coaching won on the Brighton
+Road a refinement it only aped elsewhere.
+
+[Sidenote: ARISTOCRATIC COACHMEN]
+
+It is curious to see how coaching has always been, even in its serious
+days, before steam was thought of, the chosen amusement of wealthy and
+aristocratic whips. Of those who affected the Brighton Road may be
+mentioned the Marquis of Worcester, who drove the "Duke of Beaufort," Sir
+St. Vincent Cotton of the "Age," and the Hon. Fred Jerningham, who drove
+the Day Mail. The "Age," too, had been driven by Mr. Stevenson, a
+gentleman and a graduate of Cambridge, whose "passion for the _bench_," as
+"Nimrod" says, superseded all other worldly ambitions. He became a
+coachman by profession, and a good professional he made; but he had not
+forgotten his education and early training, and he was, as a whip,
+singularly refined and courteous. He caused, at a certain change of horses
+on the road, a silver sandwich-box to be handed round to the passengers by
+his servant, with an offer of a glass of sherry, should any desire one.
+Another gentleman, "connected with the first families in Wales," whose
+father long represented his native county in Parliament, horsed and drove
+one side of this ground with Mr. Stevenson.
+
+This was "Sackie," Sackville Frederick Gwynne, of Carmarthenshire, who
+quarrelled with his relatives and took to the road; became part proprietor
+of the "Age," broke off from Stevenson, and eventually lived and died at
+Liverpool as a cabdriver. He drove a cab till 1874, when he died, aged
+seventy-three.
+
+Harry Stevenson's connection with the Brighton Road began in 1827, when,
+as a young man fresh from Cambridge, he brought with him such a social
+atmosphere and such full-fledged expertness in driving a coach that
+Cripps, a coachmaster of Brighton and proprietor of the "Coronet," not
+only was overjoyed to have him on the box, but went so far as to paint his
+name on the coach as one of the licensees, for which false declaration
+Cripps was fined in November, 1827.
+
+The parentage and circumstances of Harry Stevenson are alike mysterious.
+We are told that he "went the pace," and was already penniless at
+twenty-two years of age, about the time of his advent upon the Brighton
+Road. In 1828 his famous "Age" was put on the road, built for him by
+Aldebert, the foremost coach-builder of the period, and appointed in every
+way with unexampled luxury. The gold- and silver-embroidered horse-cloths
+of the "Age" are very properly preserved in the Brighton Museum.
+Stevenson's career was short, for he died in February, 1830.
+
+Coaching authorities give the palm for artistry to whips of other roads:
+they considered the excellence of this as fatal to the production of those
+qualities that went to make an historic name. This road had become
+"perhaps the most nearly perfect, and certainly the most fashionable, of
+all."
+
+With the introduction of this sporting and irresponsible element, racing
+between rival coaches--and not the mere conveying of passengers--became
+the real interest of the coachmen, and proprietors were obliged to issue
+notices to assure the timid that this form of rivalry would be
+discouraged. A slow coach, the "Life Preserver," was even put on the road
+to win the support of old ladies and the timid, who, as the record of
+accidents tells us, did well to be timorous. But accidents _would_ happen
+to fast and slow alike. The "Coburg" was upset at Cuckfield in August,
+1819. Six of the passengers were so much injured that they could not
+proceed, and one died the following day at the "King's Head." The "Coburg"
+was an old-fashioned coach, heavy, clumsy, and slow, carrying six
+passengers inside and twelve outside. This type gave place to coaches
+of lighter build about 1823.
+
+[Illustration: THE "DUKE OF BEAUFORT" COACH STARTING FROM THE "BULL AND
+MOUTH" OFFICE, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, 1826. _From an aquatint after W. J.
+Shayer._]
+
+In 1826 seventeen coaches ran to Brighton from London every morning,
+afternoon, or evening. They had all of them the most high-sounding of
+names, calculated to impress the mind either with a sense of swiftness, or
+to awe the understanding with visions of aristocratic and court-like
+grandeur. As for the times they individually made, and for the inns from
+which they started, you who are insatiable of dry bones of fact may go to
+the Library of the British Museum and find your Cary (without an "e") and
+do your gnawing of them. That they started at all manner of hours, even
+the most uncanny, you must rest assured; and that they took off from the
+(to ourselves) most impossible and romantic-sounding of inns, may be
+granted, when such examples as the strangely incongruous "George and Blue
+Boar," the Herrick-like "Blossoms" Inn, and the idyllic-seeming
+"Flower-pot" are mentioned.
+
+[Sidenote: NAMES OF THE COACHES]
+
+They were, those seventeen coaches, the "Royal Mail," the "Coronet,"
+"Magnet," "Comet," "Royal Sussex," "Sovereign," "Alert," "Dart," "Union,"
+"Regent," "Times," "Duke of York," "Royal George," "True Blue," "Patriot,"
+"Post," and the "Summer Coach," so called, and they nearly all started
+from the City and Holborn, calling at West End booking-offices on their
+several ways. Most of the old inns from which they set out are pulled
+down, and the memory of them has faded.
+
+The "Golden Cross" at Charing Cross, from whose doors started the "Comet"
+and the "Regent" in this year of grace 1826, and at which the "Times"
+called on its way from Holborn, has been wholly remodelled; the "White
+Horse," Fetter Lane, whence the "Duke of York" bowled away, has been
+demolished; the "Old Bell and Crown" Inn, Holborn, where the "Alert," the
+"Union," and the "Times" drew up daily in the old-fashioned galleried
+courtyard, is swept away. Were Viator to return to-morrow, he would
+surely want to return to Hades, or Paradise, wherever he may be, at once.
+Around him would be, to his senses, an astonishing whirl and noise of
+traffic, despite the wood-paving that has superseded macadam, which itself
+displaced the granite setts he knew. Many strange and horrid portents he
+would note, and Holborn would be to him as an unknown street in a strange
+town.
+
+Than 1826 the informative Cary goes no further, and his "Itinerary,"
+excellent though it be, and invaluable to those who would know aught of
+the coaches that plied in the years when it was published, gives no
+particulars of the many "butterfly" coaches and amateur drags that cut in
+upon the regular coaches during the rush and scour of the season.
+
+In 1821 it was computed that over forty coaches ran to and from London and
+Brighton daily; in September, 1822, there were thirty-nine. In 1828 it was
+calculated that the sixteen permanent coaches then running, summer and
+winter, received between them a sum of £60,000 per annum, and the total
+sum expended in fares upon coaching on this road was taken as amounting to
+£100,000 per annum. That leaves the very respectable amount of £40,000 for
+the season's takings of the "butterflies."
+
+An accident happened to the "Alert" on October 9th, 1829, when the coach
+was taking up passengers at Brighton. The horses ran away, and dashed the
+coach and themselves into an area sixteen feet deep. The coach was
+battered almost to pieces, and one lady was seriously injured. The horses
+escaped unhurt. In 1832, August 25th, the Brighton Mail was upset near
+Reigate, the coachman being killed.
+
+[Illustration: THE "AGE," 1829, STARTING FROM CASTLE SQUARE, BRIGHTON.
+_From an engraving after C. Cooper Henderson._]
+
+[Sidenote: STEAM CARRIAGES]
+
+This was the era of those early motor-cars, the steam-carriages, which, in
+spite of their clumsy construction and appalling ugliness, arrived very
+nearly to a commercial success. Many inventors were engaged from 1823 to
+1838 upon this subject. Walter Hancock, in particular, began in 1824, and
+in 1828 proposed a service of his "land-steamers" between London and
+Brighton, but did not actually appear upon this road with his "Infant"
+until November, 1832. The contrivance performed the double journey with
+some difficulty and in slower time than the coaches: but Hancock on that
+eventful day confidently declared that he was perfecting a newer machine
+by which he expected to run down in three and a half hours. He never
+achieved so much, but in October, 1833, his "Autopsy," which had been
+successfully running as an omnibus between Paddington and Stratford, went
+from the works at Stratford to Brighton in eight and a half hours, of
+which three hours were taken up by a halt on the road.
+
+No artist has preserved a view of this event for us, but a print may still
+be met with depicting the start of Sir Charles Dance's steam-carriage from
+Wellington Street, Strand, for Brighton on some eventful morning of that
+same year. A prison-van is, by comparison with this fearsome object, a
+thing of beauty; but in the picture you will observe enthusiasm on foot
+and on horseback, and even four-legged, in the person of the inevitable
+dog. In the distance the discerning may observe the old toll-house on
+Waterloo Bridge, and the gaunt shape of the Shot Tower.
+
+By 1839 the coaching business had in Brighton become concentrated in
+Castle Square, six of the seven principal offices being situated there.
+Five London coaches ran from the Blue Office (Strevens & Co.), five from
+the Red Office (Mr. Goodman's), four from the "Spread Eagle" (Chaplin &
+Crunden's), three from the Age (T. W. Capps & Co.), two from Hine's, East
+Street; two from Snow's (Capps & Chaplin), and two from the "Globe" (Mr.
+Vaughan's).
+
+To state the number of visitors to Brighton on a certain day will give an
+idea of how well this road was used during the decade that preceded the
+coming of steam. On Friday, October 25th, 1833, upwards of 480 persons
+travelled to Brighton by stage-coach. A comparison of this number with the
+hordes of visitors cast forth from the Brighton Railway Station to-day
+would render insignificant indeed that little crowd of 1833; but in those
+times, when the itch of excursionising was not so acute as now, that day's
+return was remarkable; it was a day that fully justified the note made of
+it. Then, too, those few hundreds benefited the town more certainly than
+perhaps their number multiplied by ten does now. For the Brighton visitor
+of a hundred years ago, once set down in Castle Square, had to remain the
+night at least in Brighton; for him there was no returning to London the
+same day. And so the Brighton folks had their wicked will of him for a
+while, and made something out of him; while in these times the greater
+proportion of a day's excursionists find themselves either at home in
+London already, when evening hours are striking from Westminster Ben, or
+else waiting with what patience they may the collecting of tickets at the
+bleak and dismal penitentiary platforms of Grosvenor Road Station; and,
+after all, Brighton is little or nothing advantaged by their visit.
+
+But though the tripper of the coaching era found it impracticable to have
+his morning in London, his day upon the King's Road, and his evening in
+town again, yet the pace at which the coaches went in the '30's was by no
+means despicable. Ten miles an hour now became slow and altogether behind
+the age.
+
+In 1833 the Marquis of Worcester, together with a Mr. Alexander, put three
+coaches on the road: an up and down "Quicksilver" and a single coach, the
+"Wonder." The "Quicksilver," named probably in allusion to its swiftness
+(it was timed for four hours and three-quarters), ran to and from what was
+then a favourite stopping-place, the "Elephant and Castle." But on July
+15th of the same year an accident, by which several persons were very
+seriously injured, happened to the up "Quicksilver" when starting from
+Brighton. Snow, who was driving, could not hold the team in, and they
+bolted away, and brought up violently against the railings by the New
+Steyne. Broken arms, fractured arms and ribs, and contusions were
+plenty. The "Quicksilver," chameleon-like, changed colour after this
+mishap, was repainted and renamed, and reappeared as the "Criterion"; for
+the old name carried with it too great a spice of danger for the timorous.
+
+[Illustration: SIR CHARLES DANCE'S STEAM-CARRIAGE LEAVING LONDON FOR
+BRIGHTON, 1833. _From a print after G. E. Madeley._]
+
+[Sidenote: COACHING RECORDS]
+
+On February 4th, 1834, the "Criterion," driven by Charles Harbour,
+outstripping the old performances of the "Vivid," and beating the previous
+wonderfully quick journey of the "Red Rover," carried down King William's
+Speech on the opening of Parliament in 3 hours and 40 minutes, a coach
+record that has not been surpassed, nor quite equalled, on this road, not
+even by Selby on his great drive of July 13th, 1888, his times being out
+and in respectively, 3 hours 56 minutes, and 3 hours 54 minutes. Then
+again, on another road, on May Day, 1830, the "Independent Tally-ho,"
+running from London to Birmingham, covered those 109 miles in 7 hours 39
+minutes, a better record than Selby's London to Brighton and back drive by
+eleven minutes, with an additional mile to the course. Another coach, the
+"Original Tally-ho," did the same distance in 7 hours 50 minutes. The
+"Criterion" fared ill under its new name, and gained an unenviable
+notoriety on June 7th, 1834, being overturned in a collision with a dray
+in the Borough. Many of the passengers were injured; Sir William Cosway,
+who was climbing over the roof when the collision occurred, was killed.
+
+In 1839, the coaching era, full-blown even to decay, began to pewk and
+wither before the coming of steam, long heralded and now but too sure. The
+tale of coaches now decreased to twenty-three; fares, which had fallen in
+the cut-throat competition of coach proprietors with their fellows in
+previous years to 10_s._ inside, 5_s._ outside for the single journey, now
+rose to 21_s._ and 12_s._ Every man that horsed a coach, seeing now was
+the shearing time for the public, ere the now building railway was opened,
+strove to make as much as possible ere he closed his yards, sold his
+stock, broke his coach up for firewood, and took himself off the road.
+
+Sentiment hung round the expiring age of coaching, and has cast a halo on
+old-time ways of travelling, so that we often fail to note the
+disadvantages and discomforts endured in those days; but, amid regrets
+which were often simply maudlin, occur now and again witticisms true and
+tersely epigrammatic, as thus:
+
+  For the neat wayside inn and a dish of cold meat
+  You've a gorgeous saloon, but there's nothing to eat;
+
+and a contributor to the _Sporting Magazine_ observes, very happily, that
+"even in a 'case' in a coach, it's 'there you are'; whereas in a railway
+carriage it's 'where are you?'" in case of an accident.
+
+On September 21st, 1841, the Brighton Railway was opened throughout, from
+London to Brighton, and with that event the coaching era for this road
+virtually died. Professional coach proprietors who wished to retain the
+competencies they had accumulated were well advised to shun all
+competition with steam, and others had been wise enough to cut their
+losses; for the Road for the next sixty years was to become a discarded
+institution and the Rail was entering into a long and undisputed
+possession of the carrying trade.
+
+The Brighton Mail, however--or mails, for Chaplin had started a Day Mail
+in 1838--continued a few months longer. The Day Mail ceased in October,
+1841, but the Night Mail held the road until March, 1842.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Between 1841, when the railway was opened all the way from London, and
+1866, during a period of twenty-five years, coaching, if not dead, at
+least showed but few and intermittent signs of life. The "Age," which then
+was owned by Mr. F. W. Capps, was the last coach to run regularly on the
+direct road to and from London. The "Victoria," however, was on the
+road, _via_ Dorking and Horsham, until November 8th, 1845.
+
+[Illustration: The BRIGHTON DAY MAILS CROSSING HOOKWOOD COMMON, 1838.
+_From an engraving after W. J. Shayer._]
+
+[Sidenote: THE COACHING AMATEURS]
+
+The "Age" had been one of the best equipped and driven of all the smart
+drags in that period when aristocratic amateur dragsmen frequented this
+road, when the Marquis of Worcester drove the "Beaufort," and when the
+Hon. Fred Jerningham, a son of the Earl of Stafford, a whip of consummate
+skill, drove the day-mail; a time when the "Age" itself was driven by that
+sportsman of gambling memory, Sir St. Vincent Cotton, and by that Mr.
+Stevenson who was its founder, mentioned more particularly on page 37.
+When Mr. Capps became proprietor, he had as coachman several distinguished
+men. For twelve years, for instance, Robert Brackenbury drove the "Age"
+for the nominal pay of twelve shillings per week, enough to keep him in
+whips. It was thus supremely fitting that it should also have been the
+last to survive.
+
+In later years, about 1852, a revived "Age," owned and driven by the Duke
+of Beaufort and George Clark, the "Old" Clark of coaching acquaintance,
+was on the road to London, _via_ Dorking and Kingston, in the summer
+months. It was discontinued in 1862. A picture of this coach crossing Ham
+Common _en route_ for Brighton was painted in 1852 and engraved. A
+reproduction of it is shown here.
+
+From 1862 to 1866 the rattle of the bars and the sound of the guard's yard
+of tin were silent on every route to Brighton; but in the latter year of
+horsey memory and the coaching revival, a number of aristocratic and
+wealthy amateurs of the whip, among whom were representatives of the best
+coaching talent of the day, subscribed a capital, in shares of £10, and a
+little yellow coach, the "Old Times," was put on the highway. Among the
+promoters of the venture were Captain Haworth, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord
+H. Thynne, Mr. Chandos Pole, Mr. "Cherry" Angell, Colonel Armytage,
+Captain Lawrie, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The experiment proved unsuccessful,
+but in the following season, commencing in April, 1867, when the goodwill
+and a large portion of the stock had been purchased from the original
+subscribers, by the Duke of Beaufort, Mr. E. S. Chandos Pole, and Mr.
+Angell, the coach was doubled, and two new coaches built by Holland &
+Holland.
+
+The Duke of Beaufort was chief among the sportsmen who horsed the coaches
+during this season. Mr. Chandos Pole, at the close of the summer season,
+determined to carry on by himself, throughout the winter, a service of one
+coach. This he did, and, aided by Mr. Pole-Gell, doubled it the next
+summer.
+
+The following year, 1869, the coach had so prosperous a season that it
+showed never a clean bill, _i.e._, never ran empty, all the summer, either
+way. The partners this year were the Earl of Londesborough, Mr. Pole-Gell,
+Colonel Stracey Clitherow, Mr. Chandos Pole, and Mr. G. Meek.
+
+From this season coaching became extremely popular on the Brighton Road,
+Mr. Chandos Pole running his coach until 1872. In the following year an
+American amateur, Mr. Tiffany, kept up the tradition with two coaches.
+Late in the season of 1874 Captain Haworth put in an appearance.
+
+In 1875 the "Age" was put upon the road by Mr. Stewart Freeman, and ran in
+the season up to and including 1880, in which year it was doubled. Captain
+Blyth had the "Defiance" on the road to Brighton this year by the
+circuitous route of Tunbridge Wells. In 1881 Mr. Freeman's coach was
+absent from the road, but Edwin Fownes put the "Age" on, late in the
+season. In the following year Mr. Freeman's coach ran, doubled again, and
+single in 1883. It was again absent in 1884-5-6, in which last year it ran
+to Windsor; but it reappeared on the Brighton Road in 1887 as the "Comet,"
+and in the winter of that year was continued by Captain Beckett, who had
+Selby and Fownes as whips. In 1888 Mr. Freeman ran in partnership with
+Colonel Stracey-Clitherow, Lord Wiltshire, and Mr. Hugh M'Calmont, and in
+1889 became partner in an undertaking to run the coach doubled. The two
+"Comets" therefore served the road in this season supported by two
+additional subscribers, the Honourable H. Sandys and Mr. Randolph Wemyss.
+
+[Illustration: THE "AGE," 1852, CROSSING HAM COMMON. _From an engraving
+after C. Cooper Henderson._]
+
+[Sidenote: JIM SELBY]
+
+In 1888 the "Old Times," forsaking the Oatlands Park drive, had appeared
+on the Brighton Road as a rival to the "Comet," and continued throughout
+the winter months, until Selby met his death in that winter.
+
+The "Comet" ran single in the winter season of 1889-90, and in April was
+again doubled for the summer, running single in 1891-2-3, when Mr. Freeman
+relinquished it.
+
+Mention has already been made of the "Old Times," which made such a
+fleeting appearance on this road; but justice was not done to it, or to
+Selby, in that incidental allusion. They require a niche to themselves in
+the history of the revival--a niche to which shall be appended this poetic
+excerpt:
+
+  Here's the "Old Times," it's one of the best,
+  Which no coaching man will deny,
+  Fifty miles down the road with a jolly good load,
+  Between London and Brighton each day.
+  Beckett, M'Adam, and Dickey, the driver, are there,
+  Of old Jim's presence every one is aware,
+  They are all nailing good sorts,
+  And go in for all sports,
+  So we'll all go a-coaching to-day.
+
+It is poetry whose like we do not often meet. Tennyson himself never
+attempted to capture such heights of rhyme. He could, and did, rhyme
+"poet" with "know it," but he never drove such a Cockney team as "deny"
+and "to-dy" to water at the Pierian springs.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+"Carriages without horses shall go," is the "prophecy" attributed to that
+mythical fifteenth century pythoness, Mother Shipton; really the _ex post
+facto_ forgery of Charles Hindley, the second-hand bookseller, in 1862. It
+should not be difficult, on such terms, to earn the reputation of a seer.
+
+Between 1823 and 1838, the era of the steam-carriages, that
+prognostication had already been fulfilled: and again, in another sense,
+with the introduction of railways. But it was not until the close of 1896
+that the real horseless era began to dawn. Railways, extravagantly
+discriminative tolls, and restrictions upon weight and speed killed the
+steam-carriages, and for more than fifty years the highways knew no other
+mechanical locomotion than that of the familiar traction-engines,
+restricted to three miles an hour and preceded by a man with a red flag.
+It is true that a few hardy inventors continued to waste their time and
+money on devising new forms of steam-carriages, and were only fined for
+their pains when they were rash enough to venture on the public roads, as
+when Bateman, of Greenwich, invented a steam-tricycle, and Sir Thomas
+Parkyn, Bart., was fined at Greenwich Police Court, April 8th, 1881, for
+riding it.
+
+That incident appears to have finally quenched the ardour of inventive
+genius in this country; but a new locomotive force already existing
+unsuspected was about this period being experimented with on the Continent
+by one Gottlieb Daimler, whose name--generally mispronounced--is now
+sufficiently familiar to all who know anything of motor-cars.
+
+Daimler was at that time connected with the Otto Gas Engine Works in
+Germany, where the adaptive Germans were exploiting the gas-engine
+principle invented by Crossley many years before.
+
+[Sidenote: MOTOR-CARS]
+
+In 1886 Daimler produced his motor-bicycle, and by 1891 his motor engine
+was adapted by Panhard and Levassor to other types of vehicles. The
+French were thus the first to perceive the great possibilities of it, and
+by 1894 the motor-cars already in use in France were so numerous that the
+first sporting event in the history of them--the 760 miles' race from
+Paris to Bordeaux and back--was run.
+
+[Illustration: THE "OLD TIMES," 1888. _From a painting by Alfred S.
+Bishop._]
+
+The following year Mr. Evelyn Ellis brought over the first motor-car to
+reach England, a 4 h.-p. Panhard, and a little later, Sir David Salomons,
+of Tunbridge Wells, imported a Peugeot. In that town, October 15th, 1895,
+he held the first show of cars--four or five at most--in this country.
+Then began an agitation raised by a few enthusiasts for the removal of the
+existing restrictions upon road traffic. A deputation waited upon the
+Local Government Board, and the Light Locomotives Act of 1896 was passed
+in August, legalising mechanical traction up to a speed of fourteen miles
+an hour, the Act to come into operation on November 14th.
+
+For whatever reason, the Light Locomotives Act was passed so quietly,
+under the ægis of the Local Government Board, as to almost wear the aspect
+of an organised secrecy, and the coming of what is now known as Motor-car
+Day was utterly unsuspected by the bulk of the public. It even caught the
+newspapers unprepared, until the week before.
+
+But the financiers and company-promoters had been busy. They at least
+fully realised the importance of the era about to dawn; and the
+extravagant flotations of the Great Horseless Carriage Company and of many
+others long since bankrupt and forgotten, together with the phenomenal
+over-valuation of patents, very soon discredited the new movement. Never
+has there been a new industry so hardly used by company-promoting sharks
+as that of motor-cars.
+
+[Sidenote: "MOTOR-CAR DAY"]
+
+No inkling of subsequent financial disasters clouded Motor-car Day, and as
+at almost the last moment the Press had come to the conclusion that it was
+an occasion to be written up and enlarged upon, a very great public
+interest was aroused in the Motor-car Club's proposed celebration of the
+event by a great procession of the newly-enfranchised "light locomotives"
+from Whitehall to Brighton, on November 14th.
+
+The Motor-car Club is dead. It was not a club in the proper sense of the
+word, but an organisation promoted and financed by the company-promoters
+who were interested in advertising their schemes. The run to Brighton was
+itself intended as a huge advertisement, but the unprepared condition of
+many of the cars entered, together with the miserable weather prevailing
+on that day, resulted in turning the whole thing into ridicule.
+
+The newspapers had done their best to advertise the event; but no one
+anticipated the immense crowds that assembled at the starting-point,
+Whitehall Place, by nine o'clock on that wet and foggy morning. By
+half-past ten, the hour fixed for the start, there was a maddening chaos
+of hundreds of thousands of sightseers such as no Lord Mayor's Show or
+Royal Procession had ever attracted. Everybody in the crowd wanted a front
+place, and those who got one, being both unable and unwilling to "parse
+away," were nearly scragged by the police, who on the Embankment set upon
+individuals like footballers on the ball; while snap-shotters wasted
+plates on them from the secure altitudes of omnibuses or other vehicles.
+
+Those whose journalistic duties took them to see the start had to fight
+their way down from Charing Cross, up from Westminster, or along from the
+Embankment; contesting inch by inch, and wondering if the starting-point
+would ever be gained.
+
+At length the Metropole hove in sight, but the motor-cars had yet to be
+found. To accomplish this feat it was necessary to hurl oneself into a
+surging tide of humanity, and surge with it. The tide carried the explorer
+away and eventually washed him ashore on the neck of a policeman. Rumour
+got around that an organised massacre of cab-horses was contemplated, and
+myriads of mounted police appeared and had their photographs taken from
+the tops of cabs and other envied positions occupied by amateur
+photographers, who paid dearly to take pictures of the fog, which they
+could have done elsewhere for nothing.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COMET," 1890. _From a painting by Alfred S. Bishop._]
+
+Time went on, the crowd grew bigger, the mud was churned into slush, and
+everybody was treading upon everybody else.
+
+"Ain't this bloomin' fun, sir?" asked the driver of a growler, his sides
+shaking with laughter, "Even my ole 'oss 'as bin larfin'."
+
+"Very intelligent horse," we said, thinking of Mr. Pickwick, and
+determining to ask some searching questions as to his antecedents.
+
+"Interleck's a great p'int, sir. Which 'ud you sooner be in: a runaway
+mortar-caw or a keb?"
+
+"Neither."
+
+"No, I ain't jokin', strite. I've just bin argying wif a bloke as said
+he'd sooner be in a caw. I said I pitied 'is choice, and wouldn't give 'im
+much for his charnce. 'Cos why? 'Cos mortar-caws ain't got no interleck.
+They cawn't tell the dif'rence 'tween nothink an' a brick wall. Now a 'os
+can. If 'e don't turn orf 'e tries ter jump th' wall, but yer mortar
+simply goes fer it, and then where are yer? In 'eaven, if yer lucky, or
+in----"
+
+But the rest of his sentence was lost in the roar that ascended from the
+crowd as the cars commenced their journey to Brighton.
+
+They went beautifully for a few yards, chased the mounted police right
+into the crowd, and then stopped.
+
+"It's th' standin' still as does it--not the standin' still, I mean the
+not going forrard, 'cos they don't stand still," said the cabby,
+excitedly.
+
+"Don't they hum?" he cried.
+
+"They certainly do make a little noise."
+
+"But I mean, don't they whiff?"
+
+"Whiff?"
+
+He held his nose.
+
+"I say, guv'nor." shouted cabby to a fur-coated foreigner, "wot is it
+smells so?"
+
+Meanwhile there was a certain "something lingering with oil in it,"
+permeating the fog, while a sound as of many humming-tops filled the air.
+
+Then the cars moved on a bit, amid the cheers and chaff of a good-humoured
+crowd. Presently another stoppage and more shivering.
+
+"'As thet cove there got th' Vituss dance?" inquired the elated cabby,
+indicating a gentleman who was wobbling like a piece of jelly.
+
+"That's the vibration," explained another.
+
+"'Ow does the vibration agree w' the old six yer 'ad last night?" cabby
+inquired immediately. "I say, Chawlie, don't it make yer sea-sick? Oh my!
+th' smell!" and he gasped and sat on his box, looking bilious.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When all the carriages had wended their way to Westminster we asked cabby
+what he thought of the procession.
+
+"Arsk my 'os," said he, with a look of disgust on his face. "What's yer
+opinion of it, old gal? Failyer? My sentiments. British public won't pay
+to be choked with stinks one moment and shut up like electricity t' next.
+Failyer? Quite c'rect."
+
+Meanwhile the guests of the Motor-car Club were breakfasting at the Hotel
+Metropole, where appropriate speeches were made, the Earl of Winchilsea
+concluding his remarks with the dramatic production of a red flag, which,
+amid applause, he tore in half, to symbolise the passing of the old
+restrictions.
+
+There had been fifty-four entries for this triumphal procession, but not
+more than thirty-three cars put in an appearance. It is significant of the
+vast progress made since then that no car present was more than 6 h.-p.,
+and that all, except the Bollée three-wheeled car, were precisely what
+they were frequently styled, "horseless carriages," vehicles built on
+traditional lines, from which the horses and the customary shafts were
+painfully missed. There had not yet been time sufficient for the evolution
+of the typical motor-car body.
+
+With the combined strategy of a Napoleon, the patience of Job, and the
+strength of Samson, the guests were at length piloted through the crowd
+and inducted into their seats, and the "procession"--which, it was sternly
+ordained, was not to be a "race"--set out.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FIRST CARS]
+
+The President of the Motor-car Club, Harry J. Lawson, since convicted of
+fraud and sentenced to some months' imprisonment, led the way in his
+pilot-car, bearing a purple-and-gold banner, more or less suitably
+inscribed, himself habited in a strange costume, something between that of
+a yachtsman and the conductor of a Hungarian band.
+
+Reigate was reached at 12.30 by the foremost ear, through twenty miles of
+crowded country, when rain descended once more upon the hapless day, and
+late arrivals splashed through in all the majesty of mud.
+
+The honours of the occasion belong to the little Bollée three-wheeler, of
+a type long since obsolete. The inventor, disregarding all rules and
+times, started at 11.30, and, making no stop at Reigate, drove on to
+Brighton, which he reached in the record time of two hours fifty-five
+minutes. The President's car was fourth, in seven hours twenty-two minutes
+thirty seconds.
+
+At Preston Park, on the Brighton boundary, the Mayor was to have welcomed
+the procession, which, headed by the President, was to proceed
+triumphantly into the town. A huge crowd assembled under the dripping elms
+and weeping skies, and there, at five o'clock, in the light of the misty
+lamps, stood and vibrated that presidential equipage and its banner with
+the strange device. By five o'clock only three other cars had arrived; and
+so, wet and miserable, they, the Mayor and Council, and the mounted police
+all splashed into Brighton amid a howling gale.
+
+The rest should be silence, for no one ever knew the number of cars that
+completed the journey. Some said twenty-two, others thirteen; but it is
+certain that the conditions were too much for many, and that while some
+reposed in wayside stables, others, broken down in lonely places, remained
+on the road all through that awful night. The guests, who in the morning
+had been unable to find seats on the "horseless carriages," and so had
+journeyed by special train or by coach, in the end had much to
+congratulate themselves upon.
+
+But, after all, looking back upon the hasty enthusiasm that organised so
+long a journey at such a time of year, at so early a stage in the
+motor-car era, it seems remarkable, not that so many broke down, but that
+so large a proportion reached Brighton at all.
+
+The logical outcome of years of experiment and preparation was reached, in
+the supersession of the horsed London and Brighton Parcel Mail on June
+2nd, 1905, by a motor-van, and in the establishment, on August 30th, of
+the "Vanguard" London and Brighton Motor Omnibus Service, starting in
+summer at 9.30 a.m., and reaching Brighton at 2 p.m.; returning from
+Brighton at 4 p.m., and finally arriving at its starting-point, the "Hotel
+Victoria," Northumberland Avenue, at 9 p.m. With the beginning of
+November, 1905, that summer service was replaced by one to run through the
+winter months, with inside seats only, and at reduced fares.
+
+The first fatality on the Brighton Road in connection with motor-cars
+occurred in 1901, at Smitham Bottom, when a car just purchased by a
+retired builder and contractor of Brighton was being driven by him from
+London. The steering-gear failed, the car turned completely round, ran
+into an iron fence and pinned the owner's leg against it and a tree. The
+leg was broken and had to be amputated, and the unfortunate man died of
+the shock.
+
+But the motor-omnibus accident of July 12th, 1906, was a really
+spectacular tragedy. On that day a "Vanguard" omnibus, chartered by a
+party of thirty-four pleasure seekers at Orpington for a day at Brighton,
+was proceeding down Hand Cross Hill at twelve miles an hour when some
+essential part of the gear broke and the heavy vehicle, dashing down-hill
+at an ever-increasing pace, and swerving from side to side, struck a great
+oak. The shock flung the passengers off violently. Ten were killed and all
+the others injured, mostly very seriously.
+
+Meanwhile, amateur coaching had, in most of the years since the
+professional coaches had been driven off the road, flourished in the
+summer season. The last notable amateur was the American millionaire,
+Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who for several seasons personally drove his own
+"Venture" coach between London and Brighton; at first on the main
+"classic" road, and afterwards on the Dorking and Horsham route. He met
+his death on board the _Lusitania_, when it was sunk by the Germans, May
+7th. 1915.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROAD OF RECORDS]
+
+Robinson Crusoe, weary of his island solitude, sighed, so the poet tells
+us, for "the midst of alarms." He should have chosen the Brighton Road;
+for ever since it has been a road at all it has fully realised the
+Shakespearian stage-direction of "alarums and excursions." Particularly
+the "excursions," for it is the chosen track for most record-breaking
+exploits; and thus it comes to pass that residents fortunate or
+unfortunate enough to dwell upon the Brighton Road have the whole panorama
+of sport unfolded before their eyes, whether they will or no, throughout
+the whirling year, and see strange sights, hear odd noises, and (since the
+coming of the motor-car) smell weird smells.
+
+The Brighton Road has ever been a course upon which the enthusiastic
+exponents of different methods of progression have eagerly exhibited their
+prowess. But to-day, although it affords as good going as, or better than,
+ever, it is not so suitable as it was for these displays of speed.
+Traffic has grown with the growth of villages and townships along these
+fifty-two miles, and sport and public convenience are on the highway
+antipathetic. Yet every kind of sport has its will of the road.
+
+The reasons of this exceptional sporting character are not far to seek.
+They were chiefly sportsmen who travelled it in the days when it began to
+be a road: those full-blooded sportsmen, ready for any freakish wager, who
+were the boon companions of the Prince; and they set a fashion which has
+not merely survived into modern times, but has grown amazingly.
+
+But it would never have been the road for sport it is, had its length not
+been so conveniently and alluringly near an even fifty miles. So much may
+be done or attempted along a fifty miles' course that would be impossible
+on a hundred.
+
+[Sidenote: SPORTING EVENTS]
+
+The very first sporting event on the Brighton Road of which any record
+survives is (with an astonishing fitness) the feat accomplished by the
+Prince of Wales himself on July 25th, 1784, during his second visit to
+Brighthelmstone. On that day he mounted his horse there and rode to London
+and back. He went by way of Cuckfield, and was ten hours on the road: four
+and a half hours going, five and a half hours returning. On August 21st of
+the same year, starting at one o'clock in the morning, he drove from
+Carlton House to the "Pavilion" in four hours and a half. The turn-out was
+a phaeton drawn by three horses harnessed tandem-fashion--what in those
+days was called a "random."
+
+One may venture the opinion that, although these performances were in due
+course surpassed, they were not altogether bad for a "simulacrum," as
+Thackeray was pleased to style him.
+
+Twenty-five years passed before any one arose to challenge the Prince's
+ride, and then only partially and indirectly. In May, 1809, Cornet J.
+Wedderburn Webster, of the 10th (Prince of Wales's Own) Light Dragoons,
+accepted and won a wager of 300 to 200 guineas with Sir B. Graham about
+the performance in three and a half hours of the journey from Brighton to
+Westminster Bridge, mounted upon one of the blood horses that usually ran
+in his phaeton. He accomplished the ride in three hours twenty minutes,
+knocking the Prince's up record into the proverbial cocked hat. The rider
+stopped a while at Reigate to take a glass or two of wine, and compelled
+his horse to swallow the remainder of the bottle.
+
+This spirited affair was preceded in April, 1793, by a curious match which
+seems to deserve mention. A clergyman at Brighton betted an officer of the
+Artillery quartered there 100 guineas that he would ride his own horse to
+London sooner than the officer could go in a chaise and pair, the
+officer's horses to be changed _en route_ as often as he might think
+proper. The Artilleryman accordingly despatched a servant to provide
+relays, and at twelve o'clock on an unfavourable night the parties set out
+to decide the bet, which was won by the clergyman with difficulty. He
+arrived in town at 5 a.m., only a few minutes before the chaise, which it
+had been thought was sure of winning. The driver of the last stage,
+however, nearly became stuck in a ditch, which mishap caused considerable
+delay. The Cuckfield driver performed his nine-miles' stage, between that
+place and Crawley, within the half-hour.
+
+The next outstanding incident was the run of the "Red Rover" coach, which,
+leaving the "Elephant and Castle" at 4 p.m. on June 19th, 1831, reached
+Brighton at 8.21 that evening: time, four hours twenty-one minutes. The
+fleeting era of those precursors of motor-cars, the steam-carriages, had
+by this time arrived, and after two or three had managed, at some kind of
+a slow pace, to get to and from Brighton, the "Autopsy" achieved a record
+of sorts in October, 1833. "Autopsy" was an unfortunate name, suggestive
+of _post-mortem_ examinations and "crowner's quests," but it proved not
+more dangerous than the "Mors" or "Hurtu" cars of to-day. The "Autopsy"
+was Walter Hancock's steam-carriage, and ran from his works at Stratford.
+It reached Brighton in eight hours thirty minutes; from which, however,
+must be deducted three hours for a halt on the road.
+
+In the following year, February 4th, the "Criterion" coach, driven by
+Charles Harbour, took the King's Speech down to Brighton in three hours
+forty minutes--a coach record that not only quite eclipsed that of the
+"Red Rover," but has never yet been equalled, not even by Selby, on his
+great drive of July 13th, 1888; his times being, out and home
+respectively, three hours fifty-six minutes and three hours fifty-four
+minutes.
+
+In March, 1868, the first of the walking records was established, the
+sporting papers of that age chronicling what they very rightly described
+as a "Great Walking Feat": a walk, not merely to Brighton, but to Brighton
+_and back_. This heroic undertaking, which was not repeated until 1902,
+was performed by one "Mr. Benjamin B. Trench, late Oxford University." On
+March 20th, for a heavy wager, he started to walk the hundred miles from
+Kennington Church to Brighton and back in twenty-five hours. Setting out
+on the Friday, at 6 p.m., he was back at Kennington Church at 5 p.m.
+Saturday, having thus won his wager with two hours to spare. It will be
+observed, or guessed, from the absence of odd minutes and seconds that in
+1868, timing, as an exact science, had not been born; but it is evident
+that this stalwart walked his hundred miles on ordinary roads at an
+average rate of a little over four and a quarter miles an hour. "He then,"
+concludes the report, "walked round the Oval several times, till seven
+o'clock."
+
+To each age the inventions it deserves. Cycling would have been impossible
+in the mid-eighteenth century, when Walpole and Burton travelled with such
+difficulty.
+
+When roads began to deserve the name, the Mail Coach was introduced; and
+when they grew hard and smooth, out of their former condition of ruts and
+mud, the quaint beginnings of the bicycle are noticed. The Hobby Horse
+and McAdam, the man who first preached the modern gospel of good roads,
+were contemporary.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HOBBY-HORSE]
+
+I have said the beginnings of the bicycle were quaint, and I think no one
+will be concerned to dispute this alleged quaintness of the Hobby Horse,
+which had a certain strictly limited popularity from 1819 to 1830. I do
+not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these
+machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of
+them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that
+any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human
+endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises,
+and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but
+records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should
+be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. A heavy
+timber frame connected these wheels, and on it the courageous rider
+straddled, his feet touching the ground. The Hobby Horse had no pedals,
+and the rider propelled his hundredweight or so of iron and timber by
+running in this straddling position and thus obtaining a momentum which
+only on the down grade would carry him any distance.
+
+Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the "bucks" of George
+the Fourth's time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and
+it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the
+"velocipede" of the '60's, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of
+the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.[4]
+
+[Sidenote: THE BONESHAKER]
+
+The front-driving velocipede--the well-known "boneshaker"--was invented by
+one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris
+Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred "safety" what the
+roads of 1865 are to those of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had
+iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden
+uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed
+in 1869. This pioneer's fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall,
+junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer
+of 1891.
+
+This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances
+attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as
+1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an
+athletic magazine, _Ixion_, published in that year, "J. M., jun.," who, of
+course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous
+tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note
+tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But
+_Ixion_ never reached a second number, and so Mayall's own account of his
+historic ride was never completed.
+
+He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling
+how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer's Gymnasium in Old
+Street, St. Luke's. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr.
+Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed
+the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, "a piece of
+apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not
+long before, in Paris." It was the first velocipede to reach England.
+
+It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a "velocipede," and
+although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after
+their introduction, the word "bicycle" is claimed to have been first used
+in the _Times_ in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the
+_Daily News_ of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque
+spelling, to "bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs Elysées
+and the Bois de Boulogne this summer."
+
+But to return to the "velocipede" which had found its way to England at
+the beginning of 1869.
+
+The two-wheeled mystery was helped out of its wrappings and shavings, the
+Gymnasium was cleared, and Mr. Turner, taking off his coat, grasped the
+handles of the machine, and with a short run, to Mayall's intense
+surprise, vaulted on to it. Putting his feet on what were then called the
+"treadles," Turner, to the astonishment of the beholders, made the circuit
+of the room, sitting on this bar above a pair of wheels in line that ought
+to have collapsed so soon as the momentum ceased; but, instead of falling
+down, Turner turned the front wheel at an angle to the other, and thus
+maintained at once a halt and a balance.
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN MAYALL JUNIOR]
+
+Mayall was fired with enthusiasm. The next day (Saturday) he was early at
+the Gymnasium, "intending to have a day of it," and I think, from his
+account of what followed, that he _did_, in every sense, have such a day.
+
+As Spencer had hurt himself by falling from the machine the night before,
+Mayall had it almost wholly to himself, and, after a few successful
+journeys round the room, determined to try his luck in the streets.
+Accordingly, at one o'clock in the afternoon, amid the plaudits of a
+hundred men of the adjacent factory, engaged in the congenial occupation
+of lounging against the blank walls in their dinner-hour, the velocipede
+was hoisted on to a cab and driven to Portland Place, where it was put on
+the pavement, and Mayall prepared to mount. Even nowadays the cycling
+novice requires plenty of room, and as Portland Place is well known to be
+the widest street in London, and nearly the most secluded, it seems
+probable that this intrepid pioneer deliberately chose it in order to have
+due scope for his evolutions.
+
+It was a raw and muddy day, with a high wind. Mayall sprang on to the
+velocipede, but it slipped on the wet road, and he measured his length in
+the mud. The day-out was beginning famously.
+
+Spencer, who had been worsted the night before, contented himself with
+giving Mayall a start when he made another attempt, and this time that
+courageous person got as far as the Marylebone Road, and across it on to
+the pavement of the other side, where he fell with a crash as though a
+barrow had been upset. But again vaulting into the saddle, he lumbered on
+into Regent's Park, and so to the drinking-fountain near the Zoological
+Gardens, where, in attempting to turn round, he fell over again. Mounting
+once more, he returned. Looking round, "there was the park-keeper coming
+hastily towards me, making indignant signs. I passed quickly out of the
+Park gate into the roadway." Thus early began the long warfare between
+Cycling and Authority.
+
+Thence, sometimes falling into the road, with Spencer trotting after him,
+he reached the foot of Primrose Hill, and then, at Spencer's home,
+staggered on to a sofa, and lay there, exhausted, soaked in rain and
+perspiration, and covered with mud. It had been in no sense a light matter
+to exercise with that ninety-three pounds' weight of mingled timber and
+ironmongery.
+
+On the Monday he trundled about, up to the "Angel," Islington, where
+curious crowds assembled, asking the uses of the machine and if the
+falling off and grovelling in the mud was a part of the pastime. The
+following day, very sore, but still undaunted, he re-visited the "Angel,"
+went through the City, and so to Brixton and Clapham, where, at the house
+of a friend, he looked over maps, and first conceived the "stupendous"
+idea of riding to Brighton.
+
+The following morning he endeavoured to put that plan into execution, and
+toiled up Brixton Hill, and so through Croydon, up the "never-ending"
+rise, as it seemed, of Smitham Bottom to the crest of Merstham Hill.
+There, tired, he half plunged into the saddle, and so thundered and
+clattered down hill into Merstham. At Redhill, seventeen and a half miles,
+utterly exhausted, he relinquished the attempt, and retired to the railway
+station, where he lay for some time on one of the seats until he revived.
+Then, to the intense admiration and amusement of the station-master and
+his staff, he rode about the platform, dodging the pillars, and narrowly
+escaping a fall on to the rails, until the London train came in.
+
+On Wednesday, February 17th, Mayall, Rowley B. Turner, and Charles
+Spencer, all three on velocipedes, started from Trafalgar Square for
+Brighton. The party kept together until Redhill was reached, when Mayall
+took the lead, and eventually reached Brighton alone. The time occupied
+was "about" twelve hours. Being a photographer, Mayall of course caused
+himself to be photographed standing beside the instrument of torture on
+which he made that weary ride, and thus we have preserved to us the weird
+spectacle he presented; more like that of a Russian convict than an
+athletic young Englishman. A peaked cap, an attenuated frock-coat, very
+tight in the waist, and stiff and shiny leather leggings, completed a
+costume strange enough to make a modern cyclist shudder. Fearful whiskers
+and oily-looking long hair add to the strangeness of this historic figure.
+
+[Sidenote: RECORDS]
+
+With this exploit athletic competition began, and the long series of
+modern "records" on the Brighton Road were set a-going, for during the
+March of that year two once well-known amateur pedestrian members of the
+Stock Exchange, W. M. and H. J. Chinnery, _walked_ down to Brighton in 11
+hrs. 25 mins., and on April 14th C. A. Booth bettered Mayall's adventure,
+riding down on a velocipede in 9 hrs. 30 mins.
+
+Then came the Amateur Bicycle Club's race, September 19th, 1872. By that
+time not only had the word "velocipede" been discarded for "bicycle," and
+"treadles" become "pedals," but the machine itself, although in general
+appearance very much the same, had been improved in detail. The 36-inch
+front wheel had been increased to 44 inches, the wooden spokes had given
+place to wire, and strips of rubber, nailed on, replaced the iron tyres.
+Probably as a result of these refinements the winner, A. Temple, reached
+Brighton in 5 hrs, 25 mins.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MAYALL, JUNIOR, 1869. _From a contemporary
+photograph._]
+
+By 1872 the bicycle had advanced a further stage towards the giraffe-like
+altitude of the "ordinary," and already there were many clubs in
+existence. On August 16th of that year six members of the Surrey and six
+of the Middlesex Bicycle Clubs rode from Kennington Oval to Brighton and
+back, Causton captain of the Surrey, being the first into Brighton.
+Riding a 50-inch "Keen" bicycle he reeled off the fifty miles in 4 hrs. 51
+mins. The new machine was something to be reckoned with.
+
+On February 9th. 1874, a certain John Revel, junr., backed himself in
+heavy sums to ride a bicycle the whole distance from Brighton to London
+quicker than a Mr. Gregory could walk the 22-1/2 miles from Reigate to
+London. Revel was to leave Brighton at the junction of the London and
+Montpellier roads at the same time as Gregory started from a point between
+the twenty-second and twenty-third milestones. The pedestrian won,
+finishing in 3 hrs. 27 mins. 47 secs., Revel taking 5 hrs. 57 mins. for
+the whole journey.
+
+The bicycle had by this time firmly established itself. It grew more and
+more of an athletic exercise to mount the steadily growing machines, but
+once seated on them the going was easier. April 27th, 1874, found Alfred
+Howard cycling from Brighton to London in 4 hrs. 25 mins., a speed which
+works out at eleven miles an hour.
+
+In 1875 the Brighton Road seems to have been left severely alone, and 1876
+was signalised only by two of the fantastic wagers that have been
+numerously decided on this half-century of miles. In that year, we are
+told, a Mr. Frederick Thompson staked one thousand guineas that Sir John
+Lynton would not wheel a barrow from Westminster Abbey to the "Old Ship"
+at Brighton in fifteen hours; and the knight, accepting the bet, made his
+appearance airily clothed in the "shorts" of the recognised running
+costume and wheeling a barrow made of bamboo, and provided with handles
+six feet long. He won easily, but whether the loser paid the thousand
+guineas, or lodged a protest with referees, does not appear. He should
+have specified the make of barrow, for the kinds range through quite a
+number of varieties, from the coster's barrow to the navvy's and the
+gardener's. But the wager did not contemplate the fancy article with which
+Sir John Lynton made his journey. At any rate, I have my doubts about the
+genuineness of the whole affair, for, seeking this "Sir John Lynton" in
+the usual books of reference of that period, there is no such knight or
+baronet to be discovered.
+
+According to the Sussex newspapers of 1876, over fifteen thousand people
+assembled in the King's Road at Brighton to witness the finish of the
+sporting event between Major Penton and an unnamed competitor. Major
+Penton agreed to give his opponent a start of twenty-seven miles in a
+pedestrian match to Brighton, on the condition that he was allowed a
+"go-as-you-please" method, while the other man was to walk in the fair
+"heel-and-toe" style. The major won by a yard and a half in the King's
+Road, through the excitement of his competitor, who was disqualified at
+the last minute by breaking into a trot.
+
+Freakish sport was at this time decidedly in the ascendant, for the sole
+event of 1877 was the extraordinary escapade of two persons who on
+September 11th undertook to ride, dressed as clowns, on donkeys, from
+London to Croydon, seated backwards with their faces towards the animals'
+tails. From Croydon to Redhill they were to walk the three-legged
+walk--_i.e._, tied together by right and left legs--and thence to Crawley
+(surely a most appropriate place) on hands and knees. From that place to
+the end their pilgrimage was to be made walking in boots each weighted
+with 15 lb. of lead. This last ordeal speedily finished them, for they had
+failed to accomplish more than half a mile when they broke down.
+
+John Granby was another of these fantastic persons, whose proper place
+would be a lunatic ward. He essayed to walk to Brighton with 50 lb. weight
+of sand round his shoulders, in a bag, but he sank under the weight by the
+time of his arrival at Thornton Heath.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE RECORDS]
+
+In 1878 P. J. Burt bettered the performance of the Chinnerys, ten years
+earlier, by thirty-three minutes, walking to the Aquarium in 10 hrs. 52
+mins. Most authorities agree in making his starting-point the Clock Tower
+on the north side of Westminster Bridge. 52-1/4 miles, and thus we can
+figure out his speed at about five miles an hour. All the athletic world
+wondered, and when, in 1884, C. L. O'Malley (pedestrian, swimmer,
+steeplechaser, and boxer), walking against B. Nickels, junr., lowered that
+record by so much as 1 hr. 4 mins., every one thought finality in
+long-distance padding the hoof had been reached.
+
+Meanwhile, however, 1882 had witnessed another odd adventure on the way to
+Brighton. A London clubman declared, while at dinner with a friend, that
+the bare-footed tramps sometimes to be seen in the country were not to be
+pitied. Boots, he said, were after all conventions, and declared it an
+easy matter to walk, say, fifty miles without them. He challenged his
+friend, and a walk to Brighton was arranged. The friend retired on his
+blisters in twelve miles; the challenger, however, with the soles of his
+stockings long since worn away, plodded on until he fainted with pain when
+only four miles from Brighton.
+
+On April 6th. 1886, J. A. M'Intosh, of the London Athletic Club, walked to
+Brighton in 9 hrs. 25 mins. 8 secs., improving upon O'Malley's best by 22
+mins. 52 secs.
+
+The year 1888 was notable. On January 1st the horse "Ginger," in a match
+against time, was driven at a trot to Brighton in 4 hrs. 16 mins. 30
+secs., and another horse, "The Bird," trotted from Kennington Cross to
+Brighton in 4 hrs. 30 mins. On July 13th Selby drove the "Old Times" coach
+from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, to Brighton and back in ten
+minutes under eight hours, thus arousing that competition of cyclists
+which, first directed towards beating his performance, has been continued
+to the present day.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Selby's drive was very widely chronicled. The elaborate reports and
+extensive preliminary arrangements compare oddly with the early sporting
+events undertaken on the spur of the moment and recorded only in meagre,
+unilluminating paragraphs. What would we not give for a report of the
+Prince of Wales's ride in 1784, so elaborated.
+
+A great drive, and a great coachman, worthily carrying on the good old
+traditions of the road. It has, however, been already pointed out that
+neither on his outward journey (3 hrs. 56 mins.), nor on the return (3
+hrs. 54 mins.), did he quite equal the record of the "Criterion" coach,
+which on February 4th, 1834, took the King's Speech from London to
+Brighton in 3 hrs. 40 mins.
+
+Selby did not live long to enjoy the world-wide repute his great drive
+gained him. He died, only forty-four years of age, at the end of the same
+year that saw this splendid feat.
+
+Selby's memorable drive put cyclists upon their mettle, but not at once
+was any determined attempt made to better it. The dwarf rear-driving
+"safety" bicycle, the "Rover," which, introduced in 1885, set the existing
+pattern, was not yet perfected, and cyclists still rode solid or cushion
+tyres, instead of the now universal pneumatic kind.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CYCLISTS]
+
+It was, therefore, not until August, 1889, that after several unsuccessful
+attempts had been made to better the coach-time on that double journey of
+108 miles, a team of four cyclists--E. J. Willis, G. L. Morris, C. W.
+Schafer, and S. Walker, members of the Polytechnic Cycling Club--did that
+distance in 7 hrs. 36 mins. 19-2/5 secs.; or 13 mins. 40-3/5 secs. less;
+and even then the feat was accomplished only by the four cyclists dividing
+the journey between them into four relays. Two other teams, on as many
+separate occasions, reduced the figures by a few minutes, and M. A.
+Holbein and P. C. Wilson singly made unsuccessful attempts.
+
+It was left to F. W. Shorland, a very young rider, to be the first of a
+series of single-handed breakers of the coaching time. He accomplished the
+feat in June, 1890, upon a pneumatic-tyred "Geared Facile" safety, and
+reduced the time to 7 hrs. 19 mins., being himself beaten on July 23rd by
+S. F. Edge, riding a cushion-tyred safety. Edge put the time at 7 hrs. 2
+mins. 50 secs., and, in addition, first beat Selby's outward journey, the
+times being--coach, 3 hrs. 36 mins.; cycle, 3 hrs. 18 mins. 25 secs. Then
+came yet another stalwart, C. A. Smith, who on September 3rd of the same
+year beat Edge by 10 mins. 40 secs. Even a tricyclist--E. P.
+Moorhouse--essayed the feat on September 30th, but failed, his time being
+8 hrs. 9 mins. 24 secs.
+
+To the adventitious aid of pacemakers, fresh and fresh again, to stir the
+record-breaker's flagging energies, much of this success was at first due;
+but at the present day those times have been exceeded on many unpaced
+rides.
+
+Selby's drive had the effect of creating a new and arbitrary point of
+departure for record-making, and "Hatchett's" has thus somewhat confused
+the issues with the times and distances associated with Westminster
+Bridge.
+
+The year 1891 was a blank, so far as cycling was concerned, but on March
+20th an early Stock Exchange pedestrian to walk to Brighton set out to
+cover the distance between Hatchett's and the "Old Ship" in 11 hrs. 15
+mins. This was E. H. Cuthbertson, who backed himself to equal the
+Chinnerys' performance of 1869. Out of this undertaking arose the
+additional and subsidiary match between Cuthbertson and another Stock
+Exchange member, H. K. Paxton, as to which should quickest walk between
+Hatchett's and the "Greyhound," Croydon. Paxton, a figure of
+Brobdingnagian proportions, 6 ft. 4 in. in height, and scaling 17 stone,
+received a time allowance of 23 minutes. Both aspirants went into three
+weeks' severe training, and elaborate arrangements were made for
+attendance, timing, and refreshment on the road. Paxton, urged to renewed
+efforts in the ultimate yards by the strains of a more or less German
+band, which seeing the competitors approach, played "See the Conquering
+Hero Comes,"[5] won the match to Croydon by 1 min. 18 secs., but did not
+stop here, continuing with Cuthbertson to Brighton. Although Cuthbertson
+won his wager, and walked down in 10 hrs. 6 mins. 18 secs. (9 hrs. 55
+mins. 34 secs, from Westminster) and won several heavy sums by this
+performance, he did not equal that of McIntosh in 1886. The old-timer,
+deducting a proportionate time for the difference between the
+finishing-points, the Aquarium and the "Old Ship," was still half an hour
+to the good.
+
+The next four years were exclusively cyclists' years. On June 1st, 1892,
+S. F. Edge made a great effort to regain the record that had been wrested
+from him by C. A. Smith in 1890, and did indeed win it back, but only by
+the fractional margin of 1 min. 3 secs., and only held that advantage for
+three months, Edward Dance, in the last of three separate attempts,
+succeeding on September 6th in lowering Edge's time, but only by 2 mins. 6
+secs. Then three days later, R. C. Nesbit made a "record" for the high
+"ordinary" bicycle, of 7 hrs. 42 mins. 50 secs., the last appearance of
+the now extraordinary "ordinary" on this stage.
+
+The course was from 1893 considerably varied, the Road Record Association
+being of opinion that as the original great object--the breaking of the
+coach time--had been long since attained, there was no need to maintain
+the Piccadilly end, or the Cuckfield route. The course selected,
+therefore, became from Hyde Park Corner to the Aquarium at Brighton, by
+way of Hickstead and Bolney. On September 12th of this year Edge tried for
+and again recaptured this keenly-contested prize, this time by the
+respectable margin of 35 mins. 13 secs., only to have it snatched away on
+September 17th by A. E. Knight, who knocked off 3 mins. 19 secs. Again, in
+another couple of days, the figures were revised, C. A. Smith, on one of
+the few occasions on which he deserted the tricycle for the two-wheeler,
+accomplishing the double journey in 6 hrs. 6 mins. 46 secs. On the 22nd of
+the same busy month Edge for the fourth and last time took the record, on
+this occasion by the margin of 14 mins. 16 secs. The road then knew him no
+more as a record-breaking cyclist, and his achievement lasted--not days,
+but hours, for on the _same day_ Dance lowered it by the infinitesimal
+fraction of 12 seconds. On October 4th W. W. Robertson set up a tricycle
+record of 7 hrs. 24 mins. 2 secs. for the double journey, and then a
+crowded year ended.
+
+The much-worried records of the Brighton Road came in for another turn in
+1894, W. R. Toft, on June 11th, reducing the tricycle time, and C. G.
+Wridgway on September 12th lowering that for the bicycle. This year was
+also remarkable for the appearance of women speed cyclists, setting up
+records of their own, Mrs. Noble cycling to Brighton and back in 8 hrs. 9
+mins., followed on September 20th by Miss Reynolds in 7 hrs. 48 mins. 46
+secs., and on September 22nd by Miss White in 42 mins. shorter time.
+
+The season of 1895 was not very eventful, with the ride by A. A. Chase in
+5 hrs. 34 mins. 58 secs.; 34 secs. better than the previous best, and the
+lowering by J. Parsley of the tricycle record by over an hour; but it was
+notable for an almost incredible eccentricity, that of cycling backwards
+to Brighton. This feat was accomplished by J. H. Herbert in November, as
+an advertising sensation on behalf of the inventor of a new machine
+exhibited at the Stanley Show. He rode facing the hind wheel and standing
+on the pedals. Punctures, mud, rain, and wind delayed him, but he reached
+Brighton in 7 hrs. 45 mins.
+
+On June 26th, 1896, E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood established a
+tandem-cycle record of 5 hrs. 37 mins. 34 secs., demolished September
+15th; while on July 15th C. G. Wridgway regained his lost single record,
+beating Chase's figures by 12 mins. 25 secs. In this year W. Franks, a
+professional pedestrian in his forty-fifth year, beat all earlier walks to
+Brighton, eclipsing McIntosh's walk of 1886 by 18 mins. 18 secs. But, far
+above all other considerations, 1896 was notable for the legalising of
+motor-cars. On Motor-Day, November 14th, a great number of automobiles
+were to go in procession--not a race--from Westminster to Brighton. Most
+of them broke down, but a 6 h.-p. Bollée car (a three-wheeled variety now
+obsolete) made a record journey in 2 hrs. 55 mins.
+
+The year 1897 opened on April 10th with the open London to Brighton walk
+of the Polytechnic Harriers. The start was made from Regent Street, but
+time was taken separately, from that point and from Westminster Clock
+Tower. There were thirty-seven starters. E. Knott, of the Hairdressers'
+A.C.--a quaint touch--finished in 8 hrs. 56 mins. 44 secs. Thirty-one of
+the competitors finished well within twelve hours.
+
+On May 4th W. J. Neason, cycling to Brighton and back, made the distance
+in 5 hrs. 19 mins. 39 secs., and on July 12th Miss M. Foster beat Miss
+White's 1894 record by 20 mins. 37 secs., while on the following day
+Richard Palmer made a better run than Neason's by 9 mins. 45 secs. Neason,
+however, got his own again in the following September, by 3 mins. 3 secs.,
+and on October 27th P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford improved the tandem
+record of 1896 by 25 mins. 41 secs.
+
+By this time the thoroughly artificial character of most of these later
+cycling records had become glaringly apparent. It was not only seen in the
+fact that their heavy cost was largely borne by cycle and tyre-makers, who
+found advertisement in them, but it was obvious also in the arbitrary
+selection of the starting-points, by which a record run to Brighton and
+back might be begun at Purley, run to Brighton, then back to Purley, and
+thence to London and back again, with any variation that might suit the
+day and the rider. It was evident, too, that the growing elaboration of
+pace-making, first by relays of riders and latterly by motors, had
+reduced the thing to an absurdity in which there was no credit and--worse
+still--no advertisement. Then, therefore, a new order of things was set
+agoing, and the era of unpaced records was begun.
+
+On September 27th, 1898, E. J. Steel established a London to Brighton and
+back unpaced cycling record of 6 hrs. 23 mins. 55 secs.; and on the same
+day the new unpaced tricycle record of 8 hrs. 11 mins. 10 secs. for the
+double journey was set up by P. F. A. Gomme.
+
+The South London Harriers' open "go-as-you-please" walking or running
+match of May 6th, 1899, attracted the attention of the athletic world in a
+very marked degree. Cyclists, in especial, were in evidence, to make the
+pace, to judge, to sponge down the competitors or to refresh them by the
+wayside. The start was made from Big Ben soon after seven o'clock in the
+morning, when fourteen aspirants, all clad in the regulation running
+costumes and sweaters, went forth to win the modern equivalent of the
+victor's laurelled crown in the ancient Olympian games. F. D. Randall, who
+won, got away from his most dangerous opponent on the approach to Redhill,
+and, increasing that advantage to a hundred yards' lead when in the midst
+of the town, was not afterwards seriously challenged. He finished in the
+splendid time of 6 hrs. 58 mins. 18 secs. Saward, the second, completed it
+in 7 hrs. 17 mins. 50 secs., and the veteran E. Ion Pool in another 4
+mins.
+
+As if to show the superiority of the cycle over mere pedestrian efforts,
+H. Green on June 30th cycled from London to Brighton and back, unpaced, in
+5 hrs. 50 mins. 23 secs., and on August 12th, 1902, reduced his own record
+by 20 mins. 1 sec. Meanwhile, Harry Vowles, a blind musician of Brighton,
+who had for some years made an annual walk from Brighton to London, on
+October 15th, 1900, accomplished his ambition to walk the distance in one
+day. He left Brighton at 5 a.m. and reached the Alhambra, in Leicester
+Square, at ten o'clock that night.
+
+On October 31st, 1902, the Surrey Walking Club's 104 miles contest to
+Brighton and back resulted in J. Butler winning: time, 21 hrs. 36 mins. 27
+secs., Butler performing the single journey on March 14th the following
+year in 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16 secs. For fair heel-and-toe walking, that was
+considered at the time the ultimate achievement; but it was beaten on
+April 9th, 1904, in the inter-club walk of the Blackheath and Ranelagh
+Harriers, when T. E. Hammond established the existing record of 8 hrs. 26
+mins. 57-2/5 secs.--the astonishing speed of six miles an hour.
+
+[Sidenote: STOCK-EXCHANGE WALKS]
+
+This event was preceded by the famous Stock Exchange Walk of May Day,
+1903. Every one knows the Stock Exchange to be almost as great on sport as
+it is in finance, but no one was prepared for the magnitude finally
+assumed by the match idly suggested on March 16th, during a dull hour on
+the Kaffir Market. Business had long been in a bad way, not in that market
+alone, but in the House in general. The trail of the great Boer War and
+its heritage of debt, taxation, and want of confidence lay over all
+departments, and brokers, jobbers, principals, and clerks alike were so
+heartily tired of going to "business" day after day when there was no
+business--and when there calculating how much longer they could afford
+annual subscriptions and office rent--that any relief was eagerly
+accepted. In three days twenty-five competitors had entered for the
+proposed walk to Brighton, and the House found itself not so
+poverty-stricken but that prize-money to the extent of £35, for three
+silver cups, was subscribed. And then the Press--that Press which is
+growing daily more hysterical and irresponsible--got hold of it and boomed
+it, and there was no escaping the Stock Exchange Walk. By the morning of
+March 25th, when the list was closed, there were 107 competitors entered
+and the prize-list had grown to the imposing total of three gold medals,
+valued, one at £10 10_s._ and two at £5 5_s._, with two silver cups valued
+at £10 10_s._, two at £5 5_s._, and silver commemoration medals for all
+arriving at Brighton in thirteen hours.
+
+Long before May Day the Press had worked the thing up to the semblance of
+a matter of Imperial importance, and London talked of little else. April
+13th had been at first spoken of for the event, but many of the
+competitors wanted to get into training, and in the end May Day, being an
+annual Stock Exchange holiday, was selected.
+
+There were ninety-nine starters from the Clock Tower at 6.30 on that chill
+May morning: not middle-aged stockbrokers, but chiefly young stockbrokers'
+clerks. All the papers had published particulars of the race, together
+with final weather prognostications; hawkers sold official programmes; an
+immense crowd assembled; a host of amateur photographers descended upon
+the scene, and the police kept Westminster Bridge clear. Although by no
+means to be compared with Motor-car Day, the occasion was well honoured.
+
+Advertisers had, as usual, seized the opportunity, and almost overwhelmed
+the start; and among the motor-cars and the cyclists who followed the
+competitors down the road the merits of Somebody's Whisky, and the pills,
+boots, bicycles, beef-tea, and flannels of some other bodies impudently
+obtruded.
+
+"What went ye out for to see?" The public undoubtedly expected to see a
+number of pursy, plethoric City men, attired in frock-coats and silk-hats,
+walking to Brighton. What they _did_ see was a crowd of apparently
+professional pedestrians, lightly clad in the flannels and "shorts" of
+athletics, trailing down the road, with here and there an "unattached"
+walker, such as Mr. Pringle, who, fulfilling the conditions of a wager,
+walked down in immaculate silk hat, black coat, and spats--"immaculate,"
+that is to say, at the start: as a chronicler adds, "things were rather
+different later." They were: for thirteen hours' (more or less) rain and
+mud can work vast changes. The day was, in fact, as unpleasant as well
+could be imagined, and it is said much for the sporting enthusiasm of the
+countryside that the whole length of the road to Brighton was so crowded
+with spectators that it resembled a thronged City thoroughfare.
+
+It said still more for the pluck and endurance of those who undertook the
+walk that of the ninety-nine starters no fewer than seventy-eight finished
+within the thirteen hours' limit qualifying them for the commemorative
+medal. G. D. Nicholas, the favourite, heavily backed by sportsmen, led
+from the beginning, making the pace at the rate of six miles an hour. He
+reached Streatham, six miles, in 59 mins.
+
+And then a craze for walking to Brighton set in. On June 6th the butchers
+of Smithfield Market walked, and doubtless, among the many other
+class-races, the bakers, and the candlestick-makers as well, and the
+proprietors of baked-potato cans and the roadmen, and indeed the Lord
+alone knows who not. Of the sixty butchers, who had a much more favourable
+day than the stockbrokers, the winner, H. F. Otway, covered the distance
+in 9 hrs. 21 mins. 1-4/5 secs., thus beating Broad by some 9 minutes.
+
+Whether the dairymen of London ever executed their proposed daring feat of
+walking to Brighton, each trundling an empty churn, does not appear; but
+it seems likely that many a fantastic person walked down carrying an empty
+head. A German, one Anton Hauslian, even set out on the journey pushing a
+perambulator containing his wife and six-year-old daughter; and on June
+16th an American, a Miss Florence, an eighteen-year-old music-hall
+equilibrist, started to "walk" the distance on a globe. She used for the
+purpose two globes, each made of wood covered with sheepskin, and having a
+diameter of 26 in.; one weighing 20 lb., for uphill work; the other
+weighing 75 lb., for levels and descents. Starting at an early hour on
+June 16th, and "walking" ten hours a day, she reached the Aquarium at the
+unearthly hour of 2.40 on the morning of the 21st.
+
+[Illustration: THE STOCK EXCHANGE WALK: E. F. BROAD AT HORLEY.]
+
+Those who could not rehearse the epic flights of these fifty-two miles
+walked shorter distances; and, while the craze lasted, not only did the
+"midinettes" of Paris take the walking mania severely, but the waitresses
+of various London teashops performed ten-mile wonders.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE PEDESTRIANISM]
+
+On June 20th the gigantic "go-as-you-please" walking or running match to
+Brighton organised by the _Evening News_ took place, in that dismal
+weather so generally associated, whatever the season of the year, with
+sport on the Brighton Road. Two hundred and thirty-eight competitors had
+entered, but only ninety actually faced the starter at 5 o'clock a.m. They
+were a very miscellaneous concourse of professional and amateur "peds";
+some with training and others with no discoverable athletic qualifications
+at all; some mere boys, many middle-aged, one in his fifty-second year,
+and even one octogenarian of eighty-five. Among them was a negro, F. W.
+Craig, known to the music-halls by the poetic name of the "Coffee Cooler";
+and labouring men, ostlers, and mechanics of every type were of the
+number. It was as complete a contrast from the Stock Exchange band as
+could be well imagined.
+
+The wide difference in age, and the fitness and unfitness of the many
+competitors, resulted in the race being won by the foremost while the
+rearmost were struggling fifteen miles behind. The intrepid octogenarian
+was still wearily plodding on, twenty miles from Brighton, six hours after
+the winner, Len Hurst, had reached the Aquarium in the record time--26
+mins. 18 secs. better than Randall's best of May 6th, 1899--of 6 hrs. 32
+mins. Some amazing figures were set up by the more youthful and
+incautious, who reached Croydon, 9-1/2 miles, in 54 mins., but were
+eventually worn down by those who were wise enough to save themselves for
+the later stages.
+
+In the following August Miss M. Foster repeated her ride of July 12th,
+1897, and cycled to Brighton and back, on this occasion, with
+motor-pacing, reducing her former record to 5 hrs. 33 mins. 8 secs.
+
+[Illustration: MISS M. FOSTER, PACED BY MOTOR-BICYCLE, PASSING COULSDON.]
+
+[Sidenote: PEDESTRIAN RECORDS]
+
+On November 7th the Surrey Walking Club's Brighton and back match was won
+by H. W. Horton, in 20 hrs. 31 mins. 53 secs., disposing of Butler's best
+of October 31st, 1902, by a margin of 1 hr. 4 mins. 34 secs.
+
+With 1904 a decline in Brighton Road sport set in, for it was memorable
+only for the Blackheath and Ranelagh Harriers' inter-club walk to
+Brighton of April 9th. But that was indeed a memorable event, for T. E.
+Hammond then abolished Butler's remaining record, of 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16
+secs. for the single trip, and replaced it by his own of 8 hrs. 26 mins.
+57-2/5 secs.
+
+Even the efforts of cyclists seem to for a time have spent themselves, for
+1905 witnessed only the new unpaced record made July 19th by R. Shirley,
+who cycled there and back in 5 hrs. 22 mins. 5 secs., thus shearing off a
+mere 8 mins. 5 secs. from Green's performance of so long as three years
+before. What the future may have in store none may be so hardy as to
+prophesy. Finality has a way of ever receding into the infinite, and when
+the unpaced cyclist shall have beaten the paced record of 5 hrs. 6 mins.
+42 secs. made by Neason in 1897, other new fields will arise to be
+conquered. And let no one say that speed and sport on the Brighton Road
+have finally declined, for, as we have seen, it is abundantly easy in
+these days for a popular Press to "call spirits from the vasty deep," and
+arouse sporting enthusiasm almost to frenzy, whenever and wherever it is
+"worth the while."
+
+Thus, in pedestrianism, other new times have since been set up. On
+September 22nd, 1906, J. Butler, in the Polytechnic Harriers' Open Walk,
+finished to Brighton in 8 hrs. 23 mins. 27 secs. On June 22nd, 1907,
+Hammond performed the double journey, London to Brighton and back, in 18
+hrs. 13 mins. 37 secs. And on May 1st, 1909, he regained the single
+journey record by his performance of 8 hrs. 18 mins. 18 secs. On September
+4th of the same year H. L. Ross further reduced the figures to 8 hrs. 11
+mins. 14 secs.
+
+
+BRIGHTON ROAD RECORDS.
+
+RIDING, DRIVING, CYCLING, RUNNING, WALKING, ETC.
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |     Date.     |                                             | Time.  |
+  |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
+  |               |                                             |h. m. s.|
+  |1784, July 25. |Prince of Wales rode horseback from the      |        |
+  |               |  "Pavilion," Brighton, to Carlton House,    |        |
+  |               |   London, and returned                      |10  0  0|
+  |               |       Going                                 | 4 30  0|
+  |               |       Returning                             | 5 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Aug. 21.   |Prince of Wales drove phæton, three horses   |        |
+  |               |  tandem, from Carlton House to "Pavilion"   | 4 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1809, May.     |Cornet Webster of the 10th Light Dragoons,   |        |
+  |               |  rode horseback from Brighton to            |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge                         | 3 20  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1831, June 19. |The "Red Rover" coach, leaving the "Elephant |        |
+  |               |  and Castle" at 4 p.m., reached Brighton    |        |
+  |               |  8.21                                       | 4 21  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1833, Oct.     |Walter Hancock's steam-carriage "Autopsy"    |        |
+  |               |  performed the distance between Stratford   |        |
+  |               |  and Brighton                               | 8 30  0|
+  |               |      (Halted 3 hours on road. Actual        |        |
+  |               |       running time, 5 hrs. 30 mins.)        |        |
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1834, Feb. 4.  |"Criterion" coach, London to Brighton        | 3 40  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1868, Mar. 20. |Benjamin B. Trench walked Kennington Church  |        |
+  |               |  to Brighton and back (100 miles)           |23  0  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1869, Feb. 17. |John Mayall, jun., rode a velocipede from    |        |
+  |               |  Trafalgar Square to Brighton in "about"    |12  0  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Mar. 6.    |W. M. and H. J. Chinnery walked from         |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge to Brighton             |11 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  April 14.  |C. A. Booth rode a velocipede London to      |        |
+  |               |  Brighton                                   | 9 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1872, Sept. 19.|Amateur Bicycle Club's race, London to       |        |
+  |               |  Brighton; won by A. Temple, riding a 44-in.|        |
+  |               |  wheel                                      | 5 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1873, Aug. 16. |Six members of the Surrey B.C. and six of the|        |
+  |               |  Middlesex B.C. rode to Brighton and back,  |        |
+  |               |  starting from Kennington Oval at 6.1 a.m.  |        |
+  |               |  Causton, captain of the Surrey, reached the|        |
+  |               |  "Albion," Brighton, in 4 hrs. 51 mins.,    |        |
+  |               |  riding a 50-in. Keen bicycle. W. Wood      |        |
+  |               |  (Middlesex) did the 100 miles              |11  8  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1874, April 27.|A. Howard cycled Brighton to London          | 4 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1878, --.      |P. J. Burt walked from Westminster Clock     |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                |10 52  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1884, --.      |C. L. O'Malley walked from Westminster Clock |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                | 9 48  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1886, April 10.|J. A. McIntosh walked from Westminster Clock |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                | 9 25  8|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1888, Jan. 1.  |Horse "Ginger" trotted to Brighton           | 4 16 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1888, July 13. |James Selby drove "Old Times" coach from     |        |
+  |               |  "Hatchett's," Piccadilly, to "Old Ship,"   |        |
+  |               |  Brighton, and back                         | 7 50  0|
+  |               |      Going                                  | 3 56  0|
+  |               |      Returning                              | 3 54  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1889, Aug. 10. |Team of four cyclists--E. J. Willis, G. L.   |        |
+  |               |  Morris, C. W. Schafer, and S. Walker--     |        |
+  |               |  dividing the distance between them, cycled |        |
+  |               |  from "Hatchett's," Piccadilly, to "Old     |        |
+  |               |  Ship," Brighton, and back                  | 7 36 19|
+  |               |                                             |    -2/5|
+  |1890, Mar. 30. |Another team--J. F. Shute, T. W. Girling, R. |        |
+  |               |  Wilson, and A. E. Griffin--reduced first   |        |
+  |               |  team's time by 4 mins. 19-2/5 secs.        | 7 32  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  April 13.  |Another team--E. R. and W. Scantlebury, W. W.|        |
+  |               |  Arnott, and J. Blair                       | 7 25 15|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  June.      |F. W. Shorland cycled from "Hatchett's" to   |        |
+  |               |  "Old Ship" and back ("Geared Facile"       |        |
+  |               |  bicycle, pneumatic tyres)                  | 7 19  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  July 23.   |S. F. Edge cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old  |        |
+  |               |  Ship" and back (safety bicycle, cushion    |        |
+  |               |  tyres)                                     | 7  2 50|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 3.   |C. A. Smith cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old |        |
+  |               |  Ship" (safety bicycle, pneumatic tyres) and|        |
+  |               |  back                                       | 6 52 10|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  30.    |E. P. Moorhouse cycled (tricycle) from       |        |
+  |               |  "Hatchett's" to "Old Ship"                 | 8  9 24|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1891, Mar. 20. |E. H. Cuthbertson walked from "Hatchett's" to|        |
+  |               |  "Old Ship"                                 |10  6 18|
+  |               |      From Westminster Clock Tower           | 9 55 34|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1892, June 1.  |S. F. Edge cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old  |        |
+  |               |  Ship" and back                             | 6 51  7|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 6.   |E. Dance cycled to Brighton and back         | 6 49  1|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  9.     |R. C. Nesbit cycled (high bicycle) to        |        |
+  |               |  Brighton and back                          | 7 42 50|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1893, Sept. 12.|S. F. Edge cycled to Brighton and back       | 6 13 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  17.  |A. E. Knight      "            "             | 6 10 29|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  19.  |C. A. Smith       "            "             | 6  6 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  22.  |S. F. Edge        "            "             | 5 52 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "       |E. Dance          "            "             | 5 52 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct. 4.  |W. W. Robertson (tricycle)     "             | 7 24  2|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1894, June 11. |W. R. Toft        "            "             | 6 21 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 12.  |C. G. Wridgway    "            "             | 5 35 32|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  20.    |Miss Reynolds cycled to Brighton and back    | 7 48 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  22.    |Miss White cycled to Brighton and back       | 7  6 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1895, Sept. 26.|A. A. Chase, Brighton and back               | 5 34 58|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Oct. 17.   |J. Parsley (tricycle)                        | 6 18 28|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Nov.       |J. H. Herbert cycled backwards to Brighton   | 7 45  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1896, June 26. |E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood (tandem)     | 5 37 34|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  --.        |W. Franks walked from south side of          |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge to Brighton             | 9  7  7|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  July 15.   |C. G. Wridgway                               | 5 22 33|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 15.  |H. Green and W. Nelson (tandem)              | 5 20 35|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Nov.  14.  |"Motor-car Day." A 6 h.p. Bollée motor       |        |
+  |               |  started from Hotel Metropole, London, at   |        |
+  |               |  11.30 a.m., and reached Brighton at 2.25   |        |
+  |               |  p.m.                                       | 2 55  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1897, April 10.|Polytechnic Harriers' walk, Westminster Clock|        |
+  |               |  Tower to Brighton. E. Knott                | 8 56 44|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    May    4.|W. J. Neason cycled to Brighton and back     | 5 19 39|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    July  12.|Miss M. Foster cycled from Hyde Park Corner  |        |
+  |               |  to Brighton and back                       | 6 45  9|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "    13.|Richard Palmer cycled to Brighton and back   | 5  9 45|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Sept. 11.|W. J. Neason cycled from London to Brighton  |        |
+  |               |  and back                                   | 5  6 42|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct.  27.|P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford (tandem)       | 4 54 54|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |L. Franks and G. Franks (tandem safety)      | 5  0 56|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1898, Sept. 27.|E. J. Steel cycled London to Brighton and    |        |
+  |               |  back (unpaced)                             | 6 23 55|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "     " |P. F. A. Gomme, London to Brighton and back  |        |
+  |               |  (tricycle, unpaced)                        | 8 11 10|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1899, May    6.|South London Harriers' "go-as-you-please"    |        |
+  |               |  running match, Westminster Clock Tower to  |        |
+  |               |  Brighton. Won by F. D. Randall             | 6 58 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    June  30.|H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  back (unpaced)                             | 5 50 23|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1902, Aug.  21.|H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  Brighton and back (unpaced)                | 5 30 22|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct.  31.|Surrey Walking Club's match, Westminster     |        |
+  |               |  Clock Tower to Brighton and back. J. Butler|21 36 27|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1903, Mar.  14.|J. Butler walked from Westminster Clock Tower|        |
+  |               |  to Brighton                                | 8 43 16|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    May    1.|Stock Exchange Walk, won by E. F. Broad      | 9 30  1|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    June  20.|Running Match, Westminster Clock Tower to    |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Brighton. Won by Len Hurst        | 6 32  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Aug.     |Miss M. Foster cycled to Brighton and back   |        |
+  |               |  (motor-paced)                              | 5 33  8|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Nov.   7.|Surrey Walking Club's match, Westminster     |        |
+  |               |  Clock Tower to Brighton and back. H. W.    |        |
+  |               |  Horton                                     |20 31 53|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |P. Wheelock and G. Fulford (tandem safety)   | 4 54 54|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |A. C. Gray and H. L. Dixon (tandem safety,   |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5 17 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1904, April  9.|Blackheath and Ranelagh Harriers, inter-club |        |
+  |               |  walk, Westminster Clock Tower to Brighton. |        |
+  |               |  T. E. Hammond                              | 8 26 57|
+  |               |                                             |    -2/5|
+  |1905, July  19.|R. Shirley, Polytechnic C.C., cycled Brighton|        |
+  |               |  and back (unpaced)                         | 5 22  5|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1905, --.      |J. Parsley (tricycle)                        | 6 18 28|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |H. S. Price (tricycle, unpaced)              | 6 53  5|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1906, Sept. 22.|J. Butler walked to Brighton                 | 8 23 27|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |S. C. Paget and M. R. Mott (tandem safety,   |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5  9 20|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |H. Green (safety cycle, unpaced)             | 5 20 22|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |R. Shirley      "          "                 | 5 15 29|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |L. Dralce (tricycle, unpaced)                | 6 24 56|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |J. D. Daymond   "       "                    | 6 19 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1907, June  22.|T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton and back    |18 13 37|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |C. and A. Richards (tandem-safety, unpaced)  | 5  5 25|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |G. H. Briault and E. Ward (tandem-safety,    |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 4 53 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1908, --.      |G. H. Briault (tricycle, unpaced)            | 6  8 24|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1909, May    1.|T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton             | 8 18 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Sept.  4.|H. L. Ross      "          "                 | 8 11 14|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |Harry Green cycled Brighton and back         |        |
+  |               |  (unpaced)                                  | 5 12 14|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1910, --.      |L. S. Leake and G. H. Spencer (tandem        |        |
+  |               |  tricycle, unpaced)                         | 5 59 51|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1912, June  19.|Fredk. H. Grubb cycled (paced) Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  back                                       | 5  9 41|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |E. H. and S. Hulbert (tandem tricycle,       |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5 42 21|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1913, --.      |H. G. Cook (tricycle, unpaced)               | 6  7  4|
+  |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
+  |NOTE.--The fastest L. B. & S. C. R. train, the 5 p.m. Pulman |        |
+  |Express from London Bridge, reaches Brighton (51 miles) at   |        |
+  |6.0 p.m.                                                     | 1  0  0|
+  +-------------------------------------------------------------+--------+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+We may now, somewhat belatedly, after recounting these varied annals of
+the way to Brighton, start along the road itself, coming from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge to Kennington.
+
+No one scanning the grey vista of the Kennington Road would, on sight,
+accuse Kennington of owning a past; but, as a sheer matter of fact, it is
+an historic place. It is the "Chenintun" of Domesday Book, and the
+Cyningtun or Köningtun--the King's town--of an even earlier time. It was
+indeed a royal manor belonging to Canute, and the site of the palace where
+his son, Hardicanute, died, mad drunk, in 1042. Edward the Third annexed
+it to his Duchy of Cornwall, and even yet, after the vicissitudes of nine
+hundred years, the Prince of Wales, as Duke of Cornwall, owns house
+property here. Kennington Park, too, has its own sombre romance, for it
+was an open common until 1851, and a favourite place of execution for
+Surrey malefactors. Here the minor prisoners among the Scottish rebels
+captured by the Duke of Cumberland in the '45 were executed, those of
+greater consideration being beheaded on Tower Hill. It is an odd
+coincidence that, among the lesser titles of "Butcher Cumberland" himself
+was that of Earl of Kennington.
+
+At this junction of roads, where the Kennington Road, the Kennington Park
+Road, the Camberwell New Road, and the Brixton Road, all pool their
+traffic, there stood, in times not so far removed but that some yet living
+can remember it, Kennington Gate, an important turnpike at any time, and
+one of very great traffic on Derby Day, when, I fear, the pikeman was
+freely bilked of his due at the hands of sportsmen, noble and ignoble.
+There is a view of this gate on such a day drawn by James Pollard, and
+published in 1839, which gives a very good idea of the amount of traffic
+and, incidentally, of the curious costumes of the period. You shall also
+find in the "Comic Almanack" for 1837 an illustration by George
+Cruikshank of this same place, one would say, although it is not mentioned
+by name, in which is an immense jostling crowd anxious to pass through,
+while the pikeman, having apparently been "cheeked" by the occupants of a
+passing vehicle, is vulgarly engaged, I grieve to state, in "taking a
+sight" at them. That is to say, he has, according to the poet, "Put his
+thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out."
+
+[Sidenote: KENNINGTON GATE]
+
+Kennington Gate was swept away, with other purely Metropolitan turnpike
+gates, October 31st. 1865, and is now to be found in the yard of Clare's
+Depository at the crest of Brixton Hill. It was one of nine that barred
+this route from London to the sea in 1826. The others were at South End,
+Croydon: Foxley Hatch, or Purley Gate, which stood near Purley Corner, by
+the twelfth milestone, until 1853; and Frenches, 19 miles 4 furlongs from
+London--that is to say, just before you come into Redhill streets. Leaving
+Redhill behind, another gate spanned the road at Salfords, below Earlswood
+Common, while others were situated at Horley, Ansty Cross, Stonepound, one
+mile short of Clayton; and at Preston, afterwards removed to Patcham.[6]
+
+Not the most charitable person could lay his hand upon his heart and
+declare, honestly, that the church of St. Mark, Kennington, which stands
+at this beginning of the Brixton Road, is other than extremely hideous.
+Fortunately, its pagan architecture, once fondly thought to revive the
+glories of old Greece, is largely screened from sight by the thriving
+trees of its churchyard, and so nervous wayfarers are spared something of
+the inevitable shock.
+
+The story of Kennington Church does not take us very far back, down the
+dim alleys of history, for it was built so recently as the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century, when it was thought possible to emulate the
+marble beauties of the Parthenon and other triumphs of classic
+architecture in plebeian brick and stone. Those materials, however, and
+the architects themselves, were found to be somewhat inferior to their
+models, and eventually the public taste became so outraged with the
+appalling ugliness of the pagan temples arising on every hand that at
+length the Gothic revival of the mid-nineteenth century set in.
+
+But if its history is not long, its site has a horrid kind of historic
+association, for the building stands on what was a portion of Kennington
+Common, the exact spot where the unhappy Scottish rebels were executed in
+1746, and where Jerry Abershawe, the highwayman, was hanged in 1795. The
+remains of the gibbet on which the bodies of some of his fellow knights of
+the road were exposed were actually found when the foundations for the
+church were being dug out.
+
+The origin of Kennington Church, like that of Brixton, is so singular that
+it is very well worth while to inquire into it. It was a direct outcome of
+the Napoleonic wars. England had been so long engaged in those European
+struggles, and was so wearied and impoverished by them, that Parliament
+could think of nothing better than to celebrate the peace of 1815 by
+voting a million and a half of money to the clergy as a "thank-offering."
+This sum took the shape of a church-building fund. Wages were low, work
+was scarce, and bread was so dear that the people were starving. That good
+paternal Parliament, therefore, when they asked for bread gave them stone
+and brick, and performed the heroic feat of picking their impoverished
+pockets as well. It was accomplished in this wise. There was that Lucky
+Bag, the million and a half sterling of the Thanksgiving Fund; but it
+could not be dipped into unless you gave an equal sum to that you took
+out, and then expended the whole on building churches. And yet it has been
+said that Parliament has no sense of the ridiculous! Why, it was the most
+stupendous of practical jokes!
+
+[Illustration: KENNINGTON GATE: DERBY DAY, 1839. _From an engraving after
+J. Pollard._]
+
+[Sidenote: HALF-PRICE CHURCHES]
+
+Lambeth was at that time a suburban and a greatly expanding parish, and
+was one of those that accepted this offer, and took what came eventually
+to be called Half Price Churches. It gave a large order, and took four:
+those of Kennington, Waterloo, Brixton, and Norwood, all ferociously
+hideous, and costing £15,000 apiece; the Government granting one moiety
+and the other being raised by a parish rate on all, without distinction of
+creed. The Government also remitted the usual taxes on the building
+materials, and in some instances further helped the people to rejoice by
+imposing a compulsory rate of twopence in the pound, to pay the rector or
+vicar. All this did more to weaken the Church of England than even a
+century of scandalous inefficiency:
+
+  Abuse a man, and he may brook it,
+  But keep your hands out of his breeches pocket.
+
+The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868,
+abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts;
+but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down
+and rebuilt.
+
+Brixton appears in Domesday as "Brixistan," which in later ages became
+"Brixtow"; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which
+Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of
+Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the
+street, _i.e._, the paved thoroughfare alluded to in "Brixton causeway,"
+marked on old suburban maps.
+
+The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a
+pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the
+river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve feet wide,
+which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at
+Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that
+side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was
+fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since
+been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it
+to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.
+
+The "White Horse" public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those
+times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the
+nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now
+stands, called "Angell Town," and then the houses of Brixton Road began to
+arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen's wooden
+boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until
+about 1875.
+
+There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the
+Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the
+old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a "suburban
+villa" you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but--to
+speak in the language of auctioneers--a "commodious residence situate in
+its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience," or something
+in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon
+Marché, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the
+continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of
+semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in
+the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the
+gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel
+drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid
+comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag
+armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from
+wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third
+and fourth generations; for these solid houses were built a century ago,
+or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of
+good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and
+sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised
+medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free
+from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent--and large. They
+are, indeed, of such spaciousness and commodious quality that an
+auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics
+to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul
+when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I
+think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until
+the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building
+plots for what we now understand by "villas"--a fate that has lately
+befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one
+of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour
+thirty or forty little modern houses--why, then an unwonted respect is
+felt for it and its kind.
+
+[Sidenote: BRIXTON HILL]
+
+Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous
+church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of
+the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at
+the angle of the roads--a _memento mori_, ever since the twenties, for
+travellers down the road.
+
+Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well
+as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a
+biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A
+verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton
+Hill, accompanies name and date:
+
+  O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere
+  Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;
+  The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale
+  From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale,
+  That one so young and lovely--died--and last,
+  When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave,
+  Shall come in summer's bloom and winter's blast,
+  A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave.
+
+An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in
+1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no
+flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight
+assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton
+snores.
+
+On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains
+an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black
+tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now
+replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as
+it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the
+present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here,
+unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an
+old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as
+they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this
+hill-top, and London seemed far away.
+
+And so to Streatham, once rightly "Streatham, Surrey," in the postal
+address, but now merely "Streatham, S.W." A world of significance lies in
+that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London
+Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley's "History of
+Surrey" that "the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous
+range of villas and other respectable dwellings." Respectable! I should
+think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the
+Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates "respectable." As well might one
+style the Alps "pretty"!
+
+But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there
+stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung
+in chains the body of one "Jack Gutteridge," a highwayman duly executed
+for robbing and murdering a gentleman's servant here. The place was long
+afterwards known as "Jack Gutteridge's Gate."
+
+[Illustration: Streatham Common]
+
+Streatham--the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the
+Street--emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name,
+_the_ Street--was probably so named to distinguish it from some other
+settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a
+paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand godfather to a
+place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons,
+Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those "streets" were Roman roads. The
+particular "street" on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman
+road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John's Common, Godstone,
+and Caterham, a branch of the road to _Portus Adurni_, the Old Shoreham of
+to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John's Common, when
+the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It
+was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted
+together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham
+by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many "Cold Harbours"
+associated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton
+Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be
+Broad Green.
+
+[Sidenote: DOCTOR JOHNSON]
+
+There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are
+very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the
+village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. "All
+flesh is grass," said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky
+figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an
+historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those
+who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the
+tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that "ripeness" of land for
+building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.
+
+But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will
+keep a vestige of its old-time character of roadside village. A good deal
+earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson's visits to Streatham and Thrale Place,
+the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or
+Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became
+known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the
+disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the "sower
+and weeping ground" by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or
+not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of
+Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.
+
+Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson
+will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter
+Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the
+mind's-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming
+down from London to Thrale's house, to be lionised and indulged, and in
+return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of
+a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and
+cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child's, and a simple vanity as
+engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig
+awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight
+oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to
+the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met
+at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an
+"original."
+
+He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and
+Fanny Burney--the readiest hand at the "management" of one so difficult
+and intractable--and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable
+cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That
+historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts;
+specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor's visits. Ye gods! what
+floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!
+
+They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting;
+and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved
+himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as
+any country squire on that notable occasion.
+
+But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should
+bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs.
+Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer
+bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it
+good-bye, as his diary records:
+
+"Sunday, went to church at Streatham. _Templo valedixi cum osculo._" Thus,
+kissing the old porch of St. Leonard's, the lexicographer departed with
+heavy heart. Two years later he died.
+
+This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to
+commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781,
+but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in
+truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and
+internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.
+
+It is curious to note the learned Doctor's indignation when asked to write
+an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great
+authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental
+dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an
+inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!
+
+There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a
+tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who _in pugna
+Waterlooensi occiso_. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.
+
+But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another
+down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little brass to an
+ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north
+aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the Doctor, if ever it
+revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although
+it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the
+speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and
+its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in
+1792, says that "Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres,
+surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in
+circumference." Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and
+the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the
+house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions
+built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.
+
+[Sidenote: GIBBETS BY THE WAY]
+
+Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston's time, and
+indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark
+Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad.
+Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when
+compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his "Britannia" of
+1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and
+another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later
+editor, who issued an "Ogilby Improv'd" in 1731, they still decorated the
+wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of
+affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.
+
+At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and
+eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used
+to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where
+the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at
+what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden
+and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later
+years been persuaded to play.
+
+Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall,
+the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon,
+resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in
+March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. "T 180," as he
+was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898,
+and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he
+had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his
+gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul's Cathedral by
+the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised
+commercial circles.
+
+The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180's release become "ripe for
+building," and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been
+"developed" away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.
+
+Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white
+hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long
+body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in
+South London, "for ever spoiling the view in all its compass," as Ruskin
+truly says in "Præterita."
+
+I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is
+stuffily reminiscent of half a century's stale teas and buttered toast,
+and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like
+the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural
+scenes as "Belshazzar's Feast" and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects
+from Revelation.
+
+[Illustration: STREATHAM.]
+
+At Thornton Heath--where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath
+for at least eighty years past--the electric trams of Croydon begin, and
+take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a
+continuous line of houses. "Broad Green" once stood by the wayside, but
+nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At
+Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past
+left, in "Colliers' Water Lane." The old farmhouse of Colliers' Water,
+reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was demolished
+in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it
+possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable
+than highwaymen.
+
+The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon
+was a veritable Black Country.
+
+The "colliers of Croydon," whose black trade gave such employment to
+seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of
+very recent times still called "sea-coal"--that is to say, coal shipped
+from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The
+Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that
+once overspread the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and was supplied very
+largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth.
+
+Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We
+are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a
+part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the
+time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke
+and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of
+Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to
+abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled
+lawn-sleeves.
+
+We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was "Crogdoene." In
+Domesday Book it is "Croindene." Whether the name means "crooked vale,"
+"chalk vale," or "town of the cross," I will not pretend to say, and he
+would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with
+the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror
+to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which
+still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate
+until 1750.
+
+[Sidenote: GROWTH OF CROYDON]
+
+By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings
+become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified
+churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more
+secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose
+spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the
+promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the
+far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered
+between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a
+considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and
+twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still
+Croydon grows.
+
+In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620
+they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to
+be a "very obscure and darke place." Archbishop Abbot "expounded" it by
+felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the
+headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of
+the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.
+
+The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of
+progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is
+still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances
+that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It
+_was_ the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country
+site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy
+Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last
+few years; but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a
+busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks
+"improvement"; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and
+the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good
+Whitgift's noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have
+advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane
+among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better
+than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play
+monkey-tricks--when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the
+Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the
+will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.
+
+Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, "The
+Hospital of the Holy Trinity," inscribed high up on the wall, seems
+strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.
+
+There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the
+_opposite_ side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one
+standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which
+should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It
+is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital
+is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.
+
+It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character
+of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and
+as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the
+outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury
+and eloquent with the motto _Qui dat pauperi non indigebit_, the stranger
+has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old
+Aubrey quaintly puts it, "a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a
+college, by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late
+Archbishop of Canterbury." The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass
+lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two
+floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation:
+twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each £40
+and £30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital
+so long as of good behaviour, but "obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde
+of charmmynge, or witchcrafte" are punished by the statutes with
+expulsion.
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.]
+
+The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden's
+rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their
+building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the
+stained glass is of sixteenth century date.
+
+But it is in the Warden's rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old
+woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment
+chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially
+reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop
+Whitgift.
+
+Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the
+Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of
+parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel
+of Edward VI.
+
+These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled
+sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over
+their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into
+patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his
+lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.
+
+[Illustration: The CHAPEL, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.]
+
+A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of
+carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of
+economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with
+the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder's
+portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift
+schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a
+lady, supposed to be the Archbishop's niece, and a ghastly representation
+of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but
+dimly, for the light is very feeble.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The High Street of Croydon really _is_ high, for it occupies a ridge and
+looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle,
+or "Wandel." The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down
+below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old
+Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High
+Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.
+
+The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a
+very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance,
+and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon
+Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council
+in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of
+accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low,
+quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and
+self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time
+in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture,
+built in 1808. Near by was the "Greyhound," an old coaching and posting
+inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the
+street, of which those of the "George" at Crawley and the "Greyhound" at
+Sutton are surviving examples. That of the "Cock" at Sutton disappeared in
+1898, and the similar signs of the "Crown," opposite the Whitgift
+Hospital, and of the "King's Arms" vanished many years ago.
+
+The "Greyhound" was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The
+first mention of it is found in 1563, the parish register of that year
+containing the entry, "Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of
+the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January." The voluminous John
+Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the
+headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed
+with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe
+measures.
+
+Following upon the alteration, the "Greyhound" was rebuilt. Its gallows
+sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting
+the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going
+times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and
+neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse
+of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and
+purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of £400 was claimed for
+freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually £350 was paid.
+
+[Sidenote: RUSKIN]
+
+I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under
+that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty
+and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways.
+I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way
+for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with
+John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is
+referred to in "Præterita":
+
+"... Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more than
+that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the 'Old King's Head' in
+Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint
+her Simone Memmi's 'King's Head' for a sign." And he adds: "Meantime my
+aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the
+little house still standing--or which was so four months ago[7]--the
+fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop,
+in the second story" (_sic_).
+
+There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised
+progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive
+products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of
+them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created _ad
+hoc_, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be
+as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a
+handkerchief.
+
+The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about
+the period of Croydon's first expansion, when the [Greek: ohi polloi]
+impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces,
+neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual
+and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.
+
+Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of
+the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration,
+after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of
+the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because
+he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly
+what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate
+monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that
+utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon's monument, however,
+still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face
+calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.
+
+The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been a varied kind. The
+Reverend William Clewer, who held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he
+was ejected, was a "smiter," an extortioner, and a criminal; but Roland
+Phillips, a predecessor by some two hundred years, was something of a
+seer. Preaching in 1497, he declared that "we" (the Roman Catholics) "must
+root out printing, or printing will root out us." Already, in the twenty
+years of its existence, it had undermined superstition, and was presently
+to root out the priests, even as he foresaw.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCHBISHOP'S PALACE]
+
+Unquestionably the sight best worth seeing in Croydon is that next-door
+neighbour of the church, the Archbishop's Palace. Comparatively few are
+those who see it, because it is just a little way off the road and is
+private property and shown only by favour and courtesy. When the
+Archbishops deserted the place it was sold under the Act of Parliament of
+1780 and became the factory of a calico-printer and a laundry. Some
+portions were demolished, the moat was filled up, the "minnows and the
+springs of Wandel" of which Ruskin speaks, were moved on, and mean little
+streets quartered the ground immediately adjoining. But, although all
+those facts are very grim and grey, it remains true that the old palace is
+a place very well worth seeing.
+
+It was again sold in 1887, and purchased by the Duke of Newcastle, who
+made it over to the so-called "Kilburn Sisters," who maintain it as a
+girls' school. I do not know, nor seek to inquire, by what right, or with
+what object, the "Sisters" who conduct the school affect the dress of
+Roman Catholics, while professing the tenets of the Church of England; but
+under their rule the historic building has been well treated, and the
+chapel and other portions repaired, with every care for their interesting
+antiquities, under the eyes of expert and jealous anti-restorers. The
+Great Hall, chief feature of the place, still maintains its fifteenth
+century chestnut hammerbeam roof and armorial corbels; the Long Gallery,
+where Queen Elizabeth danced, the State bedroom where she slept, the Guard
+Room, quarters of the Archbishops' bodyguard, are all existing; and the
+Chapel, with oaken bench-ends bearing the sculptured arms of Laud, of
+Juxon, and others, and the Archbishops' pew, has lately been brought back
+to decent condition. Here, too, is the exquisite oaken gallery at the
+western end, known as "Queen Elizabeth's Pew."
+
+That imperious queen and indefatigable tourist paid several visits to
+Croydon Palace, and her characteristic insolence and freedom of speech
+were let loose upon the unoffending wife of Archbishop Parker when she
+took her leave. "Madam," she said, "I may not call you; mistress I am
+ashamed to call you; and so I know not what to call you; but, however, I
+thank you." It seems evident that the daughter of Henry the Eighth had,
+despite her Protestantism, an historic preference for a celibate clergy.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Down amid what remains of the old town is a street oddly named "Pump
+Pail." Its strange name causes many a visit of curiosity, but it is a
+common-place street, and contains neither pail nor pump, and nothing more
+romantic than a tin tabernacle. But this, it appears, is not an instance
+of things not being what they seem, for in the good old days before the
+modern water-supply, one of the parish pumps stood here, and from it a
+woman supplied a house-to-house delivery of water in pails. The
+explanation seems too obvious to be true, and sure enough, a variant kicks
+the "pail" over, and tells us that it is properly Pump Pale, the Place of
+the Pump, "pale" being an ancient word, much used in old law-books to
+indicate a district, limit of jurisdiction, and so forth.
+
+[Sidenote: JABEZ BALFOUR]
+
+The modern side of all these things is best exemplified by the beautiful
+Town Hall which Croydon has provided for itself, in place of the ugly old
+building, demolished in 1893. It is a noble building, and stands on a site
+worthy of it, with broad approaches that permit good views, without which
+the best of buildings is designed in vain. It marks the starting point of
+the history of modern Croydon, and is a far cry from the old building of
+the bygone Local Board days, when the traffic of the High Street was
+regulated--or supposed to be regulated--by the Beadle, and the rates were
+low, and Croydon was a country town, and everything was dull and humdrum.
+It was a little unfortunate that the first Mayor of Croydon and Liberal
+Member of Parliament for Tamworth, that highly imaginative financier Jabez
+Spencer Balfour, should have been wanted by the police, a fugitive from
+justice brought back from the Argentine, and a criminal convicted of fraud
+as a company promoter; but accidents will happen, and the Town Council did
+its best, by turning his portrait face to the wall, and by subsequently
+(as it is reported) losing it. He was sent in 1895, a little belatedly, to
+fourteen years' penal servitude, and the victims of his "Liberator" frauds
+went into the workhouse for the most part, or died. He ceased to be V 460
+on release on licence, and became again Jabez Spencer Balfour, and so
+died, obscurely.
+
+The Liberal Party in the Government had, over Jabez Balfour, one of its
+several narrow escapes from complete moral ruin; for Balfour was on
+extremely friendly terms with the members of Gladstone's ministry,
+1892-94, and was within an ace of being given a Cabinet post. Let us pause
+to consider the odd affinity between Jabez Balfour and Trebitsch Lincoln
+and Liberal politics.
+
+The Town Hall--ahem! Municipal Buildings--stands on the site of the
+disused and abolished Central Croydon station, and the neighbourhood of it
+is glimpsed afar off by the fine tower, 170 ft. in height. All the
+departments of the Corporation are housed under one roof, including the
+fine Public Library and its beautiful feature, the Braithwaite Hall. The
+Town Council is housed in that municipal splendour without which no civic
+body can nowadays deliberate in comfort, and even the vestibule is worthy
+of a palace. I take the following "official" description of it.
+
+[Illustration: CROYDON TOWN HALL.]
+
+"On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone.
+Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns
+and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper,
+called Rose d'Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The
+capitals, architrave, cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona
+marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of
+alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The
+flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in
+design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H.
+the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass.
+Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate
+green tint, relieved by a powdering of C's and Civic Crowns. The doors and
+their surroundings are of walnut wood."
+
+[Sidenote: THE RATEPAYER'S HOME]
+
+Very beautiful indeed. Now let us see the home of one of Croydon's poorer
+ratepayers:
+
+On one side of the hall are two rooms, called respectively the parlour and
+the kitchen. Beyond is the scullery. The walls of the staircase are
+covered with a sort of plaster called stucco, but closely resembling
+road-scrapings: the skirtings are of pitch-pine, the balusters of the same
+material. The floorings are of deal. The roof lets in the rain. One of the
+windows is broken and stuffed with rags, the others are cracked. The walls
+are stained a delicate green tint relieved by a film of blue mould, owing
+to lack of a damp-course. None of the windows close properly, the flues
+smoke into the rooms instead of out of the chimney-pots, the doors jam,
+and the surroundings are wretched beyond description.
+
+Electric tramways now conduct along the Brighton Road to the uttermost end
+of the great modern borough of Croydon, at Purley Corner. Here the
+explorer begins to perceive, despite the densely packed houses, that he is
+in that "Croydene," or crooked vale, of Saxon times from which, we are
+told, Croydon takes its name; and he can see also that nature, and not
+man, ordained in the first instance the position and direction of what is
+now the road to Brighton, in the bottom, alongside where the Bourne once
+flowed, inside the fence of Haling Park. It is, in fact, the site of a
+prehistoric track which led the most easy ways across the bleak downs,
+severally through Smitham Bottom and Caterham.
+
+Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that
+long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the "Surrey Iron
+Railway." This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of
+affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy
+goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to
+Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller's earth are
+situated.
+
+This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a
+canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury
+that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing
+numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The
+Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to
+Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about £27,000. It was not a
+railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged
+the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The
+rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern
+railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the
+wheels of the waggons fitted: |_ _|. Thus, in contradistinction from all
+other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels, but
+on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable the
+waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.
+
+From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth,
+along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double
+track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called
+"Tramway Path" marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by
+way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as "Iron
+Road." Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was
+continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham Bottom and ran along the
+left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by
+the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old
+projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to
+Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that
+dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are
+obliterated.
+
+The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from "Woden" find that
+Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon "halig," or holy; and therefrom have
+built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here.
+The best we can say for those theories is that they _may_ be correct or
+they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and
+certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one
+rap about it; nor even know--or knowing, are not impressed--that here, in
+1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham.
+It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.
+
+At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the "Swan and
+Sugarloaf," the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it,
+all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark
+chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the
+once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened
+behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.
+
+The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses,
+testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the
+"Swan and Sugarloaf" to the "Windsor Castle," the "Purley Arms," the "Red
+Deer," and the "Royal Oak"; and just beyond, round the corner, is the "Red
+Lion." At the "Royal Oak" a very disreputable and stony road goes off to
+the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to
+Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable
+modern settlement near the newly built station of Purley Oaks, so called
+by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley
+station--ex "Caterham Junction"--of the South Eastern line.
+
+It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled,
+close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble
+woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and
+stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived--when, indeed, he was not
+detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.
+
+[Sidenote: HORNE TOOKE]
+
+Tooke, whose real name was Horne, was born in 1736, the son of a
+poulterer. At twenty-four years of age he became a clergyman, and was
+appointed to the living of New Brentford, which he held until 1773, when,
+clearly seeing how grievously he had missed his vocation, he studied for
+the Bar. Thereafter his life was one long series of battles, hotly
+contested in Parliament, in newspapers, books and pamphlets, and on
+platforms. He was in general a wrong-headed, as well as a hot-headed,
+politician; but he was sane enough to oppose the American War when King
+and Government were so mad as to provoke and continue it. Describing the
+Americans killed and wounded by the troops at Lexington and Concord as
+"murdered," he was the victim of a Government prosecution for libel, and
+was imprisoned for twelve months and fined £200. He took--no! that will
+not do--he "assumed" the name of Tooke in 1782, in compliment to his
+friend William Tooke, who then resided here in this delightful old country
+house of Purley. The idea seems to have been for them to live together in
+amity, and that William Tooke, the elder of the two, should leave his
+property to his friend. But quarrels arose long before that, and Horne at
+his friend's death received only £500, while other disputed points arose,
+leading to bitter law-suits.
+
+In 1801 he was Member of Parliament for Old Sarum; but how he reconciled
+the representation of that rottenest of rotten boroughs with his
+profession of reforming Whig does not appear.
+
+He was a many-sided man, of fierce energies and strong prejudices, but a
+scholar. While his political pamphlets are forgotten, his "[Greek: EPEA
+PTEROENTA]; or, the Diversions of Purley," which is not really a book of
+sports, is still remembered for its philological learning. It is a
+disquisition on the affinities of prepositions, the relationships of
+conjunctions, and the intimacies of other parts of speech. His other
+diversions appear to have been less reputable, for he was the father of
+one illegitimate son and two daughters.
+
+His intention was to have been buried in the grounds of Purley House, but
+when he died, in 1812, at Wimbledon, his mortal coil was laid to rest at
+Ealing; and so it chanced that the vault he had constructed in his garden
+remained, after all, untenanted, with the unfinished epitaph:
+
+  JOHN HORNE TOOKE,
+  Late Proprietor and now Occupier
+  of this spot,
+  was born in June 1736,
+  Died in
+  Aged    years,
+  Contented and Grateful.
+
+Purley House is still standing, though considerably altered, and presents
+few features reminiscent of the eighteenth-century politician, and fewer
+still of the Puritan Bradshaw, the regicide, who once resided here. It
+stands in the midst of tall elms, and looks as far removed from political
+dissensions as may well be imagined, its trim lawn and trellised walls
+overgrown in summer by a tangle of greenery.
+
+But suburban expansion has at last reached Tooke's rural retreat from
+political strife, and the estate is now "developed," with roads driven
+through and streets of villas planned, leaving only the old house and some
+few acres of gardens around it.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+Returning to the main road, we come, just before reaching Godstone Corner,
+to the site of the now-forgotten Foxley Hatch, a turnpike-gate, which
+stood at this point until 1865. Paying toll here "cleared," or made the
+traveller free of, the gates and bars to Merstham, on the main road, and
+as far as Wray Common, on the Reigate route, as the following copy of a
+contemporary turnpike-ticket, shows:
+
+  .............................
+  .     Foxley Hatch Gate     .
+  .              R            .
+  .clears Wray common, Gatton,.
+  .  Merstham and Hooley lane .
+  .        gates and bars     .
+  .............................
+
+"To Riddlesdown, the prettiest spot in Surrey," says a sign-post on the
+left hand. It is not true that it is the prettiest place, but, of course
+(as the proverb truly says), "every eye forms its own beauty," and
+Riddlesdown is a Beanfeasters' Paradise, where tea-gardens, swings, and I
+know not what temerarious delights await the tripper who accepts the
+invitation, boldly displayed, "Up the Steps for Home Comforts."
+
+[Sidenote: MILESTONES]
+
+Here an aged milestone, in addition, proclaims it to be "XIII Miles from
+the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1743," and "XII Miles From Westminster
+Bridge." This is, doubtless, one of the stones referred to in the _London
+Evening Post_ of September 10th, 1743, which says: "On Wednesday they
+began to measure the Croydon Road from the Standard in Cornhill and stake
+the places for erecting milestones, the inhabitants of Croydon having
+subscribed for 13, which 'tis thought will be carried on by the Gentlemen
+of Sussex."
+
+I know nothing of what those Sussex gentlemen did, but that the milestones
+_were_ carried on is evident enough to all who care to explore the old
+Brighton Road through Godstone, up Tilburstow Hill, and so on to East
+Grinstead, Uckfield, and Lewes, where this fine bold series, dated 1744,
+is continued. What, however, has become of the series so liberally
+provided in 1743 by the "inhabitants of Croydon"? What indeed? Only this
+one, the thirteenth, remains; the other twelve, marking the distance from
+the "Standard" in Cornhill, in addition to Westminster Bridge, have been
+spirited away, and their places have been taken by others, themselves old,
+but chiefly marking the mileage from Whitehall and the Royal Exchange.
+
+We all know that the Brighton Road is nowadays measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, but it is not generally known--nor possibly
+known to one person in every ten thousand of those who consider they have
+worn the Brighton Road threadbare--that it was measured from "Westminster
+Bridge" before ever there was a bridge. No bridge existed across the
+Thames anywhere between London Bridge and Putney until November 10th,
+1750, when Westminster Bridge, after being for many years under
+construction, was opened, superseding the ancient ferry which from time
+immemorial had plied between Horseferry Stairs, Westminster, and Stangate
+on the Surrey side, the site of the present Lambeth Bridge. The way to
+Brighton (and to all southern roads) lay across London Bridge.
+
+The old stones dated 1743 and 1744, and giving the mileage from the
+bridge, were thus displaying that "intelligent anticipation of events"
+which is, perhaps, even more laudable in statesmen than in
+milestones--and as rarely found.
+
+To this day no man knoweth the distance between London and Brighton.
+Convention fixes the distance as 51-1/2 miles from the south side of
+Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium, by the classic route; but where is he
+who has chained it in proper surveyorly manner? The milestones themselves
+are a curious miscellany, and form an interesting study. They might
+profitably have been made a subject for the learned deliberations of the
+Pickwick Club, but the opportunity was unfortunately missed, and the world
+is doubtless the loser of much curious lore.
+
+Where is he who can, offhand, describe the first milestone on the Brighton
+Road, and tell where it stands? It ought to be no difficult matter, for
+miles are not--or should not be--elastic.
+
+It stands, in fact, on the kerb at the right-hand side of Kennington Road,
+between Nos. 230 and 232, just short of Lower Kennington Lane, and is a
+poor old battered relic, set anglewise and with the top broken away,
+bearing the legend, in what was once bold lettering:
+
+  . . . . . . . MILE
+  HORSEGUARDS
+  WHITEHALL
+
+That is the first milestone on the Brighton Road. Sterne, were he here
+to-day, would shed salt tears of sentiment upon it, we may be sure. It
+says nothing whatever about Brighton, and is probably the one and only
+stone that takes the Horseguards as a datum.
+
+About forty yards beyond this initial landmark is another "first"
+milestone: a tall, upstanding affair, certainly a century old, with three
+blank sides, and a fourth inscribed:
+
+  I
+  MILE
+  FROM
+  WESTMINSTER
+  BRIDGE
+
+This is followed by a long series of stones of one pattern, probably
+dating from 1800, marking every _half_ mile. The series starts with the
+stone on the kerb close by the tramway office at the triangle, where the
+Brixton Road begins. It records on two sides "Royal Exchange 2-1/2 miles,"
+and on a third "Whitehall 2 miles," and is followed, opposite No. 158,
+Brixton Road, by a stone carrying on the tale by another half a mile.
+These silent witnesses may be traced nearly into Croydon, with sundry gaps
+where they have been removed. Those recording the 4th, 6th, 8-1/2th,
+9-1/2th, and 10th miles from Whitehall are missing, the last of the series
+now extant being that at the corner of Broad Green Avenue, making
+"Whitehall 9 miles, Royal Exchange 9-1/2 miles." The 10th from Whitehall,
+ending the series, stood at the corner of the Whitgift Hospital.
+
+These were succeeded by one of the old eighteenth-century series, marking
+eleven miles from Westminster Bridge and twelve from the "Standard," but
+neither new nor old stone is there now, and the only one of the thirteen
+mentioned by the _London Evening Post_ of 1743 is this near Purley Corner.
+
+This, marking the 13th mile from the "Standard" and the 12th from
+Westminster Bridge is common to both routes, but is followed by the first
+of a new series some way along Smitham Bottom, on which Brighton is for
+the first time mentioned:
+
+  XIII
+  MILES
+  FROM
+  WESTMINSTER
+  BRIDGE
+   --
+  38-1/2
+  MILES
+  TO
+  BRIGHTON
+
+The character of the lettering and the general style of this series would
+lead to the supposition that they are dated about 1820. There are three
+stones in all of this kind, the third marking 15 miles from Westminster
+Bridge and 36-1/2 to Brighton, followed by a series of triangular
+cast-iron marks, continued through Redhill, of which the first bears the
+legend, "Parish of Merstham." On the north side is "16 from Westminster
+Bridge, 35 to Brighton," and on the south "35 from Brighton, 16 to
+Westminster Bridge." It will be observed that in this first one of a new
+series half a mile is dropped, and henceforward the mileage to Brighton
+becomes by authority 51 miles. Like the confectioner who "didn't make
+ha'porths," the turnpike trust which erected these mile-"stones" refused
+to deal in half miles.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+The tramway terminus at Purley Corner is now a busy place. Those are only
+the "old crocks" who can remember the South Eastern railway-station of
+Caterham Junction and the surrounding lonely downs; and to them the change
+to "Purley" and the appearance in the wilderness of a mushroom town, with
+its parade of brilliantly lighted shops, its Queen Victoria memorial, its
+public garden and penny-squirt fountain, and--not least--its hideous
+waterworks, are things for wonderment. "How strange it seems, and new," as
+Browning--not writing of Purley--remarks. Even the ghastly loneliness of
+the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more,
+for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and
+tradesmen's carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall
+kill and maim most travellers along the highway.
+
+The numerous railway-bridges, embankments, cuttings, and retaining-walls
+that disfigure the crest of Smitham Bottom are chiefly the results of
+latter-day activities. The first bridge is that of the Chipstead Valley
+Railway--now merged in the South Eastern and Chatham--from South Croydon
+to Chipstead and Epsom, 1897-1900, with its wayside station of "Smitham."
+This is immediately followed by the London, Brighton, and South Coast's
+station of Stoat's Nest, a transformed and transported version of the old
+station of the same name some distance off, and beyond it are the bridges
+and embankments of the same company's works of 1896-8; themselves almost
+inextricably confused, to the non-technical mind, with the adjoining South
+Eastern roadside station of Coulsdon.
+
+The chapters of railway history which produced all this unlovely medley of
+engineering works are in themselves extremely interesting, and have an
+additional interest to those who trace the story of the Brighton Road, for
+they are concerned with the solution of the old problem which faced the
+coach proprietors--how best and quickest to reach Brighton.
+
+[Sidenote: RAILWAY POLITICS]
+
+Few outside those intimately concerned with railway politics know that
+although the Brighton line was opened throughout in 1842, it was not until
+1898 that the company owned an uninterrupted route between London and
+Brighton. The explanation of that singular condition of affairs is found
+in the curious reluctance of Parliament, two generations ago, to give any
+one railway company the sole control of any particular route. Few in those
+times thought the increase of population, and still more the increase of
+travelling, would be so great that competitive railways would be
+established to many places; and thus to sanction the making of a railway
+to be owned by one company throughout seemed like the granting of a
+perpetual monopoly.
+
+Following this reasoning, a break was made in the continuity of the
+Brighton Railway between Stoat's Nest and Redhill, a distance of five
+miles, and that stretch of territory given to the South Eastern Railway,
+with running powers only over it granted to the Brighton Company.
+Similarly, between Croydon and Stoat's Nest, the South Eastern had only
+running powers over that interval owned by the Brighton.
+
+In 1892 and 1894, however, the Brighton Company approached Parliament and,
+proving the growing confusion, congestion, and loss of time at Redhill
+Junction, owing to this odd condition of things, obtained powers to
+complete that missing link by the construction of an entirely new railway
+between Stoat's Nest and a point just within a quarter of a mile of
+Earlswood Station, beyond Redhill, and also to double the existing line
+between East and South Croydon and Purley. The works were completed and
+opened for traffic in 1898, when for the first time the Brighton Railway
+had a complete and uninterrupted route of its own to the sea.
+
+The hamlet of Smitham Bottom, which paradoxically stands at the top of the
+pass of that name, in this ancient way across the North Downs, can never
+have been beautiful. It was lonely when Jackson and Fewterel fought their
+prize-fight here, before that distinguished patron of sport the Prince of
+Wales and a more or less distinguished company, on June 9th, 1788; when
+the only edifice of "Smith-in-the-Bottom," as the sporting accounts of
+that time style it, appears to have been the ominous one of a gibbet. The
+Jackson who that day fought, and won, his first battle in the prize-ring
+was none other than that Bayard of the noble art, "Gentleman Jackson,"
+afterwards the friend of Byron and of the Prince Regent himself, and
+subsequently landlord of the "Cock" at Sutton. On this occasion Major
+Hanger rewarded the victor with a bank-note from the enthusiastic Prince.
+
+[Sidenote: SMITHAM]
+
+Until 1898 Smitham Bottom remained a fortuitous concourse of some twenty
+mean houses on a windswept natural platform, ghastly with the chalky
+"spoil-banks" thrown up when the South Eastern Railway engineers excavated
+the great cuttings in 1840; but when the three railway-stations within one
+mile were established that serve Smitham Bottom--the stations of Coulsdon,
+Stoat's Nest, and Smitham--the place, very naturally, began to grow with
+the magic quickness generally associated with Jonah's Gourd and Jack's
+Beanstalk, and now Smitham Bottom is a town. Most of the spoil-banks are
+gone, and those that remain are planted with quick-growing poplars; so
+that, if they can survive the hungry soil, there will presently be a leafy
+screen to the ugly railway sidings. Showy shops, all plate-glass and
+nightly glare of illumination, have arisen; the old "Red Lion" inn has got
+a new and very saucy front; and, altogether, "Smitham" has arrived. The
+second half of the name is now in process of being forgotten, and the only
+wonder is that the first part has not been changed into "Smytheham" at the
+very least, or that an entirely new name, something in the way of "ville"
+or "park," suited to its prospects, has not been coined. For Smitham, one
+can clearly see, has a Future, with a capital F, and the historian
+confidently expects to see the incorporation of Smitham, with Mayor, Town
+Council, and Town Hall, all complete.
+
+It is here, at Marrowfat, now "Marlpit," Lane, that the new link of the
+Brighton line branches off from Stoat's Nest.[8] One of the first trials
+of the engineers was the removal of three-quarters of a million cubic
+yards of the "spoil," dumped down by the roadside over half a century
+earlier; and then followed the spanning of the Brighton Road by a
+girder-bridge. The line then entered the grounds of the Cane Hill Lunatic
+Asylum, through which it runs in a covered way, the London County Council,
+under whose control that institution is carried on, obtaining a clause in
+the Company's Act, requiring the railway to be covered in at this point,
+in case the lunatics might find means of throwing themselves in front of
+passing trains.
+
+Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous
+skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and
+retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern,
+to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter
+in length--the new Merstham tunnel--running parallel with the old tunnel
+of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the
+southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham,
+where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and
+Redhill.
+
+At Merstham one of the odd problems of the new line was reached, for there
+it had to be constructed over a network of ancient tunnels made centuries
+ago in the hillside--quarry-tunnels whence came much of the limestone that
+went towards the building of Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The
+old workings are still accessible to the explorer who dares the
+accumulation of gas in them given off by the limestone rock.
+
+The geology of these five miles of new railway is peculiarly varied,
+limestone and chalk giving place suddenly to the gault of the levels, and
+followed again by a hillside bed of Fuller's earth, succeeded in turn by
+red sand. The Fuller's earth, resting upon a slippery substratum of gault,
+only required a little rain and a little disturbance to slide down and
+overwhelm the railway works, and retaining-walls of the heaviest and most
+substantial kind were necessary in the cuttings where it occurred.
+Tunnelling for a quarter of a mile through the sand that gives Redhill its
+name, the railway crosses obliquely under the South Eastern, and then
+joins the old Brighton line territory just before reaching Earlswood
+station.
+
+[Illustration: CHIPSTEAD CHURCH.]
+
+All these engineering manifestations give the old grim neighbourhood of
+Smitham Bottom a new grimness. The trains of the Brighton line boom,
+rattle, and clank overhead into the covered way, whose ventilators spout
+steam like some infernal laundry, and from the 80-foot deep cuttings close
+beside the road, steamy billows arise very weirdly. Presiding over all are
+the beautiful grounds and vast ranges of buildings of the Cane Hill
+Lunatic Asylum, housing an ever-increasing population of lunatics, now
+numbering some three thousand. Sometimes the quieter members of that
+unfortunate community are seen, being given a walk along the road, outside
+their bounds, and the sight and the thoughts they engender are not
+cheering.
+
+Along the road, where the walls of the cutting descend perpendicularly, is
+the severely common-place hamlet of Hooley, formerly Howleigh, consisting
+of the "Star" inn and some twenty square brick cottages. Just beyond it,
+where a modern Cyclists' Rest and tea-rooms building stands to the left of
+the road, the first traces of the old Surrey Iron Railway, which crossed
+the highway here, are found, in the shallower cutting, still noticeable,
+although disused seventy years ago. Alders, hazels, and blackberry
+brambles grow on the side of it, and its bridges are ivy-grown: primroses
+and violets, too, grow there wondrously profuse.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIPSTEAD]
+
+And here we will, by way of interlude, turn aside, up a lane to the right
+hand, toward the village of Chipstead, in whose churchyard lies Sir Edward
+Banks, who began life in the humblest manner, working as a navvy upon this
+same forgotten railway, afterwards rising, as partner in the firm of
+Jolliffe & Banks, to be an employer of labour and contractor to the
+Government: in short, another Tom Brassey. All these things are recorded
+of him upon a memorial tablet in the church of Chipstead--a tablet which
+lets nothing of his worth escape you, so prolix is it.[9]
+
+It was while delving amid the chalk of this tramway cutting that Edward
+Banks first became acquainted with this village, and so charmed with it
+was he that he expressed a desire, when his time should come, to be laid
+at rest in its quiet graveyard. When he died, after a singularly
+successful career, his wish was carried out, and here, in this quiet spot
+overlooking the highway, you may see his handsome tomb, begirt with iron
+railings, and overshadowed with ancient trees.
+
+The little church of Chipstead is of Norman origin, and still shows some
+interesting features of that period, with some unusual Early English
+additions that have presented architectural puzzles even to the minds of
+experts. Many years ago the late Mr. G. E. Street, the architect of the
+present Royal Courts of Justice in London, read a paper upon this
+building, advancing the theory that the curious pedimental windows of the
+chancel and the transept door were not the Saxon work they appeared to be,
+but were the creation of an architect of the Early English period who had
+a fancy for reviving Saxon features, and who was the builder and designer
+of a series of Surrey churches, among which is included that of Merstham.
+
+Within the belfry here is a ring of fine bells, some of them of a
+respectable age, and three bearing the inscription, with variations:
+
+  "OUR HOPE IS IN THE LORD, 1595."
+             R  E
+
+From here a bye-lane leads steeply once more into the high road, which
+winds along the valley, sloping always towards the Weald. Down the long
+descent into Merstham village tall and close battalions of fir-trees lend
+a sombre colouring to the foreground, while "southward o'er Surrey's
+pleasant hills" the evening sunlight streams in parting radiance. On the
+left hand as we descend are the eerie-looking blow-holes of the Merstham
+tunnel, which here succeeds the cutting. Great heaps of chalk, by this
+time partly overgrown with grass, also mark its course, and in the
+distance, crowned as many of them are with telegraph poles, they look by
+twilight curiously and awfully like so many Calvarys.
+
+Beside the descent into Merstham was situated the terminus of the old Iron
+Railway, in the great excavated hollow of the Greystone lime-works, where
+the lime-burners still quarry the limestone and the smoke of their burning
+ascends day and night. The old "Hylton Arms," down below, that served the
+turn of the lime-burners when they wanted to slake their thirst, has been
+ornately rebuilt in the modern-Elizabethan Public House Style, alongside
+the road, to catch the custom of the world at large, and is named the
+"Jolliffe Arms." Both signs reflect the ownership of Merstham, for
+Jolliffe has long been the family name of the holders of the modern Barony
+of Hylton. Formerly "Jolly," it was presumably too bacchanalian and not
+sufficiently aristocratic, and so it was changed, just as your "Smythe"
+was once Smith, and "Johnes" Jones.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+[Sidenote: MERSTHAM]
+
+Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English.
+Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great
+measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end
+of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are
+the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed
+aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the
+public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses over the
+pond where rise fitfully the springs of Merstham Brook, a congener of the
+Kentish "Nailbournes," and one of the many sources of the River Mole. To
+the marshy ground by this brook, and to its stone-quarries, the place
+owes its name. It was in Domesday Book "Merstán" = Mere-stan, the stone
+(house) by the lake.
+
+[Illustration: MERSTHAM.]
+
+Beyond the brook, above the tall trees, is seen the shingled spire of the
+church, an Early English building dedicated to St. Catherine, not yet
+spoiled, despite restorations and the scraping which its original lancet
+windows have undergone, in misguided efforts to endue them with an air of
+modernity.
+
+The church is built of that limestone or "firestone" found so freely in
+the neighbourhood--a famed speciality which entered largely into the
+building and ornamentation of Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster.
+Those wondrously intricate and involved carvings and traceries, whose
+decadent Gothic delicacy is the despair of present-day architects and
+stone-carvers, were possible only in this stone, which, when quarried, is
+of exceeding softness, but afterwards, on exposure to the air, assumes a
+hardness equalling that of any ordinary building-stone, and has, in
+addition, the merit of resisting fire, whence its name. From the softer
+layers comes that article of domestic use, the "hearthstone," used to
+whiten London hearths and doorsteps.
+
+Merstham Church is even yet of considerable interest. It contains brasses
+to the Newdegate. Best, and Elmebrygge families, one recording in black
+letter:
+
+  "Hic iacet Johesi Elmebrygge, armiger, qui obiit biij die
+  ffebruarij; Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxij, et Isabella uxor eius
+  quae fuit filia Nichi Jamys quonda Maioris et
+  Alderman London: quae obiit bijº die Septembris
+  Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxijº et Annae uxor ei: quae
+  fuit filia Johes Prophete Gentilman quae obiit ...
+  Aº Dni Mºcccº ... quoru animabus
+  ppicietur Deus."
+
+The date of the second wife's death has never been inserted, showing that
+the brass was engraved and set during her lifetime, as in so many other
+examples of monumental brasses throughout the country. The figure of John
+Elmebrygge is wanting, it having been at some time torn from its matrix,
+but above his figure's indent remains a label inscribed _Sancta Trinitas_,
+and from the mouths of the remaining figures issue labels inscribed _Unus
+Deus--Miserere nobis_. Beneath is a group of seven daughters; the group of
+four sons is long since lost.
+
+A transitional Norman font of grey Sussex marble remains at the western
+end of the church, and on an altar-tomb in the southern chapel are the
+poor remains of an ancient stone figure of the fifteenth century,
+presumably the effigy of a merchant civilian, as he is represented wearing
+the _gypcière_. It is hacked out of almost all significance at the hands
+of some iconoclasts; their chisel-marks are even now distinct and bear
+witness against the Puritan rage that defaced and buried it face
+downwards, the reverse side of the stone forming part of the chapel
+pavement until 1861, when it was discovered during the restoration of the
+church.
+
+Before that restoration this was an interior of Georgian high pews. Among
+them the "squire's parlour" was pre-eminent, with its fireplace, its
+well-carpeted floor, its chairs and tables: a snuggery wherein that good
+man snored unobserved, or partook critically of his snuff during the
+parson's discreet discourse. But now the parlour is gone, and the squire
+must slumber, if he can, with the other sinners.
+
+[Sidenote: GATTON]
+
+In Merstham village, just beyond the "Feathers" inn, stood Merstham
+toll-gate, followed by that of Gatton, at Gatton Point, a mile distant,
+where the old route through Reigate goes off to the right, and the
+new--the seven miles between Gatton Point and Povey Cross, through
+Redhill--continues, straight as an arrow, ahead. The way is bordered on
+the right hand by Gatton Park, a spot the country folk rightly describe as
+an "old arnshunt place." The history of Gatton, in truth, goes back to
+immemorial times, and has no beginning: for where history thins out and
+becomes a mere scatter of disjointed scraps purporting to be facts,
+tradition carries back the tale into a very fog of legend and conjecture.
+It was "Gatone" when the Domesday survey was made: the Saxon "Geat-ton,"
+the town in the "gate," passage, or road through the North Downs, just as
+Reigate is the Saxon "Rige-geat," the road over the ridge. The "ton" or
+town in the place-name does not necessarily mean what we moderns would
+understand by the word, and here doubtless indicated an enclosed, hedged,
+or walled-in tract of land redeemed and cultivated out of the then
+encompassing wilderness of the Downs.
+
+Who first broke the land of Gatton to the plough? History and tradition
+are silent. No voice speaks out of the grave of the centuries. But both
+Reigate and Gatton are older than Anglo-Saxon times, for a Roman way,
+itself following the course of an even earlier savage trail, came up out
+of the stodgy clay of Holmesdale, over the chalky hills, to Streatham and
+London. It was a branch of the road leading from _Portus Adurni_--the
+present Old Shoreham, on the river Adur--and doubtless, in the long
+centuries of Romano-British civilisation, it was bordered here and there
+by settlements and villas. Prominent among them was Gatton. There can
+scarcely be a doubt of it, for, although Roman relics are not found here
+now, Camden, writing in the time of Henry the Eighth, tells of "Roman
+Coynes digged forth of the Ground." It was ever a desirable site, for here
+unfailing springs well out of the chalk and give an abounding fertility,
+while another road--the ancient Pilgrims' Way--running west and east,
+crossed the other highway, and thus gave ready communication on every
+side.
+
+Gatton has, within the historic period, never been more than a manorial
+park, but an unexplained something, like the echo of a vanished greatness,
+has caused strangely unmerited honours to be granted it. Who shall say
+what induced Henry the Sixth in 1451 to make this mere country park a
+Parliamentary borough, returning two members? There must have been some
+adequate reason or excuse, even if only the one of its ancient renown;
+for there _must_ always be an apology of sorts for corruption; no job is
+jobbed without at least some shadowy semblance of legality. But no one
+will ever pluck out the heart of its mystery.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROTTEN BOROUGH]
+
+A Parliamentary borough Gatton remained until 1832, when the first Reform
+Act swept away the representation of it, together with that of many
+another "rotten borough." Rightly had Cobbett termed it "a very rascally
+spot of earth," for certainly from 1541, when Sir Roger Copley owned the
+property and was the sole elector of the place, the election was a
+scandalous farce, and never at any time did the "burgesses" exceed twenty.
+They were always tenants of the lord of the manor and the mere marionettes
+that danced to his will.
+
+Gatton, returning its two members to Parliament, as of old, was early in
+the nineteenth century purchased by Mark Wood, Esq., who was soon after
+created a Baronet. It was then recorded that in this borough there were
+six houses and only one freeholder: Sir Mark Wood himself. The other five
+houses he let by the week; and thus, paying the taxes, he was the only
+elector of the two representatives. At the election, he and his son Mark
+were the candidates, and the father duly elected himself and his son!
+Scandalous, no doubt; but those members must have represented the
+constituency better than could those of a larger electorate.
+
+The landowner who possessed such a pocket-borough as this, and could send
+whomsoever he liked to Parliament, to vote as he wished, was, of course, a
+very important personage. His opposition was a serious matter to
+Governments; his support of the highest value, both politically and in a
+pecuniary sense; and thus place, honours, riches, could be, and were,
+secured. The manor of Gatton actually, in the cynical recognition of these
+things, was valued at twice its worth without that Parliamentary
+representation, and Lord Monson, who purchased the property in 1830, gave
+as much as £100,000 for it, solely as an investment in jobbery and
+corruption, by which he hoped, in the course of shrewd political
+wire-pulling, to obtain a cent per cent return.
+
+[Illustration: GATTON HALL AND "TOWN HALL."]
+
+He was a humorist of a cynical turn who built in front of the great
+mansion in midst of the park a "Town Hall" for the non-existent town, and
+inscribed on the urn which stands by this freakish, temple-like structure
+the motto, satirical in this setting, "_Salus populi suprema lex esto_,"
+together with other sardonic Latin, to the effect that no votes sullied by
+bribery should be given.
+
+Less than two years after Lord Monson's purchase of the estate, Reform had
+destroyed the value of Gatton Park, for it was disfranchised. We can only
+wonder that he did not claim compensation for the abolition of his "vested
+interests."
+
+[Sidenote: MUSTARD]
+
+There is a remarkable appropriateness in Gatton Hall being designed in the
+classic style, for its marble hall and Corinthian hexastyle colonnade no
+doubt revive the glories of the Roman villa of sixteen hundred years ago.
+It is magnificence itself, being indeed designed something after the
+manner of the Vatican at Rome, and decorated with rare and costly marbles
+and frescoes; but perhaps, to any one less than an emperor or a pope, a
+little unhomely and uncomfortable to live in. Since 1888 it has been the
+seat of Sir Jeremiah Colman, of Colman's Mustard, created a Baronet, 1907:
+
+  Mother, get it if you're able,
+  See the trade mark on the label,
+  Colman's Mustard is the Best----[Advt.],
+
+as some unlaurelled bard of the grocery trade once sang, in deathless
+verse.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet
+another toll-gate. "Frenches" Gate took its title from the old manor on
+which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the
+unenclosed or free (_franche_) land of which it was wholly or largely
+composed.
+
+Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history.
+When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816,
+Redhill was--a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough
+knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes;
+but since that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000
+persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we
+mean--not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain
+commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction
+where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and
+quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.
+
+The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really
+in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the
+'40's, it was called "Warwick Town," after the then Countess of Warwick,
+the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear
+witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is,
+and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and "Redhill" this
+"Warwick Town," by natural selection, became.
+
+There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious
+of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town
+of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient
+castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both _look_
+their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still
+living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may
+be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the
+most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only
+frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute
+for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, "Mrs. Partington's" remark that
+"comparisons is odorous" would be altogether in order.
+
+Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from
+that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne's Asylum, housing between four
+and five hundred children of the poor.
+
+"The Cutting" through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by
+high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons,
+where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded
+only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in
+another.
+
+It is Holmesdale--the vale of holms, or oak woods--upon which you gaze
+from here; that
+
+  Vale of Holmesdall
+  Never wonne, ne never shall,
+
+as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and
+slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley A.D. 851.
+
+In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of
+London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top
+for the erection of a fort, and--in a burst of confidence--sold it again.
+The time is probably near when the War Office, like another "Sister Anne,"
+will "see somebody coming," when this or another site will be re-purchased
+at a much enhanced, or scare, price.
+
+[Sidenote: EARLSWOOD]
+
+Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of
+elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from
+the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road
+across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect "switchback," as the cyclist
+who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from
+this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective
+it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do
+the trees look from this distance.
+
+It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a
+Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.
+
+He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in
+these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found
+outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin,
+his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands
+gnarled and twisted with toil and rheumatism, he sat there in
+smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage
+brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the
+"round frock" of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore
+and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she
+who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and
+precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to
+the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild
+wonder at their oddity and complication.
+
+[Illustration: THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.]
+
+He was, it seemed, a "hedger and ditcher," and his leathern gauntlets and
+billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.
+
+"I've worked at this sort o' thing," said he, in conversation, "for the
+last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for't
+too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an' works from seven o'marnings to
+half-past five in the afternoon for that. You'll be gettin' more than two
+and twopence a day when you're at work, I reckon."
+
+To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to
+existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for
+he had visited London, and "a dirty place it was, sure-ly." Also he had
+been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called
+"Madame Two Swords": places that Londoners generally leave to provincials.
+Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock
+sights of town than townsfolk themselves.
+
+From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and
+Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last
+turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the
+midnight of October 31st, 1881.
+
+At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by
+Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield
+Castle.
+
+[Sidenote: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE]
+
+Thunderfield Castle should--if tremendous names go for aught--be a
+stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing
+of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over
+the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the
+estate of Harrowslea--"Harsley," as the countryfolk call it--supposed to
+have once belonged to King Harold.
+
+There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons _did_ name the
+place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of
+Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that
+matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it.
+It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of
+the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and
+palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and
+bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who could
+often remain a "passive resister" and see the invaders struggling with the
+sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.
+
+[Illustration: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE.]
+
+The history of Thunderfield will never be written, but if a guess may be
+hazarded, the final catastrophe, which was the prime cause of the
+half-burnt timbers and the many human remains discovered here long ago,
+was a storming of the place by the forces of the neighbouring de
+Warennes, ancient and bitter enemies of the de Clares; probably in the
+wars of the twelfth century, between King Stephen and the Empress Maud.
+
+[Illustration: THE "CHEQUERS," HORLEY.]
+
+It is an eminently undesirable situation for a residence, however suitable
+it may have been for defence; and the Saxons who occupied it must have
+known what rheumatism is. Dark woods now enclose the place, and cluttering
+wildfowl form its garrison.
+
+The "Chequers" at Horley is not quite half way to Brighton, but in default
+of another it is the halfway house. Its name derives from the old chequy,
+or chessboard, arms of the Earls of Warren, chequered in gold and blue.
+They were not only great personages in this vale, but enjoyed in mediæval
+times the right of licensing ale-houses: hence the many "Chequers"
+throughout the country. The newer portions of the house are typically
+suburban, but the old-world front, with its quaint portico, the whole
+shaded by a group of ancient oaks, remains untouched.
+
+Horley--the "Hurle" of old maps--is very scattered: a piece here, another
+there, and the parish church standing isolated at the extreme southern end
+of the wide parish. It is situated on an extensive flat, reeking like a
+sponge with the waters of the Mole, but, although so entirely undesirable
+a place, is under exploitation for building purposes. A stranger first
+arriving at Horley late at night, and seeing its long lines of lighted
+streets radiating in several directions, would think he had come to a
+town; but morning would show him that long perspectives of gas-lamps do
+not necessarily mean houses to correspond. Evidently those responsible for
+the lamps expect a coming expansion of Horley; but that expectation is not
+very likely to be realised.
+
+Much of Horley belongs to Christ's Hospital, which is said to be under
+obligation to educate two children of poor widows, in return for the great
+tithes long since bequeathed to it, and is additionally accused of having
+consistently betrayed that trust.
+
+[Illustration: THE "SIX BELLS," HORLEY.]
+
+The parish church, chiefly of the Early English and Decorated periods of
+Gothic architecture, contains some brasses and a poor old stone effigy of
+a bygone lord of the manor, broken-nosed and chipped, but not without its
+interest. The double-headed eagle on his shield is still prominent, and
+the crowded detail of his mailed armour and the lacings of his surcoat are
+as distinct as when sculptured six centuries ago. He wears the little
+misericorde, or dagger, at his belt, the "merciful" instrument with which
+gentle knights finished off their wounded enemies in the chivalric days of
+old.
+
+Many years ago some person unknown stole the old churchwardens'
+account-book, dating from the sixteenth century. After many wanderings in
+the land, it was at length purchased at a second-hand bookseller's and
+presented to the British Museum, in which mausoleum of literature, in the
+Department of Manuscripts, it is now to be found. It contains a curious
+item, showing that even in the rigid times that produced the great Puritan
+upheaval, congregations were not unapt for irreverence. Thus in 1632 "John
+Ansty is chosen by the consent of y{e} minister and parishioners to see
+y{t} y{e} younge men and boyes behave themselves decently in y{e} church
+in time of divine service and sermon, and he is to have for his paines
+ij{s.}"
+
+The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient "Six
+Bells" inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church
+tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been
+eight in the belfry.
+
+The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the "Six Bells," and
+missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been
+replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those
+matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that "ye wooden tark so ef ye had to
+live in un." A typical rustic had "comic brown-titus" acquired in one of
+those damp old cottages, and has "felt funny" ever since. One with
+difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as funny as he
+felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who
+pose as jesters.
+
+Opposite Horley church is Gatwick Park, since 1892 converted into a
+racecourse, with a railway station of its own. Less than a mile below it,
+at Povey Cross, the Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton joins the main
+road.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+The Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton, instead of branching off along
+the Brixton Road, pursues a straight undeviating course down the Clapham
+Road, through Balham and Upper and Lower Tooting, where it turns sharply
+to the left at the Broadway, and in half a mile right again, at Amen
+Corner. Thence it goes, by Figg's Marsh and Mitcham, to Sutton.
+
+[Sidenote: MITCHAM COMMON]
+
+It is not before Mitcham is reached that, in these latter days, the
+pilgrim is conscious of travelling the road to anywhere at all. It is all
+modern "street"--and streets, to this commentator at least, have a strong
+resemblance to rows of dog-kennels. They are places where citizens live on
+the chain. They lack the charm of obviously leading elsewhere: and even
+although electric tramcars speed multitudinously along them, to some near
+or distant terminus, they do but arrive there at other streets.
+
+Mitcham is at present beyond these brick and mortar tentacles, and is
+grouped not unpicturesquely about a village green and along the road to
+the Wandle. Pleasant, ruddy-faced seventeenth and eighteenth-century
+mansions look upon that green, notable in the early days of Surrey
+cricket; and away at the further end of it is the vast flat of Mitcham
+Common, that dreary, long-drawn expanse which is at once the best
+illustration of eternity and of a Shakespearian "blasted heath" that can
+readily be thought of.
+
+"Mitcham lavender" brings fragrant memories, and indeed the only thing
+that serves to render the weary length of Mitcham Common at all endurable
+is the scent of it, borne on the breeze from the distillery, midway
+across: the distillery that no one would remember to be Jakson's, except
+for the eccentricity of spelling the name.
+
+This by the way; for one does not cross Mitcham Common to reach Sutton.
+But there is, altogether, a sweet savour pervading Mitcham, a scent of
+flowers that will not be spoiled even by the linoleum works, which are apt
+to be offensive; for Mitcham is still a place where those sweet-smelling
+and other "economic" plants, lavender, mint, chamomile, aniseed,
+peppermint, rosemary, and liquorice, are grown for distillation. The place
+owes this distinction to no mere chance, but to its peculiar black mould,
+found to be exceptionally suited to this culture.
+
+Folk-rhymes are often uncomplimentary, and that which praises Sutton for
+its mutton and Cheam for juicy beef, is more severe than one cares to
+quote on Epsom; and, altogether ignoring the mingled fragrances of
+Mitcham, declares it the place "for a thief." We need not, however, take
+the matter seriously: the rhymester was only at his wit's end for a rhyme
+to "beef."
+
+Mitcham station, beside the road, is a curious example of what a railway
+company can do in its rare moments of economy; for it is an early
+nineteenth-century villa converted to railway purposes by the process of
+cutting a hole through the centre. It is a sore puzzle to a stranger in a
+hurry.
+
+[Sidenote: SUTTON]
+
+From Mitcham one ascends a hill past the woodland estate of Ravensbury,
+crossing the abundantly-exploited Wandle; and then, along a still rural
+road, to the modern town of Sutton.
+
+On the fringe of that town, at the discreet "residential" suburb of
+Benhilton, is a scenic surprise in the way of a deep cutting in the hilly
+road. Spanned by a footbridge, graced with trees, and neighboured by the
+old "Angel" inn, "Angel Bridge," as it is called, is a pretty spot. The
+rise thus cut through was once known as Been Hill, and on that basis
+was fantastically reared the name of Benhilton. One cannot but admire the
+ingenuity of it.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COCK," SUTTON 1789. _From an aquatint after
+Rowlandson._]
+
+"Sutton for mutton": so ran the old-time rhyme. The reason of that ancient
+repute is found in the downs in whose lap the place is situated; those
+thymy downs that afforded such splendid pasturage for sheep. Sutton Common
+is gone, enclosed in 1810, but the downs remain; and yet that rhyme has
+lost its reason, and Sutton is no longer celebrated for anything above its
+fellow towns. Even the famous "Cock" is gone--that old coaching-inn kept
+by the ex-pugilist, "Gentleman Jackson." Long threatened, it was at last
+demolished in 1898, and with the old house went the equally famous sign
+that straddled across the road. The similar sign of the "Greyhound" still
+remains; the last relic of narrower streets and times more spacious.
+
+Leaving Sutton "town," as we call it nowadays, the road proceeds to climb
+steadily uphill to the modern suburb of "Belmont," where stands an old,
+but very well cared-for, milestone setting forth that it is distant "XIII.
+miles from the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1745," from the Royal
+Exchange the same distance, and from Whitehall twelve miles and a half.
+The neighbourhood is now particularly respectable, but I grieve to say
+that the spot is marked on the maps of 1796 as "Little Hell," which seems
+to indicate that the character of the people living in the three houses
+apparently then standing here would not bear close inspection. With the
+"Angel" placed at one end, and this vestibule into Inferno situated at the
+other, Sutton seems to have been accorded exceptional privileges.
+
+"Cold Blow," which succeeds to Little Hell, is a tremendous transition,
+and well deserves its name, perched as it is on the shivery, bare, and
+windy heights that lead to Burgh Heath and Banstead Downs "famous," says
+an annotated map of 1716, "for its wholesome Air, once prescribed by
+Physicians as the Patients' last refuge." The feudal-looking wrought-iron
+gates newly built beside the road here, surmounted by a gorgeous shield of
+arms crested with a helmet and enveloped in mantling, form the entrance to
+Nork Park, the seat of one of the Colman family, who have mustered very
+strongly in Surrey of late years.
+
+At the right-hand turning, in midst of a group of fir-trees, stands the
+prehistoric tumulus known to the rustics as "Tumble Beacon." "Tumble" is
+probably the rural version of "tumulus."
+
+Beyond this point, on a site now occupied by a cottage, stood the
+once-famed "Tangier" inn. Originally a private residence, the seat of
+Admiral Buckle,[10] who named it "Tangier," in memory of his cruises on
+the north coast of Africa, it became a house of call for coaches, and
+especially for post-chaises. Here, we are told, George the Fourth
+invariably halted for a glass of Miss Jeal's celebrated "alderbury"--that
+is to say elderberry-wine--"roking hot," to keep out the piercing cold,
+and Miss Jeal brought it forth with her own fair hands. Other travellers,
+who were merely persons, and not personages, had to be content with the
+less fair hands of the waiter.
+
+The "Tangier" was burnt down about 1874. For some years after its
+destruction a platform that led from the house to the roadside, on a level
+with the floors of the coaches and post-chaises, survived; but only the
+cellars now remain. The woods at the back are, however, still locally
+known as "Tangier Woods."
+
+Burgh Heath, at the summit of these downs, is a curious place called
+usually "Borough" Heath: it is in Domesday "Berge." As its name not
+obscurely hints, and the half-obliterated barrows show, it is a place of
+ancient habitation and sepulture; but nowadays it is chiefly remarkable
+for the descendants of the original squatters of about a century ago, who,
+braving the cold of these heights, settled on what was then an exceedingly
+lonely heath and stole whatever land they pleased. That was the origin of
+the hamlet of Burgh Heath. The descendants of those filibusters have in
+most cases rebuilt the original hovels, but it is still a somewhat forlorn
+place, made sordid by the tumbledown pigsties and sheds on the heath in
+which they have acquired a prescriptive freehold.
+
+[Sidenote: RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN]
+
+Passing Lion Bottom, or Wilderness Bottom, we come to Tadworth Corner,
+past the grounds of Tadworth Court, late the seat of Lord Russell of
+Killowen, better known as Sir Charles Russell. He was created a Baron in
+1894, on his becoming Lord Chief Justice: but the title was--at his own
+desire--limited to a life-peerage, and consequently at his death in 1900
+became extinct. At Tadworth, in the horsey neighbourhood of Epsom, he was
+as much at home as in the Law Courts, and neither so judicial nor
+restrained, as those who remember his peppery temper and the objurgatory
+language of his "Here, you, where the ---- -- are you ---- -- coming to,
+you ---- ----, you!" will admit. There seems, in fact, an especial fitness
+in his residence on this Regency Road, for his speech was the speech
+rather of that, than of the more mealy mouthed Victorian, period.
+
+At Tadworth Court, where the ways divide, and a most picturesque view of
+long roads, dark fir trees, and a weird-looking windmill unfolds itself,
+formerly stood a toll-gate. A signpost directs on the right to Headley and
+Walton, and on the left to Reigate and Redhill, and a battered milestone
+which no one can read stands at the foot of it. The church spire on the
+left is that of Kingswood.
+
+From London to Reigate, through Sutton, is, according to Cobbett, "about
+as villainous a tract as England contains. The soil is a mixture of gravel
+and clay, with big yellow stones in it, sure sign of really bad land." The
+greater part of this is, of course, now covered by the suburbs of "the
+Wen," as Cobbett delighted to style London; and it is both unknown to and
+immaterial to most people what manner of soil their houses are built on;
+but the truth of Cobbett's observations is seen readily enough here, on
+these warrens, which owe their preservation as open spaces to that
+mixture, worthless to the farmer, and not worth the stealing in those
+times when land could be stolen with impunity.
+
+[Illustration: KINGSWOOD WARREN.]
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
+
+Past the modern village of Kingswood, almost lost in, and certainly
+entirely overshadowed by, the wild heaths of Walton and Kingswood Warren
+the road comes at last to Reigate Hill, where, immediately past the
+suspension bridge that overhangs the cutting, it tilts very suddenly and
+alarmingly over the edge of the Downs. The suddenness of it makes the
+stranger gasp with astonishment; the beauty of that wonderful view from
+this very rim and edge of the hills compels his admiration. It is the
+climax up to which he has been toiling all these long, ascending gradients
+from Sutton; and it is worth the toil.
+
+The old writers of road-books do more justice to this view than any modern
+writer dare. To them it was "a remarkably bold elevation, from whence is a
+delightful prospect of the South Downs in Sussex. But near the road, which
+is scooped out of the hill, the declivity is so steep and abrupt that the
+spectator cannot help being struck with terror, though softened by
+admiration. The Sublime and the Beautiful are here perfectly united;
+imagination is fully exercised, and the mind delighted."
+
+How would this person have described the Alps?
+
+A milestone just short of this drop--one of a series starting at Sutton
+Downs and dealing in fractions of miles--says, very curtly: "London 19,
+Sutton 8, Brighton 32-5/8, Reigate 1-3/8."
+
+[Illustration: THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE, REIGATE HILL.]
+
+The suspension bridge, carried overhead, spanning the cutting made through
+the crest of the hill, is known to the rustics--who will always invent
+simple English words of one syllable, whenever possible, to take the place
+of difficult three-syllabled words of Latin extraction--as the "Chain
+Pier." It does not, as almost invariably is the case with these bridges,
+connect two portions of an estate severed by the cutting, but forms part
+of a public path which was cut through. It is very well worth the
+traveller's attention, for it joins the severed ends of no less a road
+than the ancient Pilgrims' Way, and is a very curious instance of
+modernity helping to preserve antiquity. The Way is clearly seen above,
+coming from Box Hill as a hollow road, crossing the bridge and going in
+the direction of Gatton Park, through a wood of beech trees.
+
+The roadway of Reigate Hill is made to wind circuitously, in an attempt to
+mitigate the severity of the gradient; but for all the care taken, it
+remains one of the steepest hills in England, and is one of the very few
+provided with granite kerbs intended to ease the pull-up for horses. None
+but a very special fool among cyclists in the old days attempted to ride
+down the hill; and many, even in these times of more efficient brakes,
+prefer to walk down. Only motor-cars, like the Gadarene swine of the
+Scriptures, "rushing violently down a steep place," attempt it; and those
+who are best acquainted with the hill live in daily expectation of a
+recklessly driven car spilling over the rim.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the
+downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story.
+It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of
+"Cherchefelle," and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until
+nearly two hundred years later.
+
+Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the
+possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an
+enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a clearing of the Holmesdale
+woods; but it had not long passed into the hands of William de Varennes,
+who had married Gundrada the Conqueror's daughter and was one of his most
+intimate henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became the site of
+the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. The manors granted to William de
+Varennes comprehended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included others in
+Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were the splendours that fell to the
+son-in-law and the companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He became
+somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl of Warenne, and the ancestor
+of a line of seven Earls, of whom the last died in 1347, when the family
+became firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the Mowbrays, and
+finally in that of the alternately absorbent and fissiparous Howards.
+
+Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the warlike sort. It
+frowned terribly upon its sandstone ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216
+when the foreign allies of the discontented subjects of King John
+approached: and when the seventh Earl, who had murdered Baron de la Zouche
+at Westminster, was attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a
+grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks (equal to £24,000)
+demanded. In 1550, when Lambarde wrote, only "the ruyns and rubbishe of an
+old castle which some call Homesdale" were left, and even those were
+cleared away by order of the Parliament in 1648. Now, after many centuries
+of change in ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is
+contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road through the town.
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
+
+In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate through Sutton in 1823, is
+highly entertaining. The tunnel was then being made, and it did not please
+him. "They are," he vociferates, "in order to save a few hundred yards'
+length of road, cutting through a hill. They have lowered a little hill on
+the London side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country actually
+thrown away: the produce of labour is taken from the industrious and given
+to the idlers. Mark the process; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty
+miles from the Wen, is on the seaside, and is thought by the stockjobbers
+to afford a _salubrious air_. It is so situated that a coach which leaves
+it not very early in the morning reaches London by noon; and, starting to
+go back in two hours and a half afterwards, reaches Brighton not very late
+at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women
+and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches, and actually
+carry on stock-jobbing in Change Alley, though they reside at Brighton.
+The place is, besides, a great resort with the _whiskered_ gentry. There
+are not less than about twenty coaches that leave the Wen every day for
+this place; and, there being three or four different roads, there is a
+great rivalship for the custom. This sets the people to work to shorten
+and to level the roads; and here you see hundreds of men and horses
+constantly at work to make pleasant and quick travelling for the Jews and
+jobbers. The Jews and jobbers pay the turnpikes, to be sure; but they get
+the money from the land and labourers. They drain these, from John o'
+Groat's House to the Land's End, and they lay out some of the money on the
+Brighton roads."
+
+Cobbett is dead, and the Reform Act is an old story, but the Jews and the
+jobbers swarm more than ever.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CASTLE CAVES]
+
+The tunnel through the castle hill was made by consent of the then owner,
+Earl Somers, as a tablet informs all who care to know. The entrance
+towards the town is faced with white brick, in a style supposed to be
+Norman. Above are the grounds, now public, where a would-be mediæval
+gateway, erected in 1777, quite illegitimately impresses many innocents,
+and below is the so-called Barons' Cave, an ancient excavation in the soft
+sandstone where the Barons are (quite falsely) said to have assembled in
+conclave before forcing their will upon King John at Runnymede. Unhappily
+for that tradition, the then Earl Warenne was a supporter of the tyrant
+king, and any reforming barons he might possibly have entertained at
+Reigate Castle would have been kept on the chain as enemies, and treated
+to the cold comfort of bread and water.
+
+[Illustration: THE TUNNEL, REIGATE.]
+
+There are deeper depths than these castle caves, for dungeon-like
+excavations exist beside and underneath the tunnel; but they are not so
+very terrible, exuding as they do strong vinous and spirituous odours,
+proving that the only prisoners languishing there are hogsheads and
+kilderkins.
+
+Reigate, dropping its intermediate name of Cherchefelle on Ridgegate,
+became variously Reigate, Riggate, and Reygate in the thirteenth century.
+The name obviously indicates a gate--that is to say, a road--over the
+ridge of the downs; presumably that road upon which Gatton, the
+"gate-town," stood. Strongly supporting this theory, Wray Common and Park
+are found on the line of road between Reigate and Gatton. If we select
+"Reygate" from the many variants of the place-name, and place it beside
+that of Wray Common, we get at once the phonetic link.
+
+When Reigate lost the two members it sent to Parliament, it lost much more
+than the mere distinction of being represented. It lost free drinks and
+money to jingle in its pockets, for it was openly corrupt--in fact,
+neither better nor worse than most other constituencies. What else, when
+you consider it, could be expected when the franchise was so limited that
+the electors were a mere handful, and votes by consequence were
+individually valuable. In short, the best safeguard against bribery is to
+so increase the electorate that the purchase of votes is beyond the
+capacity of a candidate's pockets.
+
+Modern circumstances have, indeed, so wrought with country towns of the
+Reigate type that they are merely the devitalised spooks of their former
+selves, and Reigate would long ere this have been on the verge of
+extinction, had it not been within the revivifying influence of the
+suburban area. It is due to the Wen, as Cobbett would call it, that
+Reigate is still at once so old-world and so prosperous. It is surrounded
+by semi-suburban estates, but is in its centre still the Reigate of that
+time when the coaches came through, when royalty and nobility lunched at
+the still-existing "White Hart," and when fifty miles made a long day's
+journey.
+
+Reigate town was the property, almost exclusively, of the late Lady Henry
+Somerset. By direction of her heir, Somers Somerset, it was, in October,
+1921, sold at auction in several lots.
+
+There are some in Reigate who dwell in imagination upon old times. Not by
+any means the obvious people, the clergy and the usual kidney; they find
+existence there a vast yawn. The antiquarian taste revealed itself by
+chance to the present inquirer in the person of a policeman on duty by the
+tunnel, who knew all about Reigate's one industry of digging silver-sand,
+who could speak of the "Swan" inn having once possessed a gallows sign
+that spanned the road, and knew all about the red brick market-house or
+town hall being built in 1708 on the site of a pilgrims' chapel dedicated
+to St. Thomas à Becket. He could tell, too, that wonderful man, of a
+bygone militant parson of Reigate, who, warming to some dispute, took off
+his coat in the street and saying, "Lie there, divinity," handsomely
+thrashed his antagonist. "I like them old antidotes," said my constable;
+and so do I.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE CHURCH]
+
+Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments
+have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was
+originally placed, and very few are complete.
+
+The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its
+original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It
+is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a
+scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved,
+as in some sort an illustration of bygone social conditions. But the usual
+obliterators of history and of records made their usual clean sweep, and
+it has disappeared.
+
+It was a heart-shaped monument, inscribed, "Near this place lieth Edward
+Bird, Esq., Gent. Dyed the 23rd of February, 1718/9. His age 26," and was
+surmounted by a half-length portrait effigy of him in armour, with a full
+flowing wig; a truncheon in his right hand, and in the background a
+number of military trophies.
+
+The especial scandal attaching to the fact of this monument ever having
+been placed in the church arises from the fact that Edward Bird was hanged
+for murder. Some particulars are gleaned from one of the many catchpenny
+leaflets issued at the time by the Ordinary--that is to say, the
+Chaplain--of Newgate, who was never averse from adding to his official
+salary by writing the "last dying words" of interesting criminals; but his
+flaring front pages were, at the best--like the contents bills of modern
+sensational evening newspapers--indifferent honest, and his account of
+Bird is meagre.
+
+It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting
+young man had been given the advantages of "a Christian and Gentlemanlike
+Education," which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy
+under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This
+finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester's
+Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year
+later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London.
+
+One evening in September, 1718, he was driven "with a woman in a coach and
+a bottle of Champain wine" to a "bagnio" in Silver Street, Golden Square,
+and there "had the misfortune" to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through
+the body with his sword. "G--d d--n you, I will murder you all," he is
+reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the
+subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this
+martial spirit.
+
+Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not
+only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The
+historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were
+in those times very much what German officers became--privileged
+murderers--and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.
+
+[Sidenote: AN EXIT AT TYBURN]
+
+At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the
+Ordinary, saying "He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected
+Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses." The Ordinary does not tell us
+in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go
+to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not
+even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the
+rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution,
+taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that
+interesting event.
+
+He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of
+poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning
+coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by
+the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the
+threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree,
+talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so
+swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines
+prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles'
+Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available,
+he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your
+health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the
+Mouth or Nose, or both."
+
+The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is
+explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both
+patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was
+once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him.
+Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his
+execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.
+
+The date of the monument's disappearance is not clearly established, but
+old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen,
+during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of
+the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.
+
+For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed,
+the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen
+hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun
+in 1701 by the then vicar.
+
+A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a
+year lived here, in a cottage oddly named "Upper Repentance."
+
+[Illustration: TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.]
+
+The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, passes a couple of
+cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device
+intended to represent bats' wings, and inscribed "J. T. 1815." They are
+known as "Batswing Cottages," but what induced "J. T." to call them so,
+and even who he was, seems to be unknown.
+
+Over the rise of Cockshut Hill and through a wooded cutting the road comes
+to Woodhatch and the "Old Angel" inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and
+where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.
+
+Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, illustrates the ancient times when the
+De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the
+woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears
+only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down
+in these levels ending in "wood" recall the dense forests that once
+overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood,
+Hookwood--vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the
+prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of
+the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The
+scattered "leys"--Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like--allude to the
+clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old
+bosquets may be traced on the map--Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk's Gate and
+Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but
+memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either
+side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole
+sluggishly winding through them--a scene not unbeautiful in its placid
+way.
+
+The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862,
+marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the
+flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the
+Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the
+"Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the
+same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands
+to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.
+
+[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]
+
+Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past
+the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath,
+referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes
+at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet,
+and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by
+enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat,
+low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous
+error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."
+
+The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at
+times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many
+tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following
+upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless
+arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the
+nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with
+trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to
+wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley
+churchyard was flooded.
+
+[Illustration: The Floods at Horley.]
+
+A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the
+dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be
+performed, the roads being four feet under water.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]
+
+The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard
+high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the
+byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.
+
+Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay,
+thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous
+sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their
+inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian
+blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some
+unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and
+disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.
+
+The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross
+and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the
+valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen
+from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms
+forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home
+counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh
+century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its
+interior assorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan
+cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of
+village church, and presents many features of interest to the
+archæologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the
+fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late
+brass, now mural, in the chancel, dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and
+Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously,
+Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early
+period those of Purley and Sandersted--Sander's-stead, or dwelling. Sir
+Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth's time,
+bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in
+1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where,
+in happier times, they ruled.
+
+[Illustration: Charlwood.]
+
+[Sidenote: NEWDIGATE]
+
+One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on
+a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the "Surrey
+Oaks," fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the
+county, and is worth visiting, if only for a peep into the curious timber
+belfry of its little church, which contains a hoary chest, contrived out
+of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.
+
+[Illustration: A Corner in Newdigate Church.]
+
+But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and
+attractions. Here a primitive pavement or causeway is very noticeable,
+formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the grassy margins of
+the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even
+now) of the time when
+
+  Essex full of good housewyfes,
+  Middlesex full of stryves,
+  Kentshire hoot as fire,
+  Sowseks full of dirt and mire
+
+was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the
+Wealden clay asserted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for
+pedestrians were necessities.
+
+The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from
+local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a
+yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble,
+fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built
+of Charlwood stone.
+
+Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies
+through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It
+has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly
+favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county
+where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--grass, wheat,
+and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish
+forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding
+the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.
+
+[Sidenote: IFIELD]
+
+In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing
+exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from
+the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at
+Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Sussex meet, and
+was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County
+Oak."
+
+[Illustration: On the Road to Newdigate.]
+
+For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its
+architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this
+legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral
+curiosities. A brass for two brothers, with a curious metrical
+inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry
+grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed
+up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual
+_memento mori_ from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the
+chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the recumbent
+effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He
+is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, "a position," to quote
+"Thomas Ingoldsby," "so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in
+modern days." The old pews came from St. Margaret's, Westminster. But so
+dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and
+to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of
+day, however dull that day may be.
+
+From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile
+to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river
+Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley.
+The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the
+date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much
+later date.
+
+[Illustration: IFIELD MILL POND.]
+
+[Sidenote: SUSSEX IRON]
+
+Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most
+important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex iron paid for the smelting.
+
+Ironstone had been known to exist here even in the days of the Roman
+occupation, when Anderida, extending from the sea to London, was all one
+vast forest. Heaps of slag and cinders have been found, containing Roman
+coins and implements of contemporary date, proving that iron was smelted
+here to some extent even then. But it was not until the latter part of the
+Tudor period that the industry attained its greatest height. Then,
+according to Camden, "the Weald of Sussex was full of iron-mines, and the
+beating of hammers upon the iron filled the neighbourhood round about with
+continual noise." The ironstone was smelted with charcoal made from the
+forest trees that then covered the land, and it was not until the first
+year or two of the last century that the industry finally died out. The
+last remaining ironworks in Sussex were situated at Ashburnham, and ceased
+working about 1820, owing to the inability of iron-masters to compete with
+the coal-smelted ore of South Wales.
+
+By that time the great forest of Anderida had almost entirely disappeared,
+which is not at all a wonderful thing to consider when we learn that one
+ironworks alone consumed 200,000 cords of wood annually. Even in Drayton's
+time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.
+
+Relics of those days are plentiful, even now, in the ancient farmhouses;
+relics in the shape of cast-iron chimney-backs and andirons, or
+"fire-dogs," many of them very effectively designed; but, of course, in
+these days of appreciation of the antique, numbers of them have been sold
+and removed.
+
+The water-power required by the ironworks was obtained by embanking small
+streams, to form ponds; as here at Ifield, where a fine head of water is
+still existing. Very many of these "Hammer Ponds" remain in Sussex and
+Surrey, and were long so called by the rustics, whose unlettered and
+traditional memories were tenacious, and preserved local history much
+better than does the less intimate book-learning of the reading classes.
+But now that every ploughboy reads his "penny horrible," and every gaffer
+devours his Sunday paper, they have no memories for "such truck," and
+local traditions are fading.
+
+Ifield ironworks became extinct at an early date, but from a very
+arbitrary cause. During the conflicts of the Civil War the property of
+Royalists was destroyed by the Puritan soldiery wherever possible; and
+after the taking of Arundel Castle in 1643, a detachment of troops under
+Sir William Waller wantonly wrecked the works then situated here, since
+when they do not appear to have been at any time revived.
+
+It is a pretty spot to-day, and extremely quiet.
+
+From here Crawley is reached through Gossop's Green.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+[Sidenote: CRAWLEY]
+
+The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of
+Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the "White Lion," and a few
+attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the
+farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains
+to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now
+under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the
+wayfarers' attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A
+mean little house called "Casa querca"--by which I suppose the author
+means Oak House--is "refinement," as imagined in the suburbs, and excites
+the passing sneer, "Is not the English language good enough?" If the
+Italians will only oblige, and call their own "Bella Vistas" "Pretty
+View," and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall
+effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.
+
+[Illustration: CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.]
+
+At the beginning of Crawley stands the "Sun" inn, and away at the other
+end is the "Half Moon"; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and
+coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum
+when passing through, "Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?"
+Every one unfamiliar with the road "gave it up"; when came the answer,
+"Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other." It is evident
+that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers.
+
+We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early
+coaching days, that Crawley was a "poor place," by which we may suppose
+that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect--a city?
+
+Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has
+grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the
+extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a
+town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable
+thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized
+plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built
+houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless
+originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us;
+but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and
+those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and
+so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like
+islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn
+tale of grab.
+
+Even Crawley's generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide
+for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which
+every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards' winding of
+their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of
+"Sally in our Alley" or "Love's Young Dream." Then the "George" was the
+scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the
+chink and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when
+travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time,
+but a real journey, of five hours.
+
+[Illustration: CRAWLEY, 1789.]
+
+Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap.
+Occasionally some great cycle "scorch" is in progress, when whirling
+enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of
+the "George" spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on
+which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very
+invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen _and_
+bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in
+cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the
+roads are peopled again.
+
+There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey,
+embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there
+is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered
+frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of
+that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her
+so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.
+
+They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs
+that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse
+of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk
+obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad.
+Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as
+might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter
+and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with
+flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very
+attractive ruin indeed.
+
+Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789,
+when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead,
+took notes for his book, "An Excursion to Brighthelmstone." It is a work
+of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist's
+illustrations. That _they_ should have lived, you who see the reproduction
+will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is
+otherwise greatly changed.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.]
+
+An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that
+the greater part of "Crawley" is not in that parish at all, but in the
+adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same
+side of the street belong to Crawley.
+
+In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally
+open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the
+nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in
+this admonitory fashion:
+
+  Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde
+  He war be for whate comyth be hynde.
+
+When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone,
+it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton,
+"be hynde," remarking that it is "arnshunt."
+
+[Illustration: THE "GEORGE," CRAWLEY.]
+
+The sturdy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing
+Noah's dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were
+abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally
+or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.
+
+But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation
+of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful
+figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into
+fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme
+Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient
+symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling
+superstition of his remote age, has put his "fear of God," in a very
+literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of
+the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the
+terrified minds of the dark ages, when God, the loving Father, was
+non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures
+are merely like infantile grotesques.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity
+associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station,
+resided Mark Lemon, editor of _Punch_, who died here on May 20th, 1870.
+Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be
+converted into a grocer's shop.
+
+[Sidenote: PRIZE-FIGHTS]
+
+[Illustration: SCULPTURED EMBLEM OF THE HOLY TRINITY, CRAWLEY CHURCH.]
+
+The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at
+large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I
+lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after
+hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after
+pursuing him through the classic pages of "Boxiana" and the voluminous
+records of "Pugilistica," after consulting, too, that sprightly work "The
+Fancy"; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was
+fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley
+Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands
+upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the
+great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the
+metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time
+to time, when great multitudes--princes, patricians, and plebeians of
+every description--hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the
+performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so
+much a side.
+
+It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several
+routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches
+and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges
+flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else
+could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at
+the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the
+"noble art"?
+
+Many were the merry "mills" which "came off" at Crawley Downs, Copthorne
+Common, and Blindley Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men,
+conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord
+Yarmouth ("Red Herrings"), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of
+claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous
+sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are
+they not set forth with much circumstantial detail in the pages of
+"Fistiana" and "Boxiana"? There shall you read how the Prince Regent
+witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and
+Martin on Crawley Downs. "Boxiana" gives a full account of it, and is even
+moved to verse, in this wise:
+
+  THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY
+  BETWEEN
+  THE NONPAREIL
+  AND
+  THE OUT-AND-OUTER.
+
+  Come, won't you list unto my lay
+  About the fight at Crawley, O!...
+
+with the refrain--
+
+  With his filaloo trillaloo,
+  Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!
+
+For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be
+referred to the classic pages of "Boxiana" itself.
+
+Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the
+"Master of the Rolls," one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades
+went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871.
+He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the
+usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican.
+He was landlord successively of the "Crown" at Croydon, and the "Horns"
+tavern, Kennington.
+
+As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which
+Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man," came off victor, they are not for these
+pages. How the combatants "fibbed" and "countered," and did other things
+equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the
+pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing
+of all the blows given and received.
+
+This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but
+see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered
+those times. What diversions went forward on the roads--such roads as they
+were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the
+morning following the "battle," the remains of several carriages,
+phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where
+they had collided in the darkness.
+
+[Sidenote: THE REGENCY]
+
+The House of Hanover, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, was
+not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the
+gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the
+family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at
+least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will
+ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical
+periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of
+romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and
+will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation
+to the words "Regent" and "Regency"; and his wild escapades have sufficed
+to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and
+greasy vulgarity.
+
+The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous
+_bourgeois_ respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince's
+surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his _entourage_ were
+dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting
+prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the
+blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings, they
+were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.
+
+Thackeray, in his "Four Georges," has little that is pleasant to say of
+any one of them, but is astonishingly severe upon this last, both as
+Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that
+book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake,
+nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him
+to be a man, as witness this passage: "To make a portrait of him at sight
+seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig,
+his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I
+could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet,
+after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old
+magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public
+dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing
+but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great
+simulacrum."
+
+Poor fat Adonis!
+
+But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm
+of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed,
+although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those
+thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that
+Thackeray wrote so intimately of snobs: in those unworthy sneers speaks
+one of the race.
+
+One curious little item of praise the author of the "Four Georges" was
+constrained to allow the Regent: "Where my Prince did actually distinguish
+himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from
+Brighton to Carlton House--fifty-six miles."[11]
+
+So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in
+the abuse levelled at the "simulacrum."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway
+level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of
+public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good
+idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their
+excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of
+Crawley--the residential and superior modern district of country houses,
+each in midst of its own little pleasance.
+
+[Sidenote: PEASE POTTAGE]
+
+The cutting in the rise at Hog's Hill passed, the road goes in a long
+incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a
+post-office which spells the name wrongly, "Peas." No one _knows_ how the
+place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and
+tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their
+route-marching and fed with "pease-pottage," the old name for
+pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way
+to trial at the assizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead
+alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate,
+from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the "Gate" has
+latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and
+the old "Black Swan" inn still standing at the back. The green is not
+improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising
+the inn as an "hotel." The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to
+whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be)
+is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any
+question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question
+arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in
+particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful
+defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or
+private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful
+distant views of the South Downs are utterly damned by gigantic black
+hoardings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor
+garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been
+written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to
+say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes,
+while America itself is retrieving its reputation.
+
+This is the Forest Ridge of Sussex, where the Forest of St. Leonards still
+stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely
+beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and
+on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge
+is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow
+north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Sussex Ouse south, towards the
+English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it
+is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.
+
+At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining
+the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left.
+Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house
+where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all
+manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.
+
+Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom
+then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh,
+Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm's
+Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years
+pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging
+to customers--forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest
+and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to £70,000, might
+have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the
+bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824,
+when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the
+14th the bank suspended payment.
+
+[Illustration: PEASE POTTAGE.]
+
+The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the
+partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman;
+but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were
+quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been
+entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of
+complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men.
+Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to
+prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old
+Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th,
+in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among
+connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose
+its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged
+him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the
+secret died with him.
+
+No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or
+without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed--or been
+afflicted with--the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is,
+by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar
+notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood
+here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only
+scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the
+wayfarers' friend.
+
+"Squire Powlett" is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is
+more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of
+springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has
+fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists
+and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they
+have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fashioned
+spook.
+
+_Why_ "Squire Powlett" should haunt these nocturnal glades is not so
+easily to be guessed. He was not, so far as can be learned, an evildoer,
+and he certainly was not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a captain
+in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the Forest of St. Leonards, who
+seems to have led an exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under
+an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+[Sidenote: HAND CROSS]
+
+Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where
+several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives,
+of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and
+wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely
+cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest
+habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where,
+very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish
+is very extensive, stretching as far as Crawley; and the hamlet of Hand
+Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent village itself, is
+only a mere mushroom excrescence called into existence by the road travel
+of the last two centuries.
+
+It is the being on the main road, and on the junction of several routes,
+that has made Hand Cross what it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham
+itself; just as in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare will
+make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps ruin those of some other
+route.
+
+Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing to the eye; for,
+after all, it is a _parvenu_ of a place, and lacks the Domesday descent
+of, for instance, Cuckfield. Now, the _parvenu_, the man of his hands, may
+be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity grates upon the nerves.
+So it is with Hand Cross, for its prosperity, which has not waned with
+the coaching era, has incited to the building of cottages of that cheap
+and yellow brick we know so well and loathe so much. Also, though there is
+no church, there are two chapels; one of retiring position, the other
+conventicle of aggressive and red, red brick. One could find it in one's
+heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy
+building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the
+hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists
+foregather by the "Red Lion," are the most striking features of the place.
+
+The "Red Lion" is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand
+Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the
+roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands
+of another age of wheels. Shergold tells us that its landlords in olden
+times knew more of smuggling than hearsay, and dispensed from many an
+anker of brandy that had not rendered duty.
+
+At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in
+1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better
+surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two
+miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the
+"record route" for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed
+between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the
+classic route at Pyecombe.
+
+For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to
+Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern
+face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses,
+cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or
+transmuting commonplace glazier's work into sparkling diamonds.
+
+At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway,
+with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the "Jolly
+Farmers" inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield,
+under whose boughs the coach passengers of a century ago feasted off the
+"black-hearts"; where are the "Dun Cow" and its equally famous
+rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they
+had never been.
+
+[Illustration: THE "RED LION," HAND CROSS.]
+
+Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of
+hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman's Green to Cuckfield. From the
+hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards
+Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows,
+mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient
+Rome.
+
+Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was
+the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in
+others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and
+fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older
+rustics know it, if the younger and the passing stranger do not: they tell
+you "'tis wheer th' owd hroad tarned arff."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no
+manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the
+coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always
+thus, for in those centuries--from the fourteenth until the early part of
+the eighteenth--when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted
+on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given
+over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks.
+
+[Illustration: CUCKFIELD, 1789. _From an aquatint after Rowlandson._]
+
+All this was so long ago that nature has healed the scars made by that
+busy time. Wooded hills replace the uplands made bare by the smelters, the
+cinder-heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures, the
+"hammer-ponds" of the smelteries and foundries have become the resorts of
+artists seeking the picturesque, and the descendants of the old
+iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have for generations past
+been numbered among the county families.
+
+[Sidenote: CUCKFIELD]
+
+Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directly on the route of the
+Brighton railway, but it pleased the engineers to bring their line no
+nearer than Hayward's Heath, some two miles distant. They built a station
+there, on the lone heath, "for Cuckfield," with the result, sixty years
+later, that the sometime solitude is a town and still growing, while
+Cuckfield declines. Hayward's Heath, curiously enough, is, or was until
+December, 1894, in the parish of Cuckfield, but the time is at hand when
+the two will be joined by the spread of that railway upstart; and then
+will be the psychological moment for abolishing the name of Hayward's
+Heath--which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitchless--and adopting
+that of the parental "Cookfield."
+
+Meanwhile, I shall drop no sentimental tears over the chance that
+Cuckfield lost, sixty years ago, of becoming a railway junction and a
+modern town. Of junctions and mushroom towns we have a sufficiency, but of
+surviving sweet old country townlets very few.
+
+To see Cuckfield thoroughly demands some little leisure, for although it
+is small one must needs have time to assimilate the atmosphere of the
+place, if it is to be appreciated at its worth; from the grey old church
+with its tall shingled spire and its monuments of Burrells and Sergisons
+of Cuckfield Place, to the staid old houses in the quiet streets, and
+those two fine old coaching inns, the "Talbot" and the "King's Head."
+Rowlandson made a picture of the town in 1789, and it is not wholly unlike
+that, even now, but where is that Fair we see in progress in his spirited
+rendering? Gone, together with the smart fellow driving the curricle, and
+all the other figures of that scene, into the forgotten. There, in one
+corner, you see the Recruiting Sergeant and the drummer, impressing with
+military glory a typical smock-frocked Hodge, gaping so outrageously that
+he seems to be opening his face rather than merely his mouth; the artist's
+idea seems to have been that, like a dolphin, he would swallow anything,
+either in the way of food or of stories. There are no full-blooded
+Sergeant Kites and gaping yokels nowadays.
+
+Cuckfield is evidently feeling, more and more, the altered condition of
+affairs. Motorists, who are supposed to bring back prosperity to the road,
+do nothing of the kind on the road to Brighton; for those who live at
+Brighton or London merely want to reach the other end as quickly as
+possible, and, with a legal limit up to twenty miles an hour, can cover
+the distance in two hours and a half, and, with an occasional illegal
+interval, easily in two hours. Except in case of a breakdown, the wayside
+hostelries do not often see the colour of the motorists' money, but they
+smell the stink, and are choked with the dust of them, and landlords and
+every one else concerned would be only too glad if the project for
+building a road between London and Brighton, exclusively for motor
+traffic, were likely to be realised. Then ordinary users of the highway
+might once more be able to discern the natural scenery of the road, at
+present obscured with dust-clouds.
+
+The text for these remarks is furnished by the recent closing, after a
+hundred and fifty years or more, of the once chief inn of Cuckfield: the
+fine and stately "Talbot," now empty and "To Let"; the hospitable
+quotation "You're welcome, what's your will," from _The Merry Wives of
+Windsor_ on its fanlight, reading like a bitter mockery.
+
+The interior of Cuckfield Church is crowded with monuments of the
+Sergisons and the Burrells. Pride of place is given in the chancel to the
+monument of Charles Sergison, who died in 1732, aged 78. It is a very fine
+white marble monument, with a figure of Truth gazing into her mirror, and
+holding with one hand a medallion partly supported by a Cupid,
+displaying a portrait of the lamented Sergison, who, we learn from a
+sub-acid inscription, was "Commissioner of the Navy forty-eight years,
+till 1719, to the entire satisfaction of the King and his Ministers." "The
+civil government of the Navy then being put into military hands, he was
+esteemed by them not a fit person to serve any longer." He was, in short,
+like those "rulers of the Queen's (or King's) Navee" satirised by Sir W.
+S. Gilbert in modern times, and "never went to sea." At the period of his
+compulsory retirement it seems to have rather belatedly occurred to the
+authorities that such an one could not be well acquainted with the needs
+of the Navy; so the "Capacity, Penetration, exact Judgment" of this "true
+patriot" were shelved; but, at any rate, he had had his whack, and it was
+surely high time for the exact judgment, true patriotism, capacity and
+penetration of others to have a chance of making something out of the
+nation.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROAD OUT OF CUCKFIELD.]
+
+A few monuments are hidden behind the organ, among them one to Guy
+Carleton, "son of George, Lord Bishop of Chichester." He, it seems, "died
+of a consumption, cl=c=l=c=cxxiv," which appears to be the highly esoteric
+way of writing 1624. "_Mors vitæ initium_" he tells us, and illustrates it
+with the pleasing fancy of a skull mounted on an hour-glass, with ears of
+wheat sprouting from the eyeless sockets. Other equally pleasant devices,
+encircled with fragments of Greek, are plentiful, the whole concluding
+with the announcement that "The end of all things is at hand." Holding
+that opinion, it would seem to have been hardly worth while to erect the
+monument, but in the result it survives to show what a very gross mistake
+he made.
+
+Two illustrations of the quiet annals of Cuckfield, widely different in
+point of time, are the old clock and the wall-plate memorial to one Frank
+Bleach of the Royal Sussex Volunteer Company, who died at Bloemfontein in
+1901. The ancient hand-wrought clock, made in 1667 by Isaac Leney,
+probably of Cuckfield, finally stopped in 1867, and was taken down in
+1873. After lying as lumber in the belfry for many years, it was in 1904
+fixed on the interior wall of the tower.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+[Sidenote: "ROOKWOOD"]
+
+Cuckfield Place, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of
+his "Rookwood," stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in
+midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition
+is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands
+the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place.
+
+Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches,
+beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, many-gabled
+mansion looking down upon the whole.
+
+[Sidenote: AINSWORTH]
+
+"Rookwood," the fantastic and gory tale that first gave Harrison Ainsworth
+a vogue, was commenced in 1831, but not completed until 1834. Ainsworth
+died at Reigate, January 3, 1882. Thus in his preface he acknowledges his
+model:
+
+"The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads
+which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is
+ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon
+whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge
+girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved.
+Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I
+may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I
+have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat
+and domains of that fated family. The general features of the venerable
+structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular,
+the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the
+hall, 'like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe' (as the poet Shelley once observed of
+the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly
+tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves
+are carefully delineated."
+
+[Illustration: CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
+
+"Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar
+convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and
+"Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in
+gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
+Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years
+of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon
+Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her
+favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions,
+death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one,"
+daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary
+ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising
+romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured
+water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his
+verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys
+refuse any longer to be thrilled. He "wants to make yer blood run cold,"
+but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be
+impossible to burlesque "Rookwood"; it burlesques itself, and shall be
+allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the
+family vault, to his tragic end:
+
+[Illustration: THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE, CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
+
+[Illustration: HARRISON AINSWORTH. _From the Fraser portrait._]
+
+"He then walked beneath the shadow of one of the yews, chanting an odd
+stanza or so of one of his wild staves, wrapped the while, it would seem,
+in affectionate contemplation of the subject-matter of his song:
+
+  THE CHURCHYARD YEW.
+
+      '----Metuendaque succo
+        Taxus.'
+
+  A noxious tree is the churchyard yew,
+  As if from the dead its sap it drew;
+  Dark are its branches, and dismal to see,
+  Like plumes at Death's latest solemnity.
+  Spectral and jagged, and black as the wings
+  Which some spirit of ill o'er a sepulchre flings:
+  Oh! a terrible tree is the churchyard yew;
+  Like it is nothing so grimly to view.
+
+  Yet this baleful tree hath a core so sound,
+  Can nought so tough in a grove be found:
+  From it were fashioned brave English bows,
+  The boast of our isle, and the dread of its foes.
+  For our sturdy sires cut their stoutest staves
+  From the branch that hung o'er their fathers' graves;
+  And though it be dreary and dismal to view,
+  Staunch at the heart is the churchyard yew.
+
+"His ditty concluded, Alan entered the church, taking care to leave the
+door slightly ajar, in order to facilitate his grandson's entrance. For an
+instant he lingered in the chancel. The yellow moonlight fell upon the
+monuments of his race; and, directed by the instinct of hate, Alan's eye
+rested upon the gilded entablature of his perfidious brother Reginald, and
+muttering curses, 'not loud, but deep,' he passed on. Having lighted his
+lantern in no tranquil mood, he descended into the vault, observing a
+similar caution with respect to the portal of the cemetery, which he left
+partially unclosed, with the key in the lock. Here he resolved to abide
+Luke's coming. The reader knows what probability there was of his
+expectations being realised.
+
+[Sidenote: FARCICAL ROMANCE]
+
+"For a while he paced the tomb, wrapped in gloomy meditation, and
+pondering, it might be, upon the result of Luke's expedition, and the
+fulfilment of his own dark schemes, scowling from time to time beneath his
+bent eyebrows, counting the grim array of coffins, and noticing, with
+something like satisfaction, that the shell which contained the remains of
+his daughter had been restored to its former position. He then bethought
+him of Father Checkley's midnight intrusion upon his conference with Luke,
+and their apprehension of a supernatural visitation, and his curiosity was
+stimulated to ascertain by what means the priest had gained admission to
+the spot unperceived and unheard. He resolved to sound the floor, and see
+whether any secret entrance existed; and hollowly and dully did the hard
+flagging return the stroke of his heel as he pursued his scrutiny. At
+length the metallic ringing of an iron plate, immediately behind the
+marble effigy of Sir Ranulph, resolved the point. There it was that the
+priest had found access to the vault; but Alan's disappointment was
+excessive when he discovered that this plate was fastened on the
+under-side, and all communication thence with the churchyard, or to
+wherever else it might conduct him, cut off; but the present was not the
+season for further investigation, and tolerably pleased with the discovery
+he had already made, he returned to his silent march around the sepulchre.
+
+"At length a sound, like the sudden shutting of the church door, broke
+upon the profound stillness of the holy edifice. In the hush that
+succeeded a footstep was distinctly heard threading the aisle.
+
+"'He comes--he comes!' exclaimed Alan joyfully; adding, an instant after,
+in an altered voice, 'but he comes alone.'
+
+"The footstep drew near to the mouth of the vault--it was upon the stairs.
+Alan stepped forward to greet, as he supposed, his grandson, but started
+back in astonishment and dismay as he encountered in his stead Lady
+Rookwood. Alan retreated, while the lady advanced, swinging the iron door
+after her, which closed with a tremendous clang. Approaching the statue of
+the first Sir Ranulph she passed, and Alan then remarked the singular and
+terrible expression of her eyes, which appeared to be fixed upon the
+statue, or upon some invisible object near it. There was something in her
+whole attitude and manner calculated to impress the deepest terror on the
+beholder, and Alan gazed upon her with an awe which momently increased.
+Lady Rookwood's bearing was as proud and erect as we have formerly
+described it to have been, her brow was as haughtily bent, her chiselled
+lip as disdainfully curled; but the staring, changeless eye, and the
+deep-heaved sob which occasionally escaped her, betrayed how much she was
+under the influence of mortal terror. Alan watched her in amazement. He
+knew not how the scene was likely to terminate, nor what could have
+induced her to visit this ghostly spot at such an hour and alone; but he
+resolved to abide the issue in silence--profound as her own. After a time,
+however, his impatience got the better of his fears and scruples, and he
+spoke.
+
+"'What doth Lady Rookwood in the abode of the dead?' asked he at length.
+
+"She started at the sound of his voice, but still kept her eye fixed upon
+the vacancy.
+
+"'Hast thou not beckoned me hither, and am I not come?' returned she, in a
+hollow tone. 'And now thou askest wherefore I am here. I am here because,
+as in thy life I feared thee not, neither in death do I fear thee. I am
+here because----'
+
+"'What seest thou?' interrupted Alan, with ill-suppressed terror.
+
+"'What see I--ha--ha!' shouted Lady Rookwood, amidst discordant laughter;
+'that which might appal a heart less stout than mine--a figure
+anguish-writhen, with veins that glow as with a subtle and consuming
+flame. A substance, yet a shadow, in thy living likeness. Ha--frown if
+thou wilt; I can return thy glances.'
+
+[Sidenote: MELODRAMA POUR RIRE]
+
+"'Where dost thou see this vision?' demanded Alan.
+
+"'Where?' echoed Lady Rookwood, becoming for the first time sensible of
+the presence of a stranger. 'Ha--who are you that question me?--what are
+you?--speak!'
+
+"'No matter who or what I am,' returned Alan; 'I ask you what you behold?'
+
+"'Can you see nothing?'
+
+"'Nothing,' replied Alan.
+
+"'You knew Sir Piers Rookwood?'
+
+"'Is it he?' asked Alan, drawing near her.
+
+"'It is,' replied Lady Rookwood; 'I have followed him hither, and I will
+follow him whithersoever he leads me, were it to----'
+
+"'What doth he now?' asked Alan; 'do you see him still?'
+
+"'The figure points to that sarcophagus,' returned Lady Rookwood--'can you
+raise up the lid?'
+
+"'No,' replied Alan; 'my strength will not avail to lift it.'
+
+"'Yet let the trial be made,' said Lady Rookwood; 'the figure points there
+still--my own arm shall aid you.'
+
+"Alan watched her in dumb wonder. She advanced towards the marble
+monument, and beckoned him to follow. He reluctantly complied. Without any
+expectation of being able to move the ponderous lid of the sarcophagus, at
+Lady Rookwood's renewed request he applied himself to the task. What was
+his surprise when, beneath their united efforts, he found the ponderous
+slab slowly revolve upon its vast hinges, and, with little further
+difficulty, it was completely elevated, though it still required the
+exertion of all Alan's strength to prop it open and prevent its falling
+back.
+
+"'What does it contain?' asked Lady Rookwood.
+
+"'A warrior's ashes,' returned Alan.
+
+"'There is a rusty dagger upon a fold of faded linen,' cried Lady
+Rookwood, holding down the light.
+
+"'It is the weapon with which the first dame of the house of Rookwood was
+stabbed,' said Alan, with a grim smile:
+
+  'Which whoso findeth in the tomb
+  Shall clutch until the hour of doom;
+  And when 'tis grasped by hand of clay
+  The curse of blood shall pass away.
+
+So saith the rhyme. Have you seen enough?'
+
+"'No,' said Lady Rookwood, precipitating herself into the marble coffin.
+'That weapon shall be mine.'
+
+"'Come forth--come forth,' cried Alan. 'My arm trembles--I cannot support
+the lid.'
+
+"'I will have it, though I grasp it to eternity,' shrieked Lady Rookwood,
+vainly endeavouring to wrest away the dagger, which was fastened, together
+with the linen upon which it lay, by some adhesive substance to the bottom
+of the shell.
+
+"At this moment Alan Rookwood happened to cast his eye upward, and he
+then beheld what filled him with new terror. The axe of the sable statue
+was poised above its head, as in the act to strike him. Some secret
+machinery, it was evident, existed between the sarcophagus lid and this
+mysterious image. But in the first impulse of his alarm Alan abandoned his
+hold of the slab, and it sunk slowly downwards. He uttered a loud cry as
+it moved. Lady Rookwood heard this cry. She raised herself at the same
+moment--the dagger was in her hand--she pressed it against the lid, but
+its downward force was too great to be withstood. The light was within the
+sarcophagus and Alan could discern her features. The expression was
+terrible. She uttered one shriek, and the lid closed for ever.
+
+"Alan was in total darkness. The light had been enclosed with Lady
+Rookwood. There was something so horrible in her probable fate that even
+_he_ shuddered as he thought upon it. Exerting all his remaining strength,
+he essayed to raise the lid; but now it was more firmly closed than ever.
+It defied all his power. Once, for an instant, he fancied that it yielded
+to his straining sinews, but it was only his hand that slided upon the
+surface of the marble. It was fixed--immovable. The sides and lid rang
+with the strokes which the unfortunate lady bestowed upon them with the
+dagger's point; but these sounds were not long heard. Presently all was
+still; the marble ceased to vibrate with her blows. Alan struck the lid
+with his knuckles, but no response was returned. All was silent.
+
+[Sidenote: FRENZY]
+
+"He now turned his attention to his own situation, which had become
+sufficiently alarming. An hour must have elapsed, yet Luke had not
+arrived. The door of the vault was closed--the key was in the lock, and on
+the outside. He was himself a prisoner within the tomb. What if Luke
+should _not_ return? What if he were slain, as it might chance, in the
+enterprise? That thought flashed across his brain like an electric shock.
+None knew of his retreat but his grandson. He might perish of famine
+within this desolate vault.
+
+"He checked this notion as soon as it was formed--it was too dreadful to
+be indulged in. A thousand circumstances might conspire to detain Luke. He
+was sure to come. Yet the solitude, the darkness, was awful, almost
+intolerable. The dying and the dead were around him. He dared not stir.
+
+"Another hour--an age it seemed to him--had passed. Still Luke came not.
+Horrible forebodings crossed him; but he would not surrender himself to
+them. He rose, and crawled in the direction, as he supposed, of the
+door--fearful even of the stealthy sound of his own footsteps. He reached
+it, and his heart once more throbbed with hope. He bent his ear to the
+key; he drew in his breath; he listened for some sound, but nothing was to
+be heard. A groan would have been almost music in his ears.
+
+"Another hour was gone! He was now a prey to the most frightful
+apprehensions, agitated in turns by the wildest emotions of rage and
+terror. He at one moment imagined that Luke had abandoned him, and heaped
+curses upon his head; at the next, convinced that he had fallen, he
+bewailed with equal bitterness his grandson's fate and his own. He paced
+the tomb like one distracted; he stamped upon the iron plate; he smote
+with his hands upon the door; he shouted, and the vault hollowly echoed
+his lamentations. But Time's sand ran on, and Luke arrived not.
+
+"Alan now abandoned himself wholly to despair. He could no longer
+anticipate his grandson's coming--no longer hope for deliverance. His fate
+was sealed. Death awaited him. He must anticipate his slow but inevitable
+stroke, enduring all the grinding horrors of starvation. The contemplation
+of such an end was madness, but he was forced to contemplate it now; and
+so appalling did it appear to his imagination, that he half resolved to
+dash out his brains against the walls of the sepulchre, and put an end at
+once to his tortures; and nothing, except a doubt whether he might not, by
+imperfectly accomplishing his purpose, increase his own suffering,
+prevented him from putting this dreadful idea into execution. His dagger
+was gone, and he had no other weapon. Terrors of a new kind now assailed
+him. The dead, he fancied, were bursting from their coffins, and he
+peopled the darkness with grisly phantoms. They were round about him on
+each side, whirling and rustling, gibbering, groaning, shrieking,
+laughing, and lamenting. He was stunned, stifled. The air seemed to grow
+suffocating, pestilential; the wild laughter was redoubled; the horrible
+troop assailed him; they dragged him along the tomb, and amid their howls
+he fell, and became insensible.
+
+[Sidenote: TORMENT]
+
+"When he returned to himself, it was some time before he could collect his
+scattered faculties; and when the agonising consciousness of his terrible
+situation forced itself upon his mind, he had nigh relapsed into oblivion.
+He arose. He rushed towards the door: he knocked against it with his
+knuckles till the blood streamed from them; he scratched against it with
+his nails till they were torn off by the roots. With insane fury he
+hurled himself against the iron frame: it was in vain. Again he had
+recourse to the trap-door. He searched for it; he found it. He laid
+himself upon the ground. There was no interval of space in which he could
+insert a finger's point. He beat it with his clenched hand; he tore it
+with his teeth; he jumped upon it; he smote it with his heel. The iron
+returned a sullen sound.
+
+"He again essayed the lid of the sarcophagus. Despair nerved his strength.
+He raised the slab a few inches. He shouted, screamed, but no answer was
+returned; and again the lid fell.
+
+"'She is dead!' cried Alan. 'Why have I not shared her fate? But mine is
+to come. And such a death!--oh, oh!' And, frenzied at the thought, he
+again hurried to the door, and renewed his fruitless attempts to escape,
+till nature gave way, and he sank upon the floor, groaning and exhausted.
+
+"Physical suffering now began to take the place of his mental tortures.
+Parched and consumed with a fierce internal fever, he was tormented by
+unappeasable thirst--of all human ills the most unendurable. His tongue
+was dry and dusty, his throat inflamed; his lips had lost all moisture. He
+licked the humid floor; he sought to imbibe the nitrous drops from the
+walls; but, instead of allaying his thirst, they increased it. He would
+have given the world, had he possessed it, for a draught of cold
+spring-water. Oh, to have died with his lips upon some bubbling fountain's
+marge! But to perish thus!
+
+"Nor were the pangs of hunger wanting. He had to endure all the horrors of
+famine as well as the agonies of quenchless thirst.
+
+"In this dreadful state three days and nights passed over Alan's fated
+head. Nor night nor day had he. Time, with him, was only measured by its
+duration, and that seemed interminable. Each hour added to his suffering,
+and brought with it no relief. During this period of prolonged misery
+reason often tottered on her throne. Sometimes he was under the influence
+of the wildest passions. He dragged coffins from their recesses, hurled
+them upon the ground, striving to break them open and drag forth their
+loathsome contents. Upon other occasions he would weep bitterly and
+wildly; and once--once only--did he attempt to pray; but he started from
+his knees with an echo of infernal laughter, as he deemed, ringing in his
+ears. Then, again, would he call down imprecations upon himself and his
+whole line, trampling upon the pile of coffins he had reared; and, lastly,
+more subdued, would creep to the boards that contained the body of his
+child, kissing them with a frantic outbreak of affection.
+
+"At length he became sensible of his approaching dissolution. To him the
+thought of death might well be terrible; but he quailed not before it, or
+rather seemed, in his latest moments, to resume all his wonted firmness of
+character. Gathering together his remaining strength, he dragged himself
+towards the niche wherein his brother, Sir Reginald Rookwood, was
+deposited, and, placing his hand upon the coffin, solemnly exclaimed, 'My
+curse--my dying curse--be upon thee evermore!'
+
+"Falling with his face upon the coffin, Alan instantly expired. In this
+attitude his remains were discovered."
+
+How to repress a smile at the picture conjured up of Lady Rookwood
+"precipitating herself into the marble coffin"! How not to refrain from
+laughing at the fantastic description of Alan piling up coffins in the
+vault and jumping upon them!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+Half a mile below Cuckfield stands Ansty Cross, (the "Handstay" of old
+road-books, and said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon, _Heanstige_, meaning
+highway), a cluster of a few cottages and the "Green Cross" inn, once old
+and picturesque, now rebuilt in the Ready-made Picturesque order of
+architecture. Here stood one of the numerous turnpike-gates.
+
+Close by is Riddens Farm, a picturesque little homestead, with tile-hung
+front and clustered chimneys. It still contains one of those old Sussex
+cast-iron firebacks mentioned in an earlier page, dated 1622.
+
+Below Ansty, two miles or thereby down the road, the little river Adur is
+passed at Bridge Farm, and the twin towns of St. John's Common and Burgess
+Hill are reached.
+
+Before 1820 their sites were fields and common land, wild and
+gorse-covered, free and open. Few houses were then in sight; the "Anchor"
+inn, by Burgess Hill, the reputed haunt of smugglers, who stored their
+contraband in the woods and heaths close by; and the "King's Head," at St.
+John's Common, with two or three cottages--these were all.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SUSSEX FIREBACK, RIDDENS FARM.]
+
+[Sidenote: BURGESS HILL]
+
+St. John's Common, partly in Keymer and partly in Clayton parishes, was
+enclosed piecemeal, between 1828 and 1855, by an arrangement between the
+lords of the manors and the copyholders, who divided the plunder between
+them, when this large tract of land resently became the site of these
+towns of St. John's Common and Burgess Hill, which sprang up, if not with
+quite the rapidity of a Californian mining-town, at least with a celerity
+previously unknown in England. Their rapid rise was of course due to the
+Brighton Railway and its station. There are, however, nowadays not
+wanting signs, quite apart from the condition of the brick and tile and
+drainpipe-making industry, on which the two mushroom towns have come into
+being, that the unlovely places are in a bad way. Shops closed and vainly
+offered "to let" tell a story of artificial expansion and consequent
+depression: the inevitable Nemesis of discounting the future.
+
+[Illustration: JACOB'S POST.]
+
+I will show you what the site of these uninviting modern places was like,
+a hundred years ago. It is not far, geographically, from the sorry streets
+of Burgess Hill to the wild, wide commons of Wivelsfield and Ditchling;
+but such a change is wrought in two miles and a half as would be
+considered impossible by any who have not made the excursion into those
+beautiful regions. They show us, in survival, what the now hackneyed main
+roads were like three generations ago.
+
+[Sidenote: JACOB'S POST]
+
+In every circumstance Ditchling Common recalls the "Crackskull Commons" of
+the eighteenth-century comedies, for it has a little horror of its own in
+the shape of an authentic fragment of a gibbet. This is the silent
+reminder of a crime committed near at hand, at the "Royal Oak" inn,
+Wivelsfield, in 1734. In that year Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar, came to the
+inn and, stabling his horse, attacked Miles, the landlord, while he was
+grooming the animal down, and cut his throat. The servant-maid, hearing a
+disturbance in the stable, and coming downstairs to see the cause of it,
+was murdered in the same way, and then the Jew calmly walked upstairs and
+slaughtered the landlord's wife, who was lying ill in bed. None of these
+unfortunate people died at once. The two women expired the same night, but
+Miles lived long enough to identify the assassin, who was hanged at
+Horsham, his body being hung in chains from this gibbet, ever since known
+as Jacob's Post.
+
+Pieces of wood from this gallows-tree were long and highly esteemed by
+country-folk as charms, and were often carried about with them as
+preventatives of all manner of accidents and diseases; indeed, its present
+meagre proportions are due to this practice and belief.
+
+The post is fenced with a wooden rail, and is surmounted by the quaint
+iron effigy of a rooster, pierced with the date, 1734, in old-fashioned
+figures.
+
+It is a lonely spot, with but one cottage near at hand: the common
+undulating away for miles until it reaches close to the grey barrier of
+the noble South Downs, rising magnificently in the distance.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Returning to the exploited main road. Friar's Oak is soon reached. It was
+selected by Sir Conan Doyle as one of the scenes of his Regency story,
+"Rodney Stone"; but since the year 1900, when the old inn was rebuilt, the
+spot has become an eyesore to those who knew it of old.
+
+No one knows why Friar's Oak is so called, and "Nothing is ever known
+about anything on the roads," is the intemperate exclamation that rises to
+the lips of the disappointed explorer. But wild legends, as usual, supply
+the place of facts, and the old oak that stands opposite the inn is said
+to have been the spot where a friar, or friars, distributed alms. To any
+one who knows even the least about friars, this story would at once carry
+its own condemnation; but a friar, or a hermit, may have solicited alms
+here. At any rate, the old inn used to exhibit a very forbidding "friar of
+orders grey" as its sign, dancing beneath the oak. Stolen many years ago,
+it was subsequently discovered in London by the merest accident, was
+purchased for a trifling sum, and restored to its bereft signpost. The
+innkeeper, however, thinking that what befell once might happen again,
+hung the cherished panel within the house, where it remains to this day.
+
+From Friar's Oak it is but a step to that newest creation among Brighton's
+suburbs, Clayton Park, its clustering red-brick villas, building estates,
+and half-formed roads adjoining the station of Hassocks Gate, which, by
+the way, the railway authorities have long since reduced to "Hassocks."
+The name recalls certain dusty contrivances of straw and carpeting
+artfully contrived for the devout to stumble over in church. But, not to
+incur the suspicion of tripping over the name as here applied, it may be
+mentioned that "hassock" is the Anglo-Saxon name for a coppice or small
+wood; and there are really many of these at and around Hassocks Gate to
+this day.
+
+[Sidenote: TURNPIKE GATES]
+
+At Stonepound a road leads on the right to Hurstpierpoint, which is too
+big a mouthful for general use, and so is locally "Hurst." The Pierpoints,
+whose name is embedded in that of the place, like an ammonite in a
+geological stratum, were long since as extinct as those other Normans, the
+Monceaux of Hurstmonceaux, and are what Americans would term a "back
+number."
+
+  ............................
+  .    Stone Pound Gate      .
+  .   Clears Patcham Gate    .
+  .St. John's and Ansty Gates.
+  .            Y             .
+  ............................
+
+  ............................
+  .      Patcham Gate        .
+  . Clears Stone Pound Gate, .
+  .St. John's and Ansty Gates.
+  .          126             .
+  ............................
+
+Stonepound Gate was one of the nine that at one time barred the Brighton
+Road, and the last but one on the way. It will be seen, by the specimens
+of turnpike-tickets reprinted here, that at one time, at least, the burden
+of the tolls was not quite so heavy as the mere number of the gates would
+lead a casual observer to suppose, a ticket taken at Ansty "clearing" the
+remaining distance, through three other gates, to Brighton. But it was
+necessary for the traveller to know his way about, and, if he were going
+through, to ask for a ticket to clear to Brighton; else the pikeman would
+issue a ticket, which cost just as much, to the next gate only, when
+another payment would be demanded. These were "tricks upon travellers"
+familiar to every road, and they earned the pikemen, as a class, a very
+unenviable reputation.
+
+It was here, in the great Christmas Eve snowstorm of 1836, that the London
+mail was snowed up. Its adventures illustrate the uncertainty of
+travelling the roads.
+
+In those days you took your seat on your particular fancy in coaches, and
+paid your sixteen-shilling fare from London to Brighton, or _vice versa_,
+trusting (yet with heaviness of heart) in Providence to bring you to a
+happy issue from all the many dangers and discomforts of travelling.
+Occasionally it was brought home, by storm and flood, to those learned
+enough to know it, that "travelling" derived originally from "travail,"
+and the discomforts of leaving one's own fireside in the winter are
+emphasized and underscored in the particulars of what befell at Stonepound
+in the great snowstorm of December 24th, 1836--a storm that paralysed
+communications throughout the kingdom.
+
+"The Brighton up-mail of Sunday had travelled about eight miles from that
+town, when it fell into a drift of snow, from which it was impossible to
+extricate it without assistance. The guard immediately set off to obtain
+all necessary aid, but when he returned no trace whatever could be found,
+either of the coach, coachman or passengers, three in number. After much
+difficulty the coach was found, but could not be extricated from the
+hollow into which it had got. The guard did not reach London until seven
+o'clock on Tuesday night, having been obliged to travel with the bags on
+horseback, and in many instances to leave the main road and proceed
+across fields in order to avoid the deep drifts of snow.
+
+"The passengers, coachman, and guard slept at Clayton, seven miles from
+Brighton. The road from Hand Cross was quite impassable. The non-arrival
+of the mail at Crawley induced the postmaster there to send a man in a gig
+to ascertain the cause on Monday afternoon, and no tidings being heard of
+man, gig, or horse for several hours, another man was despatched on
+horseback. After a long search he found horse and gig completely built up
+in the snow. The man was in an exhausted state. After considerable
+difficulty the horse and gig were extricated, and the party returned to
+Crawley. The man had learned no tidings of the mail, and refused to go out
+again on any such exploring mission."
+
+The Brighton mail from London, too, reached Crawley, but was compelled to
+return.
+
+[Sidenote: CLAYTON TUNNEL ACCIDENT]
+
+Such were the incidents upon which the Christmas stories, of the type
+brought into favour by Dickens, were built, but the stories are better to
+read than the incidents to experience. I am retrospectively sorry for
+those passengers who thus lost their Christmas dinners; but after all, it
+was better to miss the turkey and the Christmas pudding than to be "mashed
+into a pummy" in railway accidents, such as the awful heart-shaking series
+of collisions which took place on Sunday, August 25th, 1861, in the
+railway tunnel through Clayton Hill. On that day, in that gloomy place,
+twenty-four persons lost their lives, and one hundred and seventy-five
+were injured.
+
+Three trains were timed to leave Brighton station on that fatal morning,
+two of them filled to crowding with excursionists; the other, an ordinary
+train, well filled and bound for London. Their times for starting were 8,
+8.5, and 8.30 respectively, but owing to delays occasioned by press of
+traffic, they did not set out until considerably later, at 8.28, 8.31, and
+8.35. At such terribly short intervals were they started, in times when
+no block system existed to render such close following comparatively safe.
+
+Clayton Tunnel was already considered a dangerous place, and there was
+situated at either end (north and south entrances) a signal-cabin
+furnished with telegraphic instruments and signal apparatus, by which the
+signalman at one end of the tunnel could communicate with his fellow at
+the other, and could notify "train in" or "train out" as might happen.
+This practically formed a primitive sort of "block system," especially
+devised for use in this mile and a quarter's dark burrow.
+
+A "self-acting" signal placed in the cutting some distance from the
+southern entrance was supposed, upon the passage of every train, to set
+itself at "danger" for any following, until placed at "line clear" from
+the nearest cabin, but on this occasion the first train passed in, and the
+self-acting signal failed to act.
+
+The second train, following upon the heels of the first, passed all
+unsuspecting, and dashed from daylight into the tunnel's mouth, the
+signalman, who had not received a message from the other end of the tunnel
+being clear, frantically waving his red flag to stop it. This signal
+apparently unnoticed by the driver, the train passed in.
+
+At this moment the third train came into view, and at the same time the
+signalman was advised of the tunnel being clear of the first. Meanwhile,
+the driver of the second train, who _had_ noticed the red flag, was,
+unknown to the signalman, backing his train out again. A message was sent
+to the north cabin for it, "train in"; but the man there, thinking this to
+be a mere repetition of the first, replied, "train out," referring, of
+course, to the first train.
+
+The tunnel being to the southern signalman apparently clear, the third
+train was allowed to proceed, and met, midway, away from daylight, the
+retreating second train. The collision was terrible; the two rearward
+carriages of the second train were smashed to pieces, and the engine of
+the third, reared upon their wreck, poured fire and steam and scalding
+water upon the poor wretches who, wounded but not killed by the impact,
+were struggling to free themselves from the splintered and twisted remains
+of the two carriages.
+
+The heap of wreckage was piled up to the roof of the tunnel, whose
+interior presented a dreadful scene, the engine fire throwing a wild glare
+around, but partly obscured by the blinding, scalding clouds of steam;
+while this suddenly created Inferno resounded with the prayers, shrieks,
+shouts, and curses of injured and scatheless alike, all fearful of the
+coming of another train to add to the already sufficiently hideous ruin.
+
+Fortunately no further catastrophe occurred; but nothing of horror was
+wanting, neither in the magnitude nor in the circumstances of the
+disaster, which long remained in the memories of those who read and was
+impossible ever to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SOUTH DOWNS]
+
+From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view,
+crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and
+the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this
+great wall of earth, chalk, and grass--Wolstonbury semicircular in outline
+and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small
+bushes.
+
+Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb
+Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms
+with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history,
+continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell's mouth.
+
+Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick
+ventilating-shafts going in a long perspective above the chalky cutting
+in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton,
+humbly crouching under the lee of the downs.
+
+"Clayton Hill!" It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year
+1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient
+spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill
+drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road
+takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of
+the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain
+their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick
+wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven
+have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality
+has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision
+with a trap.
+
+From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a
+pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads
+looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah's Ark
+stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature
+land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen--a pillar of
+smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so
+near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the
+downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe
+crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of
+the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district.
+Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls
+worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature
+happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence.
+
+[Illustration: CLAYTON TUNNEL.]
+
+But the shepherds have ceased to be vocal with the sheep-shearing songs of
+yore; it seems that their modern accomplishment of being able to read has
+stricken them dumb. Neither the words nor the airs of the old
+shearing-songs will ever again awaken the echoes in the daytime, nor make
+the roomy interiors of barns ring o' nights, as they were wont to do
+lang-syne, when the convivial shearing supper was held, and the ale hummed
+in the cup, and, later in the evening, in the head also.
+
+But the Sussex peasant is by no means altogether bereft of his ancient
+ways. He is, in the more secluded districts, still a South Saxon; for the
+county, until comparatively recent times remote and difficult, plunged in
+its sloughs and isolated by reason of its forests, has no manufactures,
+and the rural parts do not attract immigrants from the shires, to leaven
+his peculiarities. The Sussex folk are still rooted firmly in what Drayton
+calls their "queachy ground." Words of Saxon origin are still the staple
+of the country talk; folk-tales, told in times when the South Saxon
+kingdom was yet a power of the Heptarchy, exist in remote corners,
+currently with the latest ribald song from the London halls; superstitions
+linger, as may be proved by he who pursues his inquiries judiciously, and
+thought moves slowly still in the bucolic mind.
+
+The Norman Conquest left few traces upon the population, and the peasant
+is still the Saxon he ever has been; his occupations, too, tend to
+slowness of speech and mind. The Sussex man is by the very rarest chance
+engaged in any manufacturing industries. He is by choice and by force of
+circumstances ploughman, woodman, shepherd, market-gardener, or carter,
+and is become heavy as his soil, and curiously old-world in habit. All
+which traits are delightful to the preternaturally sharp Londoner, whose
+nerves occupy the most important place in his being. These country folk
+are new and interesting creatures for study to him who is weary of that
+acute product of civilisation--the London arab.
+
+[Sidenote: OLD SUSSEX WAYS]
+
+Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few
+years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen.
+
+[Illustration: CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS.]
+
+Their cottages that, until a few years ago, were the same as ever, have
+recently been very largely rebuilt, much to the sorrow of those who love
+the picturesque. They were thatched, for the most part, or tiled, or
+roofed with stone slabs. A living-room with yawning fireplace and
+capacious settle was the chief feature of them. The floor was covered with
+red bricks. When the settle was drawn up to the cheerful blaze the
+interior was cosy. But many of the most picturesque cottages were damp and
+insanitary, and although they pleased the artist to look at, it by no
+means followed that they would have contented him to live in.
+
+Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and
+perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of
+bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be
+purchased, but not for silver:
+
+  If you wish your bees to thrive,
+  Gold must be paid for ev'ry hive;
+  For when they're bought with other money,
+  There will be neither swarm nor honey.
+
+The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and
+it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible
+on the surface.
+
+In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the
+proper time for "worsling," that is "wassailing" the orchards, but more
+particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the
+trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks:
+
+  Stand fast root, bear well top;
+  Pray, good God, send us a howling crop
+  Ev'ry twig, apples big;
+  Ev'ry bough, apples enow';
+  Hats full, caps full,
+  Full quarters, sacks full.
+
+These wassailing folk were generally known as "howlers"; "doubtless
+rightly," says a Sussex archæologist, "for real old Sussex music is in a
+minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling." This knowledge
+enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted
+Keynes, when he records: "1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;" a
+statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs,
+would be altogether incomprehensible.
+
+Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the
+cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would
+have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not "January butter." and the
+harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree?
+
+Saints' days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast
+were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of
+any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in
+doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day:
+
+  In April he shows his bill,
+  In May he sings o' night and day,
+  In June he'll change his tune,
+  By July prepare to fly,
+  By August away he must.
+  If he stay till September,
+  'Tis as much as the oldest man
+  Can ever remember.
+
+If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere
+human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex
+folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October
+10th, the Devil goes round the country, and--dirty devil--spits on the
+blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some
+one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the
+close of the year.
+
+Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that
+county's fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful
+that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto
+been? We have read travellers' tales of woful happenings on the road; hear
+now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy
+going on the highways: "I saw," says he, "an ancient lady, and a lady of
+very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen;
+nor was it done in frolic or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way
+being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it." All which says
+much for the piety of this ancient lady. Only a few years later, in 1729,
+died Dame Judith, widow of Sir Henry Hatsell, who in her will, dated
+January 10th, 1728, directed that her body should be buried at Preston,
+should she happen to die at such a time of year when the roads were
+passable; otherwise, at any place her executors might think suitable. It
+so happened that she died in the month of June, so compliance with her
+wishes was possible.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that
+parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand
+Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies
+deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from
+the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture.
+"Slougham-cum-Crolé" is the title of the place in ancient records, "Crolé"
+being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it obtained
+its name, pronounced by the natives "Slaffam," and it was certainly due to
+them that the magnificent manor-house--almost a palace--of the Coverts,
+the old lords of the manor--was deserted and began to fall to pieces so
+soon as built.
+
+[Illustration: THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
+
+The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most
+powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of
+Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, "came over with the
+Conqueror"; but they are not found settled here until towards the close
+of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the
+Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter
+Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of
+that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was
+due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their
+enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat,
+over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the
+apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar
+of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush
+grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble
+gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its
+massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort
+of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater
+part to the level of the watery turf.
+
+The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean
+build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences
+when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few
+mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the
+mansion remain to confirm the thought.
+
+That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls
+should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its
+completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed,
+and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other
+hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of
+their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and
+defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of
+land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so
+important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it
+is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues
+and chills innumerable.
+
+[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE: RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
+
+A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on
+circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes
+to his wife: "The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I
+vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of
+dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen
+miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges
+of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient
+draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry
+summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."
+
+Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so
+ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry
+apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking
+moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all
+those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the
+havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it
+is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park,
+where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its
+handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the
+"Star" Hotel at Lewes.
+
+The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an
+architectural frieze of greyhounds' and leopards' heads and skulls of oxen
+wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of
+their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within
+the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically
+versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but
+the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the
+most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land,
+who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the
+sea on their own manors.
+
+[Illustration: BOLNEY.]
+
+The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated
+architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In
+the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503;
+and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard
+Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company
+of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a
+curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by
+armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because
+executed all innocent of joke or irreverence.
+
+Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights,
+to bear me up.
+
+[Illustration: FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.]
+
+Another Richard, but twice married, who died in 1579, is commemorated in a
+large and elaborate monument in the Covert Chapel, whereon are sculptured,
+in an attitude of prayer, Richard himself, his two wives, six sons, and
+eight daughters.
+
+Last of the Coverts whose name is perpetuated here is Jane, who deceased
+in 1586.
+
+[Illustration: HICKSTEAD PLACE.]
+
+Beside these things, Slaugham claims some interest as containing the
+mansion of Ashfold, where once resided Mrs. Matcham, a sister of Nelson.
+Indeed, it was while staying here that the Admiral received the summons
+which sped him on his last and most glorious and fatal voyage. Slaugham,
+too, with St. Leonard's Forest, contributes a title to the peerage, Lord
+St. Leonards' creation being of "Slaugham, in the county of Sussex."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly
+beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets
+trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its
+course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the
+lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of
+the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is
+only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the
+topmost branches of distant trees. "Bowlney," as the countryfolk pronounce
+the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot
+that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought
+for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new,
+the church, and the "Eight Bells" inn, group for effect.
+
+Down the road, rather over a mile distant from Bolney, and looking so
+remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied
+with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small
+but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time
+of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of
+the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the
+large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and
+supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent
+that point; but, as the inquirer may discover for himself, it now
+fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church
+of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and
+built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family
+for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the
+way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and
+adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the
+continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are
+frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of
+field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is
+covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original.
+Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his
+rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of
+eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.
+
+[Illustration: NEWTIMBER PLACE.]
+
+Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies
+away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South
+Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow
+plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow
+of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a
+noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an
+Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by
+embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the
+chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.
+
+Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of
+love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale
+Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that
+Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his
+first fight.
+
+[Illustration: PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.]
+
+He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended
+from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known
+throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and
+Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on
+the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a
+bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes
+Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the
+town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died,
+in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
+
+At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads,
+on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty
+churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in
+appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished
+off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little
+Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly
+interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
+
+[Illustration: PATCHAM.]
+
+Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the
+time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a
+gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays,
+and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is
+quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain;
+for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had
+been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no
+further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle
+Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who
+lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the
+circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints
+of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the
+weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely
+gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could
+have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he
+has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar
+that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand
+years.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the
+South Downs into the country of the "deans." North and South of the Downs
+are two different countries--so different that if they were inhabited by
+two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge,
+it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely
+England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district
+of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter.
+But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs,
+looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe
+Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that
+very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DEANS]
+
+The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows
+Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to
+be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and
+shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form
+places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These
+are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and
+all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you
+will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean,
+by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course "Dean-ton") near Newhaven,
+Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are
+strung along these last miles into Brighton--Pangdean and Withdean. Most
+of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a
+sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with
+stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little
+cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to
+conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first
+"dean" is one of these nonconformists.
+
+Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs
+are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of
+the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho
+and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond
+of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility,
+standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of
+their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and
+beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.
+
+Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other
+circumstance, a "dean" is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a
+dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the
+hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands,
+too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old
+toll-house.
+
+Not so _very_ old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston
+turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807,
+was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set
+afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for
+another term of years. It and its legend "NO TRUST," painted large for all
+the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit,
+were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one
+regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the
+early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying at Patcham Gate, and yielded
+their "tuppences" with what grace they might.
+
+On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still
+with difficulty be spelled the inscription:
+
+  Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,
+  who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,
+  November 7th, 1796.
+
+  Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,
+  Which piercèd through the young man's head.
+  He instant fell, resigned his breath,
+  And closed his languid eyes in death.
+  All you who do this stone draw near,
+  Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.
+  From this sad instance may we all,
+  Prepare to meet Jehovah's call.
+
+It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to
+youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and
+"agin the Government"; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were
+wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even
+middle-aged blood.
+
+[Illustration: OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.]
+
+Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and
+Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he
+was "unfortunately shot," he, with many others of the gang, was coming
+from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell
+in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The
+smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves,
+careful only to make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales,
+who, met by a "riding officer," was called upon to surrender himself and
+his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in
+early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand
+plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that
+Daniel was "too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before," so
+he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery
+rhyme, was made of "lead, lead, lead," Daniel was killed. Alas! poor
+Daniel.
+
+An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham,
+sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully
+buttressed.
+
+[Sidenote: PRESTON]
+
+Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although
+patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of
+Thomas à Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the
+possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is
+weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in
+one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other "kick the beam."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that
+complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through
+Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall
+elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick
+arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.
+
+It is Brighton's ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter
+and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.
+
+Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good,
+and went through a middle period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet
+fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its
+newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George
+the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste,
+become almost archæologically interesting, and the newer Brighton
+approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the
+Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an
+old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the
+twentieth century.
+
+[Illustration: PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.]
+
+The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from
+London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a
+curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of
+the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even
+if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York
+Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that,
+and Brunswick t'other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.
+
+The Old Steyne was in Florizel's time the rendezvous of fashion. The
+"front" and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction,
+but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful
+than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.
+
+[Sidenote: BRIGHTON]
+
+Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom
+Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in
+the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to
+be so desolate that "if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation
+at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on
+which to fasten a rope." At any rate it would have needed a particularly
+stout tree to serve Johnson's turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an
+ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.
+
+Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted
+fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with
+the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to
+Johnson's as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the
+elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being
+construed into praise by the townsfolk. "Of all the trees," says he, "I
+ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent
+beach at Brighton."
+
+But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the
+glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the
+tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the
+tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is
+reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive
+shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever have been
+admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost,
+one shrewdly suspects--it is supposed to have cost over £1,000,000--was
+what appealed to the imagination.
+
+That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one
+recognises as the "Marquis of Steyne" in "Vanity Fair," admired it, as
+assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, "A good idea of the
+building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon
+the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners."
+
+That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste.
+Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and
+rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the
+work of William the Fourth in 1832.
+
+The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for
+Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and
+was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace
+at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than
+it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious
+scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style,
+would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to
+justify the Prince's taste.
+
+But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence
+upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose
+population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to
+5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more
+than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian
+Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of
+Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of
+161,000--the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that
+in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.
+
+[Illustration: THE PAVILION.]
+
+One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well
+in the "Four Georges":
+
+"And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence
+and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince
+Regent, all play parts.
+
+"The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the
+scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly associates, there
+figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in
+his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with
+the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had
+taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine
+and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of
+Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in
+Sussex.
+
+"The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable
+scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to
+drink wine with the Duke--a challenge which the old toper did not refuse.
+He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank
+glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first
+gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers
+filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink.
+'Now,' says he, 'I will have my carriage and go home.'
+
+"The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof
+where he had been so generously entertained. 'No,' he said; 'he had had
+enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave
+the place at once, and never enter its doors more.'
+
+"The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour's interval, the
+liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host's generous purpose
+was answered, and the Duke's old grey head lay stupefied on the table.
+Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered to it as
+well as he could, and, stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel.
+
+"They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the
+poor old man fancied he was going home.
+
+"When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince's hideous house
+at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers
+there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the
+Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still
+there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted."
+
+[Sidenote: CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK]
+
+Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray's
+"Four Georges" is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke,
+who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other
+since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was
+not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of
+drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish
+creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink,
+he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A
+contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described
+him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had
+eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a
+bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him
+off to bed. It was well written of him:
+
+  On Norfolk's tomb inscribe this placard:
+  He lived a beast and died a blackguard.
+
+This "very old," "poor old man" of Thackeray's misplaced sympathy did not,
+as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged
+sixty-nine.
+
+Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by
+the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told
+of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great yellow
+barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect
+the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. "It was a
+position," says my authority, "which gave His Royal Highness an
+opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke.
+Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he
+exclaimed, 'By Jove, Townsend, I've been robbed; I had with me some damson
+tarts, but they are now gone.' 'Gone!' said Townsend, rising;
+'impossible!' 'Yes,' rejoined the Prince, 'and you are the purloiner,' at
+the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting
+the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, 'This is a
+sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.' 'Rather say, your
+Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,' added Townsend, raising
+the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained
+seat of his nankeen inexpressibles."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton.
+It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would
+have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion--an inferior
+Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell--the name sometimes spelt with one
+"l"--who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs
+the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He
+died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the
+fishing-village; but even before the Prince of Wales first visited
+Brighthelmstone in 1782, it had attained a certain popularity, as the
+"Brighthelmstone Guide" of July, 1777, attests, in these halting verses:
+
+  This town or village of renown,
+  Like London Bridge, half broken down,
+  Few years ago was worse than Wapping,
+  Not fit for a human soul to stop in;
+  But now, like to a worn-out shoe,
+  By patching well, the place will do.
+  You'd wonder much, I'm sure, to see
+  How it's becramm'd with quality.
+
+And so on.
+
+[Illustration: THE CLIFFS, BRIGHTHELMSTONE, 1789. _From an aquatint after
+Rowlandson._]
+
+[Illustration: DR. RICHARD RUSSELL. _From the portrait by Zoffany._]
+
+[Sidenote: GUIDES TO BRIGHTON]
+
+Brighthelmstone, indeed, has had more Guides written upon it than even
+Bath has had, and very curious some of them are become in these days. They
+range from lively to severe, from grave to gay, from the serious screeds
+of Russell and Dr. Relhan, his successor, to the light and airy, and not
+too admirable puffs of to-day. But, however these guides may vary, they
+all agree in harking back to that shadowy Brighthelm who is supposed to
+have given his peculiar name to the ancient fisher-village here
+established time out of mind. In the days when "County Histories" were
+first let loose, in folio volumes, upon an unoffending land, historians,
+archæologists, and other interested parties seemed at a loss for the
+derivation of the place-name, and, rather than confess themselves ignorant
+of its meaning, they conspired together to invent a Saxon archbishop, who,
+dying in the odour of sanctity and the ninth century, bequeathed his
+appellation to what is now known, in a contracted form, as Brighton.
+
+But the man is not known who has unassailable proofs to show of this
+Brighthelm's having so honoured the fisher-folk's hovels with his name.
+
+Thackeray, greatly daring, considering that the Fourth George is the real
+patron--saint, we can hardly say; let us make it king--of the town,
+elected to deliver his lectures upon the "Four Georges" at Brighton, among
+other places, and to that end made, with monumental assurance, a personal
+application at the Town Hall for the hire of the banqueting-room in the
+Royal Pavilion.
+
+But one of the Aldermen, who chanced to be present, suggested, with
+extra-aldermanic wit, that the Town Hall would be equally suitable,
+intimating at the same time that it was not considered as strictly
+etiquette to "abuse a man in his own house." The witty Alderman's
+suggestion, we are told, was acted upon, and the Town Hall engaged
+forthwith.
+
+It argued considerable courage on the lecturer's part to declaim against
+George the Fourth anywhere in that town which His Majesty had, by his
+example, conjured up from almost nothingness. It does not seem that
+Thackeray was, after all, ill received at Brighton; whence thoughts arise
+as to the ingratitude and fleeting memories of them that were either in
+the first or second generation, advantaged by the royal preference for
+this bleak stretch of shore beneath the bare South Downs, open to every
+wind that blows. Surely gratitude is well described as a "lively sense of
+favours to come," and they, no doubt, considered that the statue they had
+erected in the Steyne gardens to him was a full discharge of all
+obligations. Nor is the history of that effigy altogether creditable. It
+was erected in 1828, as the result of a movement among Brighton tradesfolk
+in 1820, to honour the memory of one who had incidentally made the
+fortunes of so many among them; but although the subscription list
+remained open for eight years and a half, it did not provide the £3.000
+agreed upon to be paid to Chantrey, the sculptor of it.
+
+The bronze statue presides to-day over a cab-rank, and the sea-salt
+breezes have strongly oxidised the face to an arsenical green; insulting,
+because greenness was not a distinguishing trait in the character of
+George the Fourth.
+
+[Sidenote: LAST OF THE REGENCY.]
+
+The surrounding space is saturated with memories of the Regency; but the
+roysterers are all gone and the recollection of them is dim. Prince and
+King, the Barrymores--Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate--brothers three;
+Mrs. Fitzherbert, "the only woman whom George the Fourth ever really
+loved," and whom he married; Sir John Lade, the reckless, the frolicsome,
+historic in so far that he was the first who publicly wore trousers:
+these, with others innumerable, are long since silent. No more are they
+heard who with unseemly revelry affronted the midnight moon, or upset the
+decrepit watchman in his box. Those days and nights are done, nor are they
+likely to be revived while the Brighton policemen remain so big and
+muscular.
+
+With the death of George the Fourth the play was played out. William the
+Fourth occasionally patronised Brighton, but decorum then obtained, and
+Queen Victoria and Prince Albert not only disliked the memory of the last
+of the Georges, but could not find at the Pavilion the privacy they
+desired. The Queen therefore sold it to the then Commissioners of
+Brighton in 1850, for the sum of £53,000, and never afterwards visited the
+town.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+The Pavilion and the adjoining Castle Square, where one of the old coach
+booking-offices still survives as a railway receiving-office, are to most
+people the ultimate expressions of antiquity at Brighton; but there
+remains one landmark of what was "Brighthelmstone" in the ancient parish
+church of St. Nicholas, standing upon the topmost eyrie of the town, and
+overlooking from its crowded and now disused graveyard more than a square
+mile of crowded roofs below. It is probably the place referred to by a
+vivacious Frenchman who, a hundred and twenty years ago, summed up
+"Brigtemstone" as "a miserable village, commanded by a cemetery and
+surrounded by barren mountains."
+
+From here you can, with some trouble, catch just a glimpse of the Watery
+horizon through the grey haze that rises from countless chimney-pots, and
+never a breeze but blows laden with the scent of soot and smoke. Yet, for
+all the changed fortune that changeful Time has brought this hoary and
+grimy place, it has not been deprived of interesting mementoes. You may,
+with patience, discover the tombstone of Phoebe Hassall, a centenarian
+of pith and valour, who, in her youthful days, in male attire, joined the
+army of His Majesty King George the Second and warred with her regiment in
+many lands; and all around are the resting-places of many celebrities,
+who, denied a wider fame, have yet their place in local annals; but
+prominent, in place and in fame, is the tomb of that Captain Tettersell
+who (it must be owned, for a consideration) sailed away one October morn
+of 1651 across the Channel, carrying with him the hope of the clouded
+Royalists aboard his grimy craft.
+
+[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS, THE OLD PARISH CHURCH OF BRIGHTHELMSTONE.]
+
+His altar-tomb stands without the southern doorway of the church, and
+reads curiously to modern ears. That not one of all the many who have had
+occasion to print it has transcribed the quaintness of that epitaph aright
+seems a strange thing, but so it is:
+
+    P.M.S.
+
+    Captain NICHOLAS TETTERSELL, through whose Prudence ualour an Loyalty
+    Charles the second King of England & after he had escaped the sword of
+    his merciless rebells and his fforses received a fatall ouerthrowe at
+    Worcester Sept{r} 3{d} 1651, was ffaithfully preserued & conueyed into
+    ffrance. Departed this life the 26{th} day of Iuly 1674.
+
+              ---->      ---->      ---->
+
+        Within this monument doth lye,
+        Approued Ffaith, hono{r} and Loyalty.
+        In this Cold Clay he hath now tane up his statio{n},
+        At once preserued y{e} Church, the Crowne and nation.
+        When Charles y{e} Greate was nothing but a breat{h}
+        This ualiant soule stept betweene him & death.
+        Usurpers threats nor tyrant rebells frowne
+        Could not afrright his duty to the Crowne;
+        Which glorious act of his Church & state,
+        Eight princes in one day did Gratulate
+        Professing all to him in debt to bee
+        As all the world are to his memory
+        Since Earth Could not Reward his worth have give{n},
+        Hee now receiues it from the King of heauen.
+
+The escape of Charles the Second, after many perilous adventures, belongs
+to the larger sphere of English history. Driven, after the disastrous
+result of Worcester Fight, to wander, a fugitive, through the land, he
+sought the coast from the extreme west of Dorsetshire, and only when he
+reached Sussex did he find it possible to embark and sail across the
+Channel to France. Hunted by relentless Roundheads, and sheltered on his
+way only by a few faithful adherents, who in their loyalty risked
+everything for him, he at length, with his small party, reached the
+village of Brighthelmstone and lodged at the inn then called the "George."
+
+[Illustration: THE AQUARIUM, BEFORE DESTRUCTION OF THE CHAIN PIER.]
+
+That evening, after much negotiation, Colonel Gunter, the King's
+companion, arranged with Nicholas Tettersell, master of a small trading
+craft, to convey the King across to Fécamp, to sail in the early hours
+of the following morning, October 14th. How they sailed, and the account
+of their wanderings, are fully set forth in the "narrative" of Colonel
+Gunter.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+A new era for Brighton and the Brighton Road opened in November, 1896,
+with the coming of the motor-car. Already the old period of the coaching
+inns had waned, and that of gigantic and palatial hotels, much more
+luxurious than anything ever imagined by the builders of the Pavilion, had
+dawned; and then, as though to fitly emphasize the transition, the old
+Chain Pier made a dramatic end.
+
+The Chain Pier just missed belonging to the Georgian era, for it was not
+begun until October, 1822, but, opened the following year, it had so long
+been a feature of Brighton--and so peculiar a feature--that it had come,
+with many, to typify the town, quite as much as the Pavilion itself. It
+was, moreover, additionally remarkable as being the first pleasure-pier
+built in England. It had long been failing and, condemned as dangerous,
+would soon have been demolished; but the storm of December 4th, 1896,
+spared that trouble. It was standing when day closed in, but when the next
+morning dawned, its place was vacant.
+
+Since then, those who have long known Brighton have never visited it
+without a sense of loss; and the Palace Pier, opposite the Aquarium, does
+not fill the void. It is a vulgarity for one thing, and for another
+typifies the Hebraic week-end, when the sons and daughters of Judah
+descend upon the town. Moreover, it is absolutely uncharacteristic, and
+has its counterparts in many other places.
+
+But Brighton itself is eternal. It suffers change, it grows continually;
+but while the sea remains and the air is clean and the sun shines, it, and
+the road to it, will be the most popular resorts in England.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 209-222
+
+  Albourne, 248
+
+  Ansty Cross, 93, 222
+
+  Aram, Eugene, 172
+
+  "Autopsy," Steam Carriage, 37, 63, 88
+
+
+  Banks, Sir Edward, 136
+
+  Banstead Downs, 159-161
+
+  Barrymore, The, 6, 192, 267
+
+  Belmont, 159
+
+  Benhilton, 156
+
+  Bicycles, 64-71, 74-79, 85-91
+
+  Bird, Lieutenant Edward, murderer, 169-172
+
+  Bolney, 200, 243, 246
+
+  "Boneshakers", 65
+
+  Brighton, 2, 12, 37, 255-272
+    Railway opened, 42
+    Road Records tabulated, 88-91
+    Routes to, 1-4
+
+  Brixton, 92, 97-100
+    Hill, 68, 93, 98, 105
+
+  Broad Green, 108, 129
+
+  Burgess Hill, 223
+
+  Burgh Heath, 159-161
+
+
+  Carriers, The, 11-14
+
+  Charles II., 270
+
+  Charlwood, 175
+
+  Chipstead, 135-138
+
+  Clayton, 93, 102, 231, 250
+    Hill, 25, 229, 231-232
+    Tunnel, 229-231
+
+  Coaches:--
+    Accommodation, 26
+    Age, 29, 30, 35
+      1852-1862, 42, 45, 47
+      1875-1880, 1882-3, 46
+    Alert, 33, 34
+    Coburg, 30
+    Comet, 33
+      1887-1899, 1900, 46, 49, 55
+    Coronet, 33
+    Criterion, 41, 64, 74, 88
+    Dart, 33
+    Defiance, 28, 46
+      1880, --
+    Duke of Beaufort, 31
+    "Flying Machine," coach, 18-22
+    Life-Preserver, 30
+    Magnet, 33
+    Mails, The, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 42
+    Old Times, 1866, 45
+      1888, 49-51
+    Quicksilver, 38
+    Red Rover, 41, 63, 88
+    Regent, 33
+    Sovereign, 33
+    Times, 33
+    Union, 33
+    Venture (A. G. Vanderbilt), 61
+    Victoria, 42
+    Vigilant, 1900-05, --
+    Wonder, 38
+
+  Coaching, 5, 11-14, 18-34, 37-49, 228
+
+  Coaching Notabilities:--
+    Angel, B. J., 45, 46
+    Armytage, Col., 45
+    Batchelor, Jas., 14
+    Beaufort, Duke of, 45, 46
+    Beckett, Capt. H. L., 46
+    Blyth, Capt., 46
+    Bradford, "Miller", 26
+    Clark, George, 45
+    Cotton, Sir St. Vincent, 29, 45
+    Fitzgerald, Mr., 45
+    Fownes, Edwin, 46
+    Freeman, Stewart, 46, 49
+    Gwynne, Sackville Frederick, 29
+    Harbour, Charles, 41, 64
+    Haworth, Capt., 45, 46
+    Jerningham, Hon. Fred., 29
+    Lawrie, Capt., 45
+    Londesborough, Earl of, 46
+    McCalmont, Hugh, 46
+    Meek, George, 46
+    Pole, E. S. Chandos, 45, 46
+    Pole-Gell, Mr., 46
+    Sandys, Hon. H., 49
+    Selby, Jas., 41, 49, 64, 73, 74, 75, 89
+    Stevenson, Henry, 29, 30
+    Stracey-Clitherow, Col., 46
+    Thynne, Lord H., 45
+    Tiffany, Mr., 46
+    Vanderbilt, Alfred Gwynne, 61
+    Wemyss, Randolph, 49
+    Wiltshire, Earl of, 46
+    Worcester, Marquis of, 29, 38
+
+  Coaching Records, 41, 64, 73, 74, 88, 89
+
+  Cold Blow, 159
+
+  Colliers' Water, 108
+
+  Colliers of Croydon, 108
+
+  Coulsdon, 131, 133
+
+  County Oak, 178
+
+  Covert, Family of, 238-244
+
+  Crawley, 93, 173, 182-195
+
+  Crawley Downs, 191-193
+
+  Croydon, 106-123
+
+  Cuckfield, 30, 202-209
+    Place, 209-222, 242
+
+  Cycling, 64-71, 74-79, 85-91
+
+  Cycling Notabilities:--
+    Edge, Selwyn Francis, 75, 76, 89
+    Holbein, M. A., 74
+    Mayall, John, Junior, 66-69, 70, 88
+    Shorland, F. W., 74, 89
+    Smith, C. A., 75, 76, 77, 89
+    Turner, Rowley B., 66, 67, 69
+
+  Cycling Records, 68-79, 85-91
+
+
+  Dale, 93, 248, 250
+
+  Dance, Sir Charles, 37, 39
+
+  Ditchling, 224
+
+  Driving Records, 63, 73, 194
+
+
+  Earlswood Common, 93, 146, 148
+
+
+  Fauntleroy, Henry, 196
+
+  Foxley Hatch, 93, 126
+
+  Frenches, 93, 145
+
+  Friar's Oak, 226
+
+
+  Gatton, 141-145, 164
+
+  Gatwick, 155
+
+  George IV., Prince Regent and King, 3, 6, 8-11, 24, 62, 88, 132,
+      191-194, 256-262, 266
+
+
+  Hancock, Walter, 34, 88
+
+  Hand Cross, 24, 93, 195, 198-201
+    Hill, 61
+
+  Hassall, Phoebe, 268
+
+  Hassocks, 226
+
+  Hayward's Heath, 205
+
+  Hickstead, 200, 245
+
+  "Hobby-horses", 65
+
+  Holmesdale, 172
+
+  Hooley, 136
+
+  Horley, 93, 149, 151-155, 173
+
+
+  Ifield, 175, 178-182, 188
+
+  "Infant," Steam Carriage, 37
+
+  Inns (mentioned at length):--
+    Black Swan, Pease Pottage, 195
+    Chequers, Horley, 152
+    Cock, Sutton, 159
+    Friar's Oak, 24, 226
+    George, Borough, 12-14
+      Crawley, 114, 187, 189
+    Golden Cross, Charing Cross, 20, 33
+    Green Cross, Ansty Cross, 222
+    Greyhound, Croydon, 114
+      Sutton, 159
+    Hatchett's (_see_ White Horse Cellar).
+    Old King's Head, Croydon, 115
+    Old Ship, Brighton, 12
+    Red Lion, Hand Cross, 200
+    Six Bells, Horley, 153
+    Surrey Oaks, Parkgate, 179
+    Tabard, Borough (_see_ Talbot).
+    Talbot, Borough, 12-14, 17
+    Talbot, Cuckfield, 206
+    Tangier, Banstead Downs, 160
+    White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, 34
+
+
+  Jacob's Post, 224
+
+  Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 102-105, 257
+
+
+  Kennersley, 173
+
+  Kennington, 92-96
+
+  Kimberham Bridge, 173
+
+  Kingswood, 162
+
+
+  Lade, Sir John, 267
+
+  Lemon, Mark, 190
+
+  Little Hell, 159
+
+  Lowfield Heath, 173-175, 182
+
+
+  Merstham, 93, 134, 138-141
+
+  Milestones, 126-130, 159, 163
+
+  Mitcham, 155
+
+  Mole, River, 149, 152, 173-175, 196
+
+  Motor-cars, 50, 53, 54, 57-61, 63
+
+  Motor-car Day, Nov. 14th, 1896, 53-60
+
+  Motor-omnibus, Accident to, 60
+
+
+  Newdigate, 176
+
+  Newtimber, 247, 248
+
+  Norbury, 195
+
+
+  Old-time Travellers:--
+    Burton, Dr. John, 16
+    Cobbett, William, 161, 165, 168, 178
+    George IV., Prince Regent and King (_see_ "George the Fourth.")
+    Walpole, Horace, 16-18
+
+
+  Pangdean, 253
+
+  Patcham, 25, 93, 250, 251-255
+
+  Pavilion, The, 256-261, 268
+
+  Pease Pottage, 195, 197
+
+  Pedestrian Records, 64, 69, 72, 75, 79-91
+
+  Pilgrims' Way, The, 164
+
+  Povey Cross, 155, 173, 175
+
+  Preston, 93, 250, 255
+
+  Prize-fighting, 5, 191, 248-250
+
+  Pugilistic Notabilities:--
+    Cribb, Tom, 190
+    Fewterel, 132
+    Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man", 192
+    Jackson, "Gentleman", 132, 159
+    Martin, "Master of the Rolls", 5, 192
+    Randall, Jack, "the Nonpareil", 5, 192
+    Sayers, Tom, 248
+
+  Purley, 93, 121-125, 130, 176
+
+  Pyecombe, 200, 249, 250
+
+
+  Railway to Brighton opened, 42, 131
+
+  "Records", 61-91
+    (_See_ severally, Coaching, Cycling, Driving, Pedestrian, and Riding).
+    Tabulated, 88-91
+
+  Redhill, 93, 145
+
+  Reigate, 27, 93, 164-172
+    Hill, 162-164
+
+  Riding Records, 62, 88
+
+  Roman Roads, 102
+
+  "Rookwood", 209-222
+
+  Routes to Brighton, 1-4
+
+  Rowlandson, Thomas, 157, 185, 187, 203, 263
+
+  Ruskin, John, 106, 115
+
+  Russell of Killowen, Baron, 161
+
+  Russell (_or_ Russel), Dr. Richard, 262
+
+
+  St. John's Common, 103, 223
+
+  St. Leonard's Forest, 196, 199
+
+  Salfords, 93, 149, 173
+
+  Sayers Common, 248
+
+  Sidlow Bridge, 173
+
+  Slaugham, 238-246
+    Place, 240-242
+
+  Slough Green, 93
+
+  Smitham Bottom, 68, 129, 131-133, 136
+
+  Southwark, 12-14
+
+  Staplefield Common, 200
+
+  Steam Carriages, 34, 37, 50, 63
+
+  Stoat's Nest, 132
+
+  Stock Exchange Walk, 80-82
+
+  Stonepound, 93, 227, 231
+
+  Streatham, 100, 103-105, 107
+
+  Surrey Iron Railway, The, 122, 136
+
+  Sussex Roads, 15, 178, 237, 242, 237, 242
+
+  Sutton, 93, 156-159, 161
+
+
+  Tadworth Court, 161
+
+  Tettersell, Captain, 268, 270
+
+  Thackeray, W. M., 9, 10, 266
+
+  Thornton Heath, 103, 105-108
+
+  Thrale Place, 103-105
+
+  Thrales, The, 103-105
+
+  Thunderfield Castle, 149-152
+
+  Tilgate Forest Row, 173, 196
+
+  Tooke, John Horne, 124
+
+  Turnpike Gates, 92, 126, 145, 195, 226-228, 253
+
+
+  Velocipedes, 65-69
+
+
+  Walking Records (_see_ Pedestrian Records).
+
+  Westminster Bridge, 1, 3, 14, 129
+
+  Whiteman's Green, 202
+
+  Whitgift, Archbishop, 109-114
+
+  Wilderness Bottom, 161
+
+  Withdean, 253, 255
+
+  Wivelsfield, 224
+
+  Woodhatch, 93
+
+  Wray Park, 93
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] He was a baker; hence the nickname.
+
+[2] Henry Barry, Earl of Barrymore, in the peerage of Ireland.
+
+[3] _Hiatus_ in the Journals, arranged by the editor for benefit of the
+Young Person!
+
+[4] Kirkpatrick Macmillan, in 1839-40, invented a dwarf, rear-driving
+machine of the "safety" type, and was fined at Glasgow for "furiously
+riding." He made and sold several, but they attained nothing more than
+local and temporary success.
+
+[5]
+
+  "There's nothing brings you round
+  Like the trumpet's martial sound."--W. S. GILBERT.
+                                    "The Pirates of Penzance."
+
+[6] In 1829 there were three additional gates: one at Crawley, another at
+Hand Cross, before you came to the "Red Lion," and one more at Slough
+Green. Meanwhile the Horley gate on this route had disappeared. At a later
+period another gate was added, at Merstham, just past the "Feathers." On
+the other routes there were, of course, yet more gates--e.g., those of
+Sutton, Reigate, Wray Park, Woodhatch, Dale, and many more.
+
+Salfords gate was the last on the main Brighton Road. It remained until
+midnight, October 31st. 1881, when the Reigate Turnpike Trust expired,
+after an existence of 126 years. Not until then did this most famous
+highway become free and open throughout its whole distance.
+
+[7] Preface to "Præterita," dated May 10th, 1885.
+
+[8] The name derives from a farm so called, marked on a map of 1716
+"Stotes Ness."
+
+[9] "Sir Edward Banks, Knight, of Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, and Adelphi
+Terrace, Strand, Middlesex, whose remains are deposited in the family
+vault in this churchyard. Blessed by Divine Providence with an honest
+heart, a clear head, and an extraordinary degree of perseverance, he rose
+superior to all difficulties, and was the founder of his own fortune; and
+although of self-cultivated talent, he in early life became contractor for
+public works, and was actively and successfully engaged during forty years
+in the execution of some of the most useful, extensive, and splendid works
+of his time; amongst which may be mentioned the Waterloo, Southwark,
+London, and Staines Bridges over the Thames, the Naval Works at Sheerness
+Dockyard, and the new channels for the rivers Ouse, Nene, and Witham in
+Norfolk and Lincolnshire. He was eminently distinguished for the
+simplicity of his manners and the benevolence of his heart; respected for
+his inflexible integrity and his pure and unaffected piety; in all the
+relations of his life he was candid, diligent, and humane; just in
+purpose, firm in execution; his liberality and indulgence to his numerous
+coadjutors were alone equalled by his generosity and charity displayed in
+the disposal of his honourably-acquired wealth. He departed this life at
+Tilgate, Sussex ... on the 5th day of July, 1835, in the sixty-sixth year
+of his age."
+
+[10] Matthew Buckle, Admiral of the Blue; born 1716, died 1784.
+
+[11] He really drove the other way; from Carlton House to Brighton.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Letters printed in reverse are indicated by =X=.
+
+Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.
+
+The original text contains a few letters with diacritical marks that are
+not represented in this text version.
+
+The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
+letters have been replaced with transliterations.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
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+    <title>
+      The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper&mdash;A Project Gutenberg eBook
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Brighton Road
+       The Classic Highway to the South
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2012 [EBook #38611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIGHTON ROAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>THE BRIGHTON ROAD</h1>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="vertsbox">
+<p class="center">HISTORIES OF THE ROADS<br /><small>&mdash;BY&mdash;</small><br /><span class="smcap">Charles G. Harper.</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE HASTINGS ROAD: And The &#8220;Happy Springs of Tunbridge.&#8221;</p>
+<p class="hang">THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: London to Gloucester.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: Gloucester to Milford Haven.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE NORWICH ROAD: An East Anglian Highway.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE EXETER ROAD: The West of England Highway.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD.</p>
+<p class="hang">THE CAMBRIDGE, KING&#8217;S LYNX AND ELY ROAD.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p><a name="frontis" id="frontis"></a>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/frontis.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">GEORGE THE FOURTH.<br /><small><i>From the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, R.A.</i></small></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge"><i>The</i></span><br />
+<span class="giant">BRIGHTON ROAD</span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="large">The Classic Highway to the South</span></p>
+<p class="center"><i>By</i> <span class="large">CHARLES G. HARPER</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>Illustrated by the Author, and from old-time<br />
+Prints and Pictures</i></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img01.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">London</span>:<br />
+CECIL PALMER<br />
+<span class="smcap">Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, W.C. 1</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><i>First Published</i> - 1892<br />
+<i>Second Edition</i> - 1906<br />
+<i>Third and Revised Edition</i> - 1922</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">Printed in Great Britain by <span class="smcap">C. Tinling &amp; Co., Ltd.</span>,<br />
+53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,<br />
+and 187, Fleet Street, London.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img02.jpg" alt="Preface" /></div>
+
+<div class="note">
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps"><i>Many</i></span> <i>years ago it occurred to this writer that it would be an interesting
+thing to write and illustrate a book on the Road to Brighton. The genesis
+of that thought has been forgotten, but the book was written and
+published, and has long been out of print. And there might have been the
+end of it, but that (from no preconceived plan) there has since been added
+a long series of books on others of our great highways, rendering
+imperative re-issues of the parent volume.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Two considerations have made that undertaking a matter of considerable
+difficulty, either of them sufficiently weighty. The first was that the
+original book was written at a time when the author had not arrived at a
+settled method; the second is found in the fact of the</i> <span class="smcap">Brighton Road</span>
+<i>being not only the best known of highways, but also the one most
+susceptible to change.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>When it is remembered that motor-cars have come upon the roads since
+then, that innumerable sporting &#8220;records&#8221; in cycling, walking, and other
+forms of progression have since been made, and that in many other ways the
+road is different, it was seen that not merely a re-issue of the book, but
+a book almost entirely re-written and re-illustrated was required. This,
+then, is what was provided in a second edition, published in 1906. And now
+another, the third, is issued, bringing the story of this highway up to
+date.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right">CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>
+
+<p><i>March, 1922.</i></p></div>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>THE ROAD TO BRIGHTON</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="center">MILES</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Westminster Bridge (Surrey side) to&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>St. Mark&#8217;s Church, Kennington</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1&#189;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brixton Church</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.3em;">3</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Streatham</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">5&#189;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Norbury</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">6&#190;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Thornton Heath</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.3em;">8</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Croydon (Whitgift&#8217;s Hospital)</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">9&#189;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Purley Corner</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">12</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Smitham Bottom</td>
+    <td align="center">13&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Coulsdon Railway Station</td>
+    <td align="center">14&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Merstham</td>
+    <td align="center">17&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Redhill (Market Hall)</td>
+    <td align="center">20&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Horley (&#8220;Chequers&#8221;)</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">24</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Povey Cross</td>
+    <td align="center">25&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kimberham Bridge (Cross River Mole)</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">26</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lowfield Heath</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">27</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crawley</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">29</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pease Pottage</td>
+    <td align="center">31&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hand Cross</td>
+    <td align="center">33&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Staplefield Common</td>
+    <td align="center">34&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Slough Green</td>
+    <td align="center">36&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Whiteman&#8217;s Green</td>
+    <td align="center">37&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cuckfield</td>
+    <td align="center">37&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ansty Cross</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">38</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bridge Farm (Cross River Adur)</td>
+    <td align="center">40&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>St. John&#8217;s Common</td>
+    <td align="center">40&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&#8220;Friar&#8217;s Oak&#8221; Inn</td>
+    <td align="center">42&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Stonepound</td>
+    <td align="center">43&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Clayton</td>
+    <td align="center">44&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pyecombe</td>
+    <td align="center">45&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Patcham</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">48</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Withdean</td>
+    <td align="center">48&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Preston</td>
+    <td align="center">49&#190;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brighton (Aquarium)</td>
+    <td align="center">51&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">The Sutton and Reigate Route</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>St. Mark&#8217;s, Kennington</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">1&#189;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tooting Broadway</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.3em;">6</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Mitcham</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">8&#188;</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sutton (&#8220;Greyhound&#8221;)</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">11</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tadworth</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">16</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Lower Kingswood</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">17</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Reigate Hill</td>
+    <td align="center">19&#188;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Reigate (Town Hall)</td>
+    <td align="center">20&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Woodhatch (&#8220;Old Angel&#8221;)</td>
+    <td align="center">21&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Povey Cross</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">26</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brighton</td>
+    <td align="center">51&#8541;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcap">The Bolney and Hickstead Route</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hand Cross</td>
+    <td align="center">33&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bolney</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">39</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hickstead</td>
+    <td align="center">40&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Savers Common</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">42</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Newtimber</td>
+    <td align="center">44&#189;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pyecombe</td>
+    <td align="center"><span style="margin-left: -.7em;">45</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Brighton</td>
+    <td align="center">50&#189;</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>George the Fourth</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#frontis">Frontispiece</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sketch-map showing Principal Routes to Brighton</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">4</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Stage Waggon, 1808</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Talbot&#8221; Inn Yard, Borough, about 1815</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Me and My Wife and Daughter</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Duke of Beaufort&#8221; Coach starting from the &#8220;Bull and Mouth&#8221;<br /><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Office, Piccadilly Circus, 1826</span></td>
+    <td align="right" valign="bottom"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Age,&#8221; 1829, starting from Castle Square, Brighton</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sir Charles Dance&#8217;s Steam-carriage leaving London for Brighton, 1833</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Brighton Day Mails crossing Hookwood Common, 1838</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Age,&#8221; 1852, crossing Ham Common</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Old Times,&#8221; 1888</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Comet,&#8221; 1890</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>John Mayall, Junior, 1869</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Stock Exchange Walk: E. F. Broad at Horley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Miss M. Foster, paced by Motor Cycle, passing Coulsdon</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_86">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kennington Gate: Derby Day, 1839</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_95">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Streatham Common</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Streatham</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Dining Hall, Whitgift Hospital</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Chapel, Hospital of the Holy Trinity</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_113">113</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Croydon Town Hall</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Chipstead Church</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Merstham</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_140">139</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Gatton Hall and &#8220;Town Hall&#8221;</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Switchback Road, Earlswood Common</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Thunderfield Castle</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Chequers,&#8221; Horley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Six Bells,&#8221; Horley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Cock,&#8221; Sutton, 1789</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Kingswood Warren</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Suspension Bridge, Reigate Hill</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Tunnel, Reigate</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Tablet, Batswing Cottages</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Floods at Horley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Charlwood</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Corner in Newdigate Church</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>On the Road to Newdigate</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Ifield Mill Pond</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crawley: Looking South</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Crawley, 1789</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>An Old Cottage at Crawley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;George,&#8221; Crawley</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_189">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Sculptured Emblem of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Church</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pease Pottage</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The &#8220;Red Lion,&#8221; Hand Cross</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cuckfield, 1789</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_203">203</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Road out of Cuckfield</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_208">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Cuckfield Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Clock-Tower and Haunted Avenue, Cuckfield Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Harrison Ainsworth</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Old Sussex Fireback, Ridden&#8217;s Farm</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_223">223</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Jacob&#8217;s Post</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Clayton Tunnel</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Clayton Church and the South Downs</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Ruins of Slaugham Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Entrance: Ruins of Slaugham Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Bolney</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_243">243</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>From a Brass at Slaugham</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Hickstead Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Newtimber Place</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Pyecombe: Junction of the Roads</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Patcham</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_251">251</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Old Dovecot, Patcham</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Preston Viaduct: Entrance to Brighton</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_256">256</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Pavilion</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Cliffs, Brighthelmstone, 1789</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_264">263</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Dr. Richard Russell</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_265">265</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>St. Nicholas, the old Parish Church of Brighthelmstone</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_269">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Aquarium, before destruction of the Chain Pier</td>
+    <td align="right"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img03.jpg" alt="THE BRIGHTON ROAD" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+
+<p>The road to Brighton&mdash;the main route, pre-eminently <i>the</i> road&mdash;is
+measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium. It
+goes by Croydon, Redhill, Horley, Crawley, and Cuckfield, and is (or is
+supposed to be) 51&#189; miles in length. Of this prime route&mdash;the classic
+way&mdash;there are several longer or shorter variations, of which the way
+through Clapham, Mitcham, Sutton, and Reigate, to Povey Cross is the
+chief. The modern &#8220;record&#8221; route is the first of these two, so far as Hand
+Cross, where it branches off and, instead of going through Cuckfield,
+proceeds to Brighton by way of Hickstead and Bolney, avoiding Clayton Hill
+and rejoining the initial route at Pyecombe.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">VARIOUS ROUTES</div>
+
+<p>The oldest road to Brighton is now but little used. It is not to be
+indicated in few words, but may be taken as the line of road from London
+Bridge, along the Kennington Road, to Brixton, Croydon, Godstone Green,
+Tilburstow Hill, Blindley Heath, East Grinstead, Maresfield, Uckfield, and
+Lewes; some fifty-nine miles. This is without doubt the most picturesque
+route. A circuitous way, travelled by some coaches was by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> Ewell,
+Leatherhead, Dorking, Horsham, and Mockbridge (doubtless, bearing in mind
+the ancient mires of Sussex, originally &#8220;Muckbridge&#8221;), and was 57&#189;
+miles in length. An extension of this route lay from Horsham through
+Steyning, bringing up the total mileage to sixty-one miles three furlongs.</p>
+
+<p>This multiplicity of ways meant that, in the variety of winding lanes
+which led to the Sussex coast, long before the fisher village of
+Brighthelmstone became that fashionable resort, Brighton, there were
+places on the way quite as important to the old waggoners and carriers as
+anything at the end of the journey. They set out the direction, and roads,
+when they began to be improved, were often merely the old routes widened,
+straightened, and metalled. They were kept very largely to the old lines,
+and it was not until quite late in the history of Brighton that the
+present &#8220;record&#8221; route in its entirety existed at all.</p>
+
+<p>Among the many isolated roads made or improved, which did not in the
+beginning contemplate getting to Brighton at all, the pride of place
+certainly belongs to the ten miles between Reigate and Crawley, originally
+made as a causeway for horsemen, and guarded by posts, so that wheeled
+traffic could not pass. This was constructed under the Act 8th William
+III., 1696, and was the first new road made in Surrey since the time of
+the Romans.</p>
+
+<p>It remained as a causeway until 1755, when it was widened and thrown open
+to all traffic, on paying toll. It was not only the first road to be made,
+but the last to maintain toll-gates on the way to Brighton, the Reigate
+Turnpike Trust expiring on the midnight of October 31st, 1881, from which
+time the Brighton Road became free throughout.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the road from London to Croydon was repaired in 1718; and at
+the same time the road from London to Sutton was declared to be &#8220;dangerous
+to all persons, horses, and other cattle,&#8221; and almost impassable during
+five months of the year, and was therefore repaired, and toll-gates set up
+along it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>Between 1730 and 1740 Westminster Bridge was building, and the roads in
+South London, including the Westminster Bridge Road and the Kennington
+Road, were being made. In 1755 the road (about ten miles) across the
+heaths and downs from Sutton to Reigate, was authorised, and in 1770 the
+Act was passed for widening and repairing the lanes from Povey Cross to
+County Oak and Brighthelmstone, by Cuckfield. By this time, it will be
+seen, Brighton had begun to be the goal of these improvements.</p>
+
+<p>The New Chapel and Copthorne road, on the East Grinstead route, was
+constructed under the Act of 1770, the route across St. John&#8217;s Common and
+Burgess Hill remodelled in 1780, and the road from South Croydon to
+Smitham Bottom, Merstham, and Reigate was engineered out of the narrow
+lanes formerly existing on that line in 1807-8, being opened, &#8220;at present
+toll-free,&#8221; June 4th. 1808.</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 the Bolney and Hickstead road, between Hand Cross and Pyecombe,
+was opened, and in 1816 the slip-road, avoiding Reigate, through Redhill,
+to Povey Cross. Finally, sixty yards were saved on the Reigate route by
+the cutting of the tunnel under Reigate Castle, in 1823. In this way the
+Brighton road, on its several branches, grew to be what it is now.</p>
+
+<div class="figright"><img src="images/img04.jpg" alt="" /><br />
+<small>SKETCH-MAP<br />SHOWING<br />PRINCIPAL<br />ROUTES TO<br />BRIGHTON.</small></div>
+
+<p>The Brighton Road, it has already been said, is measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, which is the proper starting-point for
+record-makers and breakers; but it has as many beginnings as Homer had
+birthplaces. Modern coaches and motor-car services set out from the
+barrack-like hotels of Northumberland Avenue, or other central points, and
+the old carriers came to and went from the Borough High Street; but the
+Corinthian starting-point in the brave old days of the Regency and of
+George the Fourth was the &#8220;White Horse Cellar&#8221;&mdash;Hatchett&#8217;s &#8220;White Horse
+Cellar&#8221;&mdash;in Piccadilly. There, any day throughout the year, the knowing
+ones were gathered&mdash;with those green goslings who wished to be thought
+knowing&mdash;exchanging the latest scandal and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> sporting gossip of the road,
+and rooking and being rooked; the high-coloured, full-blooded ancestors of
+the present generation, which looks upon them as a quite different order
+of beings, and can scarce believe in the reality of those full habits,
+those port-wine countenances, those florid garments that were
+characteristic of the age.</p>
+
+<p>No one now starts from the &#8220;White Horse Cellar,&#8221; for the excellent reason
+that it does not now exist. The original &#8220;Cellar&#8221; was a queer place.
+Figure to yourself a basement room, with sanded floor, and an odour like
+that of a wine-vault, crowded with Regency bucks drinking or discussing
+huge beef-steaks.</p>
+
+<p>It was situated on the south side of Piccadilly, where the Hotel Ritz now
+stands, and is first mentioned in 1720, when it was given its name by
+Williams, the landlord, in compliment to the House of Hanover, the
+newly-established Royal House of Great Britain, whose cognizance was a
+white horse. Abraham Hatchett first made the Cellar famous, both as a
+boozing-ken and a coach-office, and removed it to the opposite side of the
+street, where, as &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s Hotel and White<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> Horse Cellar.&#8221; it remained
+until 1884, when the present &#8220;Albemarle&#8221; arose on its site, with a &#8220;White
+Horse&#8221; restaurant in the basement.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SPORTSMEN</div>
+
+<p>What Piccadilly and the neighbourhood of the &#8220;White Horse Cellar&#8221; were
+like in the times of Tom and Jerry, we may easily discover from the
+contemporary pages of &#8220;Real Life in London,&#8221; written by one &#8220;Bob Tallyho,&#8221;
+recounting the adventures of himself and &#8220;Tom Dashall.&#8221; A prize-fight was
+to be held on Copthorne Common between Jack Randall, &#8220;the
+Nonpareil&#8221;&mdash;called in the pronunciation of that time the &#8220;Nunparell&#8221;&mdash;and
+Martin, endeared to &#8220;the Fancy&#8221; as the &#8220;Master of the Rolls.&#8221;<a name='fna_1' id='fna_1' href='#f_1'><small>[1]</small></a>
+Naturally, the roads were thronged, and &#8220;Piccadilly was all in
+motion&mdash;coaches, carts, gigs, tilburies, whiskies, buggies, dogcarts,
+sociables, dennets, curricles, and sulkies were passing in rapid
+succession, intermingled with tax-carts and waggons decorated with laurel,
+conveying company of the most varied description. Here was to be seen the
+dashing <i>Corinthian</i> tickling up his <i>tits</i>, and his <i>bang-up set-out</i> of
+<i>blood and bone</i>, giving the go-by to a <i>heavy drag</i> laden with eight
+brawny, bull-faced blades, smoking their way down behind a skeleton of a
+horse, to whom, in all probability, a good feed of corn would have been a
+luxury; <i>pattering</i> among themselves, occasionally <i>chaffing</i> the more
+elevated drivers by whom they were surrounded, and pushing forward their
+nags with all the ardour of a British merchant intent upon disposing of a
+valuable cargo of foreign goods on &#8217;Change. There was a waggon full of
+<i>all sorts</i> upon the <i>lark</i>, succeeded by a <i>donkey-cart</i> with four
+insides: but <i>Neddy</i>, not liking his burthen, stopped short in the way of
+a dandy, whose horse&#8217;s head, coming plump up to the back of the crazy
+vehicle at the moment of its stoppage, threw the rider into the arms of a
+dustman, who, hugging his <i>customer</i> with the determined grasp of a bear,
+swore, d&mdash;n his eyes, he had saved his life, and he expected he would
+stand something handsome for the Gemmen all round,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> for if he had not
+pitched into their cart he would certainly have broke his neck; which
+being complied with, though reluctantly, he regained his saddle, and
+proceeded a little more cautiously along the remainder of the road, while
+groups of pedestrians of all ranks and appearances lined each side.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On their way they pass Hyde Park Corner, where they encounter one of a
+notorious trio of brothers, friends of the Prince Regent and companions of
+his in every sort of excess&mdash;the Barrymores, to wit, named severally
+Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate, the last of this unholy trinity so
+called because of his chronic limping; the two others&#8217; titles, taken with
+the characters of their bearers, are self-explanatory.</p>
+
+<p>Dashall points his lordship out to his companion, who is new to London
+life, and requires such explanations.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LORD CRIPPLEGATE</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;The driver of that tilbury,&#8221; says he, &#8220;is the celebrated Lord
+Cripplegate,<a name='fna_2' id='fna_2' href='#f_2'><small>[2]</small></a> with his usual equipage; his blue cloak with a scarlet
+lining hanging loosely over the vehicle gives an air of importance to his
+appearance, and he is always attended by that boy, who has been
+denominated his Cupid: he is a nobleman by birth, a gentleman by courtesy
+(oh, witty Dashall!), and a gamester by profession. He exhausted a large
+estate upon <i>odd and even</i>, <i>seven&#8217;s the main</i>, etc., till, having lost
+sight of the <i>main chance</i>, he found it necessary to curtail his
+establishment and enliven his prospects by exchanging a first floor for a
+second, without an opportunity of ascertaining whether or not these
+alterations were best suited to his high notions or exalted taste; from
+which, in a short time, he was induced, either by inclination or
+necessity, to take a small lodging in an obscure street, and to sport a
+gig and one horse, instead of a curricle and pair, though in former times
+he used to drive four-in-hand, and was acknowledged to be an excellent
+whip. He still, however, possessed money enough to collect together a
+large quantity of halfpence, which in his hours of relaxation he managed
+to turn to good account by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> following stratagem:&mdash;He distributed his
+halfpence on the floor of his little parlour in straight lines, and
+ascertained how many it would require to cover it. Having thus prepared
+himself, he invited some wealthy spendthrifts (with whom he still had the
+power of associating) to sup with him, and he welcomed them to his
+habitation with much cordiality. The glass circulated freely, and each
+recounted his gaming or amorous adventures till a late hour, when, the
+effects of the bottle becoming visible, he proposed, as a momentary
+suggestion, to name how many halfpence, laid side by side, would carpet
+the floor, and offered to lay a large wager that he would guess the
+nearest.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Done! done!&#8217; was echoed round the room. Every one made a deposit of
+&pound;100, and every one made a guess, equally certain of success; and his
+lordship declaring he had a large stock of halfpence by him, though
+perhaps not enough, the experiment was to be tried immediately. &#8217;Twas an
+excellent hit!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The room was cleared; to it they went; the halfpence were arranged rank
+and file in military order, when it appeared that his lordship had
+certainly guessed (as well he might) nearest to the number. The
+consequence was an immediate alteration of his lordship&#8217;s residence and
+appearance: he got one step in the world by it. He gave up his second-hand
+gig for one warranted new; and a change in his vehicle may pretty
+generally be considered as the barometer of his pocket.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And so, with these piquant biographical remarks, they betook themselves
+along the road in the early morning, passing on their way many curious
+itinerants, whose trades have changed and decayed, and are now become
+nothing but a dim and misty memory; as, for instance, the sellers of warm
+&#8220;salop,&#8221; the forerunners of the early coffee-stalls of our own day.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<p>But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never,
+while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be
+dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either
+end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a <i>Via Regia</i>.
+It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton,
+and until the last&mdash;for close upon forty-eight years&mdash;it retained his
+affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when
+we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I
+have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the
+courtly Lawrence, in this book.</p>
+
+<p>The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his
+upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can
+mould the world to their own form.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE PRINCE</div>
+
+<p>The character of George the Fourth has been the theme of writers upon
+history and sociology, of essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without
+number, and most of them have pictured him in very dark colours indeed.
+But Horace Walpole, perhaps the clearest-headed of this company, shows in
+his &#8220;Last Journals&#8221; that from his boyhood the Prince was governed in the
+stupidest way&mdash;in a manner, indeed, but too well fitted to spoil a spirit
+so high and so impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his.</p>
+
+<p>He proves what we may abundantly learn from other sources, that the
+narrow-minded and obstinate George the Third, petty and parochial in
+public and in private, was jealous of his son&#8217;s superior parts, and
+endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of seclusion and
+inadequate training. It was impossible for such a father to appreciate
+either the qualities or the defects of such a son. &#8220;The uncommunicative
+selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him to domestic
+virtues,&#8221; says Walpole, and adds, &#8220;Nothing could equal the King&#8217;s
+attention to seclude his son<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> and protract his nonage. It went so absurdly
+far that he was made to wear a shirt with a frilled collar like that of
+babies. He one day took hold of his collar and said to a domestic, &#8216;See
+how I am treated!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of Montagu, too, was charged with the education of the Prince,
+and &#8220;he was utterly incapable of giving him any kind of instruction....
+The Prince was so good-natured, but so uninformed, that he often said, &#8216;I
+wish anybody would tell me what I ought to do; nobody gives me any
+instruction for my conduct.&#8217;&#8221; The absolute poverty of the instruction
+afforded him, the false and narrow ways of the royal household, and the
+evil example and low companionship of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland,
+did much to spoil the Prince.</p>
+
+<p>To quote Walpole again: &#8220;It made men smile to find that in the palace of
+piety and pride his Royal Highness had learnt nothing but the dialect of
+footmen and grooms.... He drunk hard, swore, and passed every night in<a name='fna_3' id='fna_3' href='#f_3'><small>[3]</small></a>
+...; such were the fruits of his being locked up in the palace of piety.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He proved, too, an intractable and undutiful son; but that was the result
+to be expected, and we cannot join Thackeray in his sentimental snivel
+over George the Third.</p>
+
+<p>He was a faithless husband, but his wife was impossible, and even the mob
+who supported her quailed when the Marquis of Anglesey, baited in front of
+his house and compelled to drink her health, did so with the bitter rider,
+&#8220;And may all your wives be like her!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All high-spirited young England flocked to the side of the Prince of
+Wales. He was the Grand Master of Corinthianism and Tom-and-Jerryism. It
+was he who peopled these roads with a numerous and brilliant concourse of
+whirling travellers, where before had been only infrequent plodders amidst
+the Sussex sloughs. To his princely presence, radiant by the Old Steyne,
+hasted all manner of people; prince and prizefighter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> statesman and
+nobleman; beauties noble and ignoble, and all who <i>lived</i> their lives.
+There he made incautious guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy
+he called &#8220;Diabolino,&#8221; and then exposed them in embarrassing situations;
+and there&mdash;let us remember it&mdash;he entertained, and was the beneficent
+patron of, the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The
+<i>Zeitgeist</i> (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was personified in, and
+radiated from him. He was the First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in
+the perspective of a hundred years or so, something more: the type and
+exemplar of an age.</p>
+
+<p>He should have been endowed with perennial youth, but even his splendid
+vitality faded at last, and he grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a &#8220;fat
+Adonis of fifty,&#8221; and was flung into prison for it; and prison is a
+fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see a misdemeanour in
+those misfortunes. No one who could help it would be fat, or fifty.
+Besides, to accuse one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon
+all: it is an accompaniment of royalty.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray denounced his wig; but there is a prejudice in favour of flowing
+locks, and the King gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for
+being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig; and it seems a curious code of
+morality that would have it so; for although we may not all lose our hair
+nor grow fat, we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and pass
+the grand climacteric.</p>
+
+<p>There has been too much abuse of the Regency times. Where modern
+moralists, folded within their little sheep-walks from observation of the
+real world, mistake is in comparing those times with these, to the
+disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of life in the round, and
+seeing it only in the flat, cannot predicate what exists on the other
+side. To them there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the
+poet, <i>are</i> what they seem, and nothing else.</p>
+
+<p>They lash the manners of the Regency, and think they are dealing out
+punishment to a bygone state of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> things; but human nature is the same in
+all centuries. The fact is so obvious that one is ashamed to state it. The
+Regency was a terrible time for gambling; but Tranby Croft had a similar
+repute when Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales. Bridge is a fine game,
+and what, think you, supports the evening newspapers? The news? Certainly:
+the Betting News. Cock-fighting was a brutal sport, and is now illegal,
+but is it dead? Oh dear, no. Virtue was not general in the picturesque
+times of George the Fourth. Is it now? Study the Cause Lists of the
+Divorce Courts. Worse offences are still punished by law, but are later
+condoned or explained by Society as an eccentricity. Society a hundred
+years ago did not plumb such depths.</p>
+
+<p>In short, behind the surface of things, the Regency riot not only exists,
+but is outdone, and Tom and Jerry, could they return, would find
+themselves very dull dogs indeed. It is all the doing of the middle
+classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the
+middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at
+Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed;
+but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper
+and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is&mdash;or they
+are&mdash;more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a
+power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other
+classes above and below.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SOCIETY: THEN AND NOW</div>
+
+<p>The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it
+then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in
+1681. In De Laune&#8217;s &#8220;Present State of Great Britain,&#8221; published in that
+year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in
+and out of London, we find<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from
+&#8220;Bredhempstone&#8221; to the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s Head,&#8221; Southwark, on Wednesdays, and,
+setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which
+was remarkably good travelling for a carrier&#8217;s waggon in the seventeenth
+century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far
+as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road.
+It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of &#8220;New Remarks on London,&#8221;
+published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At
+that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the &#8220;Talbot,&#8221; in the Borough
+High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the &#8220;Talbot&#8221; and the &#8220;George.&#8221; In
+the summer of 1745 the &#8220;Flying Machine&#8221; left the &#8220;Old Ship,&#8221;
+Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening.</p>
+
+<p>But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the
+widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in <i>The Lewes Journal</i> of December
+8th that she was continuing the business:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Thomas Smith</span>, the <span class="smcap">Old Lewes Carrier</span>, being dead, <span class="smcaplc">THE BUSINESS IS NOW
+CONTINUED BY HIS WIDOW, MARY SMITH</span>, who gets into the &#8220;George Inn,&#8221; in
+the Borough, Southwark, <span class="smcaplc">EVERY WEDNESDAY</span> in the afternoon, and sets out
+for Lewes <span class="smcaplc">EVERY THURSDAY</span> morning by eight o&#8217;clock, and brings Goods
+and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick and all places
+adjacent at reasonable rates.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Performed (<i>if God permit</i>) by</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">MARY SMITH.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>We may perceive by these early records that the real original way down to
+the Sussex coast was by the Croydon, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes
+route, and that its outlet must have been Newhaven, which, despite its
+name, is so very ancient a place, and was a port and harbour when
+Brighthelmstone was but a fisher-village.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img05.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">STAGE WAGGON, 1808.<br /><small><i>From a contemporary drawing.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>That is the only glimpse we get of the widow Smith and her waggon; but the
+&#8220;George Inn, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> Borough,&#8221; that she &#8220;got into,&#8221; is still in the
+Borough High Street. It is a fine and flourishing remnant of an ancient
+galleried hostelry of the time of Chaucer, and it is characteristic of the
+continuity of English social, as well as political history that, although
+waggons and coaches no longer come to or set out from the &#8220;George,&#8221; its
+spacious yard is now a railway receiving-office for goods, where the
+railway vans, those descendants of the stage-waggon, thunderously come and
+go all day.</p>
+
+<p>It will be observed that the traffic in those days went to and from
+Southwark, which was then the great business centre for the carriers. Not
+yet was the Brighton road measured from Westminster Bridge, for the
+adequate reason that there was no bridge at Westminster until 1749: only
+the ferry from the Horseferry Road to Lambeth.</p>
+
+<p>Widow Smith&#8217;s waggon halted at Lewes, and it is not until ten years later
+than the date of her advertisement that we hear of the Brighthelmstone
+conveyance. The first was that announced by the pioneer, James Batchelor,
+in <i>The Sussex Weekly Advertiser</i>, May 12th, 1756:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the LEWES ONE DAY STAGE COACH or CHAISE
+sets out from the Talbot Inn, in the Borough, on Saturday next, the
+19th instant.</p>
+
+<p>When likewise the Brighthelmstone Stage begins.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Performed (<i>if God permit</i>) by</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">JAMES BATCHELOR.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Talbot&#8221; inn, which stood on the site of the ancient &#8220;Tabard,&#8221; of
+Chaucerian renown, disappeared from the Borough High Street in 1870. What
+its picturesque yard was like in 1815, with the waggons of the Sussex
+carriers, let the illustration tell.</p>
+
+<p>Let us halt awhile, to admire the courage of those coaching and waggoning
+pioneers who, in the days before &#8220;the sea-side&#8221; had been invented, and few
+people travelled, dared the awful roads for what must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> then have been a
+precarious business. Sussex roads in especial had a most unenviable name
+for miriness, and wheeled traffic was so difficult that for many years
+after this period the farmers and others continued to take their womenkind
+about in the pillion fashion here caricatured by Henry Bunbury.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SUSSEX ROADS</div>
+
+<p>Horace Walpole, indeed, travelling in Sussex in 1749, visiting Arundel and
+Cowdray, acquired a too intimate acquaintance with their phenomenal depth
+of mud and ruts, inasmuch as he&mdash;finicking little gentleman&mdash;was compelled
+to alight precipitately from his overturned chaise, and to foot it like
+any common fellow. One quite pities his daintiness in the narration of his
+sorrows, picturesquely set forth by that accomplished letter-writer
+arrived home to the safe seclusion of Strawberry Hill. He writes to George
+Montagu, and dates August 26th, 1749:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mr. Chute and I returned from our expedition miraculously well,
+considering all our distresses. If you love good roads, conveniences, good
+inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into
+Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole
+county has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George
+the Second was the first monarch of the East Angles. Coaches grow there no
+more than balm and spices: we were forced to drop our post-chaise, that
+resembled nothing so much as harlequin&#8217;s calash, which was occasionally a
+chaise or a baker&#8217;s cart. We journeyed over alpine mountains&#8221; (Walpole,
+you will observe, was, equally with the evening journalist of these happy
+times, not unaccustomed to exaggerate) &#8220;drenched in clouds, and thought of
+harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the
+morning clouds, and was so glad to hear the <i>aqua vit&aelig;</i> man crying a
+dram.... I have set up my staff, and finished my pilgrimages for this
+year. Sussex is a great damper of curiosity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus he prattles on, delightfully describing the peculiarities of the
+several places he visited with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> Mr. Chute, &#8220;whom,&#8221; says he, &#8220;I have
+created <i>Strawberry King-at-Arms</i>.&#8221; One wonders what that mute, inglorious
+Chute thought of it all; if he was as disgusted with Sussex sloughs and
+moist unpleasant &#8220;mountains&#8221; as his garrulous companion. Chute suffered in
+silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper did not induce in <i>him</i> a
+fury of composition; and so we shall never know what he endured.</p>
+
+<p>Then the pedantic Doctor John Burton, who journeyed into Sussex in 1751,
+had no less unfortunate acquaintance with these miry ways than our
+<i>dilettante</i> of Strawberry Hill. To those who have small Latin and less
+Greek, this traveller&#8217;s tale must ever remain a sealed book; for it is in
+those languages that he records his views upon ways and means, and men and
+manners, in Sussex. As thus, for example:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I fell immediately upon all that was most bad, upon a land desolate and
+muddy, whether inhabited by men or beasts a stranger could not easily
+distinguish, and upon roads which were, to explain concisely what is most
+abominable, Sussexian. No one would imagine them to be intended for the
+people and the public, but rather the byways of individuals, or, more
+truly, the tracks of cattle-drivers; for everywhere the usual footmarks of
+oxen appeared, and we too, who were on horseback, going along zigzag,
+almost like oxen at plough, advanced as if we were turning back, while we
+followed out all the twists of the roads.... My friend, I will set before
+you a kind of problem in the manner of Aristotle:&mdash;Why comes it that the
+oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals(!) are so long-legged in
+Sussex? Can it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much
+mud by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles become stretched, as
+it were, and the bones lengthened?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A doleful tale. Presently he arrives at the conclusion that the peasantry
+&#8220;do not concern themselves with literature or philosophy, for they
+consider the pursuit of such things to be only idling,&#8221; which is not so
+very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> remarkable a trait, after all, in the character of an agricultural
+people.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img06.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;TALBOT&#8221; INN YARD. BOROUGH, ABOUT 1815.<br /><small><i>From an old drawing.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>Our author eventually, notwithstanding the terrible roads, arrived at
+Brighthelmstone, by way of Lewes, &#8220;just as day was fading.&#8221; It was, so he
+says, &#8220;a village on the sea-coast; lying in a valley gradually sloping,
+and yet deep. It is not, indeed, contemptible as to size, for it is
+thronged with people, though the inhabitants are mostly very needy and
+wretched in their mode of living, occupied in the employment of fishing,
+robust in their bodies, laborious, and skilled in all nautical crafts,
+and, as it is said, terrible cheats of the custom-house officers.&#8221; As who,
+indeed, is not, allowing the opportunity?</p>
+
+<p>Batchelor, the pioneer of Brighton coaching, continued his enterprise in
+1757, and with the coming of spring, and the drying of the roads, his
+coaches, which had been laid up in the winter, after the usual custom of
+those times, were plying again. In May he advertised, &#8220;for the convenience
+of country gentlemen, etc.,&#8221; his London, Lewes, and Brighthelmstone
+stage-coach, which performed the journey of fifty-eight miles in two days;
+and exclusive persons, who preferred to travel alone, might have
+post-chaises of him.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">EARLY COACHING</div>
+
+<p>Brighthelmstone had in the meanwhile sprung into notice. The health-giving
+qualities of its sea air, and the then &#8220;strange new eccentricity&#8221; of
+sea-bathing, advocated from 1750 by Dr. Richard Russell, had already given
+it something of a vogue among wealthy invalids, and the growing traffic
+was worth competing for. Competitors therefore sprang up to share
+Batchelor&#8217;s business. Most of them merely added stage-coaches like his,
+but in May, 1762, a certain &#8220;J. Tubb,&#8221; in partnership with &#8220;S. Brawne,&#8221;
+started a very superior conveyance, going from London one day and
+returning from Brighthelmstone the next. This was the:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>LEWES and BRIGHTELMSTONE new FLYING MACHINE (by Uckfield), hung on
+steel springs, very neat and commodious, to carry <span class="smcap">Four Passengers</span>,
+sets out from the Golden Cross Inn, Charing Cross, on Monday, the 7th
+of June, at six o&#8217;clock in the morning, and will continue <span class="smcap">Monday&#8217;s</span>,
+<span class="smcap">Wednesday&#8217;s</span>, and <span class="smcap">Friday&#8217;s</span> to the White Hart, at Lewes, and the Castle,
+at Brightelmstone, where regular Books are kept for entering
+passenger&#8217;s and parcels; will return to London <span class="smcap">Tuesday&#8217;s</span>, <span class="smcap">Thursday&#8217;s</span>,
+and <span class="smcap">Saturday&#8217;s</span> Each Inside Passenger to Lewes, Thirteen Shillings; to
+Brighthelmstone, Sixteen; to be allowed Fourteen Pound Weight for
+Luggage, all above to pay One Penny per Pound; half the fare to be
+paid at Booking, the other at entering the machine. Children in Lap
+and Outside Passengers to pay half-price.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Performed by J. TUBB.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 9.5em;">S. BRAWNE.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img07.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">ME AND MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER.<br /><small><i>From a caricature by Henry Bunbury.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>Batchelor saw with dismay this coach performing the whole journey in one
+day, while his took two. But he determined to be as good a man as his
+opponent, if not even a better, and started the next week, at identical
+fares, &#8220;a new large <span class="smcap">Flying Chariot</span>, with a Box and four horses (by
+Chailey) to carry two Passengers only, except three should desire to go
+together.&#8221; The better to crush the presumptuous Tubb, he later on reduced
+his fares. Then ensued a diverting, if by no means edifying, war of
+advertisements; for Tubb, unwilling to be outdone, inserted the following
+in <i>The Lewes Journal</i>, November, 1762:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>THIS IS TO INFORM THE PUBLIC that, on Monday, the 1st of November
+instant, the LEWES and BRIGHTHELMSTON FLYING MACHINE began going in
+<i>one day</i>, and continues twice a week during the Winter Season to
+Lewes only; sets out from the White Hart, at Lewes, <span class="smcap">Mondays</span> and
+<span class="smcap">Thursdays</span> at Six o&#8217;clock in the Morning, and returns from the Golden
+Cross, at Charing Cross, <span class="smcap">Tuesdays</span> and <span class="smcap">Saturdays</span>, at the same hour.</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">Performed by J. TUBB.</span></p>
+
+<p>N.B.&mdash;Gentlemen, Ladies, and others, are desired to look narrowly into
+the Meanness and Design of the other Flying Machine to Lewes and
+Brighthelmston, in lowering his <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>prices, whether &#8217;tis thro&#8217; conscience
+or an endeavour to suppress me. If the former is the case, think how
+you have been used for a great number of years, when he engrossed the
+whole to himself, and kept you two days upon the road, going fifty
+miles. If the latter, and he should be lucky enough to succeed in it,
+judge whether he wont return to his old prices, when you cannot help
+yourselves, and use you as formerly. As I have, then, been the remover
+of this obstacle, which you have all granted by your great
+encouragement to me hitherto, I, therefore, hope for the continuance
+of your favours, which will entirely frustrate the deep-laid schemes
+of my great opponent, and lay a lasting obligation on,&mdash;Your very
+humble Servant,</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">J. TUBB.</span></p></div>
+
+<p>To this replies Batchelor, possessed with an idea of vested interests
+pertaining to himself:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>WHEREAS, Mr. <span class="smcap">Tubb</span>, by an Advertisement in this paper of Monday last,
+has thought fit to cast some invidious Reflections upon me, in respect
+of the lowering my Prices and being two days upon the Road, with other
+low insinuations, I beg leave to submit the following matters to the
+calm Consideration of the Gentlemen, Ladies, and other Passengers, of
+what Degree soever, who have been pleased to favour me, viz.:</p>
+
+<p>That our Family first set up the Stage Coach from London to Lewes, and
+have continued it for a long Series of Years, from Father to Son and
+other Branches of the same Race, and that even before the Turnpikes on
+the Lewes Road were erected they drove their Stage, in the Summer
+Season, in one day, and have continued to do ever since, and now in
+the Winter Season twice in the week. And it is likewise to be
+considered that many aged and infirm Persons, who did not chuse to
+rise early in the Morning, were very desirous to be two Days on the
+Road for their own Ease and Conveniency, therefore there was no
+obstacle to be removed. And as to lowering my prices, let every one
+judge whether, when an old Servant of the Country perceives an
+Endeavour to suppress and supplant him in his Business, he is not well
+justified in taking all measures in his Power for his own Security,
+and even to oppose an unfair Adversary as far as he can. &#8217;Tis,
+therefore, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>hoped that the descendants of your very ancient Servants
+will still meet with your farther Encouragement, and leave the Schemes
+of our little Opponent to their proper Deserts.&mdash;I am, Your old and
+present most obedient Servant,</p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 4em;">J. BATCHELOR.</span></p>
+
+<p><i>December 13, 1762.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>The rivals both kept to the road until the death of Batchelor, in 1766,
+when his business was sold to Tubb, who took into partnership a Mr. Davis.
+Together they started, in 1767, the first service of a daily coach in the
+&#8220;Lewes and Brighthelmstone Flys,&#8221; each carrying four passengers, one to
+London and one to Brighton every day.</p>
+
+<p>Tubb and Davis had in 1770 one &#8220;machine&#8221; and one waggon on this road, fare
+by &#8220;machine&#8221; 14<i>s.</i> The machine ran daily to and from London, starting at
+five o&#8217;clock in the morning. The waggon was three days on the road.
+Another machine was also running, but with the coming of winter these
+machines performed only three double journeys each a week.</p>
+
+<p>In 1777 another stage-waggon was started by &#8220;Lashmar &amp; Co.&#8221; It loitered
+between the &#8220;King&#8217;s Head,&#8221; Southwark, and the &#8220;King&#8217;s Head,&#8221; Brighton,
+starting from London every Tuesday at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m., and
+reaching its destination on Thursday afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>On May 31st, 1784, Tubb and Davis put a &#8220;light post-coach&#8221; on the road,
+running to Brighton one day returning to London the next, in addition to
+their already running &#8220;machine&#8221; and &#8220;post-coach.&#8221; This new conveyance
+presumably made good time, four &#8220;insides&#8221; only being carried.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GROWTH OF COACHING</div>
+
+<p>Four years later, when Brighton&#8217;s sun of splendour was rising, there were
+on the road between London and the sea three &#8220;machines,&#8221; three light
+post-coaches, two coaches, and two stage-waggons. Tubb now disappears, and
+his firm becomes Davis &amp; Co. Other proprietors were Ibberson &amp; Co.,
+Bradford &amp; Co., and Mr. Wesson.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>On May 1st, 1791, the first Brighton Mail coach was established. It was a
+two-horse affair, running by Lewes and East Grinstead, and taking twelve
+hours to perform the journey. It was not well supported by the public, and
+as the Post Office would not pay the contractors a higher mileage, it was
+at some uncertain period withdrawn.</p>
+
+<p>About 1796 coach offices were opened in Brighton for the sole despatch of
+coaching business, the time having passed away for the old custom of
+starting from inns. Now, too, were different tales to tell of these roads,
+after the Pavilion had been set in course of building. Royalty and the
+Court could not endure to travel upon such evil tracks as had hitherto
+been the lot of travellers to Brighthelmstone. Presently, instead of a
+dearth of roads and a plethora of ruts, there became a choice of good
+highways and a plenty of travellers upon them.</p>
+
+<p>Numerous coaches ran to meet the demands of the travelling public, and
+these continually increased in number and improved in speed. About this
+time first appear the firms of Henwood, Crossweller, Cuddington, Pockney &amp;
+Harding, whose office was at No. 44, East Street: and Boulton, Tilt,
+Hicks, Baulcomb &amp; Co., at No. 1, North Street. The most remarkable thing,
+to my mind, about those companies is their long-winded names. In addition
+to the old service, there ran a &#8220;night post-coach&#8221; on alternate nights,
+starting at 10 p.m. in the season. One then went to or from London
+generally in &#8220;about&#8221; eleven hours, if all went well. If you could afford
+only a ride in the stage-waggon, why then you were carried the distance by
+the accelerated (!) waggons of this line in two days and one night.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<p>Erredge, the historian of Brighton, tells something of the social side of
+Brighton Road coaching at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social
+indeed, as you shall see:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In 1801 two pair-horse coaches ran between London and Brighton on
+alternate days, one up, the other down, driven by Messrs. Crossweller and
+Hine. The progress of these coaches was amusing. The one from London left
+the Blossoms Inn, Lawrence Lane, at 7 a.m., the passengers breaking their
+fast at the Cock, Sutton, at 9. The next stoppage for the purpose of
+refreshment was at the Tangier, Banstead Downs&mdash;a rural little spot,
+famous for its elderberry wine, which used to be brought from the cottage
+&#8216;roking hot,&#8217; and on a cold wintry morning few refused to partake of it.
+George IV. invariably stopped here and took a glass from the hand of Miss
+Jeal as he sat in his carriage. The important business of luncheon took
+place at Reigate, where sufficient time was allowed the passengers to view
+the Baron&#8217;s Cave, where, it is said, the barons assembled the night
+previous to their meeting King John at Runymeade. The grand halt for
+dinner was made at Staplefield Common, celebrated for its famous black
+cherry-trees, under the branches of which, when the fruit was ripe, the
+coaches were allowed to draw up and the passengers to partake of its
+tempting produce. The hostess of the hostelry here was famed for her
+rabbit-puddings, which, hot, were always waiting the arrival of the coach,
+and to which the travellers never failed to do such ample justice, that
+ordinarily they found it quite impossible to leave at the hour appointed;
+so grogs, pipes, and ale were ordered in, and, to use the language of the
+fraternity, &#8216;not a wheel wagged&#8217; for two hours. Handcross was a little
+resting-place, celebrated for its &#8216;neat&#8217; liquors, the landlord of the inn
+standing, bottle in hand, at the door. He and several other bonifaces at
+Friars&#8217; Oak, etc., had the reputation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> being on pretty good terms with
+the smugglers who carried on their operations with such audacity along the
+Sussex coast.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;After walking up Clayton Hill, a cup of tea was sometimes found to be
+necessary at Patcham, after which Brighton was safely reached at 7 p.m. It
+must be understood that it was the custom for the passengers to walk up
+all the hills, and even sometimes in heavy weather to give a push behind
+to assist the jaded horses.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">COMPETITION</div>
+
+<p>But it was not always so ideal or so idyllic. That there were discomforts
+and accidents is evident from the wordy warfare of advertisements that
+followed upon the starting of the Royal Brighton Four Horse Company in
+1802. As a competitor with older firms, it seems to have aroused much
+jealousy and slander, if we may believe the following contemporary
+advertisement:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>THE ROYAL BRIGHTON Four Horse Coach Company beg leave to return their
+sincere thanks to their Friends and the Public in general for the very
+liberal support they have experienced since the starting of their
+Coaches, and assure them it will always be their greatest study to
+have their Coaches safe, with good Horses and sober careful Coachmen.</p>
+
+<p>They likewise wish to rectify a report in circulation of their Coach
+having been overturned on Monday last, by which a gentleman&#8217;s leg was
+broken, &amp;c., no such thing having ever happened to either of their
+Coaches. The Fact is it was one of the <span class="smcap">Blue Coaches</span> instead of the
+Royal New Coach.</p>
+
+<p>&#8258; As several mistakes have happened, of their friends being
+<span class="smcaplc">BOOKED</span> at other Coach offices, they are requested to book themselves
+at the ROYAL NEW COACH OFFICE, CATHERINE&#8217;S HEAD, 47, East Street.</p></div>
+
+<p>The coaching business grew rapidly, and in an advertisement offering for
+sale a portion of the coaching business at No. 1, North Street, it was
+stated that the annual returns of this firm were more than &pound;12,000 per
+annum, yielding from Christmas, 1794, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> Christmas, 1808, seven and a
+half per cent. on the capital invested, besides purchasing the interest of
+four of the partners in the concern. In this last year two new businesses
+were started, those of Waldegrave &amp; Co., and Pattenden &amp; Co. Fares now
+ruled high&mdash;23<i>s.</i> inside; 13<i>s.</i> outside.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1809 marked the beginning of a new and strenuous coaching era on
+this road. Then Crossweller &amp; Co. commenced to run their &#8220;morning and
+night&#8221; coaches, and William &#8220;Miller&#8221; Bradford formed his company. This was
+an association of twelve members, contributing &pound;100 each, for the purpose
+of establishing a &#8220;double&#8221; coach&mdash;that is to say, one up and one down,
+each day. The idea was to &#8220;lick creation&#8221; on the Brighton Road by
+accelerating the speed, and to this end they acquired some forty-five
+horses then sold out of the Inniskilling Dragoons, at that time stationed
+at Brighton. On May Day, 1810, the Brighton Mail was re-established. These
+&#8220;Royal Night Mail Coaches&#8221; as they were grandiloquently announced, were
+started by arrangement with the Postmaster-General. The speed, although
+much improved, was not yet so very great, eight hours being occupied on
+the way, although these coaches went by what was then the new cut <i>via</i>
+Croydon. Like the Dover. Hastings, and Portsmouth mails, the Brighton Mail
+was two-horsed. It ran to and from the &#8220;Blossoms&#8221; Inn, Lawrence Lane,
+Cheapside, and never attained a better performance than 7 hours 20
+minutes, a speed of 7&#189; miles an hour. It had, however, <i>this</i>
+distinction, if it may so be called: it was the slowest mail in the
+kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>It was on June 25th, 1810, that an accident befell Waldegrave&#8217;s
+&#8220;Accommodation&#8221; coach on its up journey. Near Brixton Causeway its hind
+wheels collapsed, owing to the heavy weight of the loaded vehicle. By one
+of those strange chances when truth appears stranger than fiction, there
+chanced to be a farmer&#8217;s waggon passing the coach at the instant of its
+overturning. Into it were shot the &#8220;outsiders,&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> fortunate in this
+comparatively easy fall. Still, shocks and bruises were not few, and one
+gentleman had his thigh broken.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">A COACH ROBBERY</div>
+
+<p>By June, 1811, traffic had so increased that there were then no fewer than
+twenty-eight coaches running between Brighton and London. On February 5th
+in the following year occurred the only great road robbery known on this
+road. This was the theft from the &#8220;Blue&#8221; coach of a package of bank-notes
+representing a sum of between three and four thousand pounds sterling.
+Crosswellers were proprietors of the coach, and from them Messrs. Brown,
+Lashmar &amp; West, of the Brighton Union Bank, had hired a box beneath the
+seat for the conveyance of remittances to and from London. On this day the
+Bank&#8217;s London correspondents placed these notes in the box for
+transmission to London, but on arrival the box was found to have been
+broken open and the notes all stolen. It would seem that a carefully
+planned conspiracy had been entered into by several persons, who must have
+had a thorough knowledge of the means by which the Union Bank sent and
+received money to and from the metropolis. On this morning six persons
+were booked for inside places. Of this number two only made an
+appearance&mdash;a gentleman and a lady. Two gentlemen were picked up as the
+coach proceeded. The lady was taken suddenly ill when Sutton was reached,
+and she and her husband were left at the inn there. When the coach arrived
+at Reigate the two remaining passengers went to inquire for a friend.
+Returning shortly, they told the coachman that the friend whom they had
+supposed to be at Brighton had returned to town, therefore it was of no
+use proceeding further.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the coachman and guard had the remainder of the journey to
+themselves, while the cash-box, as was discovered at the journey&#8217;s end,
+was minus its cash. A reward of &pound;300 was immediately offered for
+information that would lead to recovery of the notes. This was
+subsequently altered to an offer of 100 guineas<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> for information of the
+offender, in addition to &pound;300 upon recovery of the total amount, or &#8220;ten
+per cent. upon the amount of so much thereof as shall be recovered.&#8221; No
+reward money was ever paid, for the notes were never recovered, and the
+thieves escaped with their booty.</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 the &#8220;Defiance&#8221; was started, to run to and from Brighton and London
+in the daytime, each way six hours. This produced the rival &#8220;Eclipse,&#8221;
+which belied the suggestion of its name and did not eclipse, but only
+equalled, the performance of its model. But competition had now grown very
+severe, and fares in consequence were reduced to&mdash;inside, ten shillings;
+outside, five shillings. Indeed, in 1816, a number of Jews started a coach
+to run from London to Brighton in six hours: or, failing to keep time, to
+forfeit all fares. Needless to say, under such Hebrew management, and with
+that liability, it was punctuality itself; but Nemesis awaited it, in the
+shape of an information laid for furious driving.</p>
+
+<p>The Mail, meanwhile, maintained its ancient pace of a little over six
+miles an hour&mdash;a dignified, no-hurry, governmental rate of progression.
+There was, in fact, no need for the Brighton Mail to make speed, for the
+road from the General Post Office is only fifty-three miles in length, and
+all the night and the early morning, from eight o&#8217;clock until five or six
+o&#8217;clock a.m., lay before it.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<p>We come now to the &#8220;Era of the Amateur,&#8221; who not only flourished
+pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on
+it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence
+almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became &#8220;the thing&#8221; to
+drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition,
+there arose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur
+Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by
+Corinthian gambols, and taking to the one trade on earth at which he could
+earn a wage. That is why the Golden Age of coaching won on the Brighton
+Road a refinement it only aped elsewhere.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">ARISTOCRATIC COACHMEN</div>
+
+<p>It is curious to see how coaching has always been, even in its serious
+days, before steam was thought of, the chosen amusement of wealthy and
+aristocratic whips. Of those who affected the Brighton Road may be
+mentioned the Marquis of Worcester, who drove the &#8220;Duke of Beaufort,&#8221; Sir
+St. Vincent Cotton of the &#8220;Age,&#8221; and the Hon. Fred Jerningham, who drove
+the Day Mail. The &#8220;Age,&#8221; too, had been driven by Mr. Stevenson, a
+gentleman and a graduate of Cambridge, whose &#8220;passion for the <i>bench</i>,&#8221; as
+&#8220;Nimrod&#8221; says, superseded all other worldly ambitions. He became a
+coachman by profession, and a good professional he made; but he had not
+forgotten his education and early training, and he was, as a whip,
+singularly refined and courteous. He caused, at a certain change of horses
+on the road, a silver sandwich-box to be handed round to the passengers by
+his servant, with an offer of a glass of sherry, should any desire one.
+Another gentleman, &#8220;connected with the first families in Wales,&#8221; whose
+father long represented his native county in Parliament, horsed and drove
+one side of this ground with Mr. Stevenson.</p>
+
+<p>This was &#8220;Sackie,&#8221; Sackville Frederick Gwynne, of Carmarthenshire, who
+quarrelled with his relatives and took to the road; became part proprietor
+of the &#8220;Age,&#8221; broke off from Stevenson, and eventually lived and died at
+Liverpool as a cabdriver. He drove a cab till 1874, when he died, aged
+seventy-three.</p>
+
+<p>Harry Stevenson&#8217;s connection with the Brighton Road began in 1827, when,
+as a young man fresh from Cambridge, he brought with him such a social
+atmosphere and such full-fledged expertness in driving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> a coach that
+Cripps, a coachmaster of Brighton and proprietor of the &#8220;Coronet,&#8221; not
+only was overjoyed to have him on the box, but went so far as to paint his
+name on the coach as one of the licensees, for which false declaration
+Cripps was fined in November, 1827.</p>
+
+<p>The parentage and circumstances of Harry Stevenson are alike mysterious.
+We are told that he &#8220;went the pace,&#8221; and was already penniless at
+twenty-two years of age, about the time of his advent upon the Brighton
+Road. In 1828 his famous &#8220;Age&#8221; was put on the road, built for him by
+Aldebert, the foremost coach-builder of the period, and appointed in every
+way with unexampled luxury. The gold- and silver-embroidered horse-cloths
+of the &#8220;Age&#8221; are very properly preserved in the Brighton Museum.
+Stevenson&#8217;s career was short, for he died in February, 1830.</p>
+
+<p>Coaching authorities give the palm for artistry to whips of other roads:
+they considered the excellence of this as fatal to the production of those
+qualities that went to make an historic name. This road had become
+&#8220;perhaps the most nearly perfect, and certainly the most fashionable, of
+all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>With the introduction of this sporting and irresponsible element, racing
+between rival coaches&mdash;and not the mere conveying of passengers&mdash;became
+the real interest of the coachmen, and proprietors were obliged to issue
+notices to assure the timid that this form of rivalry would be
+discouraged. A slow coach, the &#8220;Life Preserver,&#8221; was even put on the road
+to win the support of old ladies and the timid, who, as the record of
+accidents tells us, did well to be timorous. But accidents <i>would</i> happen
+to fast and slow alike. The &#8220;Coburg&#8221; was upset at Cuckfield in August,
+1819. Six of the passengers were so much injured that they could not
+proceed, and one died the following day at the &#8220;King&#8217;s Head.&#8221; The &#8220;Coburg&#8221;
+was an old-fashioned coach, heavy, clumsy, and slow, carrying six
+passengers inside and twelve outside. This type gave place to coaches
+of lighter build about 1823.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img08.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;DUKE OF BEAUFORT&#8221; COACH STARTING FROM THE<br />&#8220;BULL AND MOUTH&#8221; OFFICE, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, 1826.<br />
+<small><i>From an aquatint after W. J. Shayer.</i></small></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>In 1826 seventeen coaches ran to Brighton from London every morning,
+afternoon, or evening. They had all of them the most high-sounding of
+names, calculated to impress the mind either with a sense of swiftness, or
+to awe the understanding with visions of aristocratic and court-like
+grandeur. As for the times they individually made, and for the inns from
+which they started, you who are insatiable of dry bones of fact may go to
+the Library of the British Museum and find your Cary (without an &#8220;e&#8221;) and
+do your gnawing of them. That they started at all manner of hours, even
+the most uncanny, you must rest assured; and that they took off from the
+(to ourselves) most impossible and romantic-sounding of inns, may be
+granted, when such examples as the strangely incongruous &#8220;George and Blue
+Boar,&#8221; the Herrick-like &#8220;Blossoms&#8221; Inn, and the idyllic-seeming
+&#8220;Flower-pot&#8221; are mentioned.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NAMES OF THE COACHES</div>
+
+<p>They were, those seventeen coaches, the &#8220;Royal Mail,&#8221; the &#8220;Coronet,&#8221;
+&#8220;Magnet,&#8221; &#8220;Comet,&#8221; &#8220;Royal Sussex,&#8221; &#8220;Sovereign,&#8221; &#8220;Alert,&#8221; &#8220;Dart,&#8221; &#8220;Union,&#8221;
+&#8220;Regent,&#8221; &#8220;Times,&#8221; &#8220;Duke of York,&#8221; &#8220;Royal George,&#8221; &#8220;True Blue,&#8221; &#8220;Patriot,&#8221;
+&#8220;Post,&#8221; and the &#8220;Summer Coach,&#8221; so called, and they nearly all started
+from the City and Holborn, calling at West End booking-offices on their
+several ways. Most of the old inns from which they set out are pulled
+down, and the memory of them has faded.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Golden Cross&#8221; at Charing Cross, from whose doors started the &#8220;Comet&#8221;
+and the &#8220;Regent&#8221; in this year of grace 1826, and at which the &#8220;Times&#8221;
+called on its way from Holborn, has been wholly remodelled; the &#8220;White
+Horse,&#8221; Fetter Lane, whence the &#8220;Duke of York&#8221; bowled away, has been
+demolished; the &#8220;Old Bell and Crown&#8221; Inn, Holborn, where the &#8220;Alert,&#8221; the
+&#8220;Union,&#8221; and the &#8220;Times&#8221; drew up daily in the old-fashioned galleried
+courtyard, is swept away. Were Viator to return to-morrow, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> would
+surely want to return to Hades, or Paradise, wherever he may be, at once.
+Around him would be, to his senses, an astonishing whirl and noise of
+traffic, despite the wood-paving that has superseded macadam, which itself
+displaced the granite setts he knew. Many strange and horrid portents he
+would note, and Holborn would be to him as an unknown street in a strange
+town.</p>
+
+<p>Than 1826 the informative Cary goes no further, and his &#8220;Itinerary,&#8221;
+excellent though it be, and invaluable to those who would know aught of
+the coaches that plied in the years when it was published, gives no
+particulars of the many &#8220;butterfly&#8221; coaches and amateur drags that cut in
+upon the regular coaches during the rush and scour of the season.</p>
+
+<p>In 1821 it was computed that over forty coaches ran to and from London and
+Brighton daily; in September, 1822, there were thirty-nine. In 1828 it was
+calculated that the sixteen permanent coaches then running, summer and
+winter, received between them a sum of &pound;60,000 per annum, and the total
+sum expended in fares upon coaching on this road was taken as amounting to
+&pound;100,000 per annum. That leaves the very respectable amount of &pound;40,000 for
+the season&#8217;s takings of the &#8220;butterflies.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>An accident happened to the &#8220;Alert&#8221; on October 9th, 1829, when the coach
+was taking up passengers at Brighton. The horses ran away, and dashed the
+coach and themselves into an area sixteen feet deep. The coach was
+battered almost to pieces, and one lady was seriously injured. The horses
+escaped unhurt. In 1832, August 25th, the Brighton Mail was upset near
+Reigate, the coachman being killed.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 346px;"><img src="images/img09.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;AGE,&#8221; 1829, STARTING FROM CASTLE SQUARE, BRIGHTON.<br /><small><i>From an engraving after C. Cooper Henderson.</i></small></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">STEAM CARRIAGES</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>This was the era of those early motor-cars, the steam-carriages, which, in
+spite of their clumsy construction and appalling ugliness, arrived very
+nearly to a commercial success. Many inventors were engaged from 1823 to
+1838 upon this subject. Walter Hancock, in particular, began in 1824, and
+in 1828 proposed a service of his &#8220;land-steamers&#8221; between London and
+Brighton, but did not actually appear upon this road with his &#8220;Infant&#8221;
+until November, 1832. The contrivance performed the double journey with
+some difficulty and in slower time than the coaches: but Hancock on that
+eventful day confidently declared that he was perfecting a newer machine
+by which he expected to run down in three and a half hours. He never
+achieved so much, but in October, 1833, his &#8220;Autopsy,&#8221; which had been
+successfully running as an omnibus between Paddington and Stratford, went
+from the works at Stratford to Brighton in eight and a half hours, of
+which three hours were taken up by a halt on the road.</p>
+
+<p>No artist has preserved a view of this event for us, but a print may still
+be met with depicting the start of Sir Charles Dance&#8217;s steam-carriage from
+Wellington Street, Strand, for Brighton on some eventful morning of that
+same year. A prison-van is, by comparison with this fearsome object, a
+thing of beauty; but in the picture you will observe enthusiasm on foot
+and on horseback, and even four-legged, in the person of the inevitable
+dog. In the distance the discerning may observe the old toll-house on
+Waterloo Bridge, and the gaunt shape of the Shot Tower.</p>
+
+<p>By 1839 the coaching business had in Brighton become concentrated in
+Castle Square, six of the seven principal offices being situated there.
+Five London coaches ran from the Blue Office (Strevens &amp; Co.), five from
+the Red Office (Mr. Goodman&#8217;s), four from the &#8220;Spread Eagle&#8221; (Chaplin &amp;
+Crunden&#8217;s), three from the Age (T. W. Capps &amp; Co.), two from Hine&#8217;s, East
+Street; two from Snow&#8217;s (Capps &amp; Chaplin), and two from the &#8220;Globe&#8221; (Mr.
+Vaughan&#8217;s).</p>
+
+<p>To state the number of visitors to Brighton on a certain day will give an
+idea of how well this road was used during the decade that preceded the
+coming of steam. On Friday, October 25th, 1833, upwards of 480 persons
+travelled to Brighton by stage-coach. A comparison of this number with the
+hordes of visitors cast forth from the Brighton Railway Station<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> to-day
+would render insignificant indeed that little crowd of 1833; but in those
+times, when the itch of excursionising was not so acute as now, that day&#8217;s
+return was remarkable; it was a day that fully justified the note made of
+it. Then, too, those few hundreds benefited the town more certainly than
+perhaps their number multiplied by ten does now. For the Brighton visitor
+of a hundred years ago, once set down in Castle Square, had to remain the
+night at least in Brighton; for him there was no returning to London the
+same day. And so the Brighton folks had their wicked will of him for a
+while, and made something out of him; while in these times the greater
+proportion of a day&#8217;s excursionists find themselves either at home in
+London already, when evening hours are striking from Westminster Ben, or
+else waiting with what patience they may the collecting of tickets at the
+bleak and dismal penitentiary platforms of Grosvenor Road Station; and,
+after all, Brighton is little or nothing advantaged by their visit.</p>
+
+<p>But though the tripper of the coaching era found it impracticable to have
+his morning in London, his day upon the King&#8217;s Road, and his evening in
+town again, yet the pace at which the coaches went in the &#8217;30&#8217;s was by no
+means despicable. Ten miles an hour now became slow and altogether behind
+the age.</p>
+
+<p>In 1833 the Marquis of Worcester, together with a Mr. Alexander, put three
+coaches on the road: an up and down &#8220;Quicksilver&#8221; and a single coach, the
+&#8220;Wonder.&#8221; The &#8220;Quicksilver,&#8221; named probably in allusion to its swiftness
+(it was timed for four hours and three-quarters), ran to and from what was
+then a favourite stopping-place, the &#8220;Elephant and Castle.&#8221; But on July
+15th of the same year an accident, by which several persons were very
+seriously injured, happened to the up &#8220;Quicksilver&#8221; when starting from
+Brighton. Snow, who was driving, could not hold the team in, and they
+bolted away, and brought up violently against the railings by the New
+Steyne. Broken arms, fractured arms and ribs, and contusions were
+plenty. The &#8220;Quicksilver,&#8221; chameleon-like, changed colour after this
+mishap, was repainted and renamed, and reappeared as the &#8220;Criterion&#8221;; for
+the old name carried with it too great a spice of danger for the timorous.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img10.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">SIR CHARLES DANCE&#8217;S STEAM-CARRIAGE LEAVING LONDON FOR BRIGHTON, 1833.<br /><small><i>From a print after G. E. Madeley.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">COACHING RECORDS</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>On February 4th, 1834, the &#8220;Criterion,&#8221; driven by Charles Harbour,
+outstripping the old performances of the &#8220;Vivid,&#8221; and beating the previous
+wonderfully quick journey of the &#8220;Red Rover,&#8221; carried down King William&#8217;s
+Speech on the opening of Parliament in 3 hours and 40 minutes, a coach
+record that has not been surpassed, nor quite equalled, on this road, not
+even by Selby on his great drive of July 13th, 1888, his times being out
+and in respectively, 3 hours 56 minutes, and 3 hours 54 minutes. Then
+again, on another road, on May Day, 1830, the &#8220;Independent Tally-ho,&#8221;
+running from London to Birmingham, covered those 109 miles in 7 hours 39
+minutes, a better record than Selby&#8217;s London to Brighton and back drive by
+eleven minutes, with an additional mile to the course. Another coach, the
+&#8220;Original Tally-ho,&#8221; did the same distance in 7 hours 50 minutes. The
+&#8220;Criterion&#8221; fared ill under its new name, and gained an unenviable
+notoriety on June 7th, 1834, being overturned in a collision with a dray
+in the Borough. Many of the passengers were injured; Sir William Cosway,
+who was climbing over the roof when the collision occurred, was killed.</p>
+
+<p>In 1839, the coaching era, full-blown even to decay, began to pewk and
+wither before the coming of steam, long heralded and now but too sure. The
+tale of coaches now decreased to twenty-three; fares, which had fallen in
+the cut-throat competition of coach proprietors with their fellows in
+previous years to 10<i>s.</i> inside, 5<i>s.</i> outside for the single journey, now
+rose to 21<i>s.</i> and 12<i>s.</i> Every man that horsed a coach, seeing now was
+the shearing time for the public, ere the now building railway was opened,
+strove to make as much as possible ere he closed his yards, sold his
+stock, broke his coach up for firewood, and took himself off the road.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>Sentiment hung round the expiring age of coaching, and has cast a halo on
+old-time ways of travelling, so that we often fail to note the
+disadvantages and discomforts endured in those days; but, amid regrets
+which were often simply maudlin, occur now and again witticisms true and
+tersely epigrammatic, as thus:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">For the neat wayside inn and a dish of cold meat<br />
+You&#8217;ve a gorgeous saloon, but there&#8217;s nothing to eat;</p>
+
+<p>and a contributor to the <i>Sporting Magazine</i> observes, very happily, that
+&#8220;even in a &#8216;case&#8217; in a coach, it&#8217;s &#8216;there you are&#8217;; whereas in a railway
+carriage it&#8217;s &#8216;where are you?&#8217;&#8221; in case of an accident.</p>
+
+<p>On September 21st, 1841, the Brighton Railway was opened throughout, from
+London to Brighton, and with that event the coaching era for this road
+virtually died. Professional coach proprietors who wished to retain the
+competencies they had accumulated were well advised to shun all
+competition with steam, and others had been wise enough to cut their
+losses; for the Road for the next sixty years was to become a discarded
+institution and the Rail was entering into a long and undisputed
+possession of the carrying trade.</p>
+
+<p>The Brighton Mail, however&mdash;or mails, for Chaplin had started a Day Mail
+in 1838&mdash;continued a few months longer. The Day Mail ceased in October,
+1841, but the Night Mail held the road until March, 1842.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<p>Between 1841, when the railway was opened all the way from London, and
+1866, during a period of twenty-five years, coaching, if not dead, at
+least showed but few and intermittent signs of life. The &#8220;Age,&#8221; which then
+was owned by Mr. F. W. Capps, was the last coach to run regularly on the
+direct road to and from London. The &#8220;Victoria,&#8221; however, was on the
+road, <i>via</i> Dorking and Horsham, until November 8th, 1845.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 383px;"><img src="images/img11.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">The BRIGHTON DAY MAILS CROSSING HOOKWOOD COMMON, 1838.<br /><small><i>From an engraving after W. J. Shayer.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE COACHING AMATEURS</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>The &#8220;Age&#8221; had been one of the best equipped and driven of all the smart
+drags in that period when aristocratic amateur dragsmen frequented this
+road, when the Marquis of Worcester drove the &#8220;Beaufort,&#8221; and when the
+Hon. Fred Jerningham, a son of the Earl of Stafford, a whip of consummate
+skill, drove the day-mail; a time when the &#8220;Age&#8221; itself was driven by that
+sportsman of gambling memory, Sir St. Vincent Cotton, and by that Mr.
+Stevenson who was its founder, mentioned more particularly on page 37.
+When Mr. Capps became proprietor, he had as coachman several distinguished
+men. For twelve years, for instance, Robert Brackenbury drove the &#8220;Age&#8221;
+for the nominal pay of twelve shillings per week, enough to keep him in
+whips. It was thus supremely fitting that it should also have been the
+last to survive.</p>
+
+<p>In later years, about 1852, a revived &#8220;Age,&#8221; owned and driven by the Duke
+of Beaufort and George Clark, the &#8220;Old&#8221; Clark of coaching acquaintance,
+was on the road to London, <i>via</i> Dorking and Kingston, in the summer
+months. It was discontinued in 1862. A picture of this coach crossing Ham
+Common <i>en route</i> for Brighton was painted in 1852 and engraved. A
+reproduction of it is shown here.</p>
+
+<p>From 1862 to 1866 the rattle of the bars and the sound of the guard&#8217;s yard
+of tin were silent on every route to Brighton; but in the latter year of
+horsey memory and the coaching revival, a number of aristocratic and
+wealthy amateurs of the whip, among whom were representatives of the best
+coaching talent of the day, subscribed a capital, in shares of &pound;10, and a
+little yellow coach, the &#8220;Old Times,&#8221; was put on the highway. Among the
+promoters of the venture were Captain Haworth, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord
+H. Thynne, Mr. Chandos Pole, Mr. &#8220;Cherry&#8221; Angell, Colonel Armytage,
+Captain Lawrie, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The experiment proved unsuccessful,
+but in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> following season, commencing in April, 1867, when the goodwill
+and a large portion of the stock had been purchased from the original
+subscribers, by the Duke of Beaufort, Mr. E. S. Chandos Pole, and Mr.
+Angell, the coach was doubled, and two new coaches built by Holland &amp;
+Holland.</p>
+
+<p>The Duke of Beaufort was chief among the sportsmen who horsed the coaches
+during this season. Mr. Chandos Pole, at the close of the summer season,
+determined to carry on by himself, throughout the winter, a service of one
+coach. This he did, and, aided by Mr. Pole-Gell, doubled it the next
+summer.</p>
+
+<p>The following year, 1869, the coach had so prosperous a season that it
+showed never a clean bill, <i>i.e.</i>, never ran empty, all the summer, either
+way. The partners this year were the Earl of Londesborough, Mr. Pole-Gell,
+Colonel Stracey Clitherow, Mr. Chandos Pole, and Mr. G. Meek.</p>
+
+<p>From this season coaching became extremely popular on the Brighton Road,
+Mr. Chandos Pole running his coach until 1872. In the following year an
+American amateur, Mr. Tiffany, kept up the tradition with two coaches.
+Late in the season of 1874 Captain Haworth put in an appearance.</p>
+
+<p>In 1875 the &#8220;Age&#8221; was put upon the road by Mr. Stewart Freeman, and ran in
+the season up to and including 1880, in which year it was doubled. Captain
+Blyth had the &#8220;Defiance&#8221; on the road to Brighton this year by the
+circuitous route of Tunbridge Wells. In 1881 Mr. Freeman&#8217;s coach was
+absent from the road, but Edwin Fownes put the &#8220;Age&#8221; on, late in the
+season. In the following year Mr. Freeman&#8217;s coach ran, doubled again, and
+single in 1883. It was again absent in 1884-5-6, in which last year it ran
+to Windsor; but it reappeared on the Brighton Road in 1887 as the &#8220;Comet,&#8221;
+and in the winter of that year was continued by Captain Beckett, who had
+Selby and Fownes as whips. In 1888 Mr. Freeman ran in partnership with
+Colonel Stracey-Clitherow, Lord Wiltshire, and Mr. Hugh M&#8217;Calmont, and in
+1889 became partner in an undertaking to run the coach doubled. The two
+&#8220;Comets&#8221; therefore served the road in this season supported by two
+additional subscribers, the Honourable H. Sandys and Mr. Randolph Wemyss.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 403px;"><img src="images/img12.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;AGE,&#8221; 1852, CROSSING HAM COMMON.<br /><small><i>From an engraving after C. Cooper Henderson.</i></small></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JIM SELBY</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>In 1888 the &#8220;Old Times,&#8221; forsaking the Oatlands Park drive, had appeared
+on the Brighton Road as a rival to the &#8220;Comet,&#8221; and continued throughout
+the winter months, until Selby met his death in that winter.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Comet&#8221; ran single in the winter season of 1889-90, and in April was
+again doubled for the summer, running single in 1891-2-3, when Mr. Freeman
+relinquished it.</p>
+
+<p>Mention has already been made of the &#8220;Old Times,&#8221; which made such a
+fleeting appearance on this road; but justice was not done to it, or to
+Selby, in that incidental allusion. They require a niche to themselves in
+the history of the revival&mdash;a niche to which shall be appended this poetic
+excerpt:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Here&#8217;s the &#8220;Old Times,&#8221; it&#8217;s one of the best,<br />
+Which no coaching man will deny,<br />
+Fifty miles down the road with a jolly good load,<br />
+Between London and Brighton each day.<br />
+Beckett, M&#8217;Adam, and Dickey, the driver, are there,<br />
+Of old Jim&#8217;s presence every one is aware,<br />
+They are all nailing good sorts,<br />
+And go in for all sports,<br />
+So we&#8217;ll all go a-coaching to-day.</p>
+
+<p>It is poetry whose like we do not often meet. Tennyson himself never
+attempted to capture such heights of rhyme. He could, and did, rhyme
+&#8220;poet&#8221; with &#8220;know it,&#8221; but he never drove such a Cockney team as &#8220;deny&#8221;
+and &#8220;to-dy&#8221; to water at the Pierian springs.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<p>&#8220;Carriages without horses shall go,&#8221; is the &#8220;prophecy&#8221; attributed to that
+mythical fifteenth century pythoness, Mother Shipton; really the <i>ex post
+facto</i> forgery of Charles Hindley, the second-hand bookseller, in 1862. It
+should not be difficult, on such terms, to earn the reputation of a seer.</p>
+
+<p>Between 1823 and 1838, the era of the steam-carriages, that
+prognostication had already been fulfilled: and again, in another sense,
+with the introduction of railways. But it was not until the close of 1896
+that the real horseless era began to dawn. Railways, extravagantly
+discriminative tolls, and restrictions upon weight and speed killed the
+steam-carriages, and for more than fifty years the highways knew no other
+mechanical locomotion than that of the familiar traction-engines,
+restricted to three miles an hour and preceded by a man with a red flag.
+It is true that a few hardy inventors continued to waste their time and
+money on devising new forms of steam-carriages, and were only fined for
+their pains when they were rash enough to venture on the public roads, as
+when Bateman, of Greenwich, invented a steam-tricycle, and Sir Thomas
+Parkyn, Bart., was fined at Greenwich Police Court, April 8th, 1881, for
+riding it.</p>
+
+<p>That incident appears to have finally quenched the ardour of inventive
+genius in this country; but a new locomotive force already existing
+unsuspected was about this period being experimented with on the Continent
+by one Gottlieb Daimler, whose name&mdash;generally mispronounced&mdash;is now
+sufficiently familiar to all who know anything of motor-cars.</p>
+
+<p>Daimler was at that time connected with the Otto Gas Engine Works in
+Germany, where the adaptive Germans were exploiting the gas-engine
+principle invented by Crossley many years before.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MOTOR-CARS</div>
+
+<p>In 1886 Daimler produced his motor-bicycle, and by 1891 his motor engine
+was adapted by Panhard and Levassor to other types of vehicles. The
+French were thus the first to perceive the great possibilities of it, and
+by 1894 the motor-cars already in use in France were so numerous that the
+first sporting event in the history of them&mdash;the 760 miles&#8217; race from
+Paris to Bordeaux and back&mdash;was run.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img13.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;OLD TIMES,&#8221; 1888.<br /><small><i>From a painting by Alfred S. Bishop.</i></small></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>The following year Mr. Evelyn Ellis brought over the first motor-car to
+reach England, a 4 h.-p. Panhard, and a little later, Sir David Salomons,
+of Tunbridge Wells, imported a Peugeot. In that town, October 15th, 1895,
+he held the first show of cars&mdash;four or five at most&mdash;in this country.
+Then began an agitation raised by a few enthusiasts for the removal of the
+existing restrictions upon road traffic. A deputation waited upon the
+Local Government Board, and the Light Locomotives Act of 1896 was passed
+in August, legalising mechanical traction up to a speed of fourteen miles
+an hour, the Act to come into operation on November 14th.</p>
+
+<p>For whatever reason, the Light Locomotives Act was passed so quietly,
+under the &aelig;gis of the Local Government Board, as to almost wear the aspect
+of an organised secrecy, and the coming of what is now known as Motor-car
+Day was utterly unsuspected by the bulk of the public. It even caught the
+newspapers unprepared, until the week before.</p>
+
+<p>But the financiers and company-promoters had been busy. They at least
+fully realised the importance of the era about to dawn; and the
+extravagant flotations of the Great Horseless Carriage Company and of many
+others long since bankrupt and forgotten, together with the phenomenal
+over-valuation of patents, very soon discredited the new movement. Never
+has there been a new industry so hardly used by company-promoting sharks
+as that of motor-cars.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">&#8220;MOTOR-CAR DAY&#8221;</div>
+
+<p>No inkling of subsequent financial disasters clouded Motor-car Day, and as
+at almost the last moment the Press had come to the conclusion that it was
+an occasion to be written up and enlarged upon, a very great public
+interest was aroused in the Motor-car Club&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> proposed celebration of the
+event by a great procession of the newly-enfranchised &#8220;light locomotives&#8221;
+from Whitehall to Brighton, on November 14th.</p>
+
+<p>The Motor-car Club is dead. It was not a club in the proper sense of the
+word, but an organisation promoted and financed by the company-promoters
+who were interested in advertising their schemes. The run to Brighton was
+itself intended as a huge advertisement, but the unprepared condition of
+many of the cars entered, together with the miserable weather prevailing
+on that day, resulted in turning the whole thing into ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers had done their best to advertise the event; but no one
+anticipated the immense crowds that assembled at the starting-point,
+Whitehall Place, by nine o&#8217;clock on that wet and foggy morning. By
+half-past ten, the hour fixed for the start, there was a maddening chaos
+of hundreds of thousands of sightseers such as no Lord Mayor&#8217;s Show or
+Royal Procession had ever attracted. Everybody in the crowd wanted a front
+place, and those who got one, being both unable and unwilling to &#8220;parse
+away,&#8221; were nearly scragged by the police, who on the Embankment set upon
+individuals like footballers on the ball; while snap-shotters wasted
+plates on them from the secure altitudes of omnibuses or other vehicles.</p>
+
+<p>Those whose journalistic duties took them to see the start had to fight
+their way down from Charing Cross, up from Westminster, or along from the
+Embankment; contesting inch by inch, and wondering if the starting-point
+would ever be gained.</p>
+
+<p>At length the Metropole hove in sight, but the motor-cars had yet to be
+found. To accomplish this feat it was necessary to hurl oneself into a
+surging tide of humanity, and surge with it. The tide carried the explorer
+away and eventually washed him ashore on the neck of a policeman. Rumour
+got around that an organised massacre of cab-horses was contemplated, and
+myriads of mounted police appeared and had their photographs taken from
+the tops of cabs and other envied positions occupied by amateur
+photographers, who paid dearly to take pictures of the fog, which they
+could have done elsewhere for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 362px;"><img src="images/img14.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;COMET,&#8221; 1890.<br /><small><i>From a painting by Alfred S. Bishop.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>Time went on, the crowd grew bigger, the mud was churned into slush, and
+everybody was treading upon everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ain&#8217;t this bloomin&#8217; fun, sir?&#8221; asked the driver of a growler, his sides
+shaking with laughter, &#8220;Even my ole &#8217;oss &#8217;as bin larfin&#8217;.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Very intelligent horse,&#8221; we said, thinking of Mr. Pickwick, and
+determining to ask some searching questions as to his antecedents.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Interleck&#8217;s a great p&#8217;int, sir. Which &#8217;ud you sooner be in: a runaway
+mortar-caw or a keb?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Neither.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;No, I ain&#8217;t jokin&#8217;, strite. I&#8217;ve just bin argying wif a bloke as said
+he&#8217;d sooner be in a caw. I said I pitied &#8217;is choice, and wouldn&#8217;t give &#8217;im
+much for his charnce. &#8217;Cos why? &#8217;Cos mortar-caws ain&#8217;t got no interleck.
+They cawn&#8217;t tell the dif&#8217;rence &#8217;tween nothink an&#8217; a brick wall. Now a &#8217;os
+can. If &#8217;e don&#8217;t turn orf &#8217;e tries ter jump th&#8217; wall, but yer mortar
+simply goes fer it, and then where are yer? In &#8217;eaven, if yer lucky, or
+in&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But the rest of his sentence was lost in the roar that ascended from the
+crowd as the cars commenced their journey to Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>They went beautifully for a few yards, chased the mounted police right
+into the crowd, and then stopped.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s th&#8217; standin&#8217; still as does it&mdash;not the standin&#8217; still, I mean the
+not going forrard, &#8217;cos they don&#8217;t stand still,&#8221; said the cabby,
+excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t they hum?&#8221; he cried.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They certainly do make a little noise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But I mean, don&#8217;t they whiff?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whiff?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He held his nose.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I say, guv&#8217;nor.&#8221; shouted cabby to a fur-coated foreigner, &#8220;wot is it
+smells so?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>Meanwhile there was a certain &#8220;something lingering with oil in it,&#8221;
+permeating the fog, while a sound as of many humming-tops filled the air.</p>
+
+<p>Then the cars moved on a bit, amid the cheers and chaff of a good-humoured
+crowd. Presently another stoppage and more shivering.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;As thet cove there got th&#8217; Vituss dance?&#8221; inquired the elated cabby,
+indicating a gentleman who was wobbling like a piece of jelly.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the vibration,&#8221; explained another.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8217;Ow does the vibration agree w&#8217; the old six yer &#8217;ad last night?&#8221; cabby
+inquired immediately. &#8220;I say, Chawlie, don&#8217;t it make yer sea-sick? Oh my!
+th&#8217; smell!&#8221; and he gasped and sat on his box, looking bilious.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When all the carriages had wended their way to Westminster we asked cabby
+what he thought of the procession.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Arsk my &#8217;os,&#8221; said he, with a look of disgust on his face. &#8220;What&#8217;s yer
+opinion of it, old gal? Failyer? My sentiments. British public won&#8217;t pay
+to be choked with stinks one moment and shut up like electricity t&#8217; next.
+Failyer? Quite c&#8217;rect.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the guests of the Motor-car Club were breakfasting at the Hotel
+Metropole, where appropriate speeches were made, the Earl of Winchilsea
+concluding his remarks with the dramatic production of a red flag, which,
+amid applause, he tore in half, to symbolise the passing of the old
+restrictions.</p>
+
+<p>There had been fifty-four entries for this triumphal procession, but not
+more than thirty-three cars put in an appearance. It is significant of the
+vast progress made since then that no car present was more than 6 h.-p.,
+and that all, except the Boll&eacute;e three-wheeled car, were precisely what
+they were frequently styled, &#8220;horseless carriages,&#8221; vehicles built on
+traditional lines, from which the horses and the customary shafts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> were
+painfully missed. There had not yet been time sufficient for the evolution
+of the typical motor-car body.</p>
+
+<p>With the combined strategy of a Napoleon, the patience of Job, and the
+strength of Samson, the guests were at length piloted through the crowd
+and inducted into their seats, and the &#8220;procession&#8221;&mdash;which, it was sternly
+ordained, was not to be a &#8220;race&#8221;&mdash;set out.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE FIRST CARS</div>
+
+<p>The President of the Motor-car Club, Harry J. Lawson, since convicted of
+fraud and sentenced to some months&#8217; imprisonment, led the way in his
+pilot-car, bearing a purple-and-gold banner, more or less suitably
+inscribed, himself habited in a strange costume, something between that of
+a yachtsman and the conductor of a Hungarian band.</p>
+
+<p>Reigate was reached at 12.30 by the foremost ear, through twenty miles of
+crowded country, when rain descended once more upon the hapless day, and
+late arrivals splashed through in all the majesty of mud.</p>
+
+<p>The honours of the occasion belong to the little Boll&eacute;e three-wheeler, of
+a type long since obsolete. The inventor, disregarding all rules and
+times, started at 11.30, and, making no stop at Reigate, drove on to
+Brighton, which he reached in the record time of two hours fifty-five
+minutes. The President&#8217;s car was fourth, in seven hours twenty-two minutes
+thirty seconds.</p>
+
+<p>At Preston Park, on the Brighton boundary, the Mayor was to have welcomed
+the procession, which, headed by the President, was to proceed
+triumphantly into the town. A huge crowd assembled under the dripping elms
+and weeping skies, and there, at five o&#8217;clock, in the light of the misty
+lamps, stood and vibrated that presidential equipage and its banner with
+the strange device. By five o&#8217;clock only three other cars had arrived; and
+so, wet and miserable, they, the Mayor and Council, and the mounted police
+all splashed into Brighton amid a howling gale.</p>
+
+<p>The rest should be silence, for no one ever knew the number of cars that
+completed the journey. Some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> said twenty-two, others thirteen; but it is
+certain that the conditions were too much for many, and that while some
+reposed in wayside stables, others, broken down in lonely places, remained
+on the road all through that awful night. The guests, who in the morning
+had been unable to find seats on the &#8220;horseless carriages,&#8221; and so had
+journeyed by special train or by coach, in the end had much to
+congratulate themselves upon.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, looking back upon the hasty enthusiasm that organised so
+long a journey at such a time of year, at so early a stage in the
+motor-car era, it seems remarkable, not that so many broke down, but that
+so large a proportion reached Brighton at all.</p>
+
+<p>The logical outcome of years of experiment and preparation was reached, in
+the supersession of the horsed London and Brighton Parcel Mail on June
+2nd, 1905, by a motor-van, and in the establishment, on August 30th, of
+the &#8220;Vanguard&#8221; London and Brighton Motor Omnibus Service, starting in
+summer at 9.30 a.m., and reaching Brighton at 2 p.m.; returning from
+Brighton at 4 p.m., and finally arriving at its starting-point, the &#8220;Hotel
+Victoria,&#8221; Northumberland Avenue, at 9 p.m. With the beginning of
+November, 1905, that summer service was replaced by one to run through the
+winter months, with inside seats only, and at reduced fares.</p>
+
+<p>The first fatality on the Brighton Road in connection with motor-cars
+occurred in 1901, at Smitham Bottom, when a car just purchased by a
+retired builder and contractor of Brighton was being driven by him from
+London. The steering-gear failed, the car turned completely round, ran
+into an iron fence and pinned the owner&#8217;s leg against it and a tree. The
+leg was broken and had to be amputated, and the unfortunate man died of
+the shock.</p>
+
+<p>But the motor-omnibus accident of July 12th, 1906, was a really
+spectacular tragedy. On that day a &#8220;Vanguard&#8221; omnibus, chartered by a
+party of thirty-four pleasure seekers at Orpington for a day at Brighton,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+was proceeding down Hand Cross Hill at twelve miles an hour when some
+essential part of the gear broke and the heavy vehicle, dashing down-hill
+at an ever-increasing pace, and swerving from side to side, struck a great
+oak. The shock flung the passengers off violently. Ten were killed and all
+the others injured, mostly very seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, amateur coaching had, in most of the years since the
+professional coaches had been driven off the road, flourished in the
+summer season. The last notable amateur was the American millionaire,
+Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who for several seasons personally drove his own
+&#8220;Venture&#8221; coach between London and Brighton; at first on the main
+&#8220;classic&#8221; road, and afterwards on the Dorking and Horsham route. He met
+his death on board the <i>Lusitania</i>, when it was sunk by the Germans, May
+7th. 1915.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ROAD OF RECORDS</div>
+
+<p>Robinson Crusoe, weary of his island solitude, sighed, so the poet tells
+us, for &#8220;the midst of alarms.&#8221; He should have chosen the Brighton Road;
+for ever since it has been a road at all it has fully realised the
+Shakespearian stage-direction of &#8220;alarums and excursions.&#8221; Particularly
+the &#8220;excursions,&#8221; for it is the chosen track for most record-breaking
+exploits; and thus it comes to pass that residents fortunate or
+unfortunate enough to dwell upon the Brighton Road have the whole panorama
+of sport unfolded before their eyes, whether they will or no, throughout
+the whirling year, and see strange sights, hear odd noises, and (since the
+coming of the motor-car) smell weird smells.</p>
+
+<p>The Brighton Road has ever been a course upon which the enthusiastic
+exponents of different methods of progression have eagerly exhibited their
+prowess. But to-day, although it affords as good going as, or better than,
+ever, it is not so suitable as it was for these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> displays of speed.
+Traffic has grown with the growth of villages and townships along these
+fifty-two miles, and sport and public convenience are on the highway
+antipathetic. Yet every kind of sport has its will of the road.</p>
+
+<p>The reasons of this exceptional sporting character are not far to seek.
+They were chiefly sportsmen who travelled it in the days when it began to
+be a road: those full-blooded sportsmen, ready for any freakish wager, who
+were the boon companions of the Prince; and they set a fashion which has
+not merely survived into modern times, but has grown amazingly.</p>
+
+<p>But it would never have been the road for sport it is, had its length not
+been so conveniently and alluringly near an even fifty miles. So much may
+be done or attempted along a fifty miles&#8217; course that would be impossible
+on a hundred.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SPORTING EVENTS</div>
+
+<p>The very first sporting event on the Brighton Road of which any record
+survives is (with an astonishing fitness) the feat accomplished by the
+Prince of Wales himself on July 25th, 1784, during his second visit to
+Brighthelmstone. On that day he mounted his horse there and rode to London
+and back. He went by way of Cuckfield, and was ten hours on the road: four
+and a half hours going, five and a half hours returning. On August 21st of
+the same year, starting at one o&#8217;clock in the morning, he drove from
+Carlton House to the &#8220;Pavilion&#8221; in four hours and a half. The turn-out was
+a phaeton drawn by three horses harnessed tandem-fashion&mdash;what in those
+days was called a &#8220;random.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One may venture the opinion that, although these performances were in due
+course surpassed, they were not altogether bad for a &#8220;simulacrum,&#8221; as
+Thackeray was pleased to style him.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years passed before any one arose to challenge the Prince&#8217;s
+ride, and then only partially and indirectly. In May, 1809, Cornet J.
+Wedderburn Webster, of the 10th (Prince of Wales&#8217;s Own) Light Dragoons,
+accepted and won a wager of 300 to 200<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> guineas with Sir B. Graham about
+the performance in three and a half hours of the journey from Brighton to
+Westminster Bridge, mounted upon one of the blood horses that usually ran
+in his phaeton. He accomplished the ride in three hours twenty minutes,
+knocking the Prince&#8217;s up record into the proverbial cocked hat. The rider
+stopped a while at Reigate to take a glass or two of wine, and compelled
+his horse to swallow the remainder of the bottle.</p>
+
+<p>This spirited affair was preceded in April, 1793, by a curious match which
+seems to deserve mention. A clergyman at Brighton betted an officer of the
+Artillery quartered there 100 guineas that he would ride his own horse to
+London sooner than the officer could go in a chaise and pair, the
+officer&#8217;s horses to be changed <i>en route</i> as often as he might think
+proper. The Artilleryman accordingly despatched a servant to provide
+relays, and at twelve o&#8217;clock on an unfavourable night the parties set out
+to decide the bet, which was won by the clergyman with difficulty. He
+arrived in town at 5 a.m., only a few minutes before the chaise, which it
+had been thought was sure of winning. The driver of the last stage,
+however, nearly became stuck in a ditch, which mishap caused considerable
+delay. The Cuckfield driver performed his nine-miles&#8217; stage, between that
+place and Crawley, within the half-hour.</p>
+
+<p>The next outstanding incident was the run of the &#8220;Red Rover&#8221; coach, which,
+leaving the &#8220;Elephant and Castle&#8221; at 4 p.m. on June 19th, 1831, reached
+Brighton at 8.21 that evening: time, four hours twenty-one minutes. The
+fleeting era of those precursors of motor-cars, the steam-carriages, had
+by this time arrived, and after two or three had managed, at some kind of
+a slow pace, to get to and from Brighton, the &#8220;Autopsy&#8221; achieved a record
+of sorts in October, 1833. &#8220;Autopsy&#8221; was an unfortunate name, suggestive
+of <i>post-mortem</i> examinations and &#8220;crowner&#8217;s quests,&#8221; but it proved not
+more dangerous than the &#8220;Mors&#8221; or &#8220;Hurtu&#8221; cars of to-day. The &#8220;Autopsy&#8221;
+was Walter Hancock&#8217;s steam-carriage, and ran from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> his works at Stratford.
+It reached Brighton in eight hours thirty minutes; from which, however,
+must be deducted three hours for a halt on the road.</p>
+
+<p>In the following year, February 4th, the &#8220;Criterion&#8221; coach, driven by
+Charles Harbour, took the King&#8217;s Speech down to Brighton in three hours
+forty minutes&mdash;a coach record that not only quite eclipsed that of the
+&#8220;Red Rover,&#8221; but has never yet been equalled, not even by Selby, on his
+great drive of July 13th, 1888; his times being, out and home
+respectively, three hours fifty-six minutes and three hours fifty-four
+minutes.</p>
+
+<p>In March, 1868, the first of the walking records was established, the
+sporting papers of that age chronicling what they very rightly described
+as a &#8220;Great Walking Feat&#8221;: a walk, not merely to Brighton, but to Brighton
+<i>and back</i>. This heroic undertaking, which was not repeated until 1902,
+was performed by one &#8220;Mr. Benjamin B. Trench, late Oxford University.&#8221; On
+March 20th, for a heavy wager, he started to walk the hundred miles from
+Kennington Church to Brighton and back in twenty-five hours. Setting out
+on the Friday, at 6 p.m., he was back at Kennington Church at 5 p.m.
+Saturday, having thus won his wager with two hours to spare. It will be
+observed, or guessed, from the absence of odd minutes and seconds that in
+1868, timing, as an exact science, had not been born; but it is evident
+that this stalwart walked his hundred miles on ordinary roads at an
+average rate of a little over four and a quarter miles an hour. &#8220;He then,&#8221;
+concludes the report, &#8220;walked round the Oval several times, till seven
+o&#8217;clock.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To each age the inventions it deserves. Cycling would have been impossible
+in the mid-eighteenth century, when Walpole and Burton travelled with such
+difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>When roads began to deserve the name, the Mail Coach was introduced; and
+when they grew hard and smooth, out of their former condition of ruts and
+mud, the quaint beginnings of the bicycle are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> noticed. The Hobby Horse
+and McAdam, the man who first preached the modern gospel of good roads,
+were contemporary.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE HOBBY-HORSE</div>
+
+<p>I have said the beginnings of the bicycle were quaint, and I think no one
+will be concerned to dispute this alleged quaintness of the Hobby Horse,
+which had a certain strictly limited popularity from 1819 to 1830. I do
+not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these
+machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of
+them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that
+any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human
+endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises,
+and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but
+records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should
+be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. A heavy
+timber frame connected these wheels, and on it the courageous rider
+straddled, his feet touching the ground. The Hobby Horse had no pedals,
+and the rider propelled his hundredweight or so of iron and timber by
+running in this straddling position and thus obtaining a momentum which
+only on the down grade would carry him any distance.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the &#8220;bucks&#8221; of George
+the Fourth&#8217;s time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and
+it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the
+&#8220;velocipede&#8221; of the &#8217;60&#8217;s, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of
+the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.<a name='fna_4' id='fna_4' href='#f_4'><small>[4]</small></a></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE BONESHAKER</div>
+
+<p>The front-driving velocipede&mdash;the well-known &#8220;boneshaker&#8221;&mdash;was invented by
+one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris
+Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred &#8220;safety&#8221; what the
+roads of 1865 are to those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had
+iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden
+uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed
+in 1869. This pioneer&#8217;s fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall,
+junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer
+of 1891.</p>
+
+<p>This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances
+attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as
+1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an
+athletic magazine, <i>Ixion</i>, published in that year, &#8220;J. M., jun.,&#8221; who, of
+course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous
+tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note
+tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But
+<i>Ixion</i> never reached a second number, and so Mayall&#8217;s own account of his
+historic ride was never completed.</p>
+
+<p>He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling
+how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer&#8217;s Gymnasium in Old
+Street, St. Luke&#8217;s. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr.
+Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed
+the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, &#8220;a piece of
+apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not
+long before, in Paris.&#8221; It was the first velocipede to reach England.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a &#8220;velocipede,&#8221; and
+although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after
+their introduction, the word &#8220;bicycle&#8221; is claimed to have been first used
+in the <i>Times</i> in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the
+<i>Daily News</i> of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque
+spelling, to &#8220;bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs Elys&eacute;es
+and the Bois de Boulogne this summer.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the &#8220;velocipede&#8221; which had found its way to England at
+the beginning of 1869.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>The two-wheeled mystery was helped out of its wrappings and shavings, the
+Gymnasium was cleared, and Mr. Turner, taking off his coat, grasped the
+handles of the machine, and with a short run, to Mayall&#8217;s intense
+surprise, vaulted on to it. Putting his feet on what were then called the
+&#8220;treadles,&#8221; Turner, to the astonishment of the beholders, made the circuit
+of the room, sitting on this bar above a pair of wheels in line that ought
+to have collapsed so soon as the momentum ceased; but, instead of falling
+down, Turner turned the front wheel at an angle to the other, and thus
+maintained at once a halt and a balance.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JOHN MAYALL JUNIOR</div>
+
+<p>Mayall was fired with enthusiasm. The next day (Saturday) he was early at
+the Gymnasium, &#8220;intending to have a day of it,&#8221; and I think, from his
+account of what followed, that he <i>did</i>, in every sense, have such a day.</p>
+
+<p>As Spencer had hurt himself by falling from the machine the night before,
+Mayall had it almost wholly to himself, and, after a few successful
+journeys round the room, determined to try his luck in the streets.
+Accordingly, at one o&#8217;clock in the afternoon, amid the plaudits of a
+hundred men of the adjacent factory, engaged in the congenial occupation
+of lounging against the blank walls in their dinner-hour, the velocipede
+was hoisted on to a cab and driven to Portland Place, where it was put on
+the pavement, and Mayall prepared to mount. Even nowadays the cycling
+novice requires plenty of room, and as Portland Place is well known to be
+the widest street in London, and nearly the most secluded, it seems
+probable that this intrepid pioneer deliberately chose it in order to have
+due scope for his evolutions.</p>
+
+<p>It was a raw and muddy day, with a high wind. Mayall sprang on to the
+velocipede, but it slipped on the wet road, and he measured his length in
+the mud. The day-out was beginning famously.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer, who had been worsted the night before, contented himself with
+giving Mayall a start when he made another attempt, and this time that
+courageous<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> person got as far as the Marylebone Road, and across it on to
+the pavement of the other side, where he fell with a crash as though a
+barrow had been upset. But again vaulting into the saddle, he lumbered on
+into Regent&#8217;s Park, and so to the drinking-fountain near the Zoological
+Gardens, where, in attempting to turn round, he fell over again. Mounting
+once more, he returned. Looking round, &#8220;there was the park-keeper coming
+hastily towards me, making indignant signs. I passed quickly out of the
+Park gate into the roadway.&#8221; Thus early began the long warfare between
+Cycling and Authority.</p>
+
+<p>Thence, sometimes falling into the road, with Spencer trotting after him,
+he reached the foot of Primrose Hill, and then, at Spencer&#8217;s home,
+staggered on to a sofa, and lay there, exhausted, soaked in rain and
+perspiration, and covered with mud. It had been in no sense a light matter
+to exercise with that ninety-three pounds&#8217; weight of mingled timber and
+ironmongery.</p>
+
+<p>On the Monday he trundled about, up to the &#8220;Angel,&#8221; Islington, where
+curious crowds assembled, asking the uses of the machine and if the
+falling off and grovelling in the mud was a part of the pastime. The
+following day, very sore, but still undaunted, he re-visited the &#8220;Angel,&#8221;
+went through the City, and so to Brixton and Clapham, where, at the house
+of a friend, he looked over maps, and first conceived the &#8220;stupendous&#8221;
+idea of riding to Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>The following morning he endeavoured to put that plan into execution, and
+toiled up Brixton Hill, and so through Croydon, up the &#8220;never-ending&#8221;
+rise, as it seemed, of Smitham Bottom to the crest of Merstham Hill.
+There, tired, he half plunged into the saddle, and so thundered and
+clattered down hill into Merstham. At Redhill, seventeen and a half miles,
+utterly exhausted, he relinquished the attempt, and retired to the railway
+station, where he lay for some time on one of the seats until he revived.
+Then, to the intense admiration and amusement of the station-master<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> and
+his staff, he rode about the platform, dodging the pillars, and narrowly
+escaping a fall on to the rails, until the London train came in.</p>
+
+<p>On Wednesday, February 17th, Mayall, Rowley B. Turner, and Charles
+Spencer, all three on velocipedes, started from Trafalgar Square for
+Brighton. The party kept together until Redhill was reached, when Mayall
+took the lead, and eventually reached Brighton alone. The time occupied
+was &#8220;about&#8221; twelve hours. Being a photographer, Mayall of course caused
+himself to be photographed standing beside the instrument of torture on
+which he made that weary ride, and thus we have preserved to us the weird
+spectacle he presented; more like that of a Russian convict than an
+athletic young Englishman. A peaked cap, an attenuated frock-coat, very
+tight in the waist, and stiff and shiny leather leggings, completed a
+costume strange enough to make a modern cyclist shudder. Fearful whiskers
+and oily-looking long hair add to the strangeness of this historic figure.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RECORDS</div>
+
+<p>With this exploit athletic competition began, and the long series of
+modern &#8220;records&#8221; on the Brighton Road were set a-going, for during the
+March of that year two once well-known amateur pedestrian members of the
+Stock Exchange, W. M. and H. J. Chinnery, <i>walked</i> down to Brighton in 11
+hrs. 25 mins., and on April 14th C. A. Booth bettered Mayall&#8217;s adventure,
+riding down on a velocipede in 9 hrs. 30 mins.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the Amateur Bicycle Club&#8217;s race, September 19th, 1872. By that
+time not only had the word &#8220;velocipede&#8221; been discarded for &#8220;bicycle,&#8221; and
+&#8220;treadles&#8221; become &#8220;pedals,&#8221; but the machine itself, although in general
+appearance very much the same, had been improved in detail. The 36-inch
+front wheel had been increased to 44 inches, the wooden spokes had given
+place to wire, and strips of rubber, nailed on, replaced the iron tyres.
+Probably as a result of these refinements the winner, A. Temple, reached
+Brighton in 5 hrs, 25 mins.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img15.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">JOHN MAYALL, JUNIOR, 1869.<br /><small><i>From a contemporary photograph.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>By 1872 the bicycle had advanced a further stage towards the giraffe-like
+altitude of the &#8220;ordinary,&#8221; and already there were many clubs in
+existence. On August 16th of that year six members of the Surrey and six
+of the Middlesex Bicycle Clubs rode from Kennington Oval to Brighton and
+back, Causton<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> captain of the Surrey, being the first into Brighton.
+Riding a 50-inch &#8220;Keen&#8221; bicycle he reeled off the fifty miles in 4 hrs. 51
+mins. The new machine was something to be reckoned with.</p>
+
+<p>On February 9th. 1874, a certain John Revel, junr., backed himself in
+heavy sums to ride a bicycle the whole distance from Brighton to London
+quicker than a Mr. Gregory could walk the 22&#189; miles from Reigate to
+London. Revel was to leave Brighton at the junction of the London and
+Montpellier roads at the same time as Gregory started from a point between
+the twenty-second and twenty-third milestones. The pedestrian won,
+finishing in 3 hrs. 27 mins. 47 secs., Revel taking 5 hrs. 57 mins. for
+the whole journey.</p>
+
+<p>The bicycle had by this time firmly established itself. It grew more and
+more of an athletic exercise to mount the steadily growing machines, but
+once seated on them the going was easier. April 27th, 1874, found Alfred
+Howard cycling from Brighton to London in 4 hrs. 25 mins., a speed which
+works out at eleven miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>In 1875 the Brighton Road seems to have been left severely alone, and 1876
+was signalised only by two of the fantastic wagers that have been
+numerously decided on this half-century of miles. In that year, we are
+told, a Mr. Frederick Thompson staked one thousand guineas that Sir John
+Lynton would not wheel a barrow from Westminster Abbey to the &#8220;Old Ship&#8221;
+at Brighton in fifteen hours; and the knight, accepting the bet, made his
+appearance airily clothed in the &#8220;shorts&#8221; of the recognised running
+costume and wheeling a barrow made of bamboo, and provided with handles
+six feet long. He won easily, but whether the loser paid the thousand
+guineas, or lodged a protest with referees, does not appear. He should
+have specified the make of barrow, for the kinds range through quite a
+number of varieties, from the coster&#8217;s barrow to the navvy&#8217;s and the
+gardener&#8217;s. But the wager did not contemplate the fancy article with which
+Sir John Lynton made his journey. At any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> rate, I have my doubts about the
+genuineness of the whole affair, for, seeking this &#8220;Sir John Lynton&#8221; in
+the usual books of reference of that period, there is no such knight or
+baronet to be discovered.</p>
+
+<p>According to the Sussex newspapers of 1876, over fifteen thousand people
+assembled in the King&#8217;s Road at Brighton to witness the finish of the
+
+sporting event between Major Penton and an unnamed competitor. Major
+Penton agreed to give his opponent a start of twenty-seven miles in a
+pedestrian match to Brighton, on the condition that he was allowed a
+&#8220;go-as-you-please&#8221; method, while the other man was to walk in the fair
+&#8220;heel-and-toe&#8221; style. The major won by a yard and a half in the King&#8217;s
+Road, through the excitement of his competitor, who was disqualified at
+the last minute by breaking into a trot.</p>
+
+<p>Freakish sport was at this time decidedly in the ascendant, for the sole
+event of 1877 was the extraordinary escapade of two persons who on
+September 11th undertook to ride, dressed as clowns, on donkeys, from
+London to Croydon, seated backwards with their faces towards the animals&#8217;
+tails. From Croydon to Redhill they were to walk the three-legged
+walk&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, tied together by right and left legs&mdash;and thence to Crawley
+(surely a most appropriate place) on hands and knees. From that place to
+the end their pilgrimage was to be made walking in boots each weighted
+with 15 lb. of lead. This last ordeal speedily finished them, for they had
+failed to accomplish more than half a mile when they broke down.</p>
+
+<p>John Granby was another of these fantastic persons, whose proper place
+would be a lunatic ward. He essayed to walk to Brighton with 50 lb. weight
+of sand round his shoulders, in a bag, but he sank under the weight by the
+time of his arrival at Thornton Heath.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MORE RECORDS</div>
+
+<p>In 1878 P. J. Burt bettered the performance of the Chinnerys, ten years
+earlier, by thirty-three minutes, walking to the Aquarium in 10 hrs. 52
+mins. Most authorities agree in making his starting-point the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> Clock Tower
+on the north side of Westminster Bridge. 52&#188; miles, and thus we can
+figure out his speed at about five miles an hour. All the athletic world
+wondered, and when, in 1884, C. L. O&#8217;Malley (pedestrian, swimmer,
+steeplechaser, and boxer), walking against B. Nickels, junr., lowered that
+record by so much as 1 hr. 4 mins., every one thought finality in
+long-distance padding the hoof had been reached.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, however, 1882 had witnessed another odd adventure on the way to
+Brighton. A London clubman declared, while at dinner with a friend, that
+the bare-footed tramps sometimes to be seen in the country were not to be
+pitied. Boots, he said, were after all conventions, and declared it an
+easy matter to walk, say, fifty miles without them. He challenged his
+friend, and a walk to Brighton was arranged. The friend retired on his
+blisters in twelve miles; the challenger, however, with the soles of his
+stockings long since worn away, plodded on until he fainted with pain when
+only four miles from Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>On April 6th. 1886, J. A. M&#8217;Intosh, of the London Athletic Club, walked to
+Brighton in 9 hrs. 25 mins. 8 secs., improving upon O&#8217;Malley&#8217;s best by 22
+mins. 52 secs.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1888 was notable. On January 1st the horse &#8220;Ginger,&#8221; in a match
+against time, was driven at a trot to Brighton in 4 hrs. 16 mins. 30
+secs., and another horse, &#8220;The Bird,&#8221; trotted from Kennington Cross to
+Brighton in 4 hrs. 30 mins. On July 13th Selby drove the &#8220;Old Times&#8221; coach
+from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, to Brighton and back in ten
+minutes under eight hours, thus arousing that competition of cyclists
+which, first directed towards beating his performance, has been continued
+to the present day.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<p>Selby&#8217;s drive was very widely chronicled. The elaborate reports and
+extensive preliminary arrangements compare oddly with the early sporting
+events undertaken on the spur of the moment and recorded only in meagre,
+unilluminating paragraphs. What would we not give for a report of the
+Prince of Wales&#8217;s ride in 1784, so elaborated.</p>
+
+<p>A great drive, and a great coachman, worthily carrying on the good old
+traditions of the road. It has, however, been already pointed out that
+neither on his outward journey (3 hrs. 56 mins.), nor on the return (3
+hrs. 54 mins.), did he quite equal the record of the &#8220;Criterion&#8221; coach,
+which on February 4th, 1834, took the King&#8217;s Speech from London to
+Brighton in 3 hrs. 40 mins.</p>
+
+<p>Selby did not live long to enjoy the world-wide repute his great drive
+gained him. He died, only forty-four years of age, at the end of the same
+year that saw this splendid feat.</p>
+
+<p>Selby&#8217;s memorable drive put cyclists upon their mettle, but not at once
+was any determined attempt made to better it. The dwarf rear-driving
+&#8220;safety&#8221; bicycle, the &#8220;Rover,&#8221; which, introduced in 1885, set the existing
+pattern, was not yet perfected, and cyclists still rode solid or cushion
+tyres, instead of the now universal pneumatic kind.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CYCLISTS</div>
+
+<p>It was, therefore, not until August, 1889, that after several unsuccessful
+attempts had been made to better the coach-time on that double journey of
+108 miles, a team of four cyclists&mdash;E. J. Willis, G. L. Morris, C. W.
+Schafer, and S. Walker, members of the Polytechnic Cycling Club&mdash;did that
+distance in 7 hrs. 36 mins. 19&#8534; secs.; or 13 mins. 40&#8535; secs. less;
+and even then the feat was accomplished only by the four cyclists dividing
+the journey between them into four relays. Two other teams, on as many
+separate occasions, reduced the figures by a few minutes, and M. A.
+Holbein and P. C. Wilson singly made unsuccessful attempts.</p>
+
+<p>It was left to F. W. Shorland, a very young rider,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> to be the first of a
+series of single-handed breakers of the coaching time. He accomplished the
+feat in June, 1890, upon a pneumatic-tyred &#8220;Geared Facile&#8221; safety, and
+reduced the time to 7 hrs. 19 mins., being himself beaten on July 23rd by
+S. F. Edge, riding a cushion-tyred safety. Edge put the time at 7 hrs. 2
+mins. 50 secs., and, in addition, first beat Selby&#8217;s outward journey, the
+times being&mdash;coach, 3 hrs. 36 mins.; cycle, 3 hrs. 18 mins. 25 secs. Then
+came yet another stalwart, C. A. Smith, who on September 3rd of the same
+year beat Edge by 10 mins. 40 secs. Even a tricyclist&mdash;E. P.
+Moorhouse&mdash;essayed the feat on September 30th, but failed, his time being
+8 hrs. 9 mins. 24 secs.</p>
+
+<p>To the adventitious aid of pacemakers, fresh and fresh again, to stir the
+record-breaker&#8217;s flagging energies, much of this success was at first due;
+but at the present day those times have been exceeded on many unpaced
+rides.</p>
+
+<p>Selby&#8217;s drive had the effect of creating a new and arbitrary point of
+departure for record-making, and &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; has thus somewhat confused
+the issues with the times and distances associated with Westminster
+Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1891 was a blank, so far as cycling was concerned, but on March
+20th an early Stock Exchange pedestrian to walk to Brighton set out to
+cover the distance between Hatchett&#8217;s and the &#8220;Old Ship&#8221; in 11 hrs. 15
+mins. This was E. H. Cuthbertson, who backed himself to equal the
+Chinnerys&#8217; performance of 1869. Out of this undertaking arose the
+additional and subsidiary match between Cuthbertson and another Stock
+Exchange member, H. K. Paxton, as to which should quickest walk between
+Hatchett&#8217;s and the &#8220;Greyhound,&#8221; Croydon. Paxton, a figure of
+Brobdingnagian proportions, 6 ft. 4 in. in height, and scaling 17 stone,
+received a time allowance of 23 minutes. Both aspirants went into three
+weeks&#8217; severe training, and elaborate arrangements were made for
+attendance, timing, and refreshment on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> road. Paxton, urged to renewed
+efforts in the ultimate yards by the strains of a more or less German
+band, which seeing the competitors approach, played &#8220;See the Conquering
+Hero Comes,&#8221;<a name='fna_5' id='fna_5' href='#f_5'><small>[5]</small></a> won the match to Croydon by 1 min. 18 secs., but did not
+stop here, continuing with Cuthbertson to Brighton. Although Cuthbertson
+won his wager, and walked down in 10 hrs. 6 mins. 18 secs. (9 hrs. 55
+mins. 34 secs, from Westminster) and won several heavy sums by this
+performance, he did not equal that of McIntosh in 1886. The old-timer,
+deducting a proportionate time for the difference between the
+finishing-points, the Aquarium and the &#8220;Old Ship,&#8221; was still half an hour
+to the good.</p>
+
+<p>The next four years were exclusively cyclists&#8217; years. On June 1st, 1892,
+S. F. Edge made a great effort to regain the record that had been wrested
+from him by C. A. Smith in 1890, and did indeed win it back, but only by
+the fractional margin of 1 min. 3 secs., and only held that advantage for
+three months, Edward Dance, in the last of three separate attempts,
+succeeding on September 6th in lowering Edge&#8217;s time, but only by 2 mins. 6
+secs. Then three days later, R. C. Nesbit made a &#8220;record&#8221; for the high
+&#8220;ordinary&#8221; bicycle, of 7 hrs. 42 mins. 50 secs., the last appearance of
+the now extraordinary &#8220;ordinary&#8221; on this stage.</p>
+
+<p>The course was from 1893 considerably varied, the Road Record Association
+being of opinion that as the original great object&mdash;the breaking of the
+coach time&mdash;had been long since attained, there was no need to maintain
+the Piccadilly end, or the Cuckfield route. The course selected,
+therefore, became from Hyde Park Corner to the Aquarium at Brighton, by
+way of Hickstead and Bolney. On September 12th of this year Edge tried for
+and again recaptured this keenly-contested prize, this time by the
+respectable margin of 35 mins. 13 secs., only to have it snatched away on
+September 17th by A. E. Knight, who knocked off 3 mins. 19 secs. Again, in
+another couple of days, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> figures were revised, C. A. Smith, on one of
+the few occasions on which he deserted the tricycle for the two-wheeler,
+accomplishing the double journey in 6 hrs. 6 mins. 46 secs. On the 22nd of
+the same busy month Edge for the fourth and last time took the record, on
+this occasion by the margin of 14 mins. 16 secs. The road then knew him no
+more as a record-breaking cyclist, and his achievement lasted&mdash;not days,
+but hours, for on the <i>same day</i> Dance lowered it by the infinitesimal
+fraction of 12 seconds. On October 4th W. W. Robertson set up a tricycle
+record of 7 hrs. 24 mins. 2 secs. for the double journey, and then a
+crowded year ended.</p>
+
+<p>The much-worried records of the Brighton Road came in for another turn in
+1894, W. R. Toft, on June 11th, reducing the tricycle time, and C. G.
+Wridgway on September 12th lowering that for the bicycle. This year was
+also remarkable for the appearance of women speed cyclists, setting up
+records of their own, Mrs. Noble cycling to Brighton and back in 8 hrs. 9
+mins., followed on September 20th by Miss Reynolds in 7 hrs. 48 mins. 46
+secs., and on September 22nd by Miss White in 42 mins. shorter time.</p>
+
+<p>The season of 1895 was not very eventful, with the ride by A. A. Chase in
+5 hrs. 34 mins. 58 secs.; 34 secs. better than the previous best, and the
+lowering by J. Parsley of the tricycle record by over an hour; but it was
+notable for an almost incredible eccentricity, that of cycling backwards
+to Brighton. This feat was accomplished by J. H. Herbert in November, as
+an advertising sensation on behalf of the inventor of a new machine
+exhibited at the Stanley Show. He rode facing the hind wheel and standing
+on the pedals. Punctures, mud, rain, and wind delayed him, but he reached
+Brighton in 7 hrs. 45 mins.</p>
+
+<p>On June 26th, 1896, E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood established a
+tandem-cycle record of 5 hrs. 37 mins. 34 secs., demolished September
+15th; while on July 15th C. G. Wridgway regained his lost single record,
+beating Chase&#8217;s figures by 12 mins. 25 secs.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> In this year W. Franks, a
+professional pedestrian in his forty-fifth year, beat all earlier walks to
+Brighton, eclipsing McIntosh&#8217;s walk of 1886 by 18 mins. 18 secs. But, far
+above all other considerations, 1896 was notable for the legalising of
+motor-cars. On Motor-Day, November 14th, a great number of automobiles
+were to go in procession&mdash;not a race&mdash;from Westminster to Brighton. Most
+of them broke down, but a 6 h.-p. Boll&eacute;e car (a three-wheeled variety now
+obsolete) made a record journey in 2 hrs. 55 mins.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1897 opened on April 10th with the open London to Brighton walk
+of the Polytechnic Harriers. The start was made from Regent Street, but
+time was taken separately, from that point and from Westminster Clock
+Tower. There were thirty-seven starters. E. Knott, of the Hairdressers&#8217;
+A.C.&mdash;a quaint touch&mdash;finished in 8 hrs. 56 mins. 44 secs. Thirty-one of
+the competitors finished well within twelve hours.</p>
+
+<p>On May 4th W. J. Neason, cycling to Brighton and back, made the distance
+in 5 hrs. 19 mins. 39 secs., and on July 12th Miss M. Foster beat Miss
+White&#8217;s 1894 record by 20 mins. 37 secs., while on the following day
+Richard Palmer made a better run than Neason&#8217;s by 9 mins. 45 secs. Neason,
+however, got his own again in the following September, by 3 mins. 3 secs.,
+and on October 27th P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford improved the tandem
+record of 1896 by 25 mins. 41 secs.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the thoroughly artificial character of most of these later
+cycling records had become glaringly apparent. It was not only seen in the
+fact that their heavy cost was largely borne by cycle and tyre-makers, who
+found advertisement in them, but it was obvious also in the arbitrary
+selection of the starting-points, by which a record run to Brighton and
+back might be begun at Purley, run to Brighton, then back to Purley, and
+thence to London and back again, with any variation that might suit the
+day and the rider. It was evident, too, that the growing elaboration of
+pace-making, first by relays of riders<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> and latterly by motors, had
+reduced the thing to an absurdity in which there was no credit and&mdash;worse
+still&mdash;no advertisement. Then, therefore, a new order of things was set
+agoing, and the era of unpaced records was begun.</p>
+
+<p>On September 27th, 1898, E. J. Steel established a London to Brighton and
+back unpaced cycling record of 6 hrs. 23 mins. 55 secs.; and on the same
+day the new unpaced tricycle record of 8 hrs. 11 mins. 10 secs. for the
+double journey was set up by P. F. A. Gomme.</p>
+
+<p>The South London Harriers&#8217; open &#8220;go-as-you-please&#8221; walking or running
+match of May 6th, 1899, attracted the attention of the athletic world in a
+very marked degree. Cyclists, in especial, were in evidence, to make the
+pace, to judge, to sponge down the competitors or to refresh them by the
+wayside. The start was made from Big Ben soon after seven o&#8217;clock in the
+morning, when fourteen aspirants, all clad in the regulation running
+costumes and sweaters, went forth to win the modern equivalent of the
+victor&#8217;s laurelled crown in the ancient Olympian games. F. D. Randall, who
+won, got away from his most dangerous opponent on the approach to Redhill,
+and, increasing that advantage to a hundred yards&#8217; lead when in the midst
+of the town, was not afterwards seriously challenged. He finished in the
+splendid time of 6 hrs. 58 mins. 18 secs. Saward, the second, completed it
+in 7 hrs. 17 mins. 50 secs., and the veteran E. Ion Pool in another 4
+mins.</p>
+
+<p>As if to show the superiority of the cycle over mere pedestrian efforts,
+H. Green on June 30th cycled from London to Brighton and back, unpaced, in
+5 hrs. 50 mins. 23 secs., and on August 12th, 1902, reduced his own record
+by 20 mins. 1 sec. Meanwhile, Harry Vowles, a blind musician of Brighton,
+who had for some years made an annual walk from Brighton to London, on
+October 15th, 1900, accomplished his ambition to walk the distance in one
+day. He left Brighton at 5 a.m. and reached the Alhambra, in Leicester
+Square, at ten o&#8217;clock that night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>On October 31st, 1902, the Surrey Walking Club&#8217;s 104 miles contest to
+Brighton and back resulted in J. Butler winning: time, 21 hrs. 36 mins. 27
+secs., Butler performing the single journey on March 14th the following
+year in 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16 secs. For fair heel-and-toe walking, that was
+considered at the time the ultimate achievement; but it was beaten on
+April 9th, 1904, in the inter-club walk of the Blackheath and Ranelagh
+Harriers, when T. E. Hammond established the existing record of 8 hrs. 26
+mins. 57&#8534; secs.&mdash;the astonishing speed of six miles an hour.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">STOCK-EXCHANGE WALKS</div>
+
+<p>This event was preceded by the famous Stock Exchange Walk of May Day,
+1903. Every one knows the Stock Exchange to be almost as great on sport as
+it is in finance, but no one was prepared for the magnitude finally
+assumed by the match idly suggested on March 16th, during a dull hour on
+the Kaffir Market. Business had long been in a bad way, not in that market
+alone, but in the House in general. The trail of the great Boer War and
+its heritage of debt, taxation, and want of confidence lay over all
+departments, and brokers, jobbers, principals, and clerks alike were so
+heartily tired of going to &#8220;business&#8221; day after day when there was no
+business&mdash;and when there calculating how much longer they could afford
+annual subscriptions and office rent&mdash;that any relief was eagerly
+accepted. In three days twenty-five competitors had entered for the
+proposed walk to Brighton, and the House found itself not so
+poverty-stricken but that prize-money to the extent of &pound;35, for three
+silver cups, was subscribed. And then the Press&mdash;that Press which is
+growing daily more hysterical and irresponsible&mdash;got hold of it and boomed
+it, and there was no escaping the Stock Exchange Walk. By the morning of
+March 25th, when the list was closed, there were 107 competitors entered
+and the prize-list had grown to the imposing total of three gold medals,
+valued, one at &pound;10 10<i>s.</i> and two at &pound;5 5<i>s.</i>, with two silver cups valued
+at &pound;10 10<i>s.</i>, two at &pound;5 5<i>s.</i>, and silver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> commemoration medals for all
+arriving at Brighton in thirteen hours.</p>
+
+<p>Long before May Day the Press had worked the thing up to the semblance of
+a matter of Imperial importance, and London talked of little else. April
+13th had been at first spoken of for the event, but many of the
+competitors wanted to get into training, and in the end May Day, being an
+annual Stock Exchange holiday, was selected.</p>
+
+<p>There were ninety-nine starters from the Clock Tower at 6.30 on that chill
+May morning: not middle-aged stockbrokers, but chiefly young stockbrokers&#8217;
+clerks. All the papers had published particulars of the race, together
+with final weather prognostications; hawkers sold official programmes; an
+immense crowd assembled; a host of amateur photographers descended upon
+the scene, and the police kept Westminster Bridge clear. Although by no
+means to be compared with Motor-car Day, the occasion was well honoured.</p>
+
+<p>Advertisers had, as usual, seized the opportunity, and almost overwhelmed
+the start; and among the motor-cars and the cyclists who followed the
+competitors down the road the merits of Somebody&#8217;s Whisky, and the pills,
+boots, bicycles, beef-tea, and flannels of some other bodies impudently
+obtruded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What went ye out for to see?&#8221; The public undoubtedly expected to see a
+number of pursy, plethoric City men, attired in frock-coats and silk-hats,
+walking to Brighton. What they <i>did</i> see was a crowd of apparently
+professional pedestrians, lightly clad in the flannels and &#8220;shorts&#8221; of
+athletics, trailing down the road, with here and there an &#8220;unattached&#8221;
+walker, such as Mr. Pringle, who, fulfilling the conditions of a wager,
+walked down in immaculate silk hat, black coat, and spats&mdash;&#8220;immaculate,&#8221;
+that is to say, at the start: as a chronicler adds, &#8220;things were rather
+different later.&#8221; They were: for thirteen hours&#8217; (more or less) rain and
+mud can work vast changes. The day was, in fact, as unpleasant as well
+could be imagined, and it is said much for the sporting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> enthusiasm of the
+countryside that the whole length of the road to Brighton was so crowded
+with spectators that it resembled a thronged City thoroughfare.</p>
+
+<p>It said still more for the pluck and endurance of those who undertook the
+walk that of the ninety-nine starters no fewer than seventy-eight finished
+within the thirteen hours&#8217; limit qualifying them for the commemorative
+medal. G. D. Nicholas, the favourite, heavily backed by sportsmen, led
+from the beginning, making the pace at the rate of six miles an hour. He
+reached Streatham, six miles, in 59 mins.</p>
+
+<p>And then a craze for walking to Brighton set in. On June 6th the butchers
+of Smithfield Market walked, and doubtless, among the many other
+class-races, the bakers, and the candlestick-makers as well, and the
+proprietors of baked-potato cans and the roadmen, and indeed the Lord
+alone knows who not. Of the sixty butchers, who had a much more favourable
+day than the stockbrokers, the winner, H. F. Otway, covered the distance
+in 9 hrs. 21 mins. 1&#8536; secs., thus beating Broad by some 9 minutes.</p>
+
+<p>Whether the dairymen of London ever executed their proposed daring feat of
+walking to Brighton, each trundling an empty churn, does not appear; but
+it seems likely that many a fantastic person walked down carrying an empty
+head. A German, one Anton Hauslian, even set out on the journey pushing a
+perambulator containing his wife and six-year-old daughter; and on June
+16th an American, a Miss Florence, an eighteen-year-old music-hall
+equilibrist, started to &#8220;walk&#8221; the distance on a globe. She used for the
+purpose two globes, each made of wood covered with sheepskin, and having a
+diameter of 26 in.; one weighing 20 lb., for uphill work; the other
+weighing 75 lb., for levels and descents. Starting at an early hour on
+June 16th, and &#8220;walking&#8221; ten hours a day, she reached the Aquarium at the
+unearthly hour of 2.40 on the morning of the 21st.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 386px;"><img src="images/img16.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE STOCK EXCHANGE WALK: E. F. BROAD AT HORLEY.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>Those who could not rehearse the epic flights of these fifty-two miles
+walked shorter distances; and, while the craze lasted, not only did the
+&#8220;midinettes&#8221; of Paris take the walking mania severely, but the waitresses
+of various London teashops performed ten-mile wonders.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MORE PEDESTRIANISM</div>
+
+<p>On June 20th the gigantic &#8220;go-as-you-please&#8221; walking or running match to
+Brighton organised by the <i>Evening News</i> took place, in that dismal
+weather so generally associated, whatever the season of the year, with
+sport on the Brighton Road. Two hundred and thirty-eight competitors had
+entered, but only ninety actually faced the starter at 5 o&#8217;clock a.m. They
+were a very miscellaneous concourse of professional and amateur &#8220;peds&#8221;;
+some with training and others with no discoverable athletic qualifications
+at all; some mere boys, many middle-aged, one in his fifty-second year,
+and even one octogenarian of eighty-five. Among them was a negro, F. W.
+Craig, known to the music-halls by the poetic name of the &#8220;Coffee Cooler&#8221;;
+and labouring men, ostlers, and mechanics of every type were of the
+number. It was as complete a contrast from the Stock Exchange band as
+could be well imagined.</p>
+
+<p>The wide difference in age, and the fitness and unfitness of the many
+competitors, resulted in the race being won by the foremost while the
+rearmost were struggling fifteen miles behind. The intrepid octogenarian
+was still wearily plodding on, twenty miles from Brighton, six hours after
+the winner, Len Hurst, had reached the Aquarium in the record time&mdash;26
+mins. 18 secs. better than Randall&#8217;s best of May 6th, 1899&mdash;of 6 hrs. 32
+mins. Some amazing figures were set up by the more youthful and
+incautious, who reached Croydon, 9&#189; miles, in 54 mins., but were
+eventually worn down by those who were wise enough to save themselves for
+the later stages.</p>
+
+<p>In the following August Miss M. Foster repeated her ride of July 12th,
+1897, and cycled to Brighton and back, on this occasion, with
+motor-pacing, reducing her former record to 5 hrs. 33 mins. 8 secs.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img17.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">MISS M. FOSTER, PACED BY MOTOR-BICYCLE,<br />PASSING COULSDON.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PEDESTRIAN RECORDS</div>
+
+<p>On November 7th the Surrey Walking Club&#8217;s Brighton and back match was won
+by H. W. Horton, in 20 hrs. 31 mins. 53 secs., disposing of Butler&#8217;s best
+of October 31st, 1902, by a margin of 1 hr. 4 mins. 34 secs.</p>
+
+<p>With 1904 a decline in Brighton Road sport set in, for it was memorable
+only for the Blackheath and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>Ranelagh Harriers&#8217; inter-club walk to
+Brighton of April 9th. But that was indeed a memorable event, for T. E.
+Hammond then abolished Butler&#8217;s remaining record, of 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16
+secs. for the single trip, and replaced it by his own of 8 hrs. 26 mins.
+57&#8534; secs.</p>
+
+<p>Even the efforts of cyclists seem to for a time have spent themselves, for
+1905 witnessed only the new unpaced record made July 19th by R. Shirley,
+who cycled there and back in 5 hrs. 22 mins. 5 secs., thus shearing off a
+mere 8 mins. 5 secs. from Green&#8217;s performance of so long as three years
+before. What the future may have in store none may be so hardy as to
+prophesy. Finality has a way of ever receding into the infinite, and when
+the unpaced cyclist shall have beaten the paced record of 5 hrs. 6 mins.
+42 secs. made by Neason in 1897, other new fields will arise to be
+conquered. And let no one say that speed and sport on the Brighton Road
+have finally declined, for, as we have seen, it is abundantly easy in
+these days for a popular Press to &#8220;call spirits from the vasty deep,&#8221; and
+arouse sporting enthusiasm almost to frenzy, whenever and wherever it is
+&#8220;worth the while.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in pedestrianism, other new times have since been set up. On
+September 22nd, 1906, J. Butler, in the Polytechnic Harriers&#8217; Open Walk,
+finished to Brighton in 8 hrs. 23 mins. 27 secs. On June 22nd, 1907,
+Hammond performed the double journey, London to Brighton and back, in 18
+hrs. 13 mins. 37 secs. And on May 1st, 1909, he regained the single
+journey record by his performance of 8 hrs. 18 mins. 18 secs. On September
+4th of the same year H. L. Ross further reduced the figures to 8 hrs. 11
+mins. 14 secs.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center">BRIGHTON ROAD RECORDS.</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Riding, Driving, Cycling, Running, Walking, etc.</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="table">
+<tr><td class="btlr" align="center">Date.</td>
+    <td class="btr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="btr" align="center" colspan="3">Time.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="btlr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="btr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="bt" align="center">h.</td>
+    <td class="bt" align="center">m.</td>
+    <td class="btr" align="center">s.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1784, July 25.</td>
+    <td class="br">Prince of Wales rode horseback from the &#8220;Pavilion,&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton, to Carlton House, London, and returned</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">Going</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">Returning</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Aug. 21.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Prince of Wales drove ph&aelig;ton, three horses tandem,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">from Carlton House to &#8220;Pavilion&#8221;</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1809, May.</td>
+    <td class="br">Cornet Webster of the 10th Light Dragoons, rode<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">horseback from Brighton to Westminster Bridge</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">3</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">20</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1831, June 19.</td>
+    <td class="br">The &#8220;Red Rover&#8221; coach, leaving the &#8220;Elephant<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Castle&#8221; at 4 p.m., reached Brighton 8.21</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">21</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1833, Oct.</td>
+    <td class="br">Walter Hancock&#8217;s steam-carriage &#8220;Autopsy&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">performed the distance between Stratford and</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">(Halted 3 hours on road. Actual</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 4em;">running time, 5 hrs. 30 mins.)</span></td>
+    <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1834, Feb. 4.</td>
+    <td class="br">&#8220;Criterion&#8221; coach, London to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">3</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">40</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1868, Mar. 20.</td>
+    <td class="br">Benjamin B. Trench walked Kennington Church to<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton and back (100 miles)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">23</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1869, Feb. 17.</td>
+    <td class="br">John Mayall, jun., rode a velocipede from Trafalgar<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Square to Brighton in &#8220;about&#8221;</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">12</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mar. 6.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">W. M. and H. J. Chinnery walked from Westminster<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bridge to Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">11</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">April 14.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. A. Booth rode a velocipede London to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1872, Sept. 19.</td>
+    <td class="br">Amateur Bicycle Club&#8217;s race, London to Brighton;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">won by A. Temple, riding a 44-in. wheel</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1873, Aug. 16.</td>
+    <td class="br">Six members of the Surrey B.C. and six of the<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Middlesex B.C. rode to Brighton and back,</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">starting from Kennington Oval at 6.1 a.m.</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Causton, captain of the Surrey, reached the</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8220;Albion,&#8221; Brighton, in 4 hrs. 51 mins., riding a</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">50-in. Keen bicycle. W. Wood (Middlesex) did</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">the 100 miles</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">11</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1874, April 27.</td>
+    <td class="br">A. Howard cycled Brighton to London</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1878, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">P. J. Burt walked from Westminster Clock Tower<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">to Aquarium, Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">52</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1884, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">C. L. O&#8217;Malley walked from Westminster Clock<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tower to Aquarium, Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">48</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1886, April 10.</td>
+    <td class="br">J. A. McIntosh walked from Westminster Clock<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tower to Aquarium, Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>1888, Jan. 1.</td>
+    <td class="br">Horse &#8220;Ginger&#8221; trotted to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">16</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1888, July 13.</td>
+    <td class="br">James Selby drove &#8220;Old Times&#8221; coach from<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s,&#8221; Piccadilly, to &#8220;Old Ship,&#8221; Brighton,</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">50</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">Going</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">3</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">56</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">Returning</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">3</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">54</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1889, Aug. 10.</td>
+    <td class="br">Team of four cyclists&mdash;E. J. Willis, G. L. Morris, C.<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">W. Schafer, and S. Walker&mdash;dividing the distance</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">between them, cycled from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s,&#8221;</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Piccadilly, to &#8220;Old Ship,&#8221; Brighton, and back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">36</td>
+    <td class="br" valign="bottom">19&#8534;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1890, Mar. 30.</td>
+    <td class="br">Another team&mdash;J. F. Shute, T. W. Girling, R. Wilson,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and A. E. Griffin&mdash;reduced first team&#8217;s time</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">by 4 mins. 19&#8534; secs.</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">32</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">April 13.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Another team&mdash;E. R. and W. Scantlebury, W. W.<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Arnott, and J. Blair</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">15</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">June.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">F. W. Shorland cycled from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; to &#8220;Old<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ship&#8221; and back (&#8220;Geared Facile&#8221; bicycle,</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">pneumatic tyres)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">19</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">July 23.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">S. F. Edge cycled from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; to &#8220;Old Ship&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and back (safety bicycle, cushion tyres)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">2</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">50</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 3.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. A. Smith cycled from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; to &#8220;Old Ship&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">(safety bicycle, pneumatic tyres) and back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">52</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">30.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">E. P. Moorhouse cycled (tricycle) from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">to &#8220;Old Ship&#8221;</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">24</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1891, Mar. 20.</td>
+    <td class="br">E. H. Cuthbertson walked from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; to &#8220;Old<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ship&#8221;</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br"><span style="margin-left: 3em;">From Westminster Clock Tower</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">55</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">34</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1892, June 1.</td>
+    <td class="br">S. F. Edge cycled from &#8220;Hatchett&#8217;s&#8221; to &#8220;Old Ship&#8221;<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">and back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">51</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 6.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">E. Dance cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">49</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">9.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">R. C. Nesbit cycled (high bicycle) to Brighton and<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">42</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">50</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1893, Sept. 12.</td>
+    <td class="br">S. F. Edge cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">13</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">48</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">17.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">A. E. Knight<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">19.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. A. Smith<span style="margin-left: 2.7em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">46</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">22.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">S. F. Edge<span style="margin-left: 3.2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">52</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="br">E. Dance<span style="margin-left: 3.6em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">52</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oct. 4.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">W. W. Robertson (tricycle)<span style="margin-left: 1.7em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">24</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">2</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1894, June 11.</td>
+    <td class="br">W. R. Toft<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 3.1em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">21</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 12.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. G. Wridgway<span style="margin-left: 2.3em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 3.1em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">35</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">32</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">20.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Miss Reynolds cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">48</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">46</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">22.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Miss White cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">46</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1895, Sept. 26.</td>
+    <td class="br">A. A. Chase, Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">34</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">58</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oct. 17.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">J. Parsley (tricycle)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">28</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nov.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">J. H. Herbert cycled backwards to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">45</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1896, June 26.</td>
+    <td class="br">E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood (tandem)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">37</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">34</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">W. Franks walked from south side of Westminster<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bridge to Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">July 15.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. G. Wridgway</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">22</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">33</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 15.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">H. Green and W. Nelson (tandem)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">20</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">35</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nov. 14.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">&#8220;Motor-car Day.&#8221; A 6 h.p. Boll&eacute;e motor started from<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hotel Metropole, London, at 11.30 a.m., and</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">reached Brighton at 2.25 p.m.</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">2</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">55</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1897, April 10.</td>
+    <td class="br">Polytechnic Harriers&#8217; walk, Westminster Clock<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tower to Brighton. E. Knott</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">56</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">44</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">May 4.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">W. J. Neason cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">19</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">39</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">July 12.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Miss M. Foster cycled from Hyde Park Corner to<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton and back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">45</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">13.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Richard Palmer cycled to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">45</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 11.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">W. J. Neason cycled from London to Brighton and<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">back</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">42</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oct. 27.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford (tandem)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">54</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">54</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">L. Franks and G. Franks (tandem safety)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">56</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1898, Sept. 27.</td>
+    <td class="br">E. J. Steel cycled London to Brighton and back<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">(unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">23</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">55</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="br">P. F. A. Gomme, London to Brighton and back<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">(tricycle, unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">11</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">10</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1899, May 6.</td>
+    <td class="br">South London Harriers&#8217; &#8220;go-as-you-please&#8221; running<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">match, Westminster Clock Tower to Brighton.</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Won by F. D. Randall</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">58</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">June 30.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and back<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">(unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">50</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">23</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1902, Aug. 21.</td>
+    <td class="br">H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton and back (unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">22</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oct. 31.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Surrey Walking Club&#8217;s match, Westminster Clock<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tower to Brighton and back. J. Butler</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">21</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">36</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">27</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1903, Mar. 14.</td>
+    <td class="br">J. Butler walked from Westminster Clock Tower to<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Brighton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">43</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">16</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">May 1.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Stock Exchange Walk, won by E. F. Broad</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">30</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">June 20.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Running Match, Westminster Clock Tower to<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tower to Brighton. Won by Len Hurst</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">32</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Aug.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Miss M. Foster cycled to Brighton and back<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">(motor-paced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">33</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nov. 7.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Surrey Walking Club&#8217;s match, Westminster<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Clock Tower to Brighton and back. H. W. Horton</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">20</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">31</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">53</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">P. Wheelock and G. Fulford (tandem safety)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">54</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">54</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">A. C. Gray and H. L. Dixon (tandem safety,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">17</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1904, April 9.</td>
+    <td class="br">Blackheath and Ranelagh Harriers, inter-club walk,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Westminster Clock Tower to Brighton. T. E.</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hammond</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">26</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">57&#8534;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1905, July 19.</td>
+    <td class="br">R. Shirley, Polytechnic C.C., cycled Brighton and<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">back (unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">22</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1905, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">J. Parsley (tricycle)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">28</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">H. S. Price (tricycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">53</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1906, Sept. 22.</td>
+    <td class="br">J. Butler walked to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">23</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">27</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">S. C. Paget and M. R. Mott (tandem safety,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">20</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">H. Green (safety cycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">20</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">22</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">R. Shirley<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 4em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">15</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">L. Dralce (tricycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">24</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">56</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">J. D. Daymond<span style="margin-left: .8em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 2em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">19</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">48</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1907, June 22.</td>
+    <td class="br">T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">13</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">37</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">C. and A. Richards (tandem-safety, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">25</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">G. H. Briault and E. Ward (tandem-safety, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">53</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">48</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1908, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">G. H. Briault (tricycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">24</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1909, May 1.</td>
+    <td class="br">T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sept. 4.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">H. L. Ross<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">"</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">8</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">11</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">14</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">Harry Green cycled Brighton and back (unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">12</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">14</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1910, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">L. S. Leake and G. H. Spencer (tandem tricycle,<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 1em;">unpaced)</span></td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">59</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">51</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1912, June 19.</td>
+    <td class="br">Fredk. H. Grubb cycled (paced) Brighton and back</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">9</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">41</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">"</span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">&mdash;.</span></td>
+    <td class="br">E. H. and S. Hulbert (tandem tricycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">5</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">42</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">21</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">1913, &mdash;.</td>
+    <td class="br">H. G. Cook (tricycle, unpaced)</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">6</td>
+    <td class="dent" align="right" valign="bottom">7</td>
+    <td class="br" align="right" valign="bottom">4</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="blr" valign="top">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="br">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="bblr" colspan="2">NOTE.&mdash;The fastest L. B. &amp; S. C. R. train, the 5 p.m. Pulman<br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 2em;">Express from London Bridge, reaches Brighton (51 miles)</span><br />
+    <span style="margin-left: 2em;">at 6.0 p.m.</span></td>
+    <td class="bb" align="right" valign="bottom">1</td>
+    <td class="bb" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td>
+    <td class="bbr" align="right" valign="bottom">0</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<h2>X</h2>
+
+<p>We may now, somewhat belatedly, after recounting these varied annals of
+the way to Brighton, start along the road itself, coming from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge to Kennington.</p>
+
+<p>No one scanning the grey vista of the Kennington Road would, on sight,
+accuse Kennington of owning a past; but, as a sheer matter of fact, it is
+an historic place. It is the &#8220;Chenintun&#8221; of Domesday Book, and the
+Cyningtun or K&ouml;ningtun&mdash;the King&#8217;s town&mdash;of an even earlier time. It was
+indeed a royal manor belonging to Canute, and the site of the palace where
+his son, Hardicanute, died, mad drunk, in 1042. Edward the Third annexed
+it to his Duchy of Cornwall, and even yet, after the vicissitudes of nine
+hundred years, the Prince of Wales, as Duke of Cornwall, owns house
+property here. Kennington Park, too, has its own sombre romance, for it
+was an open common until 1851, and a favourite place of execution for
+Surrey malefactors. Here the minor prisoners among the Scottish rebels
+captured by the Duke of Cumberland in the &#8217;45 were executed, those of
+greater consideration being beheaded on Tower Hill. It is an odd
+coincidence that, among the lesser titles of &#8220;Butcher Cumberland&#8221; himself
+was that of Earl of Kennington.</p>
+
+<p>At this junction of roads, where the Kennington Road, the Kennington Park
+Road, the Camberwell New Road, and the Brixton Road, all pool their
+traffic, there stood, in times not so far removed but that some yet living
+can remember it, Kennington Gate, an important turnpike at any time, and
+one of very great traffic on Derby Day, when, I fear, the pikeman was
+freely bilked of his due at the hands of sportsmen, noble and ignoble.
+There is a view of this gate on such a day drawn by James Pollard, and
+published in 1839, which gives a very good idea of the amount of traffic
+and, incidentally, of the curious costumes of the period. You shall also
+find in the &#8220;Comic Almanack&#8221; for 1837 an illustration by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> George
+Cruikshank of this same place, one would say, although it is not mentioned
+by name, in which is an immense jostling crowd anxious to pass through,
+while the pikeman, having apparently been &#8220;cheeked&#8221; by the occupants of a
+passing vehicle, is vulgarly engaged, I grieve to state, in &#8220;taking a
+sight&#8221; at them. That is to say, he has, according to the poet, &#8220;Put his
+thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">KENNINGTON GATE</div>
+
+<p>Kennington Gate was swept away, with other purely Metropolitan turnpike
+gates, October 31st. 1865, and is now to be found in the yard of Clare&#8217;s
+Depository at the crest of Brixton Hill. It was one of nine that barred
+this route from London to the sea in 1826. The others were at South End,
+Croydon: Foxley Hatch, or Purley Gate, which stood near Purley Corner, by
+the twelfth milestone, until 1853; and Frenches, 19 miles 4 furlongs from
+London&mdash;that is to say, just before you come into Redhill streets. Leaving
+Redhill behind, another gate spanned the road at Salfords, below Earlswood
+Common, while others were situated at Horley, Ansty Cross, Stonepound, one
+mile short of Clayton; and at Preston, afterwards removed to Patcham.<a name='fna_6' id='fna_6' href='#f_6'><small>[6]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>Not the most charitable person could lay his hand upon his heart and
+declare, honestly, that the church of St. Mark, Kennington, which stands
+at this beginning of the Brixton Road, is other than extremely hideous.
+Fortunately, its pagan architecture, once fondly thought to revive the
+glories of old Greece, is largely screened from sight by the thriving
+trees of its churchyard, and so nervous wayfarers are spared something of
+the inevitable shock.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>The story of Kennington Church does not take us very far back, down the
+dim alleys of history, for it was built so recently as the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century, when it was thought possible to emulate the
+marble beauties of the Parthenon and other triumphs of classic
+architecture in plebeian brick and stone. Those materials, however, and
+the architects themselves, were found to be somewhat inferior to their
+models, and eventually the public taste became so outraged with the
+appalling ugliness of the pagan temples arising on every hand that at
+length the Gothic revival of the mid-nineteenth century set in.</p>
+
+<p>But if its history is not long, its site has a horrid kind of historic
+association, for the building stands on what was a portion of Kennington
+Common, the exact spot where the unhappy Scottish rebels were executed in
+1746, and where Jerry Abershawe, the highwayman, was hanged in 1795. The
+remains of the gibbet on which the bodies of some of his fellow knights of
+the road were exposed were actually found when the foundations for the
+church were being dug out.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of Kennington Church, like that of Brixton, is so singular that
+it is very well worth while to inquire into it. It was a direct outcome of
+the Napoleonic wars. England had been so long engaged in those European
+struggles, and was so wearied and impoverished by them, that Parliament
+could think of nothing better than to celebrate the peace of 1815 by
+voting a million and a half of money to the clergy as a &#8220;thank-offering.&#8221;
+This sum took the shape of a church-building fund. Wages were low, work
+was scarce, and bread was so dear that the people were starving. That good
+paternal Parliament, therefore, when they asked for bread gave them stone
+and brick, and performed the heroic feat of picking their impoverished
+pockets as well. It was accomplished in this wise. There was that Lucky
+Bag, the million and a half sterling of the Thanksgiving Fund; but it
+could not be dipped into unless you gave an equal sum to that you took
+out, and then expended the whole on building churches. And yet it has been
+said that Parliament has no sense of the ridiculous! Why, it was the most
+stupendous of practical jokes!</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 381px;"><img src="images/img18.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">KENNINGTON GATE: DERBY DAY, 1839.<br /><small><i>From an engraving after J. Pollard.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">HALF-PRICE CHURCHES</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>Lambeth was at that time a suburban and a greatly expanding parish, and
+was one of those that accepted this offer, and took what came eventually
+to be called Half Price Churches. It gave a large order, and took four:
+those of Kennington, Waterloo, Brixton, and Norwood, all ferociously
+hideous, and costing &pound;15,000 apiece; the Government granting one moiety
+and the other being raised by a parish rate on all, without distinction of
+creed. The Government also remitted the usual taxes on the building
+materials, and in some instances further helped the people to rejoice by
+imposing a compulsory rate of twopence in the pound, to pay the rector or
+vicar. All this did more to weaken the Church of England than even a
+century of scandalous inefficiency:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Abuse a man, and he may brook it,<br />
+But keep your hands out of his breeches pocket.</p>
+
+<p>The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868,
+abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts;
+but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down
+and rebuilt.</p>
+
+<p>Brixton appears in Domesday as &#8220;Brixistan,&#8221; which in later ages became
+&#8220;Brixtow&#8221;; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which
+Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of
+Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the
+street, <i>i.e.</i>, the paved thoroughfare alluded to in &#8220;Brixton causeway,&#8221;
+marked on old suburban maps.</p>
+
+<p>The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a
+pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the
+river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> feet wide,
+which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at
+Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that
+side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was
+fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since
+been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it
+to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;White Horse&#8221; public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those
+times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the
+nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now
+stands, called &#8220;Angell Town,&#8221; and then the houses of Brixton Road began to
+arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen&#8217;s wooden
+boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until
+about 1875.</p>
+
+<p>There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the
+Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the
+old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a &#8220;suburban
+villa&#8221; you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but&mdash;to
+speak in the language of auctioneers&mdash;a &#8220;commodious residence situate in
+its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience,&#8221; or something
+in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon
+March&eacute;, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the
+continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of
+semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in
+the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the
+gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel
+drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid
+comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag
+armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from
+wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third
+and fourth generations; for these solid houses were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> built a century ago,
+or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of
+good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and
+sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised
+medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free
+from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent&mdash;and large. They
+are, indeed, of such spaciousness and commodious quality that an
+auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics
+to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul
+when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I
+think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until
+the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building
+plots for what we now understand by &#8220;villas&#8221;&mdash;a fate that has lately
+befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one
+of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour
+thirty or forty little modern houses&mdash;why, then an unwonted respect is
+felt for it and its kind.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BRIXTON HILL</div>
+
+<p>Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous
+church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of
+the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at
+the angle of the roads&mdash;a <i>memento mori</i>, ever since the twenties, for
+travellers down the road.</p>
+
+<p>Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well
+as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a
+biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A
+verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton
+Hill, accompanies name and date:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere<br />
+Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;<br />
+The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale<br />
+From this sad turf whene&#8217;er he reads the tale,<br />
+That one so young and lovely&mdash;died&mdash;and last,<br />
+When the sun&#8217;s vigour warms, or tempests rave,<br />
+Shall come in summer&#8217;s bloom and winter&#8217;s blast,<br />
+A Mother, to weep o&#8217;er this hopeless grave.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in
+1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no
+flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight
+assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton
+snores.</p>
+
+<p>On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains
+an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black
+tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now
+replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as
+it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the
+present millers, Messrs. Joshua &amp; Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here,
+unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an
+old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as
+they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this
+hill-top, and London seemed far away.</p>
+
+<p>And so to Streatham, once rightly &#8220;Streatham, Surrey,&#8221; in the postal
+address, but now merely &#8220;Streatham, S.W.&#8221; A world of significance lies in
+that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London
+Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley&#8217;s &#8220;History of
+Surrey&#8221; that &#8220;the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous
+range of villas and other respectable dwellings.&#8221; Respectable! I should
+think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the
+Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates &#8220;respectable.&#8221; As well might one
+style the Alps &#8220;pretty&#8221;!</p>
+
+<p>But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there
+stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung
+in chains the body of one &#8220;Jack Gutteridge,&#8221; a highwayman duly executed
+for robbing and murdering a gentleman&#8217;s servant here. The place was long
+afterwards known as &#8220;Jack Gutteridge&#8217;s Gate.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img19.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">Streatham Common</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>Streatham&mdash;the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the
+Street&mdash;emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name,
+<i>the</i> Street&mdash;was probably so named to distinguish it from some other
+settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a
+paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand godfather to a
+place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons,
+Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those &#8220;streets&#8221; were Roman roads. The
+particular &#8220;street&#8221; on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman
+road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John&#8217;s Common, Godstone,
+and Caterham, a branch of the road to <i>Portus Adurni</i>, the Old Shoreham of
+to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John&#8217;s Common, when
+the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It
+was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted
+together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham
+by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many &#8220;Cold Harbours&#8221;
+associated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton
+Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be
+Broad Green.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">DOCTOR JOHNSON</div>
+
+<p>There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are
+very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the
+village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. &#8220;All
+flesh is grass,&#8221; said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky
+figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an
+historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those
+who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the
+tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that &#8220;ripeness&#8221; of land for
+building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.</p>
+
+<p>But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will
+keep a vestige of its old-time <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>character of roadside village. A good deal
+earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson&#8217;s visits to Streatham and Thrale Place,
+the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or
+Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became
+known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the
+disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the &#8220;sower
+and weeping ground&#8221; by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or
+not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of
+Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.</p>
+
+<p>Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson
+will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter
+Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the
+mind&#8217;s-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming
+down from London to Thrale&#8217;s house, to be lionised and indulged, and in
+return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of
+a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and
+cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child&#8217;s, and a simple vanity as
+engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig
+awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight
+oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to
+the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met
+at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an
+&#8220;original.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and
+Fanny Burney&mdash;the readiest hand at the &#8220;management&#8221; of one so difficult
+and intractable&mdash;and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable
+cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That
+historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts;
+specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor&#8217;s visits. Ye gods! what
+floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting;
+and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved
+himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as
+any country squire on that notable occasion.</p>
+
+<p>But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should
+bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs.
+Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer
+bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it
+good-bye, as his diary records:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Sunday, went to church at Streatham. <i>Templo valedixi cum osculo.</i>&#8221; Thus,
+kissing the old porch of St. Leonard&#8217;s, the lexicographer departed with
+heavy heart. Two years later he died.</p>
+
+<p>This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to
+commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781,
+but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in
+truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and
+internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note the learned Doctor&#8217;s indignation when asked to write
+an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great
+authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental
+dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an
+inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!</p>
+
+<p>There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a
+tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who <i>in pugna
+Waterlooensi occiso</i>. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.</p>
+
+<p>But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another
+down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little brass to an
+ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north
+aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> Doctor, if ever it
+revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although
+it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XI</h2>
+
+<p>Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the
+speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and
+its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in
+1792, says that &#8220;Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres,
+surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in
+circumference.&#8221; Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and
+the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the
+house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions
+built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GIBBETS BY THE WAY</div>
+
+<p>Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston&#8217;s time, and
+indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark
+Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad.
+Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when
+compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his &#8220;Britannia&#8221; of
+1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and
+another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later
+editor, who issued an &#8220;Ogilby Improv&#8217;d&#8221; in 1731, they still decorated the
+wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of
+affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.</p>
+
+<p>At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and
+eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used
+to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where
+the extra large and permanent gallows stood,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> like a football goal, at
+what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden
+and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later
+years been persuaded to play.</p>
+
+<p>Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall,
+the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon,
+resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in
+March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. &#8220;T 180,&#8221; as he
+was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898,
+and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he
+had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his
+gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul&#8217;s Cathedral by
+the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised
+commercial circles.</p>
+
+<p>The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180&#8217;s release become &#8220;ripe for
+building,&#8221; and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been
+&#8220;developed&#8221; away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.</p>
+
+<p>Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white
+hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long
+body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in
+South London, &#8220;for ever spoiling the view in all its compass,&#8221; as Ruskin
+truly says in &#8220;Pr&aelig;terita.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is
+stuffily reminiscent of half a century&#8217;s stale teas and buttered toast,
+and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like
+the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural
+scenes as &#8220;Belshazzar&#8217;s Feast&#8221; and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects
+from Revelation.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img20.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">STREATHAM.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>At Thornton Heath&mdash;where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath
+for at least eighty years past&mdash;the electric trams of Croydon begin, and
+take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a
+continuous line of houses. &#8220;Broad Green&#8221; once stood by the wayside, but
+nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At
+Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past
+left, in &#8220;Colliers&#8217; Water Lane.&#8221; The old farmhouse of Colliers&#8217; Water,
+reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was demolished
+in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it
+possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable
+than highwaymen.</p>
+
+<p>The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon
+was a veritable Black Country.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;colliers of Croydon,&#8221; whose black trade gave such employment to
+seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of
+very recent times still called &#8220;sea-coal&#8221;&mdash;that is to say, coal shipped
+from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The
+Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that
+once overspread the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and was supplied very
+largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth.</p>
+
+<p>Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We
+are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a
+part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the
+time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke
+and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of
+Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to
+abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled
+lawn-sleeves.</p>
+
+<p>We first find Croydon mentioned in <span class="smcaplc">A.D.</span> 962, when it was &#8220;Crogdoene.&#8221; In
+Domesday Book it is &#8220;Croindene.&#8221; Whether the name means &#8220;crooked vale,&#8221;
+&#8220;chalk vale,&#8221; or &#8220;town of the cross,&#8221; I will not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> pretend to say, and he
+would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with
+the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror
+to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which
+still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate
+until 1750.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GROWTH OF CROYDON</div>
+
+<p>By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings
+become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified
+churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more
+secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose
+spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the
+promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the
+far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered
+between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a
+considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and
+twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still
+Croydon grows.</p>
+
+<p>In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620
+they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to
+be a &#8220;very obscure and darke place.&#8221; Archbishop Abbot &#8220;expounded&#8221; it by
+felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the
+headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of
+the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.</p>
+
+<p>The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of
+progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is
+still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances
+that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It
+<i>was</i> the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country
+site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy
+Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last
+few years;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a
+busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks
+&#8220;improvement&#8221;; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and
+the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good
+Whitgift&#8217;s noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have
+advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane
+among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better
+than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play
+monkey-tricks&mdash;when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the
+Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the
+will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, &#8220;The
+Hospital of the Holy Trinity,&#8221; inscribed high up on the wall, seems
+strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the
+<i>opposite</i> side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one
+standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which
+should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It
+is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital
+is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.</p>
+
+<p>It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character
+of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and
+as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the
+outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury
+and eloquent with the motto <i>Qui dat pauperi non indigebit</i>, the stranger
+has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old
+Aubrey quaintly puts it, &#8220;a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a
+college,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late
+Archbishop of Canterbury.&#8221; The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass
+lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two
+floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation:
+twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each &pound;40
+and &pound;30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital
+so long as of good behaviour, but &#8220;obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde
+of charmmynge, or witchcrafte&#8221; are punished by the statutes with
+expulsion.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img21.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden&#8217;s
+rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their
+building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the
+stained glass is of sixteenth century date.</p>
+
+<p>But it is in the Warden&#8217;s rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old
+woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment
+chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially
+reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop
+Whitgift.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the
+Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of
+parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel
+of Edward VI.</p>
+
+<p>These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled
+sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over
+their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into
+patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his
+lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img22.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">The <span class="smcap">Chapel</span>, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of
+carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of
+economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with
+the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder&#8217;s
+portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift
+schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a
+lady, supposed to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> the Archbishop&#8217;s niece, and a ghastly representation
+of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but
+dimly, for the light is very feeble.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XII</h2>
+
+<p>The High Street of Croydon really <i>is</i> high, for it occupies a ridge and
+looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle,
+or &#8220;Wandel.&#8221; The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down
+below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old
+Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High
+Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.</p>
+
+<p>The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a
+very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance,
+and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon
+Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council
+in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of
+accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low,
+quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and
+self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time
+in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture,
+built in 1808. Near by was the &#8220;Greyhound,&#8221; an old coaching and posting
+inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the
+street, of which those of the &#8220;George&#8221; at Crawley and the &#8220;Greyhound&#8221; at
+Sutton are surviving examples. That of the &#8220;Cock&#8221; at Sutton disappeared in
+1898, and the similar signs of the &#8220;Crown,&#8221; opposite the Whitgift
+Hospital, and of the &#8220;King&#8217;s Arms&#8221; vanished many years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Greyhound&#8221; was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The
+first mention of it is found in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> 1563, the parish register of that year
+containing the entry, &#8220;Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of
+the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January.&#8221; The voluminous John
+Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the
+headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed
+with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe
+measures.</p>
+
+<p>Following upon the alteration, the &#8220;Greyhound&#8221; was rebuilt. Its gallows
+sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting
+the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going
+times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and
+neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse
+of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and
+purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of &pound;400 was claimed for
+freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually &pound;350 was paid.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RUSKIN</div>
+
+<p>I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under
+that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty
+and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways.
+I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way
+for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with
+John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is
+referred to in &#8220;Pr&aelig;terita&#8221;:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;... Of my father&#8217;s ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother&#8217;s more than
+that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the &#8216;Old King&#8217;s Head&#8217; in
+Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint
+her Simone Memmi&#8217;s &#8216;King&#8217;s Head&#8217; for a sign.&#8221; And he adds: &#8220;Meantime my
+aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the
+little house still standing&mdash;or which was so four months ago<a name='fna_7' id='fna_7' href='#f_7'><small>[7]</small></a>&mdash;the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop,
+in the second story&#8221; (<i>sic</i>).</p>
+
+<p>There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised
+progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive
+products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of
+them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created <i>ad
+hoc</i>, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be
+as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a
+handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about
+the period of Croydon&#8217;s first expansion, when the &#959;&#7985; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#8055;
+impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces,
+neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual
+and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.</p>
+
+<p>Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of
+the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration,
+after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of
+the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because
+he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly
+what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate
+monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that
+utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon&#8217;s monument, however,
+still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face
+calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.</p>
+
+<p>The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been a varied kind. The
+Reverend William Clewer, who held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he
+was ejected, was a &#8220;smiter,&#8221; an extortioner, and a criminal; but Roland
+Phillips, a predecessor by some two hundred years, was something of a
+seer. Preaching in 1497, he declared that &#8220;we&#8221; (the Roman Catholics) &#8220;must
+root out printing, or printing will root out us.&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> Already, in the twenty
+years of its existence, it had undermined superstition, and was presently
+to root out the priests, even as he foresaw.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ARCHBISHOP&#8217;S PALACE</div>
+
+<p>Unquestionably the sight best worth seeing in Croydon is that next-door
+neighbour of the church, the Archbishop&#8217;s Palace. Comparatively few are
+those who see it, because it is just a little way off the road and is
+private property and shown only by favour and courtesy. When the
+Archbishops deserted the place it was sold under the Act of Parliament of
+1780 and became the factory of a calico-printer and a laundry. Some
+portions were demolished, the moat was filled up, the &#8220;minnows and the
+springs of Wandel&#8221; of which Ruskin speaks, were moved on, and mean little
+streets quartered the ground immediately adjoining. But, although all
+those facts are very grim and grey, it remains true that the old palace is
+a place very well worth seeing.</p>
+
+<p>It was again sold in 1887, and purchased by the Duke of Newcastle, who
+made it over to the so-called &#8220;Kilburn Sisters,&#8221; who maintain it as a
+girls&#8217; school. I do not know, nor seek to inquire, by what right, or with
+what object, the &#8220;Sisters&#8221; who conduct the school affect the dress of
+Roman Catholics, while professing the tenets of the Church of England; but
+under their rule the historic building has been well treated, and the
+chapel and other portions repaired, with every care for their interesting
+antiquities, under the eyes of expert and jealous anti-restorers. The
+Great Hall, chief feature of the place, still maintains its fifteenth
+century chestnut hammerbeam roof and armorial corbels; the Long Gallery,
+where Queen Elizabeth danced, the State bedroom where she slept, the Guard
+Room, quarters of the Archbishops&#8217; bodyguard, are all existing; and the
+Chapel, with oaken bench-ends bearing the sculptured arms of Laud, of
+Juxon, and others, and the Archbishops&#8217; pew, has lately been brought back
+to decent condition. Here, too, is the exquisite oaken gallery at the
+western end, known as &#8220;Queen Elizabeth&#8217;s Pew.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>That imperious queen and indefatigable tourist paid several visits to
+Croydon Palace, and her characteristic insolence and freedom of speech
+were let loose upon the unoffending wife of Archbishop Parker when she
+took her leave. &#8220;Madam,&#8221; she said, &#8220;I may not call you; mistress I am
+ashamed to call you; and so I know not what to call you; but, however, I
+thank you.&#8221; It seems evident that the daughter of Henry the Eighth had,
+despite her Protestantism, an historic preference for a celibate clergy.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XIII</h2>
+
+<p>Down amid what remains of the old town is a street oddly named &#8220;Pump
+Pail.&#8221; Its strange name causes many a visit of curiosity, but it is a
+common-place street, and contains neither pail nor pump, and nothing more
+romantic than a tin tabernacle. But this, it appears, is not an instance
+of things not being what they seem, for in the good old days before the
+modern water-supply, one of the parish pumps stood here, and from it a
+woman supplied a house-to-house delivery of water in pails. The
+explanation seems too obvious to be true, and sure enough, a variant kicks
+the &#8220;pail&#8221; over, and tells us that it is properly Pump Pale, the Place of
+the Pump, &#8220;pale&#8221; being an ancient word, much used in old law-books to
+indicate a district, limit of jurisdiction, and so forth.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JABEZ BALFOUR</div>
+
+<p>The modern side of all these things is best exemplified by the beautiful
+Town Hall which Croydon has provided for itself, in place of the ugly old
+building, demolished in 1893. It is a noble building, and stands on a site
+worthy of it, with broad approaches that permit good views, without which
+the best of buildings is designed in vain. It marks the starting point of
+the history of modern Croydon, and is a far cry from the old building of
+the bygone Local Board days, when <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>the traffic of the High Street was
+regulated&mdash;or supposed to be regulated&mdash;by the Beadle, and the rates were
+low, and Croydon was a country town, and everything was dull and humdrum.
+It was a little unfortunate that the first Mayor of Croydon and Liberal
+Member of Parliament for Tamworth, that highly imaginative financier Jabez
+Spencer Balfour, should have been wanted by the police, a fugitive from
+justice brought back from the Argentine, and a criminal convicted of fraud
+as a company promoter; but accidents will happen, and the Town Council did
+its best, by turning his portrait face to the wall, and by subsequently
+(as it is reported) losing it. He was sent in 1895, a little belatedly, to
+fourteen years&#8217; penal servitude, and the victims of his &#8220;Liberator&#8221; frauds
+went into the workhouse for the most part, or died. He ceased to be V 460
+on release on licence, and became again Jabez Spencer Balfour, and so
+died, obscurely.</p>
+
+<p>The Liberal Party in the Government had, over Jabez Balfour, one of its
+several narrow escapes from complete moral ruin; for Balfour was on
+extremely friendly terms with the members of Gladstone&#8217;s ministry,
+1892-94, and was within an ace of being given a Cabinet post. Let us pause
+to consider the odd affinity between Jabez Balfour and Trebitsch Lincoln
+and Liberal politics.</p>
+
+<p>The Town Hall&mdash;ahem! Municipal Buildings&mdash;stands on the site of the
+disused and abolished Central Croydon station, and the neighbourhood of it
+is glimpsed afar off by the fine tower, 170 ft. in height. All the
+departments of the Corporation are housed under one roof, including the
+fine Public Library and its beautiful feature, the Braithwaite Hall. The
+Town Council is housed in that municipal splendour without which no civic
+body can nowadays deliberate in comfort, and even the vestibule is worthy
+of a palace. I take the following &#8220;official&#8221; description of it.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 355px; height: 500px;"><img src="images/img23.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CROYDON TOWN HALL.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone.
+Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns
+and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper,
+called Rose d&#8217;Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The
+capitals, architrave,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona
+marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of
+alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The
+flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in
+design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H.
+the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass.
+Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate
+green tint, relieved by a powdering of C&#8217;s and Civic Crowns. The doors and
+their surroundings are of walnut wood.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE RATEPAYER&#8217;S HOME</div>
+
+<p>Very beautiful indeed. Now let us see the home of one of Croydon&#8217;s poorer
+ratepayers:</p>
+
+<p>On one side of the hall are two rooms, called respectively the parlour and
+the kitchen. Beyond is the scullery. The walls of the staircase are
+covered with a sort of plaster called stucco, but closely resembling
+road-scrapings: the skirtings are of pitch-pine, the balusters of the same
+material. The floorings are of deal. The roof lets in the rain. One of the
+windows is broken and stuffed with rags, the others are cracked. The walls
+are stained a delicate green tint relieved by a film of blue mould, owing
+to lack of a damp-course. None of the windows close properly, the flues
+smoke into the rooms instead of out of the chimney-pots, the doors jam,
+and the surroundings are wretched beyond description.</p>
+
+<p>Electric tramways now conduct along the Brighton Road to the uttermost end
+of the great modern borough of Croydon, at Purley Corner. Here the
+explorer begins to perceive, despite the densely packed houses, that he is
+in that &#8220;Croydene,&#8221; or crooked vale, of Saxon times from which, we are
+told, Croydon takes its name; and he can see also that nature, and not
+man, ordained in the first instance the position and direction of what is
+now the road to Brighton, in the bottom, alongside where the Bourne once
+flowed, inside the fence of Haling Park. It is, in fact, the site of a
+prehistoric track which led the most easy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> ways across the bleak downs,
+severally through Smitham Bottom and Caterham.</p>
+
+<p>Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that
+long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the &#8220;Surrey Iron
+Railway.&#8221; This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of
+affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy
+goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to
+Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller&#8217;s earth are
+situated.</p>
+
+<p>This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a
+canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury
+that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing
+numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The
+Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to
+Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about &pound;27,000. It was not a
+railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged
+the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The
+rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern
+railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the
+wheels of the waggons fitted: <img src="images/wheels.jpg" alt="[image]" />. Thus, in contradistinction from
+all other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels,
+but on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable
+the waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.</p>
+
+<p>From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth,
+along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double
+track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called
+&#8220;Tramway Path&#8221; marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by
+way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as &#8220;Iron
+Road.&#8221; Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was
+continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> Bottom and ran along the
+left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by
+the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old
+projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to
+Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that
+dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are
+obliterated.</p>
+
+<p>The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from &#8220;Woden&#8221; find that
+Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon &#8220;halig,&#8221; or holy; and therefrom have
+built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here.
+The best we can say for those theories is that they <i>may</i> be correct or
+they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and
+certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one
+rap about it; nor even know&mdash;or knowing, are not impressed&mdash;that here, in
+1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham.
+It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the &#8220;Swan and
+Sugarloaf,&#8221; the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it,
+all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark
+chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the
+once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened
+behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses,
+testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the
+&#8220;Swan and Sugarloaf&#8221; to the &#8220;Windsor Castle,&#8221; the &#8220;Purley Arms,&#8221; the &#8220;Red
+Deer,&#8221; and the &#8220;Royal Oak&#8221;; and just beyond, round the corner, is the &#8220;Red
+Lion.&#8221; At the &#8220;Royal Oak&#8221; a very disreputable and stony road goes off to
+the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to
+Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable
+modern settlement near the newly built station of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> Purley Oaks, so called
+by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley
+station&mdash;ex &#8220;Caterham Junction&#8221;&mdash;of the South Eastern line.</p>
+
+<p>It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled,
+close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble
+woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and
+stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived&mdash;when, indeed, he was not
+detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">HORNE TOOKE</div>
+
+<p>Tooke, whose real name was Horne, was born in 1736, the son of a
+poulterer. At twenty-four years of age he became a clergyman, and was
+appointed to the living of New Brentford, which he held until 1773, when,
+clearly seeing how grievously he had missed his vocation, he studied for
+the Bar. Thereafter his life was one long series of battles, hotly
+contested in Parliament, in newspapers, books and pamphlets, and on
+platforms. He was in general a wrong-headed, as well as a hot-headed,
+politician; but he was sane enough to oppose the American War when King
+and Government were so mad as to provoke and continue it. Describing the
+Americans killed and wounded by the troops at Lexington and Concord as
+&#8220;murdered,&#8221; he was the victim of a Government prosecution for libel, and
+was imprisoned for twelve months and fined &pound;200. He took&mdash;no! that will
+not do&mdash;he &#8220;assumed&#8221; the name of Tooke in 1782, in compliment to his
+friend William Tooke, who then resided here in this delightful old country
+house of Purley. The idea seems to have been for them to live together in
+amity, and that William Tooke, the elder of the two, should leave his
+property to his friend. But quarrels arose long before that, and Horne at
+his friend&#8217;s death received only &pound;500, while other disputed points arose,
+leading to bitter law-suits.</p>
+
+<p>In 1801 he was Member of Parliament for Old Sarum; but how he reconciled
+the representation of that rottenest of rotten boroughs with his
+profession of reforming Whig does not appear.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>He was a many-sided man, of fierce energies and strong prejudices, but a
+scholar. While his political pamphlets are forgotten, his &#8220;&#917;&#928;&#917;&#913;
+&#928;&#932;&#917;&#929;&#927;&#917;&#925;&#932;&#913;; or, the Diversions of Purley,&#8221; which is not really a book of
+sports, is still remembered for its philological learning. It is a
+disquisition on the affinities of prepositions, the relationships of
+conjunctions, and the intimacies of other parts of speech. His other
+diversions appear to have been less reputable, for he was the father of
+one illegitimate son and two daughters.</p>
+
+<p>His intention was to have been buried in the grounds of Purley House, but
+when he died, in 1812, at Wimbledon, his mortal coil was laid to rest at
+Ealing; and so it chanced that the vault he had constructed in his garden
+remained, after all, untenanted, with the unfinished epitaph:</p>
+
+<p class="center">JOHN HORNE TOOKE,<br />
+Late Proprietor and now Occupier<br />
+of this spot,<br />
+was born in June 1736,<br />
+Died in<br />
+Aged <span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span> years,<br />
+Contented and Grateful.</p>
+
+<p>Purley House is still standing, though considerably altered, and presents
+few features reminiscent of the eighteenth-century politician, and fewer
+still of the Puritan Bradshaw, the regicide, who once resided here. It
+stands in the midst of tall elms, and looks as far removed from political
+dissensions as may well be imagined, its trim lawn and trellised walls
+overgrown in summer by a tangle of greenery.</p>
+
+<p>But suburban expansion has at last reached Tooke&#8217;s rural retreat from
+political strife, and the estate is now &#8220;developed,&#8221; with roads driven
+through and streets of villas planned, leaving only the old house and some
+few acres of gardens around it.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XIV</h2>
+
+<p>Returning to the main road, we come, just before reaching Godstone Corner,
+to the site of the now-forgotten Foxley Hatch, a turnpike-gate, which
+stood at this point until 1865. Paying toll here &#8220;cleared,&#8221; or made the
+traveller free of, the gates and bars to Merstham, on the main road, and
+as far as Wray Common, on the Reigate route, as the following copy of a
+contemporary turnpike-ticket, shows:</p>
+
+<p class="borderdots"><span class="large">Foxley Hatch Gate</span><br />
+<span class="giant">R</span><br />
+clears Wray common, Gatton,<br />
+Merstham and Hooley lane<br />
+gates and bars</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;To Riddlesdown, the prettiest spot in Surrey,&#8221; says a sign-post on the
+left hand. It is not true that it is the prettiest place, but, of course
+(as the proverb truly says), &#8220;every eye forms its own beauty,&#8221; and
+Riddlesdown is a Beanfeasters&#8217; Paradise, where tea-gardens, swings, and I
+know not what temerarious delights await the tripper who accepts the
+invitation, boldly displayed, &#8220;Up the Steps for Home Comforts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MILESTONES</div>
+
+<p>Here an aged milestone, in addition, proclaims it to be &#8220;XIII Miles from
+the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1743,&#8221; and &#8220;XII Miles From Westminster
+Bridge.&#8221; This is, doubtless, one of the stones referred to in the <i>London
+Evening Post</i> of September 10th, 1743, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>which says: &#8220;On Wednesday they
+began to measure the Croydon Road from the Standard in Cornhill and stake
+the places for erecting milestones, the inhabitants of Croydon having
+subscribed for 13, which &#8217;tis thought will be carried on by the Gentlemen
+of Sussex.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I know nothing of what those Sussex gentlemen did, but that the milestones
+<i>were</i> carried on is evident enough to all who care to explore the old
+Brighton Road through Godstone, up Tilburstow Hill, and so on to East
+Grinstead, Uckfield, and Lewes, where this fine bold series, dated 1744,
+is continued. What, however, has become of the series so liberally
+provided in 1743 by the &#8220;inhabitants of Croydon&#8221;? What indeed? Only this
+one, the thirteenth, remains; the other twelve, marking the distance from
+the &#8220;Standard&#8221; in Cornhill, in addition to Westminster Bridge, have been
+spirited away, and their places have been taken by others, themselves old,
+but chiefly marking the mileage from Whitehall and the Royal Exchange.</p>
+
+<p>We all know that the Brighton Road is nowadays measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, but it is not generally known&mdash;nor possibly
+known to one person in every ten thousand of those who consider they have
+worn the Brighton Road threadbare&mdash;that it was measured from &#8220;Westminster
+Bridge&#8221; before ever there was a bridge. No bridge existed across the
+Thames anywhere between London Bridge and Putney until November 10th,
+1750, when Westminster Bridge, after being for many years under
+construction, was opened, superseding the ancient ferry which from time
+immemorial had plied between Horseferry Stairs, Westminster, and Stangate
+on the Surrey side, the site of the present Lambeth Bridge. The way to
+Brighton (and to all southern roads) lay across London Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The old stones dated 1743 and 1744, and giving the mileage from the
+bridge, were thus displaying that &#8220;intelligent anticipation of events&#8221;
+which is,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> perhaps, even more laudable in statesmen than in
+milestones&mdash;and as rarely found.</p>
+
+<p>To this day no man knoweth the distance between London and Brighton.
+Convention fixes the distance as 51&#189; miles from the south side of
+Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium, by the classic route; but where is he
+who has chained it in proper surveyorly manner? The milestones themselves
+are a curious miscellany, and form an interesting study. They might
+profitably have been made a subject for the learned deliberations of the
+Pickwick Club, but the opportunity was unfortunately missed, and the world
+is doubtless the loser of much curious lore.</p>
+
+<p>Where is he who can, offhand, describe the first milestone on the Brighton
+Road, and tell where it stands? It ought to be no difficult matter, for
+miles are not&mdash;or should not be&mdash;elastic.</p>
+
+<p>It stands, in fact, on the kerb at the right-hand side of Kennington Road,
+between Nos. 230 and 232, just short of Lower Kennington Lane, and is a
+poor old battered relic, set anglewise and with the top broken away,
+bearing the legend, in what was once bold lettering:</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="large">. . . . . . . MILE<br />
+HORSEGUARDS<br />
+WHITEHALL</span></p>
+
+<p>That is the first milestone on the Brighton Road. Sterne, were he here
+to-day, would shed salt tears of sentiment upon it, we may be sure. It
+says nothing whatever about Brighton, and is probably the one and only
+stone that takes the Horseguards as a datum.</p>
+
+<p>About forty yards beyond this initial landmark is another &#8220;first&#8221;
+milestone: a tall, upstanding affair, certainly a century old, with three
+blank sides, and a fourth inscribed:</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span><span class="large">I<br />
+MILE<br />
+FROM<br />
+WESTMINSTER<br />
+BRIDGE</span></p>
+
+<p>This is followed by a long series of stones of one pattern, probably
+dating from 1800, marking every <i>half</i> mile. The series starts with the
+stone on the kerb close by the tramway office at the triangle, where the
+Brixton Road begins. It records on two sides &#8220;Royal Exchange 2&#189; miles,&#8221;
+and on a third &#8220;Whitehall 2 miles,&#8221; and is followed, opposite No. 158,
+Brixton Road, by a stone carrying on the tale by another half a mile.
+These silent witnesses may be traced nearly into Croydon, with sundry gaps
+where they have been removed. Those recording the 4th, 6th, 8&#189;th,
+9&#189;th, and 10th miles from Whitehall are missing, the last of the series
+now extant being that at the corner of Broad Green Avenue, making
+&#8220;Whitehall 9 miles, Royal Exchange 9&#189; miles.&#8221; The 10th from Whitehall,
+ending the series, stood at the corner of the Whitgift Hospital.</p>
+
+<p>These were succeeded by one of the old eighteenth-century series, marking
+eleven miles from Westminster Bridge and twelve from the &#8220;Standard,&#8221; but
+neither new nor old stone is there now, and the only one of the thirteen
+mentioned by the <i>London Evening Post</i> of 1743 is this near Purley Corner.</p>
+
+<p>This, marking the 13th mile from the &#8220;Standard&#8221; and the 12th from
+Westminster Bridge is common to both routes, but is followed by the first
+of a new series some way along Smitham Bottom, on which Brighton is for
+the first time mentioned:</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>XIII<br />
+MILES<br />
+FROM<br />
+WESTMINSTER<br />
+BRIDGE<br />
+&mdash;<br />
+38&#189;<br />
+MILES<br />
+TO<br />
+BRIGHTON</p>
+
+<p>The character of the lettering and the general style of this series would
+lead to the supposition that they are dated about 1820. There are three
+stones in all of this kind, the third marking 15 miles from Westminster
+Bridge and 36&#189; to Brighton, followed by a series of triangular
+cast-iron marks, continued through Redhill, of which the first bears the
+legend, &#8220;Parish of Merstham.&#8221; On the north side is &#8220;16 from Westminster
+Bridge, 35 to Brighton,&#8221; and on the south &#8220;35 from Brighton, 16 to
+Westminster Bridge.&#8221; It will be observed that in this first one of a new
+series half a mile is dropped, and henceforward the mileage to Brighton
+becomes by authority 51 miles. Like the confectioner who &#8220;didn&#8217;t make
+ha&#8217;porths,&#8221; the turnpike trust which erected these mile-&#8220;stones&#8221; refused
+to deal in half miles.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XV</h2>
+
+<p>The tramway terminus at Purley Corner is now a busy place. Those are only
+the &#8220;old crocks&#8221; who can remember the South Eastern railway-station of
+Caterham Junction and the surrounding lonely downs; and to them the change
+to &#8220;Purley&#8221; and the appearance in the wilderness of a mushroom town, with
+its parade of brilliantly lighted shops, its Queen Victoria memorial, its
+public garden and penny-squirt fountain, and&mdash;not least&mdash;its hideous
+waterworks, are things for wonderment. &#8220;How strange it seems, and new,&#8221; as
+Browning&mdash;not writing of Purley&mdash;remarks.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> Even the ghastly loneliness of
+the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more,
+for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and
+tradesmen&#8217;s carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall
+kill and maim most travellers along the highway.</p>
+
+<p>The numerous railway-bridges, embankments, cuttings, and retaining-walls
+that disfigure the crest of Smitham Bottom are chiefly the results of
+latter-day activities. The first bridge is that of the Chipstead Valley
+Railway&mdash;now merged in the South Eastern and Chatham&mdash;from South Croydon
+to Chipstead and Epsom, 1897-1900, with its wayside station of &#8220;Smitham.&#8221;
+This is immediately followed by the London, Brighton, and South Coast&#8217;s
+station of Stoat&#8217;s Nest, a transformed and transported version of the old
+station of the same name some distance off, and beyond it are the bridges
+and embankments of the same company&#8217;s works of 1896-8; themselves almost
+inextricably confused, to the non-technical mind, with the adjoining South
+Eastern roadside station of Coulsdon.</p>
+
+<p>The chapters of railway history which produced all this unlovely medley of
+engineering works are in themselves extremely interesting, and have an
+additional interest to those who trace the story of the Brighton Road, for
+they are concerned with the solution of the old problem which faced the
+coach proprietors&mdash;how best and quickest to reach Brighton.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RAILWAY POLITICS</div>
+
+<p>Few outside those intimately concerned with railway politics know that
+although the Brighton line was opened throughout in 1842, it was not until
+1898 that the company owned an uninterrupted route between London and
+Brighton. The explanation of that singular condition of affairs is found
+in the curious reluctance of Parliament, two generations ago, to give any
+one railway company the sole control of any particular route. Few in those
+times thought the increase of population, and still more the increase of
+travelling, would be so great that competitive railways would be
+established to many places;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> and thus to sanction the making of a railway
+to be owned by one company throughout seemed like the granting of a
+perpetual monopoly.</p>
+
+<p>Following this reasoning, a break was made in the continuity of the
+Brighton Railway between Stoat&#8217;s Nest and Redhill, a distance of five
+miles, and that stretch of territory given to the South Eastern Railway,
+with running powers only over it granted to the Brighton Company.
+Similarly, between Croydon and Stoat&#8217;s Nest, the South Eastern had only
+running powers over that interval owned by the Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>In 1892 and 1894, however, the Brighton Company approached Parliament and,
+proving the growing confusion, congestion, and loss of time at Redhill
+Junction, owing to this odd condition of things, obtained powers to
+complete that missing link by the construction of an entirely new railway
+between Stoat&#8217;s Nest and a point just within a quarter of a mile of
+Earlswood Station, beyond Redhill, and also to double the existing line
+between East and South Croydon and Purley. The works were completed and
+opened for traffic in 1898, when for the first time the Brighton Railway
+had a complete and uninterrupted route of its own to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The hamlet of Smitham Bottom, which paradoxically stands at the top of the
+pass of that name, in this ancient way across the North Downs, can never
+have been beautiful. It was lonely when Jackson and Fewterel fought their
+prize-fight here, before that distinguished patron of sport the Prince of
+Wales and a more or less distinguished company, on June 9th, 1788; when
+the only edifice of &#8220;Smith-in-the-Bottom,&#8221; as the sporting accounts of
+that time style it, appears to have been the ominous one of a gibbet. The
+Jackson who that day fought, and won, his first battle in the prize-ring
+was none other than that Bayard of the noble art, &#8220;Gentleman Jackson,&#8221;
+afterwards the friend of Byron and of the Prince Regent himself, and
+subsequently landlord of the &#8220;Cock&#8221; at Sutton. On this occasion Major
+Hanger rewarded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> the victor with a bank-note from the enthusiastic Prince.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SMITHAM</div>
+
+<p>Until 1898 Smitham Bottom remained a fortuitous concourse of some twenty
+mean houses on a windswept natural platform, ghastly with the chalky
+&#8220;spoil-banks&#8221; thrown up when the South Eastern Railway engineers excavated
+the great cuttings in 1840; but when the three railway-stations within one
+mile were established that serve Smitham Bottom&mdash;the stations of Coulsdon,
+Stoat&#8217;s Nest, and Smitham&mdash;the place, very naturally, began to grow with
+the magic quickness generally associated with Jonah&#8217;s Gourd and Jack&#8217;s
+Beanstalk, and now Smitham Bottom is a town. Most of the spoil-banks are
+gone, and those that remain are planted with quick-growing poplars; so
+that, if they can survive the hungry soil, there will presently be a leafy
+screen to the ugly railway sidings. Showy shops, all plate-glass and
+nightly glare of illumination, have arisen; the old &#8220;Red Lion&#8221; inn has got
+a new and very saucy front; and, altogether, &#8220;Smitham&#8221; has arrived. The
+second half of the name is now in process of being forgotten, and the only
+wonder is that the first part has not been changed into &#8220;Smytheham&#8221; at the
+very least, or that an entirely new name, something in the way of &#8220;ville&#8221;
+or &#8220;park,&#8221; suited to its prospects, has not been coined. For Smitham, one
+can clearly see, has a Future, with a capital F, and the historian
+confidently expects to see the incorporation of Smitham, with Mayor, Town
+Council, and Town Hall, all complete.</p>
+
+<p>It is here, at Marrowfat, now &#8220;Marlpit,&#8221; Lane, that the new link of the
+Brighton line branches off from Stoat&#8217;s Nest.<a name='fna_8' id='fna_8' href='#f_8'><small>[8]</small></a> One of the first trials
+of the engineers was the removal of three-quarters of a million cubic
+yards of the &#8220;spoil,&#8221; dumped down by the roadside over half a century
+earlier; and then followed the spanning of the Brighton Road by a
+girder-bridge. The line then entered the grounds of the Cane Hill<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> Lunatic
+Asylum, through which it runs in a covered way, the London County Council,
+under whose control that institution is carried on, obtaining a clause in
+the Company&#8217;s Act, requiring the railway to be covered in at this point,
+in case the lunatics might find means of throwing themselves in front of
+passing trains.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous
+skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and
+retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern,
+to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter
+in length&mdash;the new Merstham tunnel&mdash;running parallel with the old tunnel
+of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the
+southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham,
+where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and
+Redhill.</p>
+
+<p>At Merstham one of the odd problems of the new line was reached, for there
+it had to be constructed over a network of ancient tunnels made centuries
+ago in the hillside&mdash;quarry-tunnels whence came much of the limestone that
+went towards the building of Henry VII.&#8217;s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The
+old workings are still accessible to the explorer who dares the
+accumulation of gas in them given off by the limestone rock.</p>
+
+<p>The geology of these five miles of new railway is peculiarly varied,
+limestone and chalk giving place suddenly to the gault of the levels, and
+followed again by a hillside bed of Fuller&#8217;s earth, succeeded in turn by
+red sand. The Fuller&#8217;s earth, resting upon a slippery substratum of gault,
+only required a little rain and a little disturbance to slide down and
+overwhelm the railway works, and retaining-walls of the heaviest and most
+substantial kind were necessary in the cuttings where it occurred.
+Tunnelling for a quarter of a mile through the sand that gives Redhill its
+name, the railway crosses obliquely under the South<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> Eastern, and then
+joins the old Brighton line territory just before reaching Earlswood
+station.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img24.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CHIPSTEAD CHURCH.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>All these engineering manifestations give the old grim neighbourhood of
+Smitham Bottom a new grimness. The trains of the Brighton line boom,
+rattle, and clank overhead into the covered way, whose ventilators spout
+steam like some infernal laundry, and from the 80-foot deep cuttings close
+beside the road, steamy billows arise very weirdly. Presiding over all are
+the beautiful grounds and vast ranges of buildings of the Cane Hill
+Lunatic Asylum, housing an ever-increasing population of lunatics, now
+numbering some three thousand. Sometimes the quieter members of that
+unfortunate community are seen, being given a walk along the road, outside
+their bounds, and the sight and the thoughts they engender are not
+cheering.</p>
+
+<p>Along the road, where the walls of the cutting descend perpendicularly, is
+the severely common-place hamlet of Hooley, formerly Howleigh, consisting
+of the &#8220;Star&#8221; inn and some twenty square brick cottages. Just beyond it,
+where a modern Cyclists&#8217; Rest and tea-rooms building stands to the left of
+the road, the first traces of the old Surrey Iron Railway, which crossed
+the highway here, are found, in the shallower cutting, still noticeable,
+although disused seventy years ago. Alders, hazels, and blackberry
+brambles grow on the side of it, and its bridges are ivy-grown: primroses
+and violets, too, grow there wondrously profuse.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHIPSTEAD</div>
+
+<p>And here we will, by way of interlude, turn aside, up a lane to the right
+hand, toward the village of Chipstead, in whose churchyard lies Sir Edward
+Banks, who began life in the humblest manner, working as a navvy upon this
+same forgotten railway, afterwards rising, as partner in the firm of
+Jolliffe &amp; Banks, to be an employer of labour and contractor to the
+Government: in short, another Tom Brassey. All these things are recorded
+of him upon a memorial tablet in the church of Chipstead&mdash;a tablet which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+lets nothing of his worth escape you, so prolix is it.<a name='fna_9' id='fna_9' href='#f_9'><small>[9]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>It was while delving amid the chalk of this tramway cutting that Edward
+Banks first became acquainted with this village, and so charmed with it
+was he that he expressed a desire, when his time should come, to be laid
+at rest in its quiet graveyard. When he died, after a singularly
+successful career, his wish was carried out, and here, in this quiet spot
+overlooking the highway, you may see his handsome tomb, begirt with iron
+railings, and overshadowed with ancient trees.</p>
+
+<p>The little church of Chipstead is of Norman origin, and still shows some
+interesting features of that period, with some unusual Early English
+additions that have presented architectural puzzles even to the minds of
+experts. Many years ago the late Mr. G. E. Street, the architect of the
+present Royal Courts of Justice in London, read a paper upon this
+building, advancing the theory that the curious pedimental windows of the
+chancel and the transept door were not the Saxon work they appeared to be,
+but were the creation of an architect of the Early English period who had
+a fancy for reviving Saxon features, and who was the builder and designer
+of a series of Surrey churches, among which is included that of Merstham.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>Within the belfry here is a ring of fine bells, some of them of a
+respectable age, and three bearing the inscription, with variations:</p>
+
+<p class="center">&#8220;OUR HOPE IS IN THE LORD, 1595.&#8221;<br />
+R <img src="images/flower.jpg" alt="" /> E</p>
+
+<p>From here a bye-lane leads steeply once more into the high road, which
+winds along the valley, sloping always towards the Weald. Down the long
+descent into Merstham village tall and close battalions of fir-trees lend
+a sombre colouring to the foreground, while &#8220;southward o&#8217;er Surrey&#8217;s
+pleasant hills&#8221; the evening sunlight streams in parting radiance. On the
+left hand as we descend are the eerie-looking blow-holes of the Merstham
+tunnel, which here succeeds the cutting. Great heaps of chalk, by this
+time partly overgrown with grass, also mark its course, and in the
+distance, crowned as many of them are with telegraph poles, they look by
+twilight curiously and awfully like so many Calvarys.</p>
+
+<p>Beside the descent into Merstham was situated the terminus of the old Iron
+Railway, in the great excavated hollow of the Greystone lime-works, where
+the lime-burners still quarry the limestone and the smoke of their burning
+ascends day and night. The old &#8220;Hylton Arms,&#8221; down below, that served the
+turn of the lime-burners when they wanted to slake their thirst, has been
+ornately rebuilt in the modern-Elizabethan Public House Style, alongside
+the road, to catch the custom of the world at large, and is named the
+&#8220;Jolliffe Arms.&#8221; Both signs reflect the ownership of Merstham, for
+Jolliffe has long been the family name of the holders of the modern Barony
+of Hylton. Formerly &#8220;Jolly,&#8221; it was presumably too bacchanalian and not
+sufficiently aristocratic, and so it was changed, just as your &#8220;Smythe&#8221;
+was once Smith, and &#8220;Johnes&#8221; Jones.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XVI</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MERSTHAM</div>
+
+<p>Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English.
+Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great
+measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end
+of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are
+the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed
+aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the
+public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses over the
+pond where rise fitfully the springs of Merstham Brook, a congener of the
+Kentish &#8220;Nailbournes,&#8221; and one of the many sources of the River Mole. To
+the marshy ground by this brook, and to its stone-quarries, the place
+owes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> its name. It was in Domesday Book &#8220;Merst&aacute;n&#8221; = Mere-stan, the stone
+(house) by the lake.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img25.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">MERSTHAM.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the brook, above the tall trees, is seen the shingled spire of the
+church, an Early English building dedicated to St. Catherine, not yet
+spoiled, despite restorations and the scraping which its original lancet
+windows have undergone, in misguided efforts to endue them with an air of
+modernity.</p>
+
+<p>The church is built of that limestone or &#8220;firestone&#8221; found so freely in
+the neighbourhood&mdash;a famed speciality which entered largely into the
+building and ornamentation of Henry the Seventh&#8217;s Chapel at Westminster.
+Those wondrously intricate and involved carvings and traceries, whose
+decadent Gothic delicacy is the despair of present-day architects and
+stone-carvers, were possible only in this stone, which, when quarried, is
+of exceeding softness, but afterwards, on exposure to the air, assumes a
+hardness equalling that of any ordinary building-stone, and has, in
+addition, the merit of resisting fire, whence its name. From the softer
+layers comes that article of domestic use, the &#8220;hearthstone,&#8221; used to
+whiten London hearths and doorsteps.</p>
+
+<p>Merstham Church is even yet of considerable interest. It contains brasses
+to the Newdegate. Best, and Elmebrygge families, one recording in black
+letter:</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><b>&#8220;Hic iacet Joh&#275;si Elmebrygge, armiger, qui obiit biij die<br />
+ffebruarij; A&ordm; Dn&#773;i M&ordm;cccc&ordm;lxxij, et Isabella uxor eius<br />
+quae fuit filia Nich&#299; Jamys quond&#257; Maioris et<br />
+Alderman&#773; London: quae obiit bij&ordm; die Septembris<br />
+A&ordm; Dn&#773;i M&ordm;cccc&ordm;lxxij&ordm; et Annae uxor ei: quae<br />
+fuit filia Joh&#275;s Prophete Gentilman quae obiit ...<br />
+A&ordm; Dn&#773;i M&ordm;ccc&ordm; ... quor&#363; animabus<br />
+ppicietur Deus.&#8221;</b></p>
+
+<p>The date of the second wife&#8217;s death has never been inserted, showing that
+the brass was engraved and set during her lifetime, as in so many other
+examples of monumental brasses throughout the country. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> figure of John
+Elmebrygge is wanting, it having been at some time torn from its matrix,
+but above his figure&#8217;s indent remains a label inscribed <i>Sancta Trinitas</i>,
+and from the mouths of the remaining figures issue labels inscribed <i>Unus
+Deus&mdash;Miserere nobis</i>. Beneath is a group of seven daughters; the group of
+four sons is long since lost.</p>
+
+<p>A transitional Norman font of grey Sussex marble remains at the western
+end of the church, and on an altar-tomb in the southern chapel are the
+poor remains of an ancient stone figure of the fifteenth century,
+presumably the effigy of a merchant civilian, as he is represented wearing
+the <i>gypci&egrave;re</i>. It is hacked out of almost all significance at the hands
+of some iconoclasts; their chisel-marks are even now distinct and bear
+witness against the Puritan rage that defaced and buried it face
+downwards, the reverse side of the stone forming part of the chapel
+pavement until 1861, when it was discovered during the restoration of the
+church.</p>
+
+<p>Before that restoration this was an interior of Georgian high pews. Among
+them the &#8220;squire&#8217;s parlour&#8221; was pre-eminent, with its fireplace, its
+well-carpeted floor, its chairs and tables: a snuggery wherein that good
+man snored unobserved, or partook critically of his snuff during the
+parson&#8217;s discreet discourse. But now the parlour is gone, and the squire
+must slumber, if he can, with the other sinners.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GATTON</div>
+
+<p>In Merstham village, just beyond the &#8220;Feathers&#8221; inn, stood Merstham
+toll-gate, followed by that of Gatton, at Gatton Point, a mile distant,
+where the old route through Reigate goes off to the right, and the
+new&mdash;the seven miles between Gatton Point and Povey Cross, through
+Redhill&mdash;continues, straight as an arrow, ahead. The way is bordered on
+the right hand by Gatton Park, a spot the country folk rightly describe as
+an &#8220;old arnshunt place.&#8221; The history of Gatton, in truth, goes back to
+immemorial times, and has no beginning: for where history thins out and
+becomes a mere scatter of disjointed scraps purporting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> to be facts,
+tradition carries back the tale into a very fog of legend and conjecture.
+It was &#8220;Gatone&#8221; when the Domesday survey was made: the Saxon &#8220;Geat-ton,&#8221;
+the town in the &#8220;gate,&#8221; passage, or road through the North Downs, just as
+Reigate is the Saxon &#8220;Rige-geat,&#8221; the road over the ridge. The &#8220;ton&#8221; or
+town in the place-name does not necessarily mean what we moderns would
+understand by the word, and here doubtless indicated an enclosed, hedged,
+or walled-in tract of land redeemed and cultivated out of the then
+encompassing wilderness of the Downs.</p>
+
+<p>Who first broke the land of Gatton to the plough? History and tradition
+are silent. No voice speaks out of the grave of the centuries. But both
+Reigate and Gatton are older than Anglo-Saxon times, for a Roman way,
+itself following the course of an even earlier savage trail, came up out
+of the stodgy clay of Holmesdale, over the chalky hills, to Streatham and
+London. It was a branch of the road leading from <i>Portus Adurni</i>&mdash;the
+present Old Shoreham, on the river Adur&mdash;and doubtless, in the long
+centuries of Romano-British civilisation, it was bordered here and there
+by settlements and villas. Prominent among them was Gatton. There can
+scarcely be a doubt of it, for, although Roman relics are not found here
+now, Camden, writing in the time of Henry the Eighth, tells of &#8220;Roman
+Coynes digged forth of the Ground.&#8221; It was ever a desirable site, for here
+unfailing springs well out of the chalk and give an abounding fertility,
+while another road&mdash;the ancient Pilgrims&#8217; Way&mdash;running west and east,
+crossed the other highway, and thus gave ready communication on every
+side.</p>
+
+<p>Gatton has, within the historic period, never been more than a manorial
+park, but an unexplained something, like the echo of a vanished greatness,
+has caused strangely unmerited honours to be granted it. Who shall say
+what induced Henry the Sixth in 1451 to make this mere country park a
+Parliamentary borough, returning two members? There must have been some
+adequate reason or excuse, even if only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> the one of its ancient renown;
+for there <i>must</i> always be an apology of sorts for corruption; no job is
+jobbed without at least some shadowy semblance of legality. But no one
+will ever pluck out the heart of its mystery.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE ROTTEN BOROUGH</div>
+
+<p>A Parliamentary borough Gatton remained until 1832, when the first Reform
+Act swept away the representation of it, together with that of many
+another &#8220;rotten borough.&#8221; Rightly had Cobbett termed it &#8220;a very rascally
+spot of earth,&#8221; for certainly from 1541, when Sir Roger Copley owned the
+property and was the sole elector of the place, the election was a
+scandalous farce, and never at any time did the &#8220;burgesses&#8221; exceed twenty.
+They were always tenants of the lord of the manor and the mere marionettes
+that danced to his will.</p>
+
+<p>Gatton, returning its two members to Parliament, as of old, was early in
+the nineteenth century purchased by Mark Wood, Esq., who was soon after
+created a Baronet. It was then recorded that in this borough there were
+six houses and only one freeholder: Sir Mark Wood himself. The other five
+houses he let by the week; and thus, paying the taxes, he was the only
+elector of the two representatives. At the election, he and his son Mark
+were the candidates, and the father duly elected himself and his son!
+Scandalous, no doubt; but those members must have represented the
+constituency better than could those of a larger electorate.</p>
+
+<p>The landowner who possessed such a pocket-borough as this, and could send
+whomsoever he liked to Parliament, to vote as he wished, was, of course, a
+very important personage. His opposition was a serious matter to
+Governments; his support of the highest value, both politically and in a
+pecuniary sense; and thus place, honours, riches, could be, and were,
+secured. The manor of Gatton actually, in the cynical recognition of these
+things, was valued at twice its worth without that Parliamentary
+representation, and Lord Monson, who purchased the property in 1830, gave
+as much as &pound;100,000 for it, solely as an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> investment in jobbery and
+corruption, by which he hoped, in the course of shrewd political
+wire-pulling, to obtain a cent per cent return.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img26.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">GATTON HALL AND &#8220;TOWN HALL.&#8221;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>He was a humorist of a cynical turn who built in front of the great
+mansion in midst of the park a &#8220;Town Hall&#8221; for the non-existent town, and
+inscribed on the urn which stands by this freakish, temple-like structure
+the motto, satirical in this setting, &#8220;<i>Salus populi suprema lex esto</i>,&#8221;
+together with other sardonic Latin, to the effect that no votes sullied by
+bribery should be given.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>Less than two years after Lord Monson&#8217;s purchase of the estate, Reform had
+destroyed the value of Gatton Park, for it was disfranchised. We can only
+wonder that he did not claim compensation for the abolition of his &#8220;vested
+interests.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MUSTARD</div>
+
+<p>There is a remarkable appropriateness in Gatton Hall being designed in the
+classic style, for its marble hall and Corinthian hexastyle colonnade no
+doubt revive the glories of the Roman villa of sixteen hundred years ago.
+It is magnificence itself, being indeed designed something after the
+manner of the Vatican at Rome, and decorated with rare and costly marbles
+and frescoes; but perhaps, to any one less than an emperor or a pope, a
+little unhomely and uncomfortable to live in. Since 1888 it has been the
+seat of Sir Jeremiah Colman, of Colman&#8217;s Mustard, created a Baronet, 1907:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Mother, get it if you&#8217;re able,<br />
+See the trade mark on the label,<br />
+Colman&#8217;s Mustard is the Best&mdash;&mdash;[Advt.],</p>
+
+<p>as some unlaurelled bard of the grocery trade once sang, in deathless
+verse.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XVII</h2>
+
+<p>Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet
+another toll-gate. &#8220;Frenches&#8221; Gate took its title from the old manor on
+which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the
+unenclosed or free (<i>franche</i>) land of which it was wholly or largely
+composed.</p>
+
+<p>Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history.
+When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816,
+Redhill was&mdash;a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough
+knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes;
+but since<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000
+persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we
+mean&mdash;not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain
+commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction
+where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and
+quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.</p>
+
+<p>The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really
+in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the
+&#8217;40&#8217;s, it was called &#8220;Warwick Town,&#8221; after the then Countess of Warwick,
+the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear
+witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is,
+and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and &#8220;Redhill&#8221; this
+&#8220;Warwick Town,&#8221; by natural selection, became.</p>
+
+<p>There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious
+of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town
+of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient
+castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both <i>look</i>
+their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still
+living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may
+be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the
+most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only
+frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute
+for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, &#8220;Mrs. Partington&#8217;s&#8221; remark that
+&#8220;comparisons is odorous&#8221; would be altogether in order.</p>
+
+<p>Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from
+that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne&#8217;s Asylum, housing between four
+and five hundred children of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Cutting&#8221; through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by
+high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded
+only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in
+another.</p>
+
+<p>It is Holmesdale&mdash;the vale of holms, or oak woods&mdash;upon which you gaze
+from here; that</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Vale of Holmesdall<br />
+Never wonne, ne never shall,</p>
+
+<p>as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and
+slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley <span class="smcaplc">A.D.</span> 851.</p>
+
+<p>In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of
+London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top
+for the erection of a fort, and&mdash;in a burst of confidence&mdash;sold it again.
+The time is probably near when the War Office, like another &#8220;Sister Anne,&#8221;
+will &#8220;see somebody coming,&#8221; when this or another site will be re-purchased
+at a much enhanced, or scare, price.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">EARLSWOOD</div>
+
+<p>Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of
+elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from
+the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road
+across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect &#8220;switchback,&#8221; as the cyclist
+who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from
+this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective
+it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do
+the trees look from this distance.</p>
+
+<p>It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a
+Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.</p>
+
+<p>He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in
+these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found
+outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin,
+his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands
+gnarled and twisted with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> toil and rheumatism, he sat there in
+smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage
+brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the
+&#8220;round frock&#8221; of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore
+and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she
+who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and
+precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to
+the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild
+wonder at their oddity and complication.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img27.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>He was, it seemed, a &#8220;hedger and ditcher,&#8221; and his leathern gauntlets and
+billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve worked at this sort o&#8217; thing,&#8221; said he, in conversation, &#8220;for the
+last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for&#8217;t
+too. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>Two and twopence a day I gets, an&#8217; works from seven o&#8217;marnings to
+half-past five in the afternoon for that. You&#8217;ll be gettin&#8217; more than two
+and twopence a day when you&#8217;re at work, I reckon.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to
+existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for
+he had visited London, and &#8220;a dirty place it was, sure-ly.&#8221; Also he had
+been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called
+&#8220;Madame Two Swords&#8221;: places that Londoners generally leave to provincials.
+Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock
+sights of town than townsfolk themselves.</p>
+
+<p>From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and
+Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last
+turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the
+midnight of October 31st, 1881.</p>
+
+<p>At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by
+Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield
+Castle.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THUNDERFIELD CASTLE</div>
+
+<p>Thunderfield Castle should&mdash;if tremendous names go for aught&mdash;be a
+stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing
+of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over
+the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the
+estate of Harrowslea&mdash;&#8220;Harsley,&#8221; as the countryfolk call it&mdash;supposed to
+have once belonged to King Harold.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons <i>did</i> name the
+place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of
+Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that
+matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it.
+It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of
+the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and
+palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and
+bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> could
+often remain a &#8220;passive resister&#8221; and see the invaders struggling with the
+sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img28.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THUNDERFIELD CASTLE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The history of Thunderfield will never be written, but if a guess may be
+hazarded, the final catastrophe, which was the prime cause of the
+half-burnt timbers and the many human remains discovered here long ago,
+was a storming of the place by the forces of the neighbouring de
+Warennes, ancient and bitter enemies of the de Clares; probably in the
+wars of the twelfth century, between King Stephen and the Empress Maud.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img29.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;CHEQUERS,&#8221; HORLEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>It is an eminently undesirable situation for a residence, however suitable
+it may have been for defence; and the Saxons who occupied it must have
+known what rheumatism is. Dark woods now enclose the place, and cluttering
+wildfowl form its garrison.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Chequers&#8221; at Horley is not quite half way to Brighton, but in default
+of another it is the halfway house. Its name derives from the old chequy,
+or chessboard, arms of the Earls of Warren, chequered in gold and blue.
+They were not only great personages in this vale, but enjoyed in medi&aelig;val
+times the right of licensing ale-houses: hence the many &#8220;Chequers&#8221;
+throughout the country. The newer portions of the house are typically
+suburban, but the old-world front, with its quaint portico, the whole
+shaded by a group of ancient oaks, remains untouched.</p>
+
+<p>Horley&mdash;the &#8220;Hurle&#8221; of old maps&mdash;is very scattered: a piece here, another
+there, and the parish church standing isolated at the extreme southern end
+of the wide parish. It is situated on an extensive flat, reeking like a
+sponge with the waters of the Mole, but, although so entirely undesirable
+a place, is under exploitation for building purposes. A stranger first
+arriving at Horley late at night, and seeing its long lines of lighted
+streets radiating in several directions, would think he had come to a
+town; but morning would show him that long perspectives of gas-lamps do
+not necessarily mean houses to correspond. Evidently those responsible for
+the lamps expect a coming expansion of Horley; but that expectation is not
+very likely to be realised.</p>
+
+<p>Much of Horley belongs to Christ&#8217;s Hospital, which is said to be under
+obligation to educate two children of poor widows, in return for the great
+tithes long since bequeathed to it, and is additionally accused of having
+consistently betrayed that trust.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img30.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;SIX BELLS,&#8221; HORLEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>The parish church, chiefly of the Early English and Decorated periods of
+Gothic architecture, contains some brasses and a poor old stone effigy of
+a bygone lord of the manor, broken-nosed and chipped, but not without its
+interest. The double-headed eagle on his shield is still prominent, and
+the crowded detail of his mailed armour and the lacings of his surcoat are
+as distinct as when sculptured six centuries ago. He wears the little
+misericorde, or dagger, at his belt, the &#8220;merciful&#8221; instrument with which
+gentle knights finished off their wounded enemies in the chivalric days of
+old.</p>
+
+<p>Many years ago some person unknown stole the old churchwardens&#8217;
+account-book, dating from the sixteenth century. After many wanderings in
+the land, it was at length purchased at a second-hand bookseller&#8217;s and
+presented to the British Museum, in which mausoleum of literature, in the
+Department of Manuscripts, it is now to be found. It contains a curious
+item, showing that even in the rigid times that produced the great Puritan
+upheaval, congregations were not unapt for irreverence. Thus in 1632 &#8220;John
+Ansty is chosen by the consent of y<sup>e</sup> minister and parishioners to see
+y<sup>t</sup> y<sup>e</sup> younge men and boyes behave themselves decently in y<sup>e</sup> church
+in time of divine service and sermon, and he is to have for his paines
+ij<sup>s.</sup>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient &#8220;Six
+Bells&#8221; inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church
+tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been
+eight in the belfry.</p>
+
+<p>The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the &#8220;Six Bells,&#8221; and
+missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been
+replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those
+matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that &#8220;ye wooden tark so ef ye had to
+live in un.&#8221; A typical rustic had &#8220;comic brown-titus&#8221; acquired in one of
+those damp old cottages, and has &#8220;felt funny&#8221; ever since. One with
+difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> funny as he
+felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who
+pose as jesters.</p>
+
+<p>Opposite Horley church is Gatwick Park, since 1892 converted into a
+racecourse, with a railway station of its own. Less than a mile below it,
+at Povey Cross, the Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton joins the main
+road.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>The Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton, instead of branching off along
+the Brixton Road, pursues a straight undeviating course down the Clapham
+Road, through Balham and Upper and Lower Tooting, where it turns sharply
+to the left at the Broadway, and in half a mile right again, at Amen
+Corner. Thence it goes, by Figg&#8217;s Marsh and Mitcham, to Sutton.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MITCHAM COMMON</div>
+
+<p>It is not before Mitcham is reached that, in these latter days, the
+pilgrim is conscious of travelling the road to anywhere at all. It is all
+modern &#8220;street&#8221;&mdash;and streets, to this commentator at least, have a strong
+resemblance to rows of dog-kennels. They are places where citizens live on
+the chain. They lack the charm of obviously leading elsewhere: and even
+although electric tramcars speed multitudinously along them, to some near
+or distant terminus, they do but arrive there at other streets.</p>
+
+<p>Mitcham is at present beyond these brick and mortar tentacles, and is
+grouped not unpicturesquely about a village green and along the road to
+the Wandle. Pleasant, ruddy-faced seventeenth and eighteenth-century
+mansions look upon that green, notable in the early days of Surrey
+cricket; and away at the further end of it is the vast flat of Mitcham
+Common, that dreary, long-drawn expanse which is at once the best
+illustration of eternity and of a Shakespearian &#8220;blasted heath&#8221; that can
+readily be thought of.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Mitcham lavender&#8221; brings fragrant memories, and indeed the only thing
+that serves to render the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> weary length of Mitcham Common at all endurable
+is the scent of it, borne on the breeze from the distillery, midway
+across: the distillery that no one would remember to be Jakson&#8217;s, except
+for the eccentricity of spelling the name.</p>
+
+<p>This by the way; for one does not cross Mitcham Common to reach Sutton.
+But there is, altogether, a sweet savour pervading Mitcham, a scent of
+flowers that will not be spoiled even by the linoleum works, which are apt
+to be offensive; for Mitcham is still a place where those sweet-smelling
+and other &#8220;economic&#8221; plants, lavender, mint, chamomile, aniseed,
+peppermint, rosemary, and liquorice, are grown for distillation. The place
+owes this distinction to no mere chance, but to its peculiar black mould,
+found to be exceptionally suited to this culture.</p>
+
+<p>Folk-rhymes are often uncomplimentary, and that which praises Sutton for
+its mutton and Cheam for juicy beef, is more severe than one cares to
+quote on Epsom; and, altogether ignoring the mingled fragrances of
+Mitcham, declares it the place &#8220;for a thief.&#8221; We need not, however, take
+the matter seriously: the rhymester was only at his wit&#8217;s end for a rhyme
+to &#8220;beef.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Mitcham station, beside the road, is a curious example of what a railway
+company can do in its rare moments of economy; for it is an early
+nineteenth-century villa converted to railway purposes by the process of
+cutting a hole through the centre. It is a sore puzzle to a stranger in a
+hurry.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SUTTON</div>
+
+<p>From Mitcham one ascends a hill past the woodland estate of Ravensbury,
+crossing the abundantly-exploited Wandle; and then, along a still rural
+road, to the modern town of Sutton.</p>
+
+<p>On the fringe of that town, at the discreet &#8220;residential&#8221; suburb of
+Benhilton, is a scenic surprise in the way of a deep cutting in the hilly
+road. Spanned by a footbridge, graced with trees, and neighboured by the
+old &#8220;Angel&#8221; inn, &#8220;Angel Bridge,&#8221; as it is called, is a pretty spot. The
+rise thus cut through was once known as Been Hill, and on that basis
+was fantastically reared the name of Benhilton. One cannot but admire the
+ingenuity of it.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img31.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;COCK,&#8221; SUTTON 1789.<br /><small><i>From an aquatint after Rowlandson.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>&#8220;Sutton for mutton&#8221;: so ran the old-time rhyme. The reason of that ancient
+repute is found in the downs in whose lap the place is situated; those
+thymy downs that afforded such splendid pasturage for sheep. Sutton Common
+is gone, enclosed in 1810, but the downs remain; and yet that rhyme has
+lost its reason, and Sutton is no longer celebrated for anything above its
+fellow towns. Even the famous &#8220;Cock&#8221; is gone&mdash;that old coaching-inn kept
+by the ex-pugilist, &#8220;Gentleman Jackson.&#8221; Long threatened, it was at last
+demolished in 1898, and with the old house went the equally famous sign
+that straddled across the road. The similar sign of the &#8220;Greyhound&#8221; still
+remains; the last relic of narrower streets and times more spacious.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Sutton &#8220;town,&#8221; as we call it nowadays, the road proceeds to climb
+steadily uphill to the modern suburb of &#8220;Belmont,&#8221; where stands an old,
+but very well cared-for, milestone setting forth that it is distant &#8220;XIII.
+miles from the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1745,&#8221; from the Royal
+Exchange the same distance, and from Whitehall twelve miles and a half.
+The neighbourhood is now particularly respectable, but I grieve to say
+that the spot is marked on the maps of 1796 as &#8220;Little Hell,&#8221; which seems
+to indicate that the character of the people living in the three houses
+apparently then standing here would not bear close inspection. With the
+&#8220;Angel&#8221; placed at one end, and this vestibule into Inferno situated at the
+other, Sutton seems to have been accorded exceptional privileges.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Cold Blow,&#8221; which succeeds to Little Hell, is a tremendous transition,
+and well deserves its name, perched as it is on the shivery, bare, and
+windy heights that lead to Burgh Heath and Banstead Downs &#8220;famous,&#8221; says
+an annotated map of 1716, &#8220;for its wholesome Air, once prescribed by
+Physicians as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> Patients&#8217; last refuge.&#8221; The feudal-looking wrought-iron
+gates newly built beside the road here, surmounted by a gorgeous shield of
+arms crested with a helmet and enveloped in mantling, form the entrance to
+Nork Park, the seat of one of the Colman family, who have mustered very
+strongly in Surrey of late years.</p>
+
+<p>At the right-hand turning, in midst of a group of fir-trees, stands the
+prehistoric tumulus known to the rustics as &#8220;Tumble Beacon.&#8221; &#8220;Tumble&#8221; is
+probably the rural version of &#8220;tumulus.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this point, on a site now occupied by a cottage, stood the
+once-famed &#8220;Tangier&#8221; inn. Originally a private residence, the seat of
+Admiral Buckle,<a name='fna_10' id='fna_10' href='#f_10'><small>[10]</small></a> who named it &#8220;Tangier,&#8221; in memory of his cruises on
+the north coast of Africa, it became a house of call for coaches, and
+especially for post-chaises. Here, we are told, George the Fourth
+invariably halted for a glass of Miss Jeal&#8217;s celebrated &#8220;alderbury&#8221;&mdash;that
+is to say elderberry-wine&mdash;&#8220;roking hot,&#8221; to keep out the piercing cold,
+and Miss Jeal brought it forth with her own fair hands. Other travellers,
+who were merely persons, and not personages, had to be content with the
+less fair hands of the waiter.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Tangier&#8221; was burnt down about 1874. For some years after its
+destruction a platform that led from the house to the roadside, on a level
+with the floors of the coaches and post-chaises, survived; but only the
+cellars now remain. The woods at the back are, however, still locally
+known as &#8220;Tangier Woods.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Burgh Heath, at the summit of these downs, is a curious place called
+usually &#8220;Borough&#8221; Heath: it is in Domesday &#8220;Berge.&#8221; As its name not
+obscurely hints, and the half-obliterated barrows show, it is a place of
+ancient habitation and sepulture; but nowadays it is chiefly remarkable
+for the descendants of the original squatters of about a century ago, who,
+braving the cold of these heights, settled on what was then an exceedingly
+lonely heath and stole whatever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> land they pleased. That was the origin of
+the hamlet of Burgh Heath. The descendants of those filibusters have in
+most cases rebuilt the original hovels, but it is still a somewhat forlorn
+place, made sordid by the tumbledown pigsties and sheds on the heath in
+which they have acquired a prescriptive freehold.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN</div>
+
+<p>Passing Lion Bottom, or Wilderness Bottom, we come to Tadworth Corner,
+past the grounds of Tadworth Court, late the seat of Lord Russell of
+Killowen, better known as Sir Charles Russell. He was created a Baron in
+1894, on his becoming Lord Chief Justice: but the title was&mdash;at his own
+desire&mdash;limited to a life-peerage, and consequently at his death in 1900
+became extinct. At Tadworth, in the horsey neighbourhood of Epsom, he was
+as much at home as in the Law Courts, and neither so judicial nor
+restrained, as those who remember his peppery temper and the objurgatory
+language of his &#8220;Here, you, where the &mdash;&mdash; &mdash; are you &mdash;&mdash; &mdash; coming to,
+you &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash;, you!&#8221; will admit. There seems, in fact, an especial fitness
+in his residence on this Regency Road, for his speech was the speech
+rather of that, than of the more mealy mouthed Victorian, period.</p>
+
+<p>At Tadworth Court, where the ways divide, and a most picturesque view of
+long roads, dark fir trees, and a weird-looking windmill unfolds itself,
+formerly stood a toll-gate. A signpost directs on the right to Headley and
+Walton, and on the left to Reigate and Redhill, and a battered milestone
+which no one can read stands at the foot of it. The church spire on the
+left is that of Kingswood.</p>
+
+<p>From London to Reigate, through Sutton, is, according to Cobbett, &#8220;about
+as villainous a tract as England contains. The soil is a mixture of gravel
+and clay, with big yellow stones in it, sure sign of really bad land.&#8221; The
+greater part of this is, of course, now covered by the suburbs of &#8220;the
+Wen,&#8221; as Cobbett delighted to style London; and it is both unknown to and
+immaterial to most people what manner of soil their houses are built on;
+but the truth of Cobbett&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> observations is seen readily enough here, on
+these warrens, which owe their preservation as open spaces to that
+mixture, worthless to the farmer, and not worth the stealing in those
+times when land could be stolen with impunity.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img32.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">KINGSWOOD WARREN.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">REIGATE HILL</div>
+
+<p>Past the modern village of Kingswood, almost lost in, and certainly
+entirely overshadowed by, the wild heaths of Walton and Kingswood Warren
+the road comes at last to Reigate Hill, where, immediately past the
+suspension bridge that overhangs the cutting, it tilts very suddenly and
+alarmingly over the edge of the Downs. The suddenness of it makes the
+stranger gasp with astonishment; the beauty of that wonderful view from
+this very rim and edge of the hills compels his admiration. It is the
+climax up to which he has been toiling all these long, ascending gradients
+from Sutton; and it is worth the toil.</p>
+
+<p>The old writers of road-books do more justice to this view than any modern
+writer dare. To them it was &#8220;a remarkably bold elevation, from whence is a
+delightful prospect of the South Downs in Sussex. But near the road, which
+is scooped out of the hill, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>the declivity is so steep and abrupt that the
+spectator cannot help being struck with terror, though softened by
+admiration. The Sublime and the Beautiful are here perfectly united;
+imagination is fully exercised, and the mind delighted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>How would this person have described the Alps?</p>
+
+<p>A milestone just short of this drop&mdash;one of a series starting at Sutton
+Downs and dealing in fractions of miles&mdash;says, very curtly: &#8220;London 19,
+Sutton 8, Brighton 32&#8541;, Reigate 1&#8540;.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img33.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE, REIGATE HILL.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The suspension bridge, carried overhead, spanning the cutting made through
+the crest of the hill, is known to the rustics&mdash;who will always invent
+simple English words of one syllable, whenever possible, to take the place
+of difficult three-syllabled words of Latin extraction&mdash;as the &#8220;Chain
+Pier.&#8221; It does not, as almost invariably is the case with these bridges,
+connect two portions of an estate severed by the cutting,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> but forms part
+of a public path which was cut through. It is very well worth the
+traveller&#8217;s attention, for it joins the severed ends of no less a road
+than the ancient Pilgrims&#8217; Way, and is a very curious instance of
+modernity helping to preserve antiquity. The Way is clearly seen above,
+coming from Box Hill as a hollow road, crossing the bridge and going in
+the direction of Gatton Park, through a wood of beech trees.</p>
+
+<p>The roadway of Reigate Hill is made to wind circuitously, in an attempt to
+mitigate the severity of the gradient; but for all the care taken, it
+remains one of the steepest hills in England, and is one of the very few
+provided with granite kerbs intended to ease the pull-up for horses. None
+but a very special fool among cyclists in the old days attempted to ride
+down the hill; and many, even in these times of more efficient brakes,
+prefer to walk down. Only motor-cars, like the Gadarene swine of the
+Scriptures, &#8220;rushing violently down a steep place,&#8221; attempt it; and those
+who are best acquainted with the hill live in daily expectation of a
+recklessly driven car spilling over the rim.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XIX</h2>
+
+<p>Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the
+downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story.
+It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of
+&#8220;Cherchefelle,&#8221; and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until
+nearly two hundred years later.</p>
+
+<p>Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the
+possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an
+enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a clearing of the Holmesdale
+woods; but it had not long passed into the hands of William de Varennes,
+who had married Gundrada the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> Conqueror&#8217;s daughter and was one of his most
+intimate henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became the site of
+the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. The manors granted to William de
+Varennes comprehended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included others in
+Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were the splendours that fell to the
+son-in-law and the companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He became
+somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl of Warenne, and the ancestor
+of a line of seven Earls, of whom the last died in 1347, when the family
+became firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the Mowbrays, and
+finally in that of the alternately absorbent and fissiparous Howards.</p>
+
+<p>Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the warlike sort. It
+frowned terribly upon its sandstone ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216
+when the foreign allies of the discontented subjects of King John
+approached: and when the seventh Earl, who had murdered Baron de la Zouche
+at Westminster, was attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a
+grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks (equal to &pound;24,000)
+demanded. In 1550, when Lambarde wrote, only &#8220;the ruyns and rubbishe of an
+old castle which some call Homesdale&#8221; were left, and even those were
+cleared away by order of the Parliament in 1648. Now, after many centuries
+of change in ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is
+contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road through the town.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">REIGATE HILL</div>
+
+<p>In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate through Sutton in 1823, is
+highly entertaining. The tunnel was then being made, and it did not please
+him. &#8220;They are,&#8221; he vociferates, &#8220;in order to save a few hundred yards&#8217;
+length of road, cutting through a hill. They have lowered a little hill on
+the London side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country actually
+thrown away: the produce of labour is taken from the industrious and given
+to the idlers. Mark the process; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+miles from the Wen, is on the seaside, and is thought by the stockjobbers
+to afford a <i>salubrious air</i>. It is so situated that a coach which leaves
+it not very early in the morning reaches London by noon; and, starting to
+go back in two hours and a half afterwards, reaches Brighton not very late
+at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women
+and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches, and actually
+carry on stock-jobbing in Change Alley, though they reside at Brighton.
+The place is, besides, a great resort with the <i>whiskered</i> gentry. There
+are not less than about twenty coaches that leave the Wen every day for
+this place; and, there being three or four different roads, there is a
+great rivalship for the custom. This sets the people to work to shorten
+and to level the roads; and here you see hundreds of men and horses
+constantly at work to make pleasant and quick travelling for the Jews and
+jobbers. The Jews and jobbers pay the turnpikes, to be sure; but they get
+the money from the land and labourers. They drain these, from John o&#8217;
+Groat&#8217;s House to the Land&#8217;s End, and they lay out some of the money on the
+Brighton roads.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Cobbett is dead, and the Reform Act is an old story, but the Jews and the
+jobbers swarm more than ever.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE CASTLE CAVES</div>
+
+<p>The tunnel through the castle hill was made by consent of the then owner,
+Earl Somers, as a tablet informs all who care to know. The entrance
+towards the town is faced with white brick, in a style supposed to be
+Norman. Above are the grounds, now public, where a would-be medi&aelig;val
+gateway, erected in 1777, quite illegitimately impresses many innocents,
+and below is the so-called Barons&#8217; Cave, an ancient excavation in the soft
+sandstone where the Barons are (quite falsely) said to have assembled in
+conclave before forcing their will upon King John at Runnymede. Unhappily
+for that tradition, the then Earl Warenne was a supporter of the tyrant
+king, and any reforming barons he might possibly have entertained at
+Reigate <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>Castle would have been kept on the chain as enemies, and treated
+to the cold comfort of bread and water.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img34.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE TUNNEL, REIGATE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>There are deeper depths than these castle caves, for dungeon-like
+excavations exist beside and underneath the tunnel; but they are not so
+very terrible, exuding as they do strong vinous and spirituous odours,
+proving that the only prisoners languishing there are hogsheads and
+kilderkins.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>Reigate, dropping its intermediate name of Cherchefelle on Ridgegate,
+became variously Reigate, Riggate, and Reygate in the thirteenth century.
+The name obviously indicates a gate&mdash;that is to say, a road&mdash;over the
+ridge of the downs; presumably that road upon which Gatton, the
+&#8220;gate-town,&#8221; stood. Strongly supporting this theory, Wray Common and Park
+are found on the line of road between Reigate and Gatton. If we select
+&#8220;Reygate&#8221; from the many variants of the place-name, and place it beside
+that of Wray Common, we get at once the phonetic link.</p>
+
+<p>When Reigate lost the two members it sent to Parliament, it lost much more
+than the mere distinction of being represented. It lost free drinks and
+money to jingle in its pockets, for it was openly corrupt&mdash;in fact,
+neither better nor worse than most other constituencies. What else, when
+you consider it, could be expected when the franchise was so limited that
+the electors were a mere handful, and votes by consequence were
+individually valuable. In short, the best safeguard against bribery is to
+so increase the electorate that the purchase of votes is beyond the
+capacity of a candidate&#8217;s pockets.</p>
+
+<p>Modern circumstances have, indeed, so wrought with country towns of the
+Reigate type that they are merely the devitalised spooks of their former
+selves, and Reigate would long ere this have been on the verge of
+extinction, had it not been within the revivifying influence of the
+suburban area. It is due to the Wen, as Cobbett would call it, that
+Reigate is still at once so old-world and so prosperous. It is surrounded
+by semi-suburban estates, but is in its centre still the Reigate of that
+time when the coaches came through, when royalty and nobility lunched at
+the still-existing &#8220;White Hart,&#8221; and when fifty miles made a long day&#8217;s
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>Reigate town was the property, almost exclusively, of the late Lady Henry
+Somerset. By direction of her heir, Somers Somerset, it was, in October,
+1921, sold at auction in several lots.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>There are some in Reigate who dwell in imagination upon old times. Not by
+any means the obvious people, the clergy and the usual kidney; they find
+existence there a vast yawn. The antiquarian taste revealed itself by
+chance to the present inquirer in the person of a policeman on duty by the
+tunnel, who knew all about Reigate&#8217;s one industry of digging silver-sand,
+who could speak of the &#8220;Swan&#8221; inn having once possessed a gallows sign
+that spanned the road, and knew all about the red brick market-house or
+town hall being built in 1708 on the site of a pilgrims&#8217; chapel dedicated
+to St. Thomas &agrave; Becket. He could tell, too, that wonderful man, of a
+bygone militant parson of Reigate, who, warming to some dispute, took off
+his coat in the street and saying, &#8220;Lie there, divinity,&#8221; handsomely
+thrashed his antagonist. &#8220;I like them old antidotes,&#8221; said my constable;
+and so do I.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XX</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">REIGATE CHURCH</div>
+
+<p>Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments
+have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was
+originally placed, and very few are complete.</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its
+original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It
+is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a
+scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved,
+as in some sort an illustration of bygone social conditions. But the usual
+obliterators of history and of records made their usual clean sweep, and
+it has disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>It was a heart-shaped monument, inscribed, &#8220;Near this place lieth Edward
+Bird, Esq., Gent. Dyed the 23rd of February, 1718/9. His age 26,&#8221; and was
+surmounted by a half-length portrait effigy of him in armour, with a full
+flowing wig; a truncheon in his right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> hand, and in the background a
+number of military trophies.</p>
+
+<p>The especial scandal attaching to the fact of this monument ever having
+been placed in the church arises from the fact that Edward Bird was hanged
+for murder. Some particulars are gleaned from one of the many catchpenny
+leaflets issued at the time by the Ordinary&mdash;that is to say, the
+Chaplain&mdash;of Newgate, who was never averse from adding to his official
+salary by writing the &#8220;last dying words&#8221; of interesting criminals; but his
+flaring front pages were, at the best&mdash;like the contents bills of modern
+sensational evening newspapers&mdash;indifferent honest, and his account of
+Bird is meagre.</p>
+
+<p>It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting
+young man had been given the advantages of &#8220;a Christian and Gentlemanlike
+Education,&#8221; which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy
+under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This
+finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester&#8217;s
+Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year
+later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London.</p>
+
+<p>One evening in September, 1718, he was driven &#8220;with a woman in a coach and
+a bottle of Champain wine&#8221; to a &#8220;bagnio&#8221; in Silver Street, Golden Square,
+and there &#8220;had the misfortune&#8221; to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through
+the body with his sword. &#8220;G&mdash;d d&mdash;n you, I will murder you all,&#8221; he is
+reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the
+subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this
+martial spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not
+only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The
+historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were
+in those times very much what German officers became&mdash;privileged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+murderers&mdash;and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AN EXIT AT TYBURN</div>
+
+<p>At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the
+Ordinary, saying &#8220;He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected
+Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses.&#8221; The Ordinary does not tell us
+in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go
+to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not
+even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the
+rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution,
+taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that
+interesting event.</p>
+
+<p>He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of
+poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning
+coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by
+the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the
+threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree,
+talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so
+swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines
+prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles&#8217;
+Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available,
+he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, &#8220;Gentlemen, I wish your
+health,&#8221; and then &#8220;was ty&#8217;d up, turned off, and bled very much at the
+Mouth or Nose, or both.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is
+explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both
+patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was
+once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him.
+Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his
+execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.</p>
+
+<p>The date of the monument&#8217;s disappearance is not clearly established, but
+old inhabitants of Reigate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> have recollections of the laughing workmen,
+during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of
+the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed,
+the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen
+hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun
+in 1701 by the then vicar.</p>
+
+<p>A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a
+year lived here, in a cottage oddly named &#8220;Upper Repentance.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figleft"><img src="images/img35.jpg" alt="" /><br /><small>TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.</small></div>
+
+<p>The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, passes a couple of
+cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device
+intended to represent bats&#8217; wings, and inscribed &#8220;J. T. 1815.&#8221; They are
+known as &#8220;Batswing Cottages,&#8221; but what induced &#8220;J. T.&#8221; to call them so,
+and even who he was, seems to be unknown.</p>
+
+<p>Over the rise of Cockshut Hill and through a wooded cutting the road comes
+to Woodhatch and the &#8220;Old Angel&#8221; inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and
+where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.</p>
+
+<p>Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, illustrates the ancient times when the
+De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the
+woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears
+only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+in these levels ending in &#8220;wood&#8221; recall the dense forests that once
+overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood,
+Hookwood&mdash;vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the
+prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of
+the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The
+scattered &#8220;leys&#8221;&mdash;Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like&mdash;allude to the
+clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old
+bosquets may be traced on the map&mdash;Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk&#8217;s Gate and
+Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but
+memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either
+side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole
+sluggishly winding through them&mdash;a scene not unbeautiful in its placid
+way.</p>
+
+<p>The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862,
+marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the
+flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the
+Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the
+&#8220;Black Horse&#8221; inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the
+same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands
+to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LOWFIELD HEATH</div>
+
+<p>Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past
+the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath,
+referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the &#8220;Statutes
+at Large,&#8221; as &#8220;Lovell&#8221; Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet,
+and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by
+enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat,
+low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous
+error of some old maps which style it &#8220;Level Heath.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at
+times little more than an inland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> sea, for here ooze and crawl the many
+tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following
+upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless
+arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the
+nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with
+trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to
+
+wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley
+churchyard was flooded.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img36.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">The Floods at Horley.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the
+dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be
+performed, the roads being four feet under water.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXI</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHARLWOOD</div>
+
+<p>The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard
+high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the
+byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.</p>
+
+<p>Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay,
+thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous
+sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their
+inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian
+blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some
+unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and
+disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.</p>
+
+<p>The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross
+and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the
+valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen
+from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms
+forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home
+counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh
+century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its
+interior assorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan
+cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of
+village church, and presents many features of interest to the
+arch&aelig;ologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the
+fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late
+brass, now mural, in the chancel,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and
+Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously,
+Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early
+period those of Purley and Sandersted&mdash;Sander&#8217;s-stead, or dwelling. Sir
+Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth&#8217;s time,
+bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in
+1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where,
+in happier times, they ruled.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img37.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">Charlwood.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">NEWDIGATE</div>
+
+<p>One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on
+a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the &#8220;Surrey
+Oaks,&#8221; fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the
+county, and is worth visiting, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>if only for a peep into the curious timber
+belfry of its little church, which contains a hoary chest, contrived out
+of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img38.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">A Corner in Newdigate Church.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and
+attractions. Here a primitive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> pavement or causeway is very noticeable,
+formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the grassy margins of
+the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even
+now) of the time when</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Essex full of good housewyfes,<br />
+Middlesex full of stryves,<br />
+Kentshire hoot as fire,<br />
+Sowseks full of dirt and mire</p>
+
+<p>was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the
+Wealden clay asserted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for
+pedestrians were necessities.</p>
+
+<p>The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from
+local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a
+yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble,
+fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built
+of Charlwood stone.</p>
+
+<p>Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies
+through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It
+has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly
+favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, &#8220;It is a county
+where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well&mdash;grass, wheat,
+and oak-trees;&#8221; and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish
+forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding
+the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">IFIELD</div>
+
+<p>In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing
+exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from
+the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at
+Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Sussex meet, and
+was cut down in the &#8220;forties.&#8221; The tree was known far and wide as &#8220;County
+Oak.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img39.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">On the Road to Newdigate.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its
+architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this
+legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral
+curiosities. A brass for two brothers, with a curious metrical
+inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry
+grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed
+up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual
+<i>memento mori</i> from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the
+chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the recumbent
+effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He
+is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, &#8220;a position,&#8221; to quote
+&#8220;Thomas Ingoldsby,&#8221; &#8220;so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in
+modern days.&#8221; The old pews came from St. Margaret&#8217;s, Westminster. But so
+dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and
+to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of
+day, however dull that day may be.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile
+to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river
+Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley.
+The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the
+date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much
+later date.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img40.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">IFIELD MILL POND.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">SUSSEX IRON</div>
+
+<p>Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>of one of the most
+important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex iron paid for the smelting.</p>
+
+<p>Ironstone had been known to exist here even in the days of the Roman
+occupation, when Anderida, extending from the sea to London, was all one
+vast forest. Heaps of slag and cinders have been found, containing Roman
+coins and implements of contemporary date, proving that iron was smelted
+here to some extent even then. But it was not until the latter part of the
+Tudor period that the industry attained its greatest height. Then,
+according to Camden, &#8220;the Weald of Sussex was full of iron-mines, and the
+beating of hammers upon the iron filled the neighbourhood round about with
+continual noise.&#8221; The ironstone was smelted with charcoal made from the
+forest trees that then covered the land, and it was not until the first
+year or two of the last century that the industry finally died out. The
+last remaining ironworks in Sussex were situated at Ashburnham, and ceased
+working about 1820, owing to the inability of iron-masters to compete with
+the coal-smelted ore of South Wales.</p>
+
+<p>By that time the great forest of Anderida had almost entirely disappeared,
+which is not at all a wonderful thing to consider when we learn that one
+ironworks alone consumed 200,000 cords of wood annually. Even in Drayton&#8217;s
+time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.</p>
+
+<p>Relics of those days are plentiful, even now, in the ancient farmhouses;
+relics in the shape of cast-iron chimney-backs and andirons, or
+&#8220;fire-dogs,&#8221; many of them very effectively designed; but, of course, in
+these days of appreciation of the antique, numbers of them have been sold
+and removed.</p>
+
+<p>The water-power required by the ironworks was obtained by embanking small
+streams, to form ponds; as here at Ifield, where a fine head of water is
+still existing. Very many of these &#8220;Hammer Ponds&#8221; remain in Sussex and
+Surrey, and were long so called by the rustics, whose unlettered and
+traditional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> memories were tenacious, and preserved local history much
+better than does the less intimate book-learning of the reading classes.
+But now that every ploughboy reads his &#8220;penny horrible,&#8221; and every gaffer
+devours his Sunday paper, they have no memories for &#8220;such truck,&#8221; and
+local traditions are fading.</p>
+
+<p>Ifield ironworks became extinct at an early date, but from a very
+arbitrary cause. During the conflicts of the Civil War the property of
+Royalists was destroyed by the Puritan soldiery wherever possible; and
+after the taking of Arundel Castle in 1643, a detachment of troops under
+Sir William Waller wantonly wrecked the works then situated here, since
+when they do not appear to have been at any time revived.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pretty spot to-day, and extremely quiet.</p>
+
+<p>From here Crawley is reached through Gossop&#8217;s Green.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXII</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CRAWLEY</div>
+
+<p>The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of
+Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the &#8220;White Lion,&#8221; and a few
+attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the
+farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains
+to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now
+under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the
+wayfarers&#8217; attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A
+mean little house called &#8220;Casa querca&#8221;&mdash;by which I suppose the author
+means Oak House&mdash;is &#8220;refinement,&#8221; as imagined in the suburbs, and excites
+the passing sneer, &#8220;Is not the English language good enough?&#8221; If the
+Italians will only oblige, and call their own &#8220;Bella Vistas&#8221; &#8220;Pretty
+View,&#8221; and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall
+effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img41.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>At the beginning of Crawley stands the &#8220;Sun&#8221; inn, and away at the other
+end is the &#8220;Half Moon&#8221;; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and
+coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum
+when passing through, &#8220;Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?&#8221;
+Every one unfamiliar with the road &#8220;gave it up&#8221;; when came the answer,
+&#8220;Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other.&#8221; It is evident
+that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers.</p>
+
+<p>We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early
+coaching days, that Crawley was a &#8220;poor place,&#8221; by which we may suppose
+that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect&mdash;a city?</p>
+
+<p>Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has
+grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the
+extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a
+town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable
+thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized
+plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built
+houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless
+originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us;
+but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and
+those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and
+so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like
+islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn
+tale of grab.</p>
+
+<p>Even Crawley&#8217;s generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide
+for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which
+every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards&#8217; winding of
+their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of
+&#8220;Sally in our Alley&#8221; or &#8220;Love&#8217;s Young Dream.&#8221; Then the &#8220;George&#8221; was the
+scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the
+chink and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when
+travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time,
+but a real journey, of five hours.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img42.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CRAWLEY, 1789.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap.
+Occasionally some great cycle &#8220;scorch&#8221; is in progress, when whirling
+enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of
+the &#8220;George&#8221; spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on
+which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very
+invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen <i>and</i>
+bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in
+cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the
+roads are peopled again.</p>
+
+<p>There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey,
+embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there
+is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered
+frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of
+that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her
+so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.</p>
+
+<p>They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs
+that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse
+of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk
+obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad.
+Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as
+might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter
+and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with
+flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very
+attractive ruin indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789,
+when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead,
+took notes for his book, &#8220;An Excursion to Brighthelmstone.&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> It is a work
+of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist&#8217;s
+illustrations. That <i>they</i> should have lived, you who see the reproduction
+will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is
+otherwise greatly changed.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img43.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that
+the greater part of &#8220;Crawley&#8221; is not in that parish at all, but in the
+adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same
+side of the street belong to Crawley.</p>
+
+<p>In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally
+open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the
+nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in
+this admonitory fashion:</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><b>Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde<br />
+He war be for whate comyth be hynde.</b></p>
+
+<p>When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone,
+it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton,
+&#8220;be hynde,&#8221; remarking that it is &#8220;arnshunt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img44.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;GEORGE,&#8221; CRAWLEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>The sturdy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing
+Noah&#8217;s dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were
+abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally
+or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.</p>
+
+<p>But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation
+of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful
+figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into
+fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme
+Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient
+symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling
+superstition of his remote age, has put his &#8220;fear of God,&#8221; in a very
+literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of
+the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the
+terrified minds of the dark ages, when God, the loving Father, was
+non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures
+are merely like infantile grotesques.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXIII</h2>
+
+<div class="figright"><img src="images/img45.jpg" alt="" /><br /><small>SCULPTURED EMBLEM<br />OF THE HOLY TRINITY,<br />CRAWLEY CHURCH.</small></div>
+
+<p>There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity
+associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station,
+resided Mark Lemon, editor of <i>Punch</i>, who died here on May 20th, 1870.
+Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be
+converted into a grocer&#8217;s shop.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PRIZE-FIGHTS</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at
+large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I
+lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after
+hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after
+pursuing him through the classic pages of &#8220;Boxiana&#8221; and the voluminous
+records of &#8220;Pugilistica,&#8221; after consulting, too, that sprightly work &#8220;The
+Fancy&#8221;; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was
+fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley
+Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands
+upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the
+great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the
+metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time
+to time, when great multitudes&mdash;princes, patricians, and plebeians of
+every description&mdash;hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the
+performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so
+much a side.</p>
+
+<p>It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several
+routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches
+and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges
+flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else
+could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at
+the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the
+&#8220;noble art&#8221;?</p>
+
+<p>Many were the merry &#8220;mills&#8221; which &#8220;came off&#8221; at Crawley Downs, Copthorne
+Common, and Blindley<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men,
+conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord
+Yarmouth (&#8220;Red Herrings&#8221;), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of
+claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous
+sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are
+they not set forth with much circumstantial detail in the pages of
+&#8220;Fistiana&#8221; and &#8220;Boxiana&#8221;? There shall you read how the Prince Regent
+witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and
+Martin on Crawley Downs. &#8220;Boxiana&#8221; gives a full account of it, and is even
+moved to verse, in this wise:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">BETWEEN</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">THE NONPAREIL</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">AND</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: .5em;">THE OUT-AND-OUTER.</span><br />
+<br />
+Come, won&#8217;t you list unto my lay<br />
+About the fight at Crawley, O!...</p>
+
+<p>with the refrain&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">With his filaloo trillaloo,<br />
+Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!</p>
+
+<p>For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be
+referred to the classic pages of &#8220;Boxiana&#8221; itself.</p>
+
+<p>Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the
+&#8220;Master of the Rolls,&#8221; one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades
+went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871.
+He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the
+usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican.
+He was landlord successively of the &#8220;Crown&#8221; at Croydon, and the &#8220;Horns&#8221;
+tavern, Kennington.</p>
+
+<p>As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which
+Hickman, &#8220;The Gas-Light Man,&#8221; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>came off victor, they are not for these
+pages. How the combatants &#8220;fibbed&#8221; and &#8220;countered,&#8221; and did other things
+equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the
+pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing
+of all the blows given and received.</p>
+
+<p>This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but
+see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered
+those times. What diversions went forward on the roads&mdash;such roads as they
+were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the
+morning following the &#8220;battle,&#8221; the remains of several carriages,
+phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where
+they had collided in the darkness.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE REGENCY</div>
+
+<p>The House of Hanover, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, was
+not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the
+gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the
+family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at
+least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will
+ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical
+periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of
+romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and
+will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation
+to the words &#8220;Regent&#8221; and &#8220;Regency&#8221;; and his wild escapades have sufficed
+to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and
+greasy vulgarity.</p>
+
+<p>The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous
+<i>bourgeois</i> respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince&#8217;s
+surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his <i>entourage</i> were
+dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting
+prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the
+blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> they
+were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray, in his &#8220;Four Georges,&#8221; has little that is pleasant to say of
+any one of them, but is astonishingly severe upon this last, both as
+Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that
+book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake,
+nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him
+to be a man, as witness this passage: &#8220;To make a portrait of him at sight
+seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig,
+his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I
+could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet,
+after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old
+magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public
+dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing
+but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great
+simulacrum.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Poor fat Adonis!</p>
+
+<p>But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm
+of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed,
+although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those
+thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that
+Thackeray wrote so intimately of snobs: in those unworthy sneers speaks
+one of the race.</p>
+
+<p>One curious little item of praise the author of the &#8220;Four Georges&#8221; was
+constrained to allow the Regent: &#8220;Where my Prince did actually distinguish
+himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from
+Brighton to Carlton House&mdash;fifty-six miles.&#8221;<a name='fna_11' id='fna_11' href='#f_11'><small>[11]</small></a></p>
+
+<p>So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in
+the abuse levelled at the &#8220;simulacrum.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XXIV</h2>
+
+
+<p>Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway
+level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of
+public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good
+idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their
+excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of
+Crawley&mdash;the residential and superior modern district of country houses,
+each in midst of its own little pleasance.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PEASE POTTAGE</div>
+
+<p>The cutting in the rise at Hog&#8217;s Hill passed, the road goes in a long
+incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a
+post-office which spells the name wrongly, &#8220;Peas.&#8221; No one <i>knows</i> how the
+place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and
+tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their
+route-marching and fed with &#8220;pease-pottage,&#8221; the old name for
+pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way
+to trial at the assizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead
+alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate,
+from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the &#8220;Gate&#8221; has
+latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and
+the old &#8220;Black Swan&#8221; inn still standing at the back. The green is not
+improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising
+the inn as an &#8220;hotel.&#8221; The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to
+whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be)
+is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any
+question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question
+arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in
+particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful
+defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or
+private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful
+distant views<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> of the South Downs are utterly damned by gigantic black
+hoardings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor
+garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been
+written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to
+say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes,
+while America itself is retrieving its reputation.</p>
+
+<p>This is the Forest Ridge of Sussex, where the Forest of St. Leonards still
+stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely
+beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and
+on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge
+is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow
+north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Sussex Ouse south, towards the
+English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it
+is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.</p>
+
+<p>At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining
+the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left.
+Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house
+where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all
+manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom
+then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh,
+Sibbald &amp; Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm&#8217;s
+Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years
+pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging
+to customers&mdash;forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest
+and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to &pound;70,000, might
+have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the
+bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824,
+when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the
+14th the bank suspended payment.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img46.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">PEASE POTTAGE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the
+partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman;
+but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were
+quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been
+entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of
+complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men.
+Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to
+prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old
+Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th,
+in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among
+connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose
+its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged
+him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the
+secret died with him.</p>
+
+<p>No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or
+without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed&mdash;or been
+afflicted with&mdash;the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is,
+by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar
+notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood
+here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only
+scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the
+wayfarers&#8217; friend.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Squire Powlett&#8221; is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is
+more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of
+springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has
+fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists
+and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they
+have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fashioned
+spook.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span><i>Why</i> &#8220;Squire Powlett&#8221; should haunt these nocturnal glades is not so
+easily to be guessed. He was not, so far as can be learned, an evildoer,
+and he certainly was not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a captain
+in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the Forest of St. Leonards, who
+seems to have led an exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under
+an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXV</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">HAND CROSS</div>
+
+<p>Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where
+several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives,
+of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and
+wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely
+cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest
+habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where,
+very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish
+is very extensive, stretching as far as Crawley; and the hamlet of Hand
+Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent village itself, is
+only a mere mushroom excrescence called into existence by the road travel
+of the last two centuries.</p>
+
+<p>It is the being on the main road, and on the junction of several routes,
+that has made Hand Cross what it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham
+itself; just as in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare will
+make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps ruin those of some other
+route.</p>
+
+<p>Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing to the eye; for,
+after all, it is a <i>parvenu</i> of a place, and lacks the Domesday descent
+of, for instance, Cuckfield. Now, the <i>parvenu</i>, the man of his hands, may
+be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity grates upon the nerves.
+So it is with Hand Cross, for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> its prosperity, which has not waned with
+the coaching era, has incited to the building of cottages of that cheap
+and yellow brick we know so well and loathe so much. Also, though there is
+no church, there are two chapels; one of retiring position, the other
+conventicle of aggressive and red, red brick. One could find it in one&#8217;s
+heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy
+building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the
+hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists
+foregather by the &#8220;Red Lion,&#8221; are the most striking features of the place.</p>
+
+<p>The &#8220;Red Lion&#8221; is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand
+Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the
+roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands
+of another age of wheels. Shergold tells us that its landlords in olden
+times knew more of smuggling than hearsay, and dispensed from many an
+anker of brandy that had not rendered duty.</p>
+
+<p>At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in
+1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better
+surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two
+miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the
+&#8220;record route&#8221; for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed
+between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the
+classic route at Pyecombe.</p>
+
+<p>For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to
+Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern
+face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses,
+cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or
+transmuting commonplace glazier&#8217;s work into sparkling diamonds.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway,
+with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the &#8220;Jolly
+Farmers&#8221; inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield,
+under whose boughs the coach passengers of a century ago feasted off the
+&#8220;black-hearts&#8221;; where are the &#8220;Dun Cow&#8221; and its equally famous
+rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they
+had never been.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img47.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE &#8220;RED LION,&#8221; HAND CROSS.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of
+hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman&#8217;s Green to Cuckfield. From the
+hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards
+Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows,
+mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p>Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was
+the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in
+others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and
+fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older
+rustics know it, if the younger and the passing stranger do not: they tell
+you &#8220;&#8217;tis wheer th&#8217; owd hroad tarned arff.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXVI</h2>
+
+<p>The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no
+manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the
+coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always
+thus, for in those centuries&mdash;from the fourteenth until the early part of
+the eighteenth&mdash;when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted
+on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given
+over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img48.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CUCKFIELD, 1789.<br /><small><i>From an aquatint after Rowlandson.</i></small></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>All this was so long ago that nature has healed the scars made by that
+busy time. Wooded hills replace the uplands made bare by the smelters, the
+cinder-heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures, the
+&#8220;hammer-ponds&#8221; of the smelteries and foundries have become the resorts of
+artists seeking the picturesque, and the descendants of the old
+iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have for generations past
+been numbered among the county families.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CUCKFIELD</div>
+
+<p>Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directly on the route of the
+Brighton railway, but it pleased the engineers to bring their line no
+nearer than Hayward&#8217;s Heath, some two miles distant. They built a station
+there, on the lone heath, &#8220;for Cuckfield,&#8221; with the result, sixty years
+later, that the sometime solitude is a town and still growing, while
+Cuckfield declines. Hayward&#8217;s Heath, curiously enough, is, or was until
+December, 1894, in the parish of Cuckfield, but the time is at hand when
+the two will be joined by the spread of that railway upstart; and then
+will be the psychological moment for abolishing the name of Hayward&#8217;s
+Heath&mdash;which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitchless&mdash;and adopting
+that of the parental &#8220;Cookfield.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, I shall drop no sentimental tears over the chance that
+Cuckfield lost, sixty years ago, of becoming a railway junction and a
+modern town. Of junctions and mushroom towns we have a sufficiency, but of
+surviving sweet old country townlets very few.</p>
+
+<p>To see Cuckfield thoroughly demands some little leisure, for although it
+is small one must needs have time to assimilate the atmosphere of the
+place, if it is to be appreciated at its worth; from the grey old church
+with its tall shingled spire and its monuments of Burrells and Sergisons
+of Cuckfield Place, to the staid old houses in the quiet streets, and
+those two fine old coaching inns, the &#8220;Talbot&#8221; and the &#8220;King&#8217;s Head.&#8221;
+Rowlandson made a picture of the town in 1789, and it is not wholly unlike
+that, even now, but where is that Fair we see in progress in his spirited
+rendering? Gone, together with the smart fellow driving the curricle, and
+all the other figures of that scene, into the forgotten. There, in one
+corner, you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> see the Recruiting Sergeant and the drummer, impressing with
+military glory a typical smock-frocked Hodge, gaping so outrageously that
+he seems to be opening his face rather than merely his mouth; the artist&#8217;s
+idea seems to have been that, like a dolphin, he would swallow anything,
+either in the way of food or of stories. There are no full-blooded
+Sergeant Kites and gaping yokels nowadays.</p>
+
+<p>Cuckfield is evidently feeling, more and more, the altered condition of
+affairs. Motorists, who are supposed to bring back prosperity to the road,
+do nothing of the kind on the road to Brighton; for those who live at
+Brighton or London merely want to reach the other end as quickly as
+possible, and, with a legal limit up to twenty miles an hour, can cover
+the distance in two hours and a half, and, with an occasional illegal
+interval, easily in two hours. Except in case of a breakdown, the wayside
+hostelries do not often see the colour of the motorists&#8217; money, but they
+smell the stink, and are choked with the dust of them, and landlords and
+every one else concerned would be only too glad if the project for
+building a road between London and Brighton, exclusively for motor
+traffic, were likely to be realised. Then ordinary users of the highway
+might once more be able to discern the natural scenery of the road, at
+present obscured with dust-clouds.</p>
+
+<p>The text for these remarks is furnished by the recent closing, after a
+hundred and fifty years or more, of the once chief inn of Cuckfield: the
+fine and stately &#8220;Talbot,&#8221; now empty and &#8220;To Let&#8221;; the hospitable
+quotation &#8220;You&#8217;re welcome, what&#8217;s your will,&#8221; from <i>The Merry Wives of
+Windsor</i> on its fanlight, reading like a bitter mockery.</p>
+
+<p>The interior of Cuckfield Church is crowded with monuments of the
+Sergisons and the Burrells. Pride of place is given in the chancel to the
+monument of Charles Sergison, who died in 1732, aged 78. It is a very fine
+white marble monument, with a figure of Truth gazing into her mirror, and
+holding with one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> hand a medallion partly supported by a Cupid,
+displaying a portrait of the lamented Sergison, who, we learn from a
+sub-acid inscription, was &#8220;Commissioner of the Navy forty-eight years,
+till 1719, to the entire satisfaction of the King and his Ministers.&#8221; &#8220;The
+civil government of the Navy then being put into military hands, he was
+esteemed by them not a fit person to serve any longer.&#8221; He was, in short,
+like those &#8220;rulers of the Queen&#8217;s (or King&#8217;s) Navee&#8221; satirised by Sir W.
+S. Gilbert in modern times, and &#8220;never went to sea.&#8221; At the period of his
+compulsory retirement it seems to have rather belatedly occurred to the
+authorities that such an one could not be well acquainted with the needs
+of the Navy; so the &#8220;Capacity, Penetration, exact Judgment&#8221; of this &#8220;true
+patriot&#8221; were shelved; but, at any rate, he had had his whack, and it was
+surely high time for the exact judgment, true patriotism, capacity and
+penetration of others to have a chance of making something out of the
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img49.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE ROAD OUT OF CUCKFIELD.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A few monuments are hidden behind the organ, among them one to Guy
+Carleton, &#8220;son of George, Lord Bishop of Chichester.&#8221; He, it seems, &#8220;died
+of a consumption, <span class="nowrap">cl<img src="images/back_c.jpg" alt="&lt;c&gt;" />l<img src="images/back_c.jpg" alt="&lt;c&gt;" />cxxiv,&#8221;</span>
+which appears to be the highly esoteric way of writing 1624. &#8220;<i>Mors vit&aelig; initium</i>&#8221; he tells us, and illustrates it
+with the pleasing fancy of a skull mounted on an hour-glass, with ears of
+wheat sprouting from the eyeless sockets. Other equally pleasant devices,
+encircled with fragments of Greek, are plentiful, the whole concluding
+with the announcement that &#8220;The end of all things is at hand.&#8221; Holding
+that opinion, it would seem to have been hardly worth while to erect the
+monument, but in the result it survives to show what a very gross mistake
+he made.</p>
+
+<p>Two illustrations of the quiet annals of Cuckfield, widely different in
+point of time, are the old clock and the wall-plate memorial to one Frank
+Bleach of the Royal Sussex Volunteer Company, who died at Bloemfontein in
+1901. The ancient hand-wrought <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>clock, made in 1667 by Isaac Leney,
+probably of Cuckfield, finally stopped in 1867, and was taken down in
+1873. After lying as lumber in the belfry for many years, it was in 1904
+fixed on the interior wall of the tower.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXVII</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">&#8220;ROOKWOOD&#8221;</div>
+
+<p>Cuckfield Place, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of
+his &#8220;Rookwood,&#8221; stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in
+midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition
+is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands
+the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches,
+beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, many-gabled
+mansion looking down upon the whole.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">AINSWORTH</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Rookwood,&#8221; the fantastic and gory tale that first gave Harrison Ainsworth
+a vogue, was commenced in 1831, but not completed until 1834. Ainsworth
+died at Reigate, January 3, 1882. Thus in his preface he acknowledges his
+model:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads
+which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is
+ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon
+whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge
+girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved.
+Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I
+may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I
+have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat
+and domains of that fated family. The general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> features of the venerable
+structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular,
+the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the
+hall, &#8216;like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe&#8217; (as the poet Shelley once observed of
+the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly
+tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves
+are carefully delineated.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 600px; height: 391px;"><img src="images/img50.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CUCKFIELD PLACE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Like Mrs. Radcliffe!&#8221; That romance is indeed written in the peculiar
+convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and
+&#8220;Monk&#8221; Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in
+gore and apparitions, responsible for the &#8220;Mysteries of Udolpho,&#8221; &#8220;The
+Italian,&#8221; &#8220;The Monk,&#8221; and other highly seasoned reading of the early years
+of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon
+Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her
+favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions,
+death-watches, highwaymen, &#8220;pistols for two and breakfasts for one,&#8221;
+daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary
+ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising
+romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured
+water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his
+verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys
+refuse any longer to be thrilled. He &#8220;wants to make yer blood run cold,&#8221;
+but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be
+impossible to burlesque &#8220;Rookwood&#8221;; it burlesques itself, and shall be
+allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the
+family vault, to his tragic end:</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+<div class="bbox" style="width: 361px; height: 500px;"><img src="images/img51.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE,<br />CUCKFIELD PLACE.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img52.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">HARRISON AINSWORTH.<br /><small><i>From the Fraser portrait.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>&#8220;He then walked beneath the shadow of one of the yews, chanting an odd
+stanza or so of one of his wild staves, wrapped the while, it would seem,
+in affectionate contemplation of the subject-matter of his song:</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE CHURCHYARD YEW.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">&#8216;&mdash;&mdash;Metuendaque succo</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">Taxus.&#8217;</span><br />
+<br />
+A noxious tree is the churchyard yew,<br />
+As if from the dead its sap it drew;<br />
+Dark are its branches, and dismal to see,<br />
+Like plumes at Death&#8217;s latest solemnity.<br />
+Spectral and jagged, and black as the wings<br />
+Which some spirit of ill o&#8217;er a sepulchre flings:<br />
+Oh! a terrible tree is the churchyard yew;<br />
+Like it is nothing so grimly to view.<br />
+<br />
+Yet this baleful tree hath a core so sound,<br />
+Can nought so tough in a grove be found:<br />
+From it were fashioned brave English bows,<br />
+The boast of our isle, and the dread of its foes.<br />
+For our sturdy sires cut their stoutest staves<br />
+From the branch that hung o&#8217;er their fathers&#8217; graves;<br />
+And though it be dreary and dismal to view,<br />
+Staunch at the heart is the churchyard yew.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;His ditty concluded, Alan entered the church, taking care to leave the
+door slightly ajar, in order to facilitate his grandson&#8217;s entrance. For an
+instant he lingered in the chancel. The yellow moonlight fell upon the
+monuments of his race; and, directed by the instinct of hate, Alan&#8217;s eye
+rested upon the gilded entablature of his perfidious brother Reginald, and
+muttering curses, &#8216;not loud, but deep,&#8217; he passed on. Having lighted his
+lantern in no tranquil mood, he descended into the vault, observing a
+similar caution with respect to the portal of the cemetery, which he left
+partially unclosed, with the key in the lock. Here he resolved to abide
+Luke&#8217;s coming. The reader knows what probability there was of his
+expectations being realised.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FARCICAL ROMANCE</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>&#8220;For a while he paced the tomb, wrapped in gloomy meditation, and
+pondering, it might be, upon the result of Luke&#8217;s expedition, and the
+fulfilment of his own dark schemes, scowling from time to time beneath his
+bent eyebrows, counting the grim array of coffins, and noticing, with
+something like satisfaction, that the shell which contained the remains of
+his daughter had been restored to its former position. He then bethought
+him of Father Checkley&#8217;s midnight intrusion upon his conference with Luke,
+and their apprehension of a supernatural visitation, and his curiosity was
+stimulated to ascertain by what means the priest had gained admission to
+the spot unperceived and unheard. He resolved to sound the floor, and see
+whether any secret entrance existed; and hollowly and dully did the hard
+flagging return the stroke of his heel as he pursued his scrutiny. At
+length the metallic ringing of an iron plate, immediately behind the
+marble effigy of Sir Ranulph, resolved the point. There it was that the
+priest had found access to the vault; but Alan&#8217;s disappointment was
+excessive when he discovered that this plate was fastened on the
+under-side, and all communication thence with the churchyard, or to
+wherever else it might conduct him, cut off; but the present was not the
+season for further investigation, and tolerably pleased with the discovery
+he had already made, he returned to his silent march around the sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At length a sound, like the sudden shutting of the church door, broke
+upon the profound stillness of the holy edifice. In the hush that
+succeeded a footstep was distinctly heard threading the aisle.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;He comes&mdash;he comes!&#8217; exclaimed Alan joyfully; adding, an instant after,
+in an altered voice, &#8216;but he comes alone.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The footstep drew near to the mouth of the vault&mdash;it was upon the stairs.
+Alan stepped forward to greet, as he supposed, his grandson, but started
+back in astonishment and dismay as he encountered in his stead Lady
+Rookwood. Alan retreated, while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> the lady advanced, swinging the iron door
+after her, which closed with a tremendous clang. Approaching the statue of
+the first Sir Ranulph she passed, and Alan then remarked the singular and
+terrible expression of her eyes, which appeared to be fixed upon the
+statue, or upon some invisible object near it. There was something in her
+whole attitude and manner calculated to impress the deepest terror on the
+beholder, and Alan gazed upon her with an awe which momently increased.
+Lady Rookwood&#8217;s bearing was as proud and erect as we have formerly
+described it to have been, her brow was as haughtily bent, her chiselled
+lip as disdainfully curled; but the staring, changeless eye, and the
+deep-heaved sob which occasionally escaped her, betrayed how much she was
+under the influence of mortal terror. Alan watched her in amazement. He
+knew not how the scene was likely to terminate, nor what could have
+induced her to visit this ghostly spot at such an hour and alone; but he
+resolved to abide the issue in silence&mdash;profound as her own. After a time,
+however, his impatience got the better of his fears and scruples, and he
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;What doth Lady Rookwood in the abode of the dead?&#8217; asked he at length.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;She started at the sound of his voice, but still kept her eye fixed upon
+the vacancy.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Hast thou not beckoned me hither, and am I not come?&#8217; returned she, in a
+hollow tone. &#8216;And now thou askest wherefore I am here. I am here because,
+as in thy life I feared thee not, neither in death do I fear thee. I am
+here because&mdash;&mdash;&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;What seest thou?&#8217; interrupted Alan, with ill-suppressed terror.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;What see I&mdash;ha&mdash;ha!&#8217; shouted Lady Rookwood, amidst discordant laughter;
+&#8216;that which might appal a heart less stout than mine&mdash;a figure
+anguish-writhen, with veins that glow as with a subtle and consuming
+flame. A substance, yet a shadow, in thy living likeness. Ha&mdash;frown if
+thou wilt; I can return thy glances.&#8217;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">MELODRAMA POUR RIRE</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>&#8220;&#8216;Where dost thou see this vision?&#8217; demanded Alan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Where?&#8217; echoed Lady Rookwood, becoming for the first time sensible of
+the presence of a stranger. &#8216;Ha&mdash;who are you that question me?&mdash;what are
+you?&mdash;speak!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;No matter who or what I am,&#8217; returned Alan; &#8216;I ask you what you behold?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Can you see nothing?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Nothing,&#8217; replied Alan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;You knew Sir Piers Rookwood?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Is it he?&#8217; asked Alan, drawing near her.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;It is,&#8217; replied Lady Rookwood; &#8216;I have followed him hither, and I will
+follow him whithersoever he leads me, were it to&mdash;&mdash;&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;What doth he now?&#8217; asked Alan; &#8216;do you see him still?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;The figure points to that sarcophagus,&#8217; returned Lady Rookwood&mdash;&#8216;can you
+raise up the lid?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;No,&#8217; replied Alan; &#8216;my strength will not avail to lift it.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Yet let the trial be made,&#8217; said Lady Rookwood; &#8216;the figure points there
+still&mdash;my own arm shall aid you.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alan watched her in dumb wonder. She advanced towards the marble
+monument, and beckoned him to follow. He reluctantly complied. Without any
+expectation of being able to move the ponderous lid of the sarcophagus, at
+Lady Rookwood&#8217;s renewed request he applied himself to the task. What was
+his surprise when, beneath their united efforts, he found the ponderous
+slab slowly revolve upon its vast hinges, and, with little further
+difficulty, it was completely elevated, though it still required the
+exertion of all Alan&#8217;s strength to prop it open and prevent its falling
+back.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;What does it contain?&#8217; asked Lady Rookwood.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;A warrior&#8217;s ashes,&#8217; returned Alan.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;There is a rusty dagger upon a fold of faded linen,&#8217; cried Lady
+Rookwood, holding down the light.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>&#8220;&#8216;It is the weapon with which the first dame of the house of Rookwood was
+stabbed,&#8217; said Alan, with a grim smile:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Which whoso findeth in the tomb<br />
+Shall clutch until the hour of doom;<br />
+And when &#8217;tis grasped by hand of clay<br />
+The curse of blood shall pass away.</p>
+
+<p>So saith the rhyme. Have you seen enough?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;No,&#8217; said Lady Rookwood, precipitating herself into the marble coffin.
+&#8216;That weapon shall be mine.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Come forth&mdash;come forth,&#8217; cried Alan. &#8216;My arm trembles&mdash;I cannot support
+the lid.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;I will have it, though I grasp it to eternity,&#8217; shrieked Lady Rookwood,
+vainly endeavouring to wrest away the dagger, which was fastened, together
+with the linen upon which it lay, by some adhesive substance to the bottom
+of the shell.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At this moment Alan Rookwood happened to cast his eye upward, and he
+then beheld what filled him with new terror. The axe of the sable statue
+was poised above its head, as in the act to strike him. Some secret
+machinery, it was evident, existed between the sarcophagus lid and this
+mysterious image. But in the first impulse of his alarm Alan abandoned his
+hold of the slab, and it sunk slowly downwards. He uttered a loud cry as
+it moved. Lady Rookwood heard this cry. She raised herself at the same
+moment&mdash;the dagger was in her hand&mdash;she pressed it against the lid, but
+its downward force was too great to be withstood. The light was within the
+sarcophagus and Alan could discern her features. The expression was
+terrible. She uttered one shriek, and the lid closed for ever.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alan was in total darkness. The light had been enclosed with Lady
+Rookwood. There was something so horrible in her probable fate that even
+<i>he</i> shuddered as he thought upon it. Exerting all his remaining strength,
+he essayed to raise the lid; but now it was more firmly closed than ever.
+It defied all his power. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>Once, for an instant, he fancied that it yielded
+to his straining sinews, but it was only his hand that slided upon the
+surface of the marble. It was fixed&mdash;immovable. The sides and lid rang
+with the strokes which the unfortunate lady bestowed upon them with the
+dagger&#8217;s point; but these sounds were not long heard. Presently all was
+still; the marble ceased to vibrate with her blows. Alan struck the lid
+with his knuckles, but no response was returned. All was silent.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">FRENZY</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;He now turned his attention to his own situation, which had become
+sufficiently alarming. An hour must have elapsed, yet Luke had not
+arrived. The door of the vault was closed&mdash;the key was in the lock, and on
+the outside. He was himself a prisoner within the tomb. What if Luke
+should <i>not</i> return? What if he were slain, as it might chance, in the
+enterprise? That thought flashed across his brain like an electric shock.
+None knew of his retreat but his grandson. He might perish of famine
+within this desolate vault.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He checked this notion as soon as it was formed&mdash;it was too dreadful to
+be indulged in. A thousand circumstances might conspire to detain Luke. He
+was sure to come. Yet the solitude, the darkness, was awful, almost
+intolerable. The dying and the dead were around him. He dared not stir.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Another hour&mdash;an age it seemed to him&mdash;had passed. Still Luke came not.
+Horrible forebodings crossed him; but he would not surrender himself to
+them. He rose, and crawled in the direction, as he supposed, of the
+door&mdash;fearful even of the stealthy sound of his own footsteps. He reached
+it, and his heart once more throbbed with hope. He bent his ear to the
+key; he drew in his breath; he listened for some sound, but nothing was to
+be heard. A groan would have been almost music in his ears.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Another hour was gone! He was now a prey to the most frightful
+apprehensions, agitated in turns by the wildest emotions of rage and
+terror. He at one moment imagined that Luke had abandoned him, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> heaped
+curses upon his head; at the next, convinced that he had fallen, he
+bewailed with equal bitterness his grandson&#8217;s fate and his own. He paced
+the tomb like one distracted; he stamped upon the iron plate; he smote
+with his hands upon the door; he shouted, and the vault hollowly echoed
+his lamentations. But Time&#8217;s sand ran on, and Luke arrived not.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Alan now abandoned himself wholly to despair. He could no longer
+anticipate his grandson&#8217;s coming&mdash;no longer hope for deliverance. His fate
+was sealed. Death awaited him. He must anticipate his slow but inevitable
+stroke, enduring all the grinding horrors of starvation. The contemplation
+of such an end was madness, but he was forced to contemplate it now; and
+so appalling did it appear to his imagination, that he half resolved to
+dash out his brains against the walls of the sepulchre, and put an end at
+once to his tortures; and nothing, except a doubt whether he might not, by
+imperfectly accomplishing his purpose, increase his own suffering,
+prevented him from putting this dreadful idea into execution. His dagger
+was gone, and he had no other weapon. Terrors of a new kind now assailed
+him. The dead, he fancied, were bursting from their coffins, and he
+peopled the darkness with grisly phantoms. They were round about him on
+each side, whirling and rustling, gibbering, groaning, shrieking,
+laughing, and lamenting. He was stunned, stifled. The air seemed to grow
+suffocating, pestilential; the wild laughter was redoubled; the horrible
+troop assailed him; they dragged him along the tomb, and amid their howls
+he fell, and became insensible.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TORMENT</div>
+
+<p>&#8220;When he returned to himself, it was some time before he could collect his
+scattered faculties; and when the agonising consciousness of his terrible
+situation forced itself upon his mind, he had nigh relapsed into oblivion.
+He arose. He rushed towards the door: he knocked against it with his
+knuckles till the blood streamed from them; he scratched against it with
+his nails till they were torn off by the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>roots. With insane fury he
+hurled himself against the iron frame: it was in vain. Again he had
+recourse to the trap-door. He searched for it; he found it. He laid
+himself upon the ground. There was no interval of space in which he could
+insert a finger&#8217;s point. He beat it with his clenched hand; he tore it
+with his teeth; he jumped upon it; he smote it with his heel. The iron
+returned a sullen sound.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;He again essayed the lid of the sarcophagus. Despair nerved his strength.
+He raised the slab a few inches. He shouted, screamed, but no answer was
+returned; and again the lid fell.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;She is dead!&#8217; cried Alan. &#8216;Why have I not shared her fate? But mine is
+to come. And such a death!&mdash;oh, oh!&#8217; And, frenzied at the thought, he
+again hurried to the door, and renewed his fruitless attempts to escape,
+till nature gave way, and he sank upon the floor, groaning and exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Physical suffering now began to take the place of his mental tortures.
+Parched and consumed with a fierce internal fever, he was tormented by
+unappeasable thirst&mdash;of all human ills the most unendurable. His tongue
+was dry and dusty, his throat inflamed; his lips had lost all moisture. He
+licked the humid floor; he sought to imbibe the nitrous drops from the
+walls; but, instead of allaying his thirst, they increased it. He would
+have given the world, had he possessed it, for a draught of cold
+spring-water. Oh, to have died with his lips upon some bubbling fountain&#8217;s
+marge! But to perish thus!</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Nor were the pangs of hunger wanting. He had to endure all the horrors of
+famine as well as the agonies of quenchless thirst.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In this dreadful state three days and nights passed over Alan&#8217;s fated
+head. Nor night nor day had he. Time, with him, was only measured by its
+duration, and that seemed interminable. Each hour added to his suffering,
+and brought with it no relief. During this period of prolonged misery
+reason often tottered on her throne. Sometimes he was under the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> influence
+of the wildest passions. He dragged coffins from their recesses, hurled
+them upon the ground, striving to break them open and drag forth their
+loathsome contents. Upon other occasions he would weep bitterly and
+wildly; and once&mdash;once only&mdash;did he attempt to pray; but he started from
+his knees with an echo of infernal laughter, as he deemed, ringing in his
+ears. Then, again, would he call down imprecations upon himself and his
+whole line, trampling upon the pile of coffins he had reared; and, lastly,
+more subdued, would creep to the boards that contained the body of his
+child, kissing them with a frantic outbreak of affection.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;At length he became sensible of his approaching dissolution. To him the
+thought of death might well be terrible; but he quailed not before it, or
+rather seemed, in his latest moments, to resume all his wonted firmness of
+character. Gathering together his remaining strength, he dragged himself
+towards the niche wherein his brother, Sir Reginald Rookwood, was
+deposited, and, placing his hand upon the coffin, solemnly exclaimed, &#8216;My
+curse&mdash;my dying curse&mdash;be upon thee evermore!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Falling with his face upon the coffin, Alan instantly expired. In this
+attitude his remains were discovered.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>How to repress a smile at the picture conjured up of Lady Rookwood
+&#8220;precipitating herself into the marble coffin&#8221;! How not to refrain from
+laughing at the fantastic description of Alan piling up coffins in the
+vault and jumping upon them!</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<p>Half a mile below Cuckfield stands Ansty Cross, (the &#8220;Handstay&#8221; of old
+road-books, and said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon, <i>Heanstige</i>, meaning
+highway), a cluster of a few cottages and the &#8220;Green Cross&#8221; inn, once old
+and picturesque, now rebuilt in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>Ready-made Picturesque order of
+architecture. Here stood one of the numerous turnpike-gates.</p>
+
+<p>Close by is Riddens Farm, a picturesque little homestead, with tile-hung
+front and clustered chimneys. It still contains one of those old Sussex
+cast-iron firebacks mentioned in an earlier page, dated 1622.</p>
+
+<div class="figright"><img src="images/img53.jpg" alt="" /><br /><small>OLD SUSSEX FIREBACK,<br />RIDDENS FARM.</small></div>
+
+<p>Below Ansty, two miles or thereby down the road, the little river Adur is
+passed at Bridge Farm, and the twin towns of St. John&#8217;s Common and Burgess
+Hill are reached.</p>
+
+<p>Before 1820 their sites were fields and common land, wild and
+gorse-covered, free and open. Few houses were then in sight; the &#8220;Anchor&#8221;
+inn, by Burgess Hill, the reputed haunt of smugglers, who stored their
+contraband in the woods and heaths close by; and the &#8220;King&#8217;s Head,&#8221; at St.
+John&#8217;s Common, with two or three cottages&mdash;these were all.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BURGESS HILL</div>
+
+<p>St. John&#8217;s Common, partly in Keymer and partly in Clayton parishes, was
+enclosed piecemeal, between 1828 and 1855, by an arrangement between the
+lords of the manors and the copyholders, who divided the plunder between
+them, when this large tract of land resently became the site of these
+towns of St. John&#8217;s Common and Burgess Hill, which sprang up, if not with
+quite the rapidity of a Californian mining-town, at least with a celerity
+previously unknown in England. Their rapid rise was of course due to the
+Brighton Railway and its station.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> There are, however, nowadays not
+wanting signs, quite apart from the condition of the brick and tile and
+drainpipe-making industry, on which the two mushroom towns have come into
+being, that the unlovely places are in a bad way. Shops closed and vainly
+offered &#8220;to let&#8221; tell a story of artificial expansion and consequent
+depression: the inevitable Nemesis of discounting the future.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img54.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">JACOB&#8217;S POST.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I will show you what the site of these uninviting modern places was like,
+a hundred years ago. It is not far, geographically, from the sorry streets
+of Burgess Hill to the wild, wide commons of Wivelsfield and Ditchling;
+but such a change is wrought in two miles and a half as would be
+considered impossible by any who have not made the excursion into those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+beautiful regions. They show us, in survival, what the now hackneyed main
+roads were like three generations ago.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">JACOB&#8217;S POST</div>
+
+<p>In every circumstance Ditchling Common recalls the &#8220;Crackskull Commons&#8221; of
+the eighteenth-century comedies, for it has a little horror of its own in
+the shape of an authentic fragment of a gibbet. This is the silent
+reminder of a crime committed near at hand, at the &#8220;Royal Oak&#8221; inn,
+Wivelsfield, in 1734. In that year Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar, came to the
+inn and, stabling his horse, attacked Miles, the landlord, while he was
+grooming the animal down, and cut his throat. The servant-maid, hearing a
+disturbance in the stable, and coming downstairs to see the cause of it,
+was murdered in the same way, and then the Jew calmly walked upstairs and
+slaughtered the landlord&#8217;s wife, who was lying ill in bed. None of these
+unfortunate people died at once. The two women expired the same night, but
+Miles lived long enough to identify the assassin, who was hanged at
+Horsham, his body being hung in chains from this gibbet, ever since known
+as Jacob&#8217;s Post.</p>
+
+<p>Pieces of wood from this gallows-tree were long and highly esteemed by
+country-folk as charms, and were often carried about with them as
+preventatives of all manner of accidents and diseases; indeed, its present
+meagre proportions are due to this practice and belief.</p>
+
+<p>The post is fenced with a wooden rail, and is surmounted by the quaint
+iron effigy of a rooster, pierced with the date, 1734, in old-fashioned
+figures.</p>
+
+<p>It is a lonely spot, with but one cottage near at hand: the common
+undulating away for miles until it reaches close to the grey barrier of
+the noble South Downs, rising magnificently in the distance.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XXIX</h2>
+
+<p>Returning to the exploited main road. Friar&#8217;s Oak is soon reached. It was
+selected by Sir Conan Doyle as one of the scenes of his Regency story,
+&#8220;Rodney Stone&#8221;; but since the year 1900, when the old inn was rebuilt, the
+spot has become an eyesore to those who knew it of old.</p>
+
+<p>No one knows why Friar&#8217;s Oak is so called, and &#8220;Nothing is ever known
+about anything on the roads,&#8221; is the intemperate exclamation that rises to
+the lips of the disappointed explorer. But wild legends, as usual, supply
+the place of facts, and the old oak that stands opposite the inn is said
+to have been the spot where a friar, or friars, distributed alms. To any
+one who knows even the least about friars, this story would at once carry
+its own condemnation; but a friar, or a hermit, may have solicited alms
+here. At any rate, the old inn used to exhibit a very forbidding &#8220;friar of
+orders grey&#8221; as its sign, dancing beneath the oak. Stolen many years ago,
+it was subsequently discovered in London by the merest accident, was
+purchased for a trifling sum, and restored to its bereft signpost. The
+innkeeper, however, thinking that what befell once might happen again,
+hung the cherished panel within the house, where it remains to this day.</p>
+
+<p>From Friar&#8217;s Oak it is but a step to that newest creation among Brighton&#8217;s
+suburbs, Clayton Park, its clustering red-brick villas, building estates,
+and half-formed roads adjoining the station of Hassocks Gate, which, by
+the way, the railway authorities have long since reduced to &#8220;Hassocks.&#8221;
+The name recalls certain dusty contrivances of straw and carpeting
+artfully contrived for the devout to stumble over in church. But, not to
+incur the suspicion of tripping over the name as here applied, it may be
+mentioned that &#8220;hassock&#8221; is the Anglo-Saxon name for a coppice or small
+wood; and there are really many of these at and around Hassocks Gate to
+this day.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">TURNPIKE GATES</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>At Stonepound a road leads on the right to Hurstpierpoint, which is too
+big a mouthful for general use, and so is locally &#8220;Hurst.&#8221; The Pierpoints,
+whose name is embedded in that of the place, like an ammonite in a
+geological stratum, were long since as extinct as those other Normans, the
+Monceaux of Hurstmonceaux, and are what Americans would term a &#8220;back
+number.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="borderdots">Stone Pound Gate<br />
+Clears Patcham Gate<br />
+St. John&#8217;s and Ansty Gates<br />
+<span class="giant">Y</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="borderdots">Patcham Gate<br />
+Clears Stone Pound Gate,<br />
+St. John&#8217;s and Ansty Gates<br />
+<span class="huge">126</span></p>
+
+<p>Stonepound Gate was one of the nine that at one time barred the Brighton
+Road, and the last but one on the way. It will be seen, by the specimens
+of turnpike-tickets reprinted here, that at one time, at least, the burden
+of the tolls was not quite so heavy as the mere number of the gates would
+lead a casual observer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> to suppose, a ticket taken at Ansty &#8220;clearing&#8221; the
+remaining distance, through three other gates, to Brighton. But it was
+necessary for the traveller to know his way about, and, if he were going
+through, to ask for a ticket to clear to Brighton; else the pikeman would
+issue a ticket, which cost just as much, to the next gate only, when
+another payment would be demanded. These were &#8220;tricks upon travellers&#8221;
+familiar to every road, and they earned the pikemen, as a class, a very
+unenviable reputation.</p>
+
+<p>It was here, in the great Christmas Eve snowstorm of 1836, that the London
+mail was snowed up. Its adventures illustrate the uncertainty of
+travelling the roads.</p>
+
+<p>In those days you took your seat on your particular fancy in coaches, and
+paid your sixteen-shilling fare from London to Brighton, or <i>vice versa</i>,
+trusting (yet with heaviness of heart) in Providence to bring you to a
+happy issue from all the many dangers and discomforts of travelling.
+Occasionally it was brought home, by storm and flood, to those learned
+enough to know it, that &#8220;travelling&#8221; derived originally from &#8220;travail,&#8221;
+and the discomforts of leaving one&#8217;s own fireside in the winter are
+emphasized and underscored in the particulars of what befell at Stonepound
+in the great snowstorm of December 24th, 1836&mdash;a storm that paralysed
+communications throughout the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Brighton up-mail of Sunday had travelled about eight miles from that
+town, when it fell into a drift of snow, from which it was impossible to
+extricate it without assistance. The guard immediately set off to obtain
+all necessary aid, but when he returned no trace whatever could be found,
+either of the coach, coachman or passengers, three in number. After much
+difficulty the coach was found, but could not be extricated from the
+hollow into which it had got. The guard did not reach London until seven
+o&#8217;clock on Tuesday night, having been obliged to travel with the bags on
+horseback, and in many instances to leave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> the main road and proceed
+across fields in order to avoid the deep drifts of snow.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The passengers, coachman, and guard slept at Clayton, seven miles from
+Brighton. The road from Hand Cross was quite impassable. The non-arrival
+of the mail at Crawley induced the postmaster there to send a man in a gig
+to ascertain the cause on Monday afternoon, and no tidings being heard of
+man, gig, or horse for several hours, another man was despatched on
+horseback. After a long search he found horse and gig completely built up
+in the snow. The man was in an exhausted state. After considerable
+difficulty the horse and gig were extricated, and the party returned to
+Crawley. The man had learned no tidings of the mail, and refused to go out
+again on any such exploring mission.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The Brighton mail from London, too, reached Crawley, but was compelled to
+return.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CLAYTON TUNNEL ACCIDENT</div>
+
+<p>Such were the incidents upon which the Christmas stories, of the type
+brought into favour by Dickens, were built, but the stories are better to
+read than the incidents to experience. I am retrospectively sorry for
+those passengers who thus lost their Christmas dinners; but after all, it
+was better to miss the turkey and the Christmas pudding than to be &#8220;mashed
+into a pummy&#8221; in railway accidents, such as the awful heart-shaking series
+of collisions which took place on Sunday, August 25th, 1861, in the
+railway tunnel through Clayton Hill. On that day, in that gloomy place,
+twenty-four persons lost their lives, and one hundred and seventy-five
+were injured.</p>
+
+<p>Three trains were timed to leave Brighton station on that fatal morning,
+two of them filled to crowding with excursionists; the other, an ordinary
+train, well filled and bound for London. Their times for starting were 8,
+8.5, and 8.30 respectively, but owing to delays occasioned by press of
+traffic, they did not set out until considerably later, at 8.28, 8.31, and
+8.35. At such terribly short intervals were they started, in times<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> when
+no block system existed to render such close following comparatively safe.</p>
+
+<p>Clayton Tunnel was already considered a dangerous place, and there was
+situated at either end (north and south entrances) a signal-cabin
+furnished with telegraphic instruments and signal apparatus, by which the
+signalman at one end of the tunnel could communicate with his fellow at
+the other, and could notify &#8220;train in&#8221; or &#8220;train out&#8221; as might happen.
+This practically formed a primitive sort of &#8220;block system,&#8221; especially
+devised for use in this mile and a quarter&#8217;s dark burrow.</p>
+
+<p>A &#8220;self-acting&#8221; signal placed in the cutting some distance from the
+southern entrance was supposed, upon the passage of every train, to set
+itself at &#8220;danger&#8221; for any following, until placed at &#8220;line clear&#8221; from
+the nearest cabin, but on this occasion the first train passed in, and the
+self-acting signal failed to act.</p>
+
+<p>The second train, following upon the heels of the first, passed all
+unsuspecting, and dashed from daylight into the tunnel&#8217;s mouth, the
+signalman, who had not received a message from the other end of the tunnel
+being clear, frantically waving his red flag to stop it. This signal
+apparently unnoticed by the driver, the train passed in.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the third train came into view, and at the same time the
+signalman was advised of the tunnel being clear of the first. Meanwhile,
+the driver of the second train, who <i>had</i> noticed the red flag, was,
+unknown to the signalman, backing his train out again. A message was sent
+to the north cabin for it, &#8220;train in&#8221;; but the man there, thinking this to
+be a mere repetition of the first, replied, &#8220;train out,&#8221; referring, of
+course, to the first train.</p>
+
+<p>The tunnel being to the southern signalman apparently clear, the third
+train was allowed to proceed, and met, midway, away from daylight, the
+retreating second train. The collision was terrible; the two rearward
+carriages of the second train were smashed to pieces,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> and the engine of
+the third, reared upon their wreck, poured fire and steam and scalding
+water upon the poor wretches who, wounded but not killed by the impact,
+were struggling to free themselves from the splintered and twisted remains
+of the two carriages.</p>
+
+<p>The heap of wreckage was piled up to the roof of the tunnel, whose
+interior presented a dreadful scene, the engine fire throwing a wild glare
+around, but partly obscured by the blinding, scalding clouds of steam;
+while this suddenly created Inferno resounded with the prayers, shrieks,
+shouts, and curses of injured and scatheless alike, all fearful of the
+coming of another train to add to the already sufficiently hideous ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately no further catastrophe occurred; but nothing of horror was
+wanting, neither in the magnitude nor in the circumstances of the
+disaster, which long remained in the memories of those who read and was
+impossible ever to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXX</h2>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE SOUTH DOWNS</div>
+
+<p>From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view,
+crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and
+the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this
+great wall of earth, chalk, and grass&mdash;Wolstonbury semicircular in outline
+and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small
+bushes.</p>
+
+<p>Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb
+Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms
+with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history,
+continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell&#8217;s mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick
+ventilating-shafts going in a long<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> perspective above the chalky cutting
+in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton,
+humbly crouching under the lee of the downs.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Clayton Hill!&#8221; It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year
+1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient
+spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill
+drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road
+takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of
+the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain
+their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick
+wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven
+have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality
+has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision
+with a trap.</p>
+
+<p>From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a
+pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads
+looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah&#8217;s Ark
+stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature
+land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen&mdash;a pillar of
+smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so
+near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the
+downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe
+crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of
+the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district.
+Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls
+worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature
+happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img55.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CLAYTON TUNNEL.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>But the shepherds have ceased to be vocal with the sheep-shearing songs of
+yore; it seems that their modern accomplishment of being able to read has
+stricken them dumb. Neither the words nor the airs of the old
+shearing-songs will ever again awaken the echoes in the daytime, nor make
+the roomy interiors of barns ring o&#8217; nights, as they were wont to do
+lang-syne, when the convivial shearing supper was held, and the ale hummed
+in the cup, and, later in the evening, in the head also.</p>
+
+<p>But the Sussex peasant is by no means altogether bereft of his ancient
+ways. He is, in the more secluded districts, still a South Saxon; for the
+county, until comparatively recent times remote and difficult, plunged in
+its sloughs and isolated by reason of its forests, has no manufactures,
+and the rural parts do not attract immigrants from the shires, to leaven
+his peculiarities. The Sussex folk are still rooted firmly in what Drayton
+calls their &#8220;queachy ground.&#8221; Words of Saxon origin are still the staple
+of the country talk; folk-tales, told in times when the South Saxon
+kingdom was yet a power of the Heptarchy, exist in remote corners,
+currently with the latest ribald song from the London halls; superstitions
+linger, as may be proved by he who pursues his inquiries judiciously, and
+thought moves slowly still in the bucolic mind.</p>
+
+<p>The Norman Conquest left few traces upon the population, and the peasant
+is still the Saxon he ever has been; his occupations, too, tend to
+slowness of speech and mind. The Sussex man is by the very rarest chance
+engaged in any manufacturing industries. He is by choice and by force of
+circumstances ploughman, woodman, shepherd, market-gardener, or carter,
+and is become heavy as his soil, and curiously old-world in habit. All
+which traits are delightful to the preternaturally sharp Londoner, whose
+nerves occupy the most important place in his being. These country folk
+are new and interesting creatures for study to him who is weary of that
+acute product of civilisation&mdash;the London arab.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">OLD SUSSEX WAYS</div>
+
+<p>Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few
+years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img56.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>Their cottages that, until a few years ago, were the same as ever, have
+recently been very largely rebuilt, much to the sorrow of those who love
+the picturesque. They were thatched, for the most part, or tiled, or
+roofed with stone slabs. A living-room with yawning fireplace and
+capacious settle was the chief feature of them. The floor was covered with
+red bricks. When the settle was drawn up to the cheerful blaze the
+interior was cosy. But many of the most picturesque cottages were damp and
+insanitary, and although they pleased the artist to look at, it by no
+means followed that they would have contented him to live in.</p>
+
+<p>Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and
+perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of
+bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be
+purchased, but not for silver:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">If you wish your bees to thrive,<br />
+Gold must be paid for ev&#8217;ry hive;<br />
+For when they&#8217;re bought with other money,<br />
+There will be neither swarm nor honey.</p>
+
+<p>The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and
+it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible
+on the surface.</p>
+
+<p>In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the
+proper time for &#8220;worsling,&#8221; that is &#8220;wassailing&#8221; the orchards, but more
+particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the
+trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">Stand fast root, bear well top;<br />
+Pray, good God, send us a howling crop<br />
+Ev&#8217;ry twig, apples big;<br />
+Ev&#8217;ry bough, apples enow&#8217;;<br />
+Hats full, caps full,<br />
+Full quarters, sacks full.</p>
+
+<p>These wassailing folk were generally known as &#8220;howlers&#8221;; &#8220;doubtless
+rightly,&#8221; says a Sussex arch&aelig;ologist, &#8220;for real old Sussex music is in a
+minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling.&#8221;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> This knowledge
+enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted
+Keynes, when he records: &#8220;1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;&#8221; a
+statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs,
+would be altogether incomprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the
+cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would
+have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not &#8220;January butter.&#8221; and the
+harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree?</p>
+
+<p>Saints&#8217; days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast
+were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of
+any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in
+doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">In April he shows his bill,<br />
+In May he sings o&#8217; night and day,<br />
+In June he&#8217;ll change his tune,<br />
+By July prepare to fly,<br />
+By August away he must.<br />
+If he stay till September,<br />
+&#8217;Tis as much as the oldest man<br />
+Can ever remember.</p>
+
+<p>If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere
+human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex
+folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October
+10th, the Devil goes round the country, and&mdash;dirty devil&mdash;spits on the
+blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some
+one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the
+close of the year.</p>
+
+<p>Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that
+county&#8217;s fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful
+that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto
+been? We have read travellers&#8217; tales of woful happenings on the road; hear
+now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+going on the highways: &#8220;I saw,&#8221; says he, &#8220;an ancient lady, and a lady of
+very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen;
+nor was it done in frolic or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way
+being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it.&#8221; All which says
+much for the piety of this ancient lady. Only a few years later, in 1729,
+died Dame Judith, widow of Sir Henry Hatsell, who in her will, dated
+January 10th, 1728, directed that her body should be buried at Preston,
+should she happen to die at such a time of year when the roads were
+passable; otherwise, at any place her executors might think suitable. It
+so happened that she died in the month of June, so compliance with her
+wishes was possible.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXI</h2>
+
+<p>And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that
+parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand
+Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies
+deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from
+the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture.
+&#8220;Slougham-cum-Crol&eacute;&#8221; is the title of the place in ancient records, &#8220;Crol&eacute;&#8221;
+being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it obtained
+its name, pronounced by the natives &#8220;Slaffam,&#8221; and it was certainly due to
+them that the magnificent manor-house&mdash;almost a palace&mdash;of the Coverts,
+the old lords of the manor&mdash;was deserted and began to fall to pieces so
+soon as built.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img57.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most
+powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of
+Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, &#8220;came over with the
+Conqueror&#8221;; but they are not found settled here until towards the close
+of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the
+Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter
+Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of
+that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was
+due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their
+enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat,
+over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the
+apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar
+of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush
+grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble
+gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its
+massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort
+of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater
+part to the level of the watery turf.</p>
+
+<p>The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean
+build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences
+when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few
+mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the
+mansion remain to confirm the thought.</p>
+
+<p>That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls
+should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its
+completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed,
+and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other
+hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of
+their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and
+defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of
+land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so
+important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it
+is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues
+and chills innumerable.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img58.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE ENTRANCE: RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on
+circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes
+to his wife: &#8220;The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I
+vow &#8217;tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of
+dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen
+miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges
+of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient
+draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry
+summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so
+ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry
+apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking
+moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all
+those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the
+havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it
+is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park,
+where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its
+handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the
+&#8220;Star&#8221; Hotel at Lewes.</p>
+
+<p>The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an
+architectural frieze of greyhounds&#8217; and leopards&#8217; heads and skulls of oxen
+wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of
+their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within
+the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically
+versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but
+the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the
+most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land,
+who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the
+sea on their own manors.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img59.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">BOLNEY.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated
+architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In
+the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503;
+and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard
+Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company
+of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a
+curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by
+armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because
+executed all innocent of joke or irreverence.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights,
+to bear me up.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img60.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Another Richard, but twice married, who died in 1579, is commemorated in a
+large and elaborate monument in the Covert Chapel, whereon are sculptured,
+in an attitude of prayer, Richard himself, his two wives, six sons, and
+eight daughters.</p>
+
+<p>Last of the Coverts whose name is perpetuated here is Jane, who deceased
+in 1586.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img61.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">HICKSTEAD PLACE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>Beside these things, Slaugham claims some interest as containing the
+mansion of Ashfold, where once resided Mrs. Matcham, a sister of Nelson.
+Indeed, it was while staying here that the Admiral received the summons
+which sped him on his last and most glorious and fatal voyage. Slaugham,
+too, with St. Leonard&#8217;s Forest, contributes a title to the peerage, Lord
+St. Leonards&#8217; creation being of &#8220;Slaugham, in the county of Sussex.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXII</h2>
+
+<p>This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly
+beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets
+trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its
+course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the
+lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of
+the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is
+only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the
+topmost branches of distant trees. &#8220;Bowlney,&#8221; as the countryfolk pronounce
+the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot
+that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought
+for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new,
+the church, and the &#8220;Eight Bells&#8221; inn, group for effect.</p>
+
+<p>Down the road, rather over a mile distant from Bolney, and looking so
+remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied
+with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small
+but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time
+of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of
+the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the
+large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and
+supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent
+that point; but, as the inquirer may discover for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> himself, it now
+fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church
+of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and
+built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family
+for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the
+way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and
+adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the
+continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are
+frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of
+field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is
+covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original.
+Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his
+rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of
+eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img62.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">NEWTIMBER PLACE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies
+away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South
+Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow
+plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow
+of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a
+noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an
+Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by
+embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the
+chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of
+love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale
+Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that
+Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his
+first fight.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img63.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended
+from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known
+throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and
+Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on
+the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a
+bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes
+Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the
+town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died,
+in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.</p>
+
+<p>At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads,
+on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty
+churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in
+appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished
+off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little
+Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly
+interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img64.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">PATCHAM.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the
+time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a
+gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays,
+and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is
+quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain;
+for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had
+been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no
+further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle
+Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who
+lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the
+circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints
+of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the
+weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely
+gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could
+have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he
+has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar
+that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand
+years.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXIII</h2>
+
+
+<p>From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the
+South Downs into the country of the &#8220;deans.&#8221; North and South of the Downs
+are two different countries&mdash;so different that if they were inhabited by
+two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge,
+it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely
+England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district
+of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter.
+But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs,
+looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe
+Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that
+very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">THE DEANS</div>
+
+<p>The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows
+Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to
+be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and
+shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form
+places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These
+are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and
+all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you
+will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean,
+by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course &#8220;Dean-ton&#8221;) near Newhaven,
+Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are
+strung along these last miles into <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>Brighton&mdash;Pangdean and Withdean. Most
+of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a
+sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with
+stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little
+cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to
+conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first
+&#8220;dean&#8221; is one of these nonconformists.</p>
+
+<p>Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs
+are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of
+the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho
+and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond
+of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility,
+standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of
+their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and
+beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.</p>
+
+<p>Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other
+circumstance, a &#8220;dean&#8221; is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a
+dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the
+hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands,
+too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old
+toll-house.</p>
+
+<p>Not so <i>very</i> old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston
+turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807,
+was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set
+afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for
+another term of years. It and its legend &#8220;NO TRUST,&#8221; painted large for all
+the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit,
+were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one
+regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the
+early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> at Patcham Gate, and yielded
+their &#8220;tuppences&#8221; with what grace they might.</p>
+
+<p>On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still
+with difficulty be spelled the inscription:</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: .5em;">Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,</span><br />
+who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">November 7th, 1796.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Which pierc&egrave;d through the young man&#8217;s head.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">He instant fell, resigned his breath,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And closed his languid eyes in death.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">All you who do this stone draw near,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">From this sad instance may we all,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Prepare to meet Jehovah&#8217;s call.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to
+youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and
+&#8220;agin the Government&#8221;; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were
+wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even
+middle-aged blood.</p>
+
+<div class="figright"><img src="images/img65.jpg" alt="" /><br /><small>OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.</small></div>
+
+<p>Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and
+Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he
+was &#8220;unfortunately shot,&#8221; he, with many others of the gang, was coming
+from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell
+in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The
+smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves,
+careful only to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales,
+who, met by a &#8220;riding officer,&#8221; was called upon to surrender himself and
+his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in
+early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand
+plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that
+Daniel was &#8220;too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before,&#8221; so
+he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery
+rhyme, was made of &#8220;lead, lead, lead,&#8221; Daniel was killed. Alas! poor
+Daniel.</p>
+
+<p>An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham,
+sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully
+buttressed.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">PRESTON</div>
+
+<p>Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although
+patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of
+Thomas &agrave; Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the
+possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is
+weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in
+one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other &#8220;kick the beam.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXIV</h2>
+
+<p>It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that
+complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through
+Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall
+elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick
+arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.</p>
+
+<p>It is Brighton&#8217;s ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter
+and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.</p>
+
+<p>Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good,
+and went through a middle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet
+fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its
+newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George
+the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste,
+become almost arch&aelig;ologically interesting, and the newer Brighton
+approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the
+Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an
+old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the
+twentieth century.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img66.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from
+London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a
+curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of
+the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even
+if those characteristic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York
+Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that,
+and Brunswick t&#8217;other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.</p>
+
+<p>The Old Steyne was in Florizel&#8217;s time the rendezvous of fashion. The
+&#8220;front&#8221; and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction,
+but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful
+than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">BRIGHTON</div>
+
+<p>Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom
+Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in
+the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to
+be so desolate that &#8220;if one had a mind to hang one&#8217;s self for desperation
+at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on
+which to fasten a rope.&#8221; At any rate it would have needed a particularly
+stout tree to serve Johnson&#8217;s turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an
+ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted
+fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with
+the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to
+Johnson&#8217;s as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the
+elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being
+construed into praise by the townsfolk. &#8220;Of all the trees,&#8221; says he, &#8220;I
+ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent
+beach at Brighton.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the
+glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the
+tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the
+tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is
+reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive
+shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> have been
+admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost,
+one shrewdly suspects&mdash;it is supposed to have cost over &pound;1,000,000&mdash;was
+what appealed to the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one
+recognises as the &#8220;Marquis of Steyne&#8221; in &#8220;Vanity Fair,&#8221; admired it, as
+assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, &#8220;A good idea of the
+building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon
+the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste.
+Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and
+rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the
+work of William the Fourth in 1832.</p>
+
+<p>The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for
+Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and
+was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace
+at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than
+it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious
+scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style,
+would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to
+justify the Prince&#8217;s taste.</p>
+
+<p>But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence
+upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose
+population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to
+5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more
+than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian
+Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of
+Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of
+161,000&mdash;the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that
+in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img67.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE PAVILION.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well
+in the &#8220;Four Georges&#8221;:</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence
+and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince
+Regent, all play parts.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the
+scene. In Gilray&#8217;s caricatures, and amongst Fox&#8217;s jolly associates, there
+figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in
+his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with
+the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had
+taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine
+and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of
+Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in
+Sussex.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable
+scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to
+drink wine with the Duke&mdash;a challenge which the old toper did not refuse.
+He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank
+glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first
+gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers
+filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink.
+&#8216;Now,&#8217; says he, &#8216;I will have my carriage and go home.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof
+where he had been so generously entertained. &#8216;No,&#8217; he said; &#8216;he had had
+enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave
+the place at once, and never enter its doors more.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour&#8217;s interval, the
+liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host&#8217;s generous purpose
+was answered, and the Duke&#8217;s old grey head lay stupefied on the table.
+Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> announced, he staggered to it as
+well as he could, and, stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the
+poor old man fancied he was going home.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince&#8217;s hideous house
+at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers
+there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the
+Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still
+there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK</div>
+
+<p>Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray&#8217;s
+&#8220;Four Georges&#8221; is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke,
+who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other
+since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was
+not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of
+drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish
+creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink,
+he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A
+contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described
+him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had
+eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a
+bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him
+off to bed. It was well written of him:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">On Norfolk&#8217;s tomb inscribe this placard:<br />
+He lived a beast and died a blackguard.</p>
+
+<p>This &#8220;very old,&#8221; &#8220;poor old man&#8221; of Thackeray&#8217;s misplaced sympathy did not,
+as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged
+sixty-nine.</p>
+
+<p>Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by
+the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told
+of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> yellow
+barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect
+the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. &#8220;It was a
+position,&#8221; says my authority, &#8220;which gave His Royal Highness an
+opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke.
+Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he
+exclaimed, &#8216;By Jove, Townsend, I&#8217;ve been robbed; I had with me some damson
+tarts, but they are now gone.&#8217; &#8216;Gone!&#8217; said Townsend, rising;
+&#8216;impossible!&#8217; &#8216;Yes,&#8217; rejoined the Prince, &#8216;and you are the purloiner,&#8217; at
+the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting
+the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, &#8216;This is a
+sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.&#8217; &#8216;Rather say, your
+Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,&#8217; added Townsend, raising
+the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained
+seat of his nankeen inexpressibles.&#8221;</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXV</h2>
+
+<p>But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton.
+It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would
+have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion&mdash;an inferior
+Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell&mdash;the name sometimes spelt with one
+&#8220;l&#8221;&mdash;who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs
+the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He
+died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the
+fishing-village; but even before the Prince of Wales first visited
+Brighthelmstone in 1782, it had attained a certain popularity, as the
+&#8220;Brighthelmstone Guide&#8221; of July, 1777, attests, in these halting verses:</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+This town or village of renown,<br />
+Like London Bridge, half broken down,<br />
+Few years ago was worse than Wapping,<br />
+Not fit for a human soul to stop in;<br />
+But now, like to a worn-out shoe,<br />
+By patching well, the place will do.<br />
+You&#8217;d wonder much, I&#8217;m sure, to see<br />
+How it&#8217;s becramm&#8217;d with quality.</p>
+
+<p>And so on.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img68.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE CLIFFS, BRIGHTHELMSTONE, 1789.<br /><small><i>From an aquatint after Rowlandson.</i></small></p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img69.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">DR. RICHARD RUSSELL.<br /><small><i>From the portrait by Zoffany.</i></small></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">GUIDES TO BRIGHTON</div>
+
+<p>Brighthelmstone, indeed, has had more Guides written upon it than even
+Bath has had, and very curious some of them are become in these days. They
+range from lively to severe, from grave to gay, from the serious screeds
+of Russell and Dr. Relhan, his successor, to the light and airy, and not
+too admirable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> puffs of to-day. But, however these guides may vary, they
+all agree in harking back to that shadowy Brighthelm who is supposed to
+have given his peculiar name to the ancient fisher-village here
+established time out of mind. In the days when &#8220;County Histories&#8221; were
+first let loose, in folio volumes, upon an unoffending land, historians,
+arch&aelig;ologists, and other interested parties seemed at a loss for the
+derivation of the place-name, and, rather than confess themselves ignorant
+of its meaning, they conspired together to invent a Saxon archbishop, who,
+dying in the odour of sanctity and the ninth century, bequeathed his
+appellation to what is now known, in a contracted form, as Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>But the man is not known who has unassailable proofs to show of this
+Brighthelm&#8217;s having so honoured the fisher-folk&#8217;s hovels with his name.</p>
+
+<p>Thackeray, greatly daring, considering that the Fourth George is the real
+patron&mdash;saint, we can hardly say; let us make it king&mdash;of the town,
+elected to deliver his lectures upon the &#8220;Four Georges&#8221; at Brighton, among
+other places, and to that end made, with monumental assurance, a personal
+application at the Town Hall for the hire of the banqueting-room in the
+Royal Pavilion.</p>
+
+<p>But one of the Aldermen, who chanced to be present, suggested, with
+extra-aldermanic wit, that the Town Hall would be equally suitable,
+intimating at the same time that it was not considered as strictly
+etiquette to &#8220;abuse a man in his own house.&#8221; The witty Alderman&#8217;s
+suggestion, we are told, was acted upon, and the Town Hall engaged
+forthwith.</p>
+
+<p>It argued considerable courage on the lecturer&#8217;s part to declaim against
+George the Fourth anywhere in that town which His Majesty had, by his
+example, conjured up from almost nothingness. It does not seem that
+Thackeray was, after all, ill received at Brighton; whence thoughts arise
+as to the ingratitude and fleeting memories of them that were either in
+the first or second generation, advantaged by the royal preference for
+this bleak stretch of shore beneath the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> bare South Downs, open to every
+wind that blows. Surely gratitude is well described as a &#8220;lively sense of
+favours to come,&#8221; and they, no doubt, considered that the statue they had
+erected in the Steyne gardens to him was a full discharge of all
+obligations. Nor is the history of that effigy altogether creditable. It
+was erected in 1828, as the result of a movement among Brighton tradesfolk
+in 1820, to honour the memory of one who had incidentally made the
+fortunes of so many among them; but although the subscription list
+remained open for eight years and a half, it did not provide the &pound;3.000
+agreed upon to be paid to Chantrey, the sculptor of it.</p>
+
+<p>The bronze statue presides to-day over a cab-rank, and the sea-salt
+breezes have strongly oxidised the face to an arsenical green; insulting,
+because greenness was not a distinguishing trait in the character of
+George the Fourth.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote">LAST OF THE REGENCY.</div>
+
+<p>The surrounding space is saturated with memories of the Regency; but the
+roysterers are all gone and the recollection of them is dim. Prince and
+King, the Barrymores&mdash;Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate&mdash;brothers three;
+Mrs. Fitzherbert, &#8220;the only woman whom George the Fourth ever really
+loved,&#8221; and whom he married; Sir John Lade, the reckless, the frolicsome,
+historic in so far that he was the first who publicly wore trousers:
+these, with others innumerable, are long since silent. No more are they
+heard who with unseemly revelry affronted the midnight moon, or upset the
+decrepit watchman in his box. Those days and nights are done, nor are they
+likely to be revived while the Brighton policemen remain so big and
+muscular.</p>
+
+<p>With the death of George the Fourth the play was played out. William the
+Fourth occasionally patronised Brighton, but decorum then obtained, and
+Queen Victoria and Prince Albert not only disliked the memory of the last
+of the Georges, but could not find at the Pavilion the privacy they
+desired. The Queen therefore sold it to the then Commissioners of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+Brighton in 1850, for the sum of &pound;53,000, and never afterwards visited the
+town.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXVI</h2>
+
+<p>The Pavilion and the adjoining Castle Square, where one of the old coach
+booking-offices still survives as a railway receiving-office, are to most
+people the ultimate expressions of antiquity at Brighton; but there
+remains one landmark of what was &#8220;Brighthelmstone&#8221; in the ancient parish
+church of St. Nicholas, standing upon the topmost eyrie of the town, and
+overlooking from its crowded and now disused graveyard more than a square
+mile of crowded roofs below. It is probably the place referred to by a
+vivacious Frenchman who, a hundred and twenty years ago, summed up
+&#8220;Brigtemstone&#8221; as &#8220;a miserable village, commanded by a cemetery and
+surrounded by barren mountains.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>From here you can, with some trouble, catch just a glimpse of the Watery
+horizon through the grey haze that rises from countless chimney-pots, and
+never a breeze but blows laden with the scent of soot and smoke. Yet, for
+all the changed fortune that changeful Time has brought this hoary and
+grimy place, it has not been deprived of interesting mementoes. You may,
+with patience, discover the tombstone of Ph&oelig;be Hassall, a centenarian
+of pith and valour, who, in her youthful days, in male attire, joined the
+army of His Majesty King George the Second and warred with her regiment in
+many lands; and all around are the resting-places of many celebrities,
+who, denied a wider fame, have yet their place in local annals; but
+prominent, in place and in fame, is the tomb of that Captain Tettersell
+who (it must be owned, for a consideration) sailed away one October morn
+of 1651 across the Channel, carrying with him the hope of the clouded
+Royalists aboard his grimy craft.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img70.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">ST. NICHOLAS, THE OLD PARISH CHURCH OF BRIGHTHELMSTONE.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>His altar-tomb stands without the southern doorway of the church, and
+reads curiously to modern ears. That not one of all the many who have had
+occasion to print it has transcribed the quaintness of that epitaph aright
+seems a strange thing, but so it is:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="center">P.M.S.</p>
+
+<p>Captain NICHOLAS TETTERSELL, through whose Prudence ualour an Loyalty
+Charles the second King of England &amp; after he had escaped the sword of
+his merciless rebells and his fforses received a fatall ouerthrowe at
+Worcester Sept<sup>r</sup> 3<sup>d</sup> 1651, was ffaithfully preserued &amp; conueyed into
+ffrance. Departed this life the 26<sup>th</sup> day of Iuly 1674.</p>
+
+<p class="center">&mdash;&mdash;><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>&mdash;&mdash;><span class="spacer">&nbsp;</span>&mdash;&mdash;></p>
+
+<p class="poem">Within this monument doth lye,<br />
+Approued Ffaith, hono<sup>r</sup> and Loyalty.<br />
+In this Cold Clay he hath now tane up his statio<sup>n</sup>,<br />
+At once preserued y<sup>e</sup> Church, the Crowne and nation.<br />
+When Charles y<sup>e</sup> Greate was nothing but a breat<sup>h</sup><br />
+This ualiant soule stept betweene him &amp; death.<br />
+Usurpers threats nor tyrant rebells frowne<br />
+Could not afrright his duty to the Crowne;<br />
+Which glorious act of his Church &amp; state,<br />
+Eight princes in one day did Gratulate<br />
+Professing all to him in debt to bee<br />
+As all the world are to his memory<br />
+Since Earth Could not Reward his worth have give<sup>n</sup>,<br />
+Hee now receiues it from the King of heauen.</p></div>
+
+<p>The escape of Charles the Second, after many perilous adventures, belongs
+to the larger sphere of English history. Driven, after the disastrous
+result of Worcester Fight, to wander, a fugitive, through the land, he
+sought the coast from the extreme west of Dorsetshire, and only when he
+reached Sussex did he find it possible to embark and sail across the
+Channel to France. Hunted by relentless Roundheads, and sheltered on his
+way only by a few faithful adherents, who in their loyalty risked
+everything for him, he at length, with his small party, reached the
+village of Brighthelmstone and lodged at the inn then called the &#8220;George.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/img71.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">THE AQUARIUM, BEFORE DESTRUCTION OF THE CHAIN PIER.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>That evening, after much negotiation, Colonel Gunter, the King&#8217;s
+companion, arranged with Nicholas Tettersell, master of a small trading
+craft, to convey the King across to F&eacute;camp, to sail in the early hours
+of the following morning, October 14th. How they sailed, and the account
+of their wanderings, are fully set forth in the &#8220;narrative&#8221; of Colonel
+Gunter.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>XXXVII</h2>
+
+<p>A new era for Brighton and the Brighton Road opened in November, 1896,
+with the coming of the motor-car. Already the old period of the coaching
+inns had waned, and that of gigantic and palatial hotels, much more
+luxurious than anything ever imagined by the builders of the Pavilion, had
+dawned; and then, as though to fitly emphasize the transition, the old
+Chain Pier made a dramatic end.</p>
+
+<p>The Chain Pier just missed belonging to the Georgian era, for it was not
+begun until October, 1822, but, opened the following year, it had so long
+been a feature of Brighton&mdash;and so peculiar a feature&mdash;that it had come,
+with many, to typify the town, quite as much as the Pavilion itself. It
+was, moreover, additionally remarkable as being the first pleasure-pier
+built in England. It had long been failing and, condemned as dangerous,
+would soon have been demolished; but the storm of December 4th, 1896,
+spared that trouble. It was standing when day closed in, but when the next
+morning dawned, its place was vacant.</p>
+
+<p>Since then, those who have long known Brighton have never visited it
+without a sense of loss; and the Palace Pier, opposite the Aquarium, does
+not fill the void. It is a vulgarity for one thing, and for another
+typifies the Hebraic week-end, when the sons and daughters of Judah
+descend upon the town. Moreover, it is absolutely uncharacteristic, and
+has its counterparts in many other places.</p>
+
+<p>But Brighton itself is eternal. It suffers change, it grows continually;
+but while the sea remains and the air is clean and the sun shines, it, and
+the road to it, will be the most popular resorts in England.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>INDEX.</h2>
+
+<p class="index">
+Ainsworth, W. Harrison, <a href="#Page_209">209-222</a><br />
+<br />
+Albourne, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Ansty Cross, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Aram, Eugene, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Autopsy,&#8221; Steam Carriage, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Banks, Sir Edward, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+Banstead Downs, <a href="#Page_159">159-161</a><br />
+<br />
+Barrymore, The, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a><br />
+<br />
+Belmont, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Benhilton, <a href="#Page_156">156</a><br />
+<br />
+Bicycles, <a href="#Page_64">64-71</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74-79</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85-91</a><br />
+<br />
+Bird, Lieutenant Edward, murderer, <a href="#Page_169">169-172</a><br />
+<br />
+Bolney, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Boneshakers&#8221;, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Brighton, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255-272</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Railway opened, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Road Records tabulated, <a href="#Page_88">88-91</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Routes to, <a href="#Page_1">1-4</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Brixton, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97-100</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hill, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Broad Green, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Burgess Hill, <a href="#Page_223">223</a><br />
+<br />
+Burgh Heath, <a href="#Page_159">159-161</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Carriers, The, <a href="#Page_11">11-14</a><br />
+<br />
+Charles II., <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Charlwood, <a href="#Page_175">175</a><br />
+<br />
+Chipstead, <a href="#Page_135">135-138</a><br />
+<br />
+Clayton, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hill, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231-232</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tunnel, <a href="#Page_229">229-231</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Coaches:&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Accommodation, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Age, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1852-1862, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1875-1880, 1882-3, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Alert, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Coburg, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Comet, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1887-1899, 1900, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Coronet, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Criterion, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dart, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Defiance, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1880, &mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Duke of Beaufort, <a href="#Page_31">31</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">&#8220;Flying Machine,&#8221; coach, <a href="#Page_18">18-22</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Life-Preserver, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Magnet, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mails, The, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Old Times, 1866, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">1888, <a href="#Page_49">49-51</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Quicksilver, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Red Rover, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Regent, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sovereign, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Times, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Union, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Venture (A. G. Vanderbilt), <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Victoria, <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vigilant, 1900-05, &mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wonder, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Coaching, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11-14</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18-34</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37-49</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a><br />
+<br />
+Coaching Notabilities:&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Angel, B. J., <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Armytage, Col., <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Batchelor, Jas., <a href="#Page_14">14</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beaufort, Duke of, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beckett, Capt. H. L., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Blyth, Capt., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bradford, &#8220;Miller&#8221;, <a href="#Page_26">26</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Clark, George, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cotton, Sir St. Vincent, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fitzgerald, Mr., <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fownes, Edwin, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Freeman, Stewart, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gwynne, Sackville Frederick, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Harbour, Charles, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Haworth, Capt., <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jerningham, Hon. Fred., <a href="#Page_29">29</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lawrie, Capt., <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Londesborough, Earl of, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">McCalmont, Hugh, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Meek, George, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pole, E. S. Chandos, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pole-Gell, Mr., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sandys, Hon. H., <a href="#Page_49">49</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Selby, Jas., <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Stevenson, Henry, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Stracey-Clitherow, Col., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thynne, Lord H., <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tiffany, Mr., <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Vanderbilt, Alfred Gwynne, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wemyss, Randolph, <a href="#Page_49">49</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Wiltshire, Earl of, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Worcester, Marquis of, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a></span><br />
+<br /><a name="coaching" id="coaching"></a>
+Coaching Records, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br />
+<br />
+Cold Blow, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Colliers&#8217; Water, <a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+Colliers of Croydon, <a href="#Page_108">108</a><br />
+<br />
+Coulsdon, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<br />
+County Oak, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Covert, Family of, <a href="#Page_238">238-244</a><br />
+<br />
+Crawley, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182-195</a><br />
+<br />
+Crawley Downs, <a href="#Page_191">191-193</a><br />
+<br />
+Croydon, <a href="#Page_106">106-123</a><br />
+<br />
+Cuckfield, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202-209</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Place, <a href="#Page_209">209-222</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Cycling, <a href="#Page_64">64-71</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74-79</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85-91</a><br />
+<br />
+Cycling Notabilities:&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Edge, Selwyn Francis, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Holbein, M. A., <a href="#Page_74">74</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Mayall, John, Junior, <a href="#Page_66">66-69</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shorland, F. W., <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Smith, C. A., <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Turner, Rowley B., <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></span><br />
+<br /><a name="cycling" id="cycling"></a>
+Cycling Records, <a href="#Page_68">68-79</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85-91</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Dale, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+Dance, Sir Charles, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br />
+<br />
+Ditchling, <a href="#Page_224">224</a><br />
+<br /><a name="driving" id="driving"></a>
+Driving Records, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Earlswood Common, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Fauntleroy, Henry, <a href="#Page_196">196</a><br />
+<br />
+Foxley Hatch, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Frenches, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Friar&#8217;s Oak, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gatton, <a href="#Page_141">141-145</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br />
+<br />
+Gatwick, <a href="#Page_155">155</a><br />
+<br /><a name="george" id="george"></a>
+George IV., Prince Regent and King, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8-11</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191-194</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256-262</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hancock, Walter, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+Hand Cross, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198-201</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hill, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Hassall, Ph&oelig;be, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Hassocks, <a href="#Page_226">226</a><br />
+<br />
+Hayward&#8217;s Heath, <a href="#Page_205">205</a><br />
+<br />
+Hickstead, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Hobby-horses&#8221;, <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br />
+<br />
+Holmesdale, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br />
+<br />
+Hooley, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+Horley, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151-155</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ifield, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178-182</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Infant,&#8221; Steam Carriage, <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br />
+<br />
+Inns (mentioned at length):&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Black Swan, Pease Pottage, <a href="#Page_195">195</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Chequers, Horley, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cock, Sutton, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Friar&#8217;s Oak, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">George, Borough, <a href="#Page_12">12-14</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Crawley, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Golden Cross, Charing Cross, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Green Cross, Ansty Cross, <a href="#Page_222">222</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Greyhound, Croydon, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Sutton, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hatchett&#8217;s (<i>see</i> <a href="#white">White Horse Cellar</a>).</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Old King&#8217;s Head, Croydon, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Old Ship, Brighton, <a href="#Page_12">12</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Red Lion, Hand Cross, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Six Bells, Horley, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Surrey Oaks, Parkgate, <a href="#Page_179">179</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tabard, Borough (<i>see</i> <a href="#talbot">Talbot</a>).</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a name="talbot" id="talbot"></a>Talbot, Borough, <a href="#Page_12">12-14</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Talbot, Cuckfield, <a href="#Page_206">206</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tangier, Banstead Downs, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><a name="white" id="white"></a>White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jacob&#8217;s Post, <a href="#Page_224">224</a><br />
+<br />
+Johnson, Dr. Samuel, <a href="#Page_102">102-105</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Kennersley, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Kennington, <a href="#Page_92">92-96</a><br />
+<br />
+Kimberham Bridge, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Kingswood, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Lade, Sir John, <a href="#Page_267">267</a><br />
+<br />
+Lemon, Mark, <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br />
+<br />
+Little Hell, <a href="#Page_159">159</a><br />
+<br />
+Lowfield Heath, <a href="#Page_173">173-175</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Merstham, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138-141</a><br />
+<br />
+Milestones, <a href="#Page_126">126-130</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br />
+<br />
+Mitcham, <a href="#Page_155">155</a><br />
+<br />
+Mole, River, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173-175</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a><br />
+<br />
+Motor-cars, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57-61</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Motor-car Day, Nov. 14th, 1896, <a href="#Page_53">53-60</a><br />
+<br />
+Motor-omnibus, Accident to, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Newdigate, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Newtimber, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Norbury, <a href="#Page_195">195</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Old-time Travellers:&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Burton, Dr. John, <a href="#Page_16">16</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cobbett, William, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">George IV., Prince Regent and King (<i>see</i> <a href="#george">&#8220;George the Fourth.&#8221;</a>)</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Walpole, Horace, <a href="#Page_16">16-18</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Pangdean, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+Patcham, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251-255</a><br />
+<br />
+Pavilion, The, <a href="#Page_256">256-261</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+Pease Pottage, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a><br />
+<br /><a name="pedestrian" id="pedestrian"></a>
+Pedestrian Records, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79-91</a><br />
+<br />
+Pilgrims&#8217; Way, The, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br />
+<br />
+Povey Cross, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a><br />
+<br />
+Preston, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br />
+<br />
+Prize-fighting, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248-250</a><br />
+<br />
+Pugilistic Notabilities:&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cribb, Tom, <a href="#Page_190">190</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fewterel, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hickman, &#8220;The Gas-Light Man&#8221;, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jackson, &#8220;Gentleman&#8221;, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Martin, &#8220;Master of the Rolls&#8221;, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Randall, Jack, &#8220;the Nonpareil&#8221;, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Sayers, Tom, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Purley, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121-125</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Pyecombe, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Railway to Brighton opened, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Records&#8221;, <a href="#Page_61">61-91</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(<i>See</i> severally, <a href="#coaching">Coaching</a>, <a href="#cycling">Cycling</a>, <a href="#driving">Driving</a>,
+<a href="#pedestrian">Pedestrian</a>, and <a href="#riding">Riding</a>).</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tabulated, <a href="#Page_88">88-91</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Redhill, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Reigate, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164-172</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hill, <a href="#Page_162">162-164</a></span><br />
+<br /><a name="riding" id="riding"></a>
+Riding Records, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+Roman Roads, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+&#8220;Rookwood&#8221;, <a href="#Page_209">209-222</a><br />
+<br />
+Routes to Brighton, <a href="#Page_1">1-4</a><br />
+<br />
+Rowlandson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+Russell of Killowen, Baron, <a href="#Page_161">161</a><br />
+<br />
+Russell (<i>or</i> Russel), Dr. Richard, <a href="#Page_262">262</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+St. John&#8217;s Common, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Leonard&#8217;s Forest, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+Salfords, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Sayers Common, <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br />
+<br />
+Sidlow Bridge, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Slaugham, <a href="#Page_238">238-246</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Place, <a href="#Page_240">240-242</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Slough Green, <a href="#Page_93">93</a><br />
+<br />
+Smitham Bottom, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131-133</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+Southwark, <a href="#Page_12">12-14</a><br />
+<br />
+Staplefield Common, <a href="#Page_200">200</a><br />
+<br />
+Steam Carriages, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Stoat&#8217;s Nest, <a href="#Page_132">132</a><br />
+<br />
+Stock Exchange Walk, <a href="#Page_80">80-82</a><br />
+<br />
+Stonepound, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a><br />
+<br />
+Streatham, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103-105</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Surrey Iron Railway, The, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br />
+<br />
+Sussex Roads, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Sutton, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156-159</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Tadworth Court, <a href="#Page_161">161</a><br />
+<br />
+Tettersell, Captain, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br />
+<br />
+Thackeray, W. M., <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br />
+<br />
+Thornton Heath, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105-108</a><br />
+<br />
+Thrale Place, <a href="#Page_103">103-105</a><br />
+<br />
+Thrales, The, <a href="#Page_103">103-105</a><br />
+<br />
+Thunderfield Castle, <a href="#Page_149">149-152</a><br />
+<br />
+Tilgate Forest Row, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a><br />
+<br />
+Tooke, John Horne, <a href="#Page_124">124</a><br />
+<br />
+Turnpike Gates, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226-228</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Velocipedes, <a href="#Page_65">65-69</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Walking Records (<i>see</i> <a href="#pedestrian">Pedestrian Records</a>).<br />
+<br />
+Westminster Bridge, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br />
+<br />
+Whiteman&#8217;s Green, <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br />
+<br />
+Whitgift, Archbishop, <a href="#Page_109">109-114</a><br />
+<br />
+Wilderness Bottom, <a href="#Page_161">161</a><br />
+<br />
+Withdean, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br />
+<br />
+Wivelsfield, <a href="#Page_224">224</a><br />
+<br />
+Woodhatch, <a href="#Page_93">93</a><br />
+<br />
+Wray Park, <a href="#Page_93">93</a><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><strong>Footnotes:</strong></p>
+
+<p><a name='f_1' id='f_1' href='#fna_1'>[1]</a> He was a baker; hence the nickname.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_2' id='f_2' href='#fna_2'>[2]</a> Henry Barry, Earl of Barrymore, in the peerage of Ireland.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_3' id='f_3' href='#fna_3'>[3]</a> <i>Hiatus</i> in the Journals, arranged by the editor for benefit of the
+Young Person!</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_4' id='f_4' href='#fna_4'>[4]</a> Kirkpatrick Macmillan, in 1839-40, invented a dwarf, rear-driving
+machine of the &#8220;safety&#8221; type, and was fined at Glasgow for &#8220;furiously
+riding.&#8221; He made and sold several, but they attained nothing more than
+local and temporary success.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_5' id='f_5' href='#fna_5'>[5]</a></p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8220;There&#8217;s nothing brings you round<br />
+Like the trumpet&#8217;s martial sound.&#8221;&mdash;<span class="smcap">W. S. Gilbert.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">&#8220;The Pirates of Penzance.&#8221;</span></p>
+
+<p><a name='f_6' id='f_6' href='#fna_6'>[6]</a> In 1829 there were three additional gates: one at Crawley, another at
+Hand Cross, before you came to the &#8220;Red Lion,&#8221; and one more at Slough
+Green. Meanwhile the Horley gate on this route had disappeared. At a later
+period another gate was added, at Merstham, just past the &#8220;Feathers.&#8221; On
+the other routes there were, of course, yet more gates&mdash;e.g., those of
+Sutton, Reigate, Wray Park, Woodhatch, Dale, and many more.</p>
+
+<p>Salfords gate was the last on the main Brighton Road. It remained until
+midnight, October 31st. 1881, when the Reigate Turnpike Trust expired,
+after an existence of 126 years. Not until then did this most famous
+highway become free and open throughout its whole distance.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_7' id='f_7' href='#fna_7'>[7]</a> Preface to &#8220;Pr&aelig;terita,&#8221; dated May 10th, 1885.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_8' id='f_8' href='#fna_8'>[8]</a> The name derives from a farm so called, marked on a map of 1716
+&#8220;Stotes Ness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_9' id='f_9' href='#fna_9'>[9]</a> &#8220;Sir Edward Banks, Knight, of Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, and Adelphi
+Terrace, Strand, Middlesex, whose remains are deposited in the family
+vault in this churchyard. Blessed by Divine Providence with an honest
+heart, a clear head, and an extraordinary degree of perseverance, he rose
+superior to all difficulties, and was the founder of his own fortune; and
+although of self-cultivated talent, he in early life became contractor for
+public works, and was actively and successfully engaged during forty years
+in the execution of some of the most useful, extensive, and splendid works
+of his time; amongst which may be mentioned the Waterloo, Southwark,
+London, and Staines Bridges over the Thames, the Naval Works at Sheerness
+Dockyard, and the new channels for the rivers Ouse, Nene, and Witham in
+Norfolk and Lincolnshire. He was eminently distinguished for the
+simplicity of his manners and the benevolence of his heart; respected for
+his inflexible integrity and his pure and unaffected piety; in all the
+relations of his life he was candid, diligent, and humane; just in
+purpose, firm in execution; his liberality and indulgence to his numerous
+coadjutors were alone equalled by his generosity and charity displayed in
+the disposal of his honourably-acquired wealth. He departed this life at
+Tilgate, Sussex ... on the 5th day of July, 1835, in the sixty-sixth year
+of his age.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_10' id='f_10' href='#fna_10'>[10]</a> Matthew Buckle, Admiral of the Blue; born 1716, died 1784.</p>
+
+<p><a name='f_11' id='f_11' href='#fna_11'>[11]</a> He really drove the other way; from Carlton House to Brighton.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,8508 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Brighton Road
+       The Classic Highway to the South
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2012 [EBook #38611]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIGHTON ROAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
+Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+
+
+
+HISTORIES OF THE ROADS
+
+BY CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South.
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York.
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh.
+
+THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
+
+THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway.
+
+THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester.
+
+THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow.
+
+THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham.
+
+THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead.
+
+THE HASTINGS ROAD: And The "Happy Springs of Tunbridge."
+
+THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: London to Gloucester.
+
+THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: Gloucester to Milford
+Haven.
+
+THE NORWICH ROAD: An East Anglian Highway.
+
+THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD.
+
+THE EXETER ROAD: The West of England Highway.
+
+THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD.
+
+THE CAMBRIDGE, KING'S LYNX AND ELY ROAD.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE THE FOURTH. _From the painting by Sir Thomas
+Lawrence, R.A._]
+
+
+
+
+  _The_
+  BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+  The Classic Highway to the South
+
+  _By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
+
+  _Illustrated by the Author, and from old-time
+  Prints and Pictures_
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  LONDON:
+  CECIL PALMER
+  OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C. 1
+
+
+
+
+  _First Published_ - 1892
+  _Second Edition_ - 1906
+  _Third and Revised Edition_ - 1922
+
+  Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & CO., LTD.,
+  53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
+  and 187, Fleet Street, London.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_Many years ago it occurred to this writer that it would be an interesting
+thing to write and illustrate a book on the Road to Brighton. The genesis
+of that thought has been forgotten, but the book was written and
+published, and has long been out of print. And there might have been the
+end of it, but that (from no preconceived plan) there has since been added
+a long series of books on others of our great highways, rendering
+imperative re-issues of the parent volume._
+
+_Two considerations have made that undertaking a matter of considerable
+difficulty, either of them sufficiently weighty. The first was that the
+original book was written at a time when the author had not arrived at a
+settled method; the second is found in the fact of the BRIGHTON ROAD being
+not only the best known of highways, but also the one most susceptible to
+change._
+
+_When it is remembered that motor-cars have come upon the roads since
+then, that innumerable sporting "records" in cycling, walking, and other
+forms of progression have since been made, and that in many other ways the
+road is different, it was seen that not merely a re-issue of the book, but
+a book almost entirely re-written and re-illustrated was required. This,
+then, is what was provided in a second edition, published in 1906. And now
+another, the third, is issued, bringing the story of this highway up to
+date._
+
+CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+_March, 1922._
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO BRIGHTON
+
+
+                                              MILES
+
+  Westminster Bridge (Surrey side) to--
+
+  St. Mark's Church, Kennington               1-1/2
+
+  Brixton Church                              3
+
+  Streatham                                   5-1/2
+
+  Norbury                                     6-3/4
+
+  Thornton Heath                              8
+
+  Croydon (Whitgift's Hospital)               9-1/2
+
+  Purley Corner                               12
+
+  Smitham Bottom                              13-1/2
+
+  Coulsdon Railway Station                    14-1/4
+
+  Merstham                                    17-3/4
+
+  Redhill (Market Hall)                       20-1/2
+
+  Horley ("Chequers")                         24
+
+  Povey Cross                                 25-3/4
+
+  Kimberham Bridge (Cross River Mole)         26
+
+  Lowfield Heath                              27
+
+  Crawley                                     29
+
+  Pease Pottage                               31-1/4
+
+  Hand Cross                                  33-1/2
+
+  Staplefield Common                          34-3/4
+
+  Slough Green                                36-1/4
+
+  Whiteman's Green                            37-1/4
+
+  Cuckfield                                   37-1/2
+
+  Ansty Cross                                 38
+
+  Bridge Farm (Cross River Adur)              40-1/4
+
+  St. John's Common                           40-3/4
+
+  "Friar's Oak" Inn                           42-3/4
+
+  Stonepound                                  43-1/2
+
+  Clayton                                     44-1/2
+
+  Pyecombe                                    45-1/2
+
+  Patcham                                     48
+
+  Withdean                                    48-3/4
+
+  Preston                                     49-3/4
+
+  Brighton (Aquarium)                         51-1/2
+
+
+THE SUTTON AND REIGATE ROUTE
+
+  St. Mark's, Kennington                       1-1/2
+
+  Tooting Broadway                             6
+
+  Mitcham                                      8-1/4
+
+  Sutton ("Greyhound")                        11
+
+  Tadworth                                    16
+
+  Lower Kingswood                             17
+
+  Reigate Hill                                19-1/4
+
+  Reigate (Town Hall)                         20-1/2
+
+  Woodhatch ("Old Angel")                     21-1/2
+
+  Povey Cross                                 26
+
+  Brighton                                    51-5/8
+
+
+THE BOLNEY AND HICKSTEAD ROUTE
+
+  Hand Cross                                  33-1/2
+
+  Bolney                                      39
+
+  Hickstead                                   40-1/2
+
+  Savers Common                               42
+
+  Newtimber                                   44-1/2
+
+  Pyecombe                                    45
+
+  Brighton                                    50-1/2
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                             PAGE
+
+  George the Fourth                                  Frontispiece
+
+  Sketch-map showing Principal Routes to Brighton               4
+
+  Stage Waggon, 1808                                           13
+
+  The "Talbot" Inn Yard, Borough, about 1815                   17
+
+  Me and My Wife and Daughter                                  19
+
+  The "Duke of Beaufort" Coach starting from the "Bull
+  and Mouth" Office, Piccadilly Circus, 1826                   31
+
+  The "Age," 1829, starting from Castle Square, Brighton       35
+
+  Sir Charles Dance's Steam-carriage leaving London for
+  Brighton, 1833                                               39
+
+  The Brighton Day Mails crossing Hookwood Common, 1838        43
+
+  The "Age," 1852, crossing Ham Common                         47
+
+  The "Old Times," 1888                                        51
+
+  The "Comet," 1890                                            55
+
+  John Mayall, Junior, 1869                                    70
+
+  The Stock Exchange Walk: E. F. Broad at Horley               83
+
+  Miss M. Foster, paced by Motor Cycle, passing Coulsdon       86
+
+  Kennington Gate: Derby Day, 1839                             95
+
+  Streatham Common                                            101
+
+  Streatham                                                   107
+
+  The Dining Hall, Whitgift Hospital                          111
+
+  The Chapel, Hospital of the Holy Trinity                    113
+
+  Croydon Town Hall                                           120
+
+  Chipstead Church                                            135
+
+  Merstham                                                    139
+
+  Gatton Hall and "Town Hall"                                 144
+
+  The Switchback Road, Earlswood Common                       148
+
+  Thunderfield Castle                                         150
+
+  The "Chequers," Horley                                      151
+
+  The "Six Bells," Horley                                     153
+
+  The "Cock," Sutton, 1789                                    157
+
+  Kingswood Warren                                            162
+
+  The Suspension Bridge, Reigate Hill                         163
+
+  The Tunnel, Reigate                                         167
+
+  Tablet, Batswing Cottages                                   172
+
+  The Floods at Horley                                        174
+
+  Charlwood                                                   176
+
+  A Corner in Newdigate Church                                177
+
+  On the Road to Newdigate                                    179
+
+  Ifield Mill Pond                                            180
+
+  Crawley: Looking South                                      183
+
+  Crawley, 1789                                               185
+
+  An Old Cottage at Crawley                                   188
+
+  The "George," Crawley                                       189
+
+  Sculptured Emblem of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Church       191
+
+  Pease Pottage                                               197
+
+  The "Red Lion," Hand Cross                                  201
+
+  Cuckfield, 1789                                             203
+
+  The Road out of Cuckfield                                   207
+
+  Cuckfield Place                                             210
+
+  The Clock-Tower and Haunted Avenue, Cuckfield Place         211
+
+  Harrison Ainsworth                                          213
+
+  Old Sussex Fireback, Ridden's Farm                          223
+
+  Jacob's Post                                                224
+
+  Clayton Tunnel                                              233
+
+  Clayton Church and the South Downs                          235
+
+  The Ruins of Slaugham Place                                 239
+
+  The Entrance: Ruins of Slaugham Place                       241
+
+  Bolney                                                      243
+
+  From a Brass at Slaugham                                    244
+
+  Hickstead Place                                             245
+
+  Newtimber Place                                             247
+
+  Pyecombe: Junction of the Roads                             249
+
+  Patcham                                                     251
+
+  Old Dovecot, Patcham                                        254
+
+  Preston Viaduct: Entrance to Brighton                       256
+
+  The Pavilion                                                259
+
+  The Cliffs, Brighthelmstone, 1789                           263
+
+  Dr. Richard Russell                                         265
+
+  St. Nicholas, the old Parish Church of Brighthelmstone      269
+
+  The Aquarium, before destruction of the Chain Pier          271
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIGHTON ROAD
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The road to Brighton--the main route, pre-eminently _the_ road--is
+measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium. It
+goes by Croydon, Redhill, Horley, Crawley, and Cuckfield, and is (or is
+supposed to be) 51-1/2 miles in length. Of this prime route--the classic
+way--there are several longer or shorter variations, of which the way
+through Clapham, Mitcham, Sutton, and Reigate, to Povey Cross is the
+chief. The modern "record" route is the first of these two, so far as Hand
+Cross, where it branches off and, instead of going through Cuckfield,
+proceeds to Brighton by way of Hickstead and Bolney, avoiding Clayton Hill
+and rejoining the initial route at Pyecombe.
+
+[Sidenote: VARIOUS ROUTES]
+
+The oldest road to Brighton is now but little used. It is not to be
+indicated in few words, but may be taken as the line of road from London
+Bridge, along the Kennington Road, to Brixton, Croydon, Godstone Green,
+Tilburstow Hill, Blindley Heath, East Grinstead, Maresfield, Uckfield, and
+Lewes; some fifty-nine miles. This is without doubt the most picturesque
+route. A circuitous way, travelled by some coaches was by Ewell,
+Leatherhead, Dorking, Horsham, and Mockbridge (doubtless, bearing in mind
+the ancient mires of Sussex, originally "Muckbridge"), and was 57-1/2
+miles in length. An extension of this route lay from Horsham through
+Steyning, bringing up the total mileage to sixty-one miles three furlongs.
+
+This multiplicity of ways meant that, in the variety of winding lanes
+which led to the Sussex coast, long before the fisher village of
+Brighthelmstone became that fashionable resort, Brighton, there were
+places on the way quite as important to the old waggoners and carriers as
+anything at the end of the journey. They set out the direction, and roads,
+when they began to be improved, were often merely the old routes widened,
+straightened, and metalled. They were kept very largely to the old lines,
+and it was not until quite late in the history of Brighton that the
+present "record" route in its entirety existed at all.
+
+Among the many isolated roads made or improved, which did not in the
+beginning contemplate getting to Brighton at all, the pride of place
+certainly belongs to the ten miles between Reigate and Crawley, originally
+made as a causeway for horsemen, and guarded by posts, so that wheeled
+traffic could not pass. This was constructed under the Act 8th William
+III., 1696, and was the first new road made in Surrey since the time of
+the Romans.
+
+It remained as a causeway until 1755, when it was widened and thrown open
+to all traffic, on paying toll. It was not only the first road to be made,
+but the last to maintain toll-gates on the way to Brighton, the Reigate
+Turnpike Trust expiring on the midnight of October 31st, 1881, from which
+time the Brighton Road became free throughout.
+
+Meanwhile, the road from London to Croydon was repaired in 1718; and at
+the same time the road from London to Sutton was declared to be "dangerous
+to all persons, horses, and other cattle," and almost impassable during
+five months of the year, and was therefore repaired, and toll-gates set up
+along it.
+
+Between 1730 and 1740 Westminster Bridge was building, and the roads in
+South London, including the Westminster Bridge Road and the Kennington
+Road, were being made. In 1755 the road (about ten miles) across the
+heaths and downs from Sutton to Reigate, was authorised, and in 1770 the
+Act was passed for widening and repairing the lanes from Povey Cross to
+County Oak and Brighthelmstone, by Cuckfield. By this time, it will be
+seen, Brighton had begun to be the goal of these improvements.
+
+The New Chapel and Copthorne road, on the East Grinstead route, was
+constructed under the Act of 1770, the route across St. John's Common and
+Burgess Hill remodelled in 1780, and the road from South Croydon to
+Smitham Bottom, Merstham, and Reigate was engineered out of the narrow
+lanes formerly existing on that line in 1807-8, being opened, "at present
+toll-free," June 4th. 1808.
+
+In 1813 the Bolney and Hickstead road, between Hand Cross and Pyecombe,
+was opened, and in 1816 the slip-road, avoiding Reigate, through Redhill,
+to Povey Cross. Finally, sixty yards were saved on the Reigate route by
+the cutting of the tunnel under Reigate Castle, in 1823. In this way the
+Brighton road, on its several branches, grew to be what it is now.
+
+The Brighton Road, it has already been said, is measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, which is the proper starting-point for
+record-makers and breakers; but it has as many beginnings as Homer had
+birthplaces. Modern coaches and motor-car services set out from the
+barrack-like hotels of Northumberland Avenue, or other central points, and
+the old carriers came to and went from the Borough High Street; but the
+Corinthian starting-point in the brave old days of the Regency and of
+George the Fourth was the "White Horse Cellar"--Hatchett's "White Horse
+Cellar"--in Piccadilly. There, any day throughout the year, the knowing
+ones were gathered--with those green goslings who wished to be thought
+knowing--exchanging the latest scandal and sporting gossip of the road,
+and rooking and being rooked; the high-coloured, full-blooded ancestors of
+the present generation, which looks upon them as a quite different order
+of beings, and can scarce believe in the reality of those full habits,
+those port-wine countenances, those florid garments that were
+characteristic of the age.
+
+[Illustration: SKETCH-MAP SHOWING PRINCIPAL ROUTES TO BRIGHTON.]
+
+No one now starts from the "White Horse Cellar," for the excellent reason
+that it does not now exist. The original "Cellar" was a queer place.
+Figure to yourself a basement room, with sanded floor, and an odour like
+that of a wine-vault, crowded with Regency bucks drinking or discussing
+huge beef-steaks.
+
+It was situated on the south side of Piccadilly, where the Hotel Ritz now
+stands, and is first mentioned in 1720, when it was given its name by
+Williams, the landlord, in compliment to the House of Hanover, the
+newly-established Royal House of Great Britain, whose cognizance was a
+white horse. Abraham Hatchett first made the Cellar famous, both as a
+boozing-ken and a coach-office, and removed it to the opposite side of the
+street, where, as "Hatchett's Hotel and White Horse Cellar." it remained
+until 1884, when the present "Albemarle" arose on its site, with a "White
+Horse" restaurant in the basement.
+
+[Sidenote: SPORTSMEN]
+
+What Piccadilly and the neighbourhood of the "White Horse Cellar" were
+like in the times of Tom and Jerry, we may easily discover from the
+contemporary pages of "Real Life in London," written by one "Bob Tallyho,"
+recounting the adventures of himself and "Tom Dashall." A prize-fight was
+to be held on Copthorne Common between Jack Randall, "the
+Nonpareil"--called in the pronunciation of that time the "Nunparell"--and
+Martin, endeared to "the Fancy" as the "Master of the Rolls."[1]
+Naturally, the roads were thronged, and "Piccadilly was all in
+motion--coaches, carts, gigs, tilburies, whiskies, buggies, dogcarts,
+sociables, dennets, curricles, and sulkies were passing in rapid
+succession, intermingled with tax-carts and waggons decorated with laurel,
+conveying company of the most varied description. Here was to be seen the
+dashing _Corinthian_ tickling up his _tits_, and his _bang-up set-out_ of
+_blood and bone_, giving the go-by to a _heavy drag_ laden with eight
+brawny, bull-faced blades, smoking their way down behind a skeleton of a
+horse, to whom, in all probability, a good feed of corn would have been a
+luxury; _pattering_ among themselves, occasionally _chaffing_ the more
+elevated drivers by whom they were surrounded, and pushing forward their
+nags with all the ardour of a British merchant intent upon disposing of a
+valuable cargo of foreign goods on 'Change. There was a waggon full of
+_all sorts_ upon the _lark_, succeeded by a _donkey-cart_ with four
+insides: but _Neddy_, not liking his burthen, stopped short in the way of
+a dandy, whose horse's head, coming plump up to the back of the crazy
+vehicle at the moment of its stoppage, threw the rider into the arms of a
+dustman, who, hugging his _customer_ with the determined grasp of a bear,
+swore, d--n his eyes, he had saved his life, and he expected he would
+stand something handsome for the Gemmen all round, for if he had not
+pitched into their cart he would certainly have broke his neck; which
+being complied with, though reluctantly, he regained his saddle, and
+proceeded a little more cautiously along the remainder of the road, while
+groups of pedestrians of all ranks and appearances lined each side."
+
+On their way they pass Hyde Park Corner, where they encounter one of a
+notorious trio of brothers, friends of the Prince Regent and companions of
+his in every sort of excess--the Barrymores, to wit, named severally
+Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate, the last of this unholy trinity so
+called because of his chronic limping; the two others' titles, taken with
+the characters of their bearers, are self-explanatory.
+
+Dashall points his lordship out to his companion, who is new to London
+life, and requires such explanations.
+
+[Sidenote: LORD CRIPPLEGATE]
+
+"The driver of that tilbury," says he, "is the celebrated Lord
+Cripplegate,[2] with his usual equipage; his blue cloak with a scarlet
+lining hanging loosely over the vehicle gives an air of importance to his
+appearance, and he is always attended by that boy, who has been
+denominated his Cupid: he is a nobleman by birth, a gentleman by courtesy
+(oh, witty Dashall!), and a gamester by profession. He exhausted a large
+estate upon _odd and even_, _seven's the main_, etc., till, having lost
+sight of the _main chance_, he found it necessary to curtail his
+establishment and enliven his prospects by exchanging a first floor for a
+second, without an opportunity of ascertaining whether or not these
+alterations were best suited to his high notions or exalted taste; from
+which, in a short time, he was induced, either by inclination or
+necessity, to take a small lodging in an obscure street, and to sport a
+gig and one horse, instead of a curricle and pair, though in former times
+he used to drive four-in-hand, and was acknowledged to be an excellent
+whip. He still, however, possessed money enough to collect together a
+large quantity of halfpence, which in his hours of relaxation he managed
+to turn to good account by the following stratagem:--He distributed his
+halfpence on the floor of his little parlour in straight lines, and
+ascertained how many it would require to cover it. Having thus prepared
+himself, he invited some wealthy spendthrifts (with whom he still had the
+power of associating) to sup with him, and he welcomed them to his
+habitation with much cordiality. The glass circulated freely, and each
+recounted his gaming or amorous adventures till a late hour, when, the
+effects of the bottle becoming visible, he proposed, as a momentary
+suggestion, to name how many halfpence, laid side by side, would carpet
+the floor, and offered to lay a large wager that he would guess the
+nearest.
+
+"'Done! done!' was echoed round the room. Every one made a deposit of
+L100, and every one made a guess, equally certain of success; and his
+lordship declaring he had a large stock of halfpence by him, though
+perhaps not enough, the experiment was to be tried immediately. 'Twas an
+excellent hit!
+
+"The room was cleared; to it they went; the halfpence were arranged rank
+and file in military order, when it appeared that his lordship had
+certainly guessed (as well he might) nearest to the number. The
+consequence was an immediate alteration of his lordship's residence and
+appearance: he got one step in the world by it. He gave up his second-hand
+gig for one warranted new; and a change in his vehicle may pretty
+generally be considered as the barometer of his pocket."
+
+And so, with these piquant biographical remarks, they betook themselves
+along the road in the early morning, passing on their way many curious
+itinerants, whose trades have changed and decayed, and are now become
+nothing but a dim and misty memory; as, for instance, the sellers of warm
+"salop," the forerunners of the early coffee-stalls of our own day.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never,
+while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be
+dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either
+end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a _Via Regia_.
+It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton,
+and until the last--for close upon forty-eight years--it retained his
+affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when
+we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I
+have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the
+courtly Lawrence, in this book.
+
+The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his
+upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can
+mould the world to their own form.
+
+[Sidenote: THE PRINCE]
+
+The character of George the Fourth has been the theme of writers upon
+history and sociology, of essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without
+number, and most of them have pictured him in very dark colours indeed.
+But Horace Walpole, perhaps the clearest-headed of this company, shows in
+his "Last Journals" that from his boyhood the Prince was governed in the
+stupidest way--in a manner, indeed, but too well fitted to spoil a spirit
+so high and so impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his.
+
+He proves what we may abundantly learn from other sources, that the
+narrow-minded and obstinate George the Third, petty and parochial in
+public and in private, was jealous of his son's superior parts, and
+endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of seclusion and
+inadequate training. It was impossible for such a father to appreciate
+either the qualities or the defects of such a son. "The uncommunicative
+selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him to domestic
+virtues," says Walpole, and adds, "Nothing could equal the King's
+attention to seclude his son and protract his nonage. It went so absurdly
+far that he was made to wear a shirt with a frilled collar like that of
+babies. He one day took hold of his collar and said to a domestic, 'See
+how I am treated!'"
+
+The Duke of Montagu, too, was charged with the education of the Prince,
+and "he was utterly incapable of giving him any kind of instruction....
+The Prince was so good-natured, but so uninformed, that he often said, 'I
+wish anybody would tell me what I ought to do; nobody gives me any
+instruction for my conduct.'" The absolute poverty of the instruction
+afforded him, the false and narrow ways of the royal household, and the
+evil example and low companionship of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland,
+did much to spoil the Prince.
+
+To quote Walpole again: "It made men smile to find that in the palace of
+piety and pride his Royal Highness had learnt nothing but the dialect of
+footmen and grooms.... He drunk hard, swore, and passed every night in[3]
+...; such were the fruits of his being locked up in the palace of piety."
+
+He proved, too, an intractable and undutiful son; but that was the result
+to be expected, and we cannot join Thackeray in his sentimental snivel
+over George the Third.
+
+He was a faithless husband, but his wife was impossible, and even the mob
+who supported her quailed when the Marquis of Anglesey, baited in front of
+his house and compelled to drink her health, did so with the bitter rider,
+"And may all your wives be like her!"
+
+All high-spirited young England flocked to the side of the Prince of
+Wales. He was the Grand Master of Corinthianism and Tom-and-Jerryism. It
+was he who peopled these roads with a numerous and brilliant concourse of
+whirling travellers, where before had been only infrequent plodders amidst
+the Sussex sloughs. To his princely presence, radiant by the Old Steyne,
+hasted all manner of people; prince and prizefighter, statesman and
+nobleman; beauties noble and ignoble, and all who _lived_ their lives.
+There he made incautious guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy
+he called "Diabolino," and then exposed them in embarrassing situations;
+and there--let us remember it--he entertained, and was the beneficent
+patron of, the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The
+_Zeitgeist_ (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was personified in, and
+radiated from him. He was the First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in
+the perspective of a hundred years or so, something more: the type and
+exemplar of an age.
+
+He should have been endowed with perennial youth, but even his splendid
+vitality faded at last, and he grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a "fat
+Adonis of fifty," and was flung into prison for it; and prison is a
+fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see a misdemeanour in
+those misfortunes. No one who could help it would be fat, or fifty.
+Besides, to accuse one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon
+all: it is an accompaniment of royalty.
+
+Thackeray denounced his wig; but there is a prejudice in favour of flowing
+locks, and the King gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for
+being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig; and it seems a curious code of
+morality that would have it so; for although we may not all lose our hair
+nor grow fat, we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and pass
+the grand climacteric.
+
+There has been too much abuse of the Regency times. Where modern
+moralists, folded within their little sheep-walks from observation of the
+real world, mistake is in comparing those times with these, to the
+disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of life in the round, and
+seeing it only in the flat, cannot predicate what exists on the other
+side. To them there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the
+poet, _are_ what they seem, and nothing else.
+
+They lash the manners of the Regency, and think they are dealing out
+punishment to a bygone state of things; but human nature is the same in
+all centuries. The fact is so obvious that one is ashamed to state it. The
+Regency was a terrible time for gambling; but Tranby Croft had a similar
+repute when Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales. Bridge is a fine game,
+and what, think you, supports the evening newspapers? The news? Certainly:
+the Betting News. Cock-fighting was a brutal sport, and is now illegal,
+but is it dead? Oh dear, no. Virtue was not general in the picturesque
+times of George the Fourth. Is it now? Study the Cause Lists of the
+Divorce Courts. Worse offences are still punished by law, but are later
+condoned or explained by Society as an eccentricity. Society a hundred
+years ago did not plumb such depths.
+
+In short, behind the surface of things, the Regency riot not only exists,
+but is outdone, and Tom and Jerry, could they return, would find
+themselves very dull dogs indeed. It is all the doing of the middle
+classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the
+middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at
+Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed;
+but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper
+and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is--or they
+are--more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a
+power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other
+classes above and below.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+[Sidenote: SOCIETY: THEN AND NOW]
+
+The coaching and waggoning history of the road to Brighthelmstone (as it
+then was called) emerges dimly out of the formless ooze of tradition in
+1681. In De Laune's "Present State of Great Britain," published in that
+year, in the course of a list of carriers, coaches, and stage-waggons in
+and out of London, we find Thomas Blewman, carrier, coming from
+"Bredhempstone" to the "Queen's Head," Southwark, on Wednesdays, and,
+setting forth again on Thursdays, reaching Shoreham the same day: which
+was remarkably good travelling for a carrier's waggon in the seventeenth
+century. Here, then, we have the Father Adam, the great original, so far
+as records can tell us, of all the after charioteers of the Brighton Road.
+It is not until 1732, that, from the pages of "New Remarks on London,"
+published by the Company of Parish Clerks, we hear anything further. At
+that date a coach set out on Thursdays from the "Talbot," in the Borough
+High Street, and a van on Tuesdays from the "Talbot" and the "George." In
+the summer of 1745 the "Flying Machine" left the "Old Ship,"
+Brighthelmstone at 5.30 a.m., and reached Southwark in the evening.
+
+But the first extended and authoritative notice is found in 1746, when the
+widow of the Lewes carrier advertised in _The Lewes Journal_ of December
+8th that she was continuing the business:
+
+    THOMAS SMITH, the OLD LEWES CARRIER, being dead, THE BUSINESS IS NOW
+    CONTINUED BY HIS WIDOW, MARY SMITH, who gets into the "George Inn," in
+    the Borough, Southwark, EVERY WEDNESDAY in the afternoon, and sets out
+    for Lewes EVERY THURSDAY morning by eight o'clock, and brings Goods
+    and Passengers to Lewes, Fletching, Chayley, Newick and all places
+    adjacent at reasonable rates.
+
+        Performed (_if God permit_) by
+          MARY SMITH.
+
+We may perceive by these early records that the real original way down to
+the Sussex coast was by the Croydon, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes
+route, and that its outlet must have been Newhaven, which, despite its
+name, is so very ancient a place, and was a port and harbour when
+Brighthelmstone was but a fisher-village.
+
+[Illustration: STAGE WAGGON, 1808. _From a contemporary drawing._]
+
+That is the only glimpse we get of the widow Smith and her waggon; but the
+"George Inn, in the Borough," that she "got into," is still in the
+Borough High Street. It is a fine and flourishing remnant of an ancient
+galleried hostelry of the time of Chaucer, and it is characteristic of the
+continuity of English social, as well as political history that, although
+waggons and coaches no longer come to or set out from the "George," its
+spacious yard is now a railway receiving-office for goods, where the
+railway vans, those descendants of the stage-waggon, thunderously come and
+go all day.
+
+It will be observed that the traffic in those days went to and from
+Southwark, which was then the great business centre for the carriers. Not
+yet was the Brighton road measured from Westminster Bridge, for the
+adequate reason that there was no bridge at Westminster until 1749: only
+the ferry from the Horseferry Road to Lambeth.
+
+Widow Smith's waggon halted at Lewes, and it is not until ten years later
+than the date of her advertisement that we hear of the Brighthelmstone
+conveyance. The first was that announced by the pioneer, James Batchelor,
+in _The Sussex Weekly Advertiser_, May 12th, 1756:
+
+    NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the LEWES ONE DAY STAGE COACH or CHAISE
+    sets out from the Talbot Inn, in the Borough, on Saturday next, the
+    19th instant.
+
+    When likewise the Brighthelmstone Stage begins.
+
+        Performed (_if God permit_) by
+          JAMES BATCHELOR.
+
+The "Talbot" inn, which stood on the site of the ancient "Tabard," of
+Chaucerian renown, disappeared from the Borough High Street in 1870. What
+its picturesque yard was like in 1815, with the waggons of the Sussex
+carriers, let the illustration tell.
+
+Let us halt awhile, to admire the courage of those coaching and waggoning
+pioneers who, in the days before "the sea-side" had been invented, and few
+people travelled, dared the awful roads for what must then have been a
+precarious business. Sussex roads in especial had a most unenviable name
+for miriness, and wheeled traffic was so difficult that for many years
+after this period the farmers and others continued to take their womenkind
+about in the pillion fashion here caricatured by Henry Bunbury.
+
+[Sidenote: SUSSEX ROADS]
+
+Horace Walpole, indeed, travelling in Sussex in 1749, visiting Arundel and
+Cowdray, acquired a too intimate acquaintance with their phenomenal depth
+of mud and ruts, inasmuch as he--finicking little gentleman--was compelled
+to alight precipitately from his overturned chaise, and to foot it like
+any common fellow. One quite pities his daintiness in the narration of his
+sorrows, picturesquely set forth by that accomplished letter-writer
+arrived home to the safe seclusion of Strawberry Hill. He writes to George
+Montagu, and dates August 26th, 1749:
+
+"Mr. Chute and I returned from our expedition miraculously well,
+considering all our distresses. If you love good roads, conveniences, good
+inns, plenty of postilions and horses, be so kind as never to go into
+Sussex. We thought ourselves in the northest part of England; the whole
+county has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George
+the Second was the first monarch of the East Angles. Coaches grow there no
+more than balm and spices: we were forced to drop our post-chaise, that
+resembled nothing so much as harlequin's calash, which was occasionally a
+chaise or a baker's cart. We journeyed over alpine mountains" (Walpole,
+you will observe, was, equally with the evening journalist of these happy
+times, not unaccustomed to exaggerate) "drenched in clouds, and thought of
+harlequin again, when he was driving the chariot of the sun through the
+morning clouds, and was so glad to hear the _aqua vitae_ man crying a
+dram.... I have set up my staff, and finished my pilgrimages for this
+year. Sussex is a great damper of curiosity."
+
+Thus he prattles on, delightfully describing the peculiarities of the
+several places he visited with this Mr. Chute, "whom," says he, "I have
+created _Strawberry King-at-Arms_." One wonders what that mute, inglorious
+Chute thought of it all; if he was as disgusted with Sussex sloughs and
+moist unpleasant "mountains" as his garrulous companion. Chute suffered in
+silence, for the sight of pen, ink, and paper did not induce in _him_ a
+fury of composition; and so we shall never know what he endured.
+
+Then the pedantic Doctor John Burton, who journeyed into Sussex in 1751,
+had no less unfortunate acquaintance with these miry ways than our
+_dilettante_ of Strawberry Hill. To those who have small Latin and less
+Greek, this traveller's tale must ever remain a sealed book; for it is in
+those languages that he records his views upon ways and means, and men and
+manners, in Sussex. As thus, for example:
+
+"I fell immediately upon all that was most bad, upon a land desolate and
+muddy, whether inhabited by men or beasts a stranger could not easily
+distinguish, and upon roads which were, to explain concisely what is most
+abominable, Sussexian. No one would imagine them to be intended for the
+people and the public, but rather the byways of individuals, or, more
+truly, the tracks of cattle-drivers; for everywhere the usual footmarks of
+oxen appeared, and we too, who were on horseback, going along zigzag,
+almost like oxen at plough, advanced as if we were turning back, while we
+followed out all the twists of the roads.... My friend, I will set before
+you a kind of problem in the manner of Aristotle:--Why comes it that the
+oxen, the swine, the women, and all other animals(!) are so long-legged in
+Sussex? Can it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much
+mud by the strength of the ankle, so that the muscles become stretched, as
+it were, and the bones lengthened?"
+
+A doleful tale. Presently he arrives at the conclusion that the peasantry
+"do not concern themselves with literature or philosophy, for they
+consider the pursuit of such things to be only idling," which is not so
+very remarkable a trait, after all, in the character of an agricultural
+people.
+
+[Illustration: THE "TALBOT" INN YARD. BOROUGH, ABOUT 1815. _From an old
+drawing._]
+
+Our author eventually, notwithstanding the terrible roads, arrived at
+Brighthelmstone, by way of Lewes, "just as day was fading." It was, so he
+says, "a village on the sea-coast; lying in a valley gradually sloping,
+and yet deep. It is not, indeed, contemptible as to size, for it is
+thronged with people, though the inhabitants are mostly very needy and
+wretched in their mode of living, occupied in the employment of fishing,
+robust in their bodies, laborious, and skilled in all nautical crafts,
+and, as it is said, terrible cheats of the custom-house officers." As who,
+indeed, is not, allowing the opportunity?
+
+Batchelor, the pioneer of Brighton coaching, continued his enterprise in
+1757, and with the coming of spring, and the drying of the roads, his
+coaches, which had been laid up in the winter, after the usual custom of
+those times, were plying again. In May he advertised, "for the convenience
+of country gentlemen, etc.," his London, Lewes, and Brighthelmstone
+stage-coach, which performed the journey of fifty-eight miles in two days;
+and exclusive persons, who preferred to travel alone, might have
+post-chaises of him.
+
+[Sidenote: EARLY COACHING]
+
+Brighthelmstone had in the meanwhile sprung into notice. The health-giving
+qualities of its sea air, and the then "strange new eccentricity" of
+sea-bathing, advocated from 1750 by Dr. Richard Russell, had already given
+it something of a vogue among wealthy invalids, and the growing traffic
+was worth competing for. Competitors therefore sprang up to share
+Batchelor's business. Most of them merely added stage-coaches like his,
+but in May, 1762, a certain "J. Tubb," in partnership with "S. Brawne,"
+started a very superior conveyance, going from London one day and
+returning from Brighthelmstone the next. This was the:
+
+    LEWES and BRIGHTELMSTONE new FLYING MACHINE (by Uckfield), hung on
+    steel springs, very neat and commodious, to carry FOUR PASSENGERS,
+    sets out from the Golden Cross Inn, Charing Cross, on Monday, the 7th
+    of June, at six o'clock in the morning, and will continue MONDAY'S,
+    WEDNESDAY'S, and FRIDAY'S to the White Hart, at Lewes, and the Castle,
+    at Brightelmstone, where regular Books are kept for entering
+    passenger's and parcels; will return to London TUESDAY'S, THURSDAY'S,
+    and SATURDAY'S Each Inside Passenger to Lewes, Thirteen Shillings; to
+    Brighthelmstone, Sixteen; to be allowed Fourteen Pound Weight for
+    Luggage, all above to pay One Penny per Pound; half the fare to be
+    paid at Booking, the other at entering the machine. Children in Lap
+    and Outside Passengers to pay half-price.
+
+        Performed by J. TUBB.
+                     S. BRAWNE.
+
+[Illustration: ME AND MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER. _From a caricature by Henry
+Bunbury._]
+
+Batchelor saw with dismay this coach performing the whole journey in one
+day, while his took two. But he determined to be as good a man as his
+opponent, if not even a better, and started the next week, at identical
+fares, "a new large FLYING CHARIOT, with a Box and four horses (by
+Chailey) to carry two Passengers only, except three should desire to go
+together." The better to crush the presumptuous Tubb, he later on reduced
+his fares. Then ensued a diverting, if by no means edifying, war of
+advertisements; for Tubb, unwilling to be outdone, inserted the following
+in _The Lewes Journal_, November, 1762:
+
+    THIS IS TO INFORM THE PUBLIC that, on Monday, the 1st of November
+    instant, the LEWES and BRIGHTHELMSTON FLYING MACHINE began going in
+    _one day_, and continues twice a week during the Winter Season to
+    Lewes only; sets out from the White Hart, at Lewes, MONDAYS and
+    THURSDAYS at Six o'clock in the Morning, and returns from the Golden
+    Cross, at Charing Cross, TUESDAYS and SATURDAYS, at the same hour.
+
+        Performed by J. TUBB.
+
+    N.B.--Gentlemen, Ladies, and others, are desired to look narrowly into
+    the Meanness and Design of the other Flying Machine to Lewes and
+    Brighthelmston, in lowering his prices, whether 'tis thro' conscience
+    or an endeavour to suppress me. If the former is the case, think how
+    you have been used for a great number of years, when he engrossed the
+    whole to himself, and kept you two days upon the road, going fifty
+    miles. If the latter, and he should be lucky enough to succeed in it,
+    judge whether he wont return to his old prices, when you cannot help
+    yourselves, and use you as formerly. As I have, then, been the remover
+    of this obstacle, which you have all granted by your great
+    encouragement to me hitherto, I, therefore, hope for the continuance
+    of your favours, which will entirely frustrate the deep-laid schemes
+    of my great opponent, and lay a lasting obligation on,--Your very
+    humble Servant,
+
+        J. TUBB.
+
+To this replies Batchelor, possessed with an idea of vested interests
+pertaining to himself:
+
+    WHEREAS, Mr. TUBB, by an Advertisement in this paper of Monday last,
+    has thought fit to cast some invidious Reflections upon me, in respect
+    of the lowering my Prices and being two days upon the Road, with other
+    low insinuations, I beg leave to submit the following matters to the
+    calm Consideration of the Gentlemen, Ladies, and other Passengers, of
+    what Degree soever, who have been pleased to favour me, viz.:
+
+    That our Family first set up the Stage Coach from London to Lewes, and
+    have continued it for a long Series of Years, from Father to Son and
+    other Branches of the same Race, and that even before the Turnpikes on
+    the Lewes Road were erected they drove their Stage, in the Summer
+    Season, in one day, and have continued to do ever since, and now in
+    the Winter Season twice in the week. And it is likewise to be
+    considered that many aged and infirm Persons, who did not chuse to
+    rise early in the Morning, were very desirous to be two Days on the
+    Road for their own Ease and Conveniency, therefore there was no
+    obstacle to be removed. And as to lowering my prices, let every one
+    judge whether, when an old Servant of the Country perceives an
+    Endeavour to suppress and supplant him in his Business, he is not well
+    justified in taking all measures in his Power for his own Security,
+    and even to oppose an unfair Adversary as far as he can. 'Tis,
+    therefore, hoped that the descendants of your very ancient Servants
+    will still meet with your farther Encouragement, and leave the Schemes
+    of our little Opponent to their proper Deserts.--I am, Your old and
+    present most obedient Servant,
+
+        J. BATCHELOR.
+
+    _December 13, 1762._
+
+The rivals both kept to the road until the death of Batchelor, in 1766,
+when his business was sold to Tubb, who took into partnership a Mr. Davis.
+Together they started, in 1767, the first service of a daily coach in the
+"Lewes and Brighthelmstone Flys," each carrying four passengers, one to
+London and one to Brighton every day.
+
+Tubb and Davis had in 1770 one "machine" and one waggon on this road, fare
+by "machine" 14_s._ The machine ran daily to and from London, starting at
+five o'clock in the morning. The waggon was three days on the road.
+Another machine was also running, but with the coming of winter these
+machines performed only three double journeys each a week.
+
+In 1777 another stage-waggon was started by "Lashmar & Co." It loitered
+between the "King's Head," Southwark, and the "King's Head," Brighton,
+starting from London every Tuesday at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m., and
+reaching its destination on Thursday afternoons.
+
+On May 31st, 1784, Tubb and Davis put a "light post-coach" on the road,
+running to Brighton one day returning to London the next, in addition to
+their already running "machine" and "post-coach." This new conveyance
+presumably made good time, four "insides" only being carried.
+
+[Sidenote: GROWTH OF COACHING]
+
+Four years later, when Brighton's sun of splendour was rising, there were
+on the road between London and the sea three "machines," three light
+post-coaches, two coaches, and two stage-waggons. Tubb now disappears, and
+his firm becomes Davis & Co. Other proprietors were Ibberson & Co.,
+Bradford & Co., and Mr. Wesson.
+
+On May 1st, 1791, the first Brighton Mail coach was established. It was a
+two-horse affair, running by Lewes and East Grinstead, and taking twelve
+hours to perform the journey. It was not well supported by the public, and
+as the Post Office would not pay the contractors a higher mileage, it was
+at some uncertain period withdrawn.
+
+About 1796 coach offices were opened in Brighton for the sole despatch of
+coaching business, the time having passed away for the old custom of
+starting from inns. Now, too, were different tales to tell of these roads,
+after the Pavilion had been set in course of building. Royalty and the
+Court could not endure to travel upon such evil tracks as had hitherto
+been the lot of travellers to Brighthelmstone. Presently, instead of a
+dearth of roads and a plethora of ruts, there became a choice of good
+highways and a plenty of travellers upon them.
+
+Numerous coaches ran to meet the demands of the travelling public, and
+these continually increased in number and improved in speed. About this
+time first appear the firms of Henwood, Crossweller, Cuddington, Pockney &
+Harding, whose office was at No. 44, East Street: and Boulton, Tilt,
+Hicks, Baulcomb & Co., at No. 1, North Street. The most remarkable thing,
+to my mind, about those companies is their long-winded names. In addition
+to the old service, there ran a "night post-coach" on alternate nights,
+starting at 10 p.m. in the season. One then went to or from London
+generally in "about" eleven hours, if all went well. If you could afford
+only a ride in the stage-waggon, why then you were carried the distance by
+the accelerated (!) waggons of this line in two days and one night.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Erredge, the historian of Brighton, tells something of the social side of
+Brighton Road coaching at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social
+indeed, as you shall see:
+
+"In 1801 two pair-horse coaches ran between London and Brighton on
+alternate days, one up, the other down, driven by Messrs. Crossweller and
+Hine. The progress of these coaches was amusing. The one from London left
+the Blossoms Inn, Lawrence Lane, at 7 a.m., the passengers breaking their
+fast at the Cock, Sutton, at 9. The next stoppage for the purpose of
+refreshment was at the Tangier, Banstead Downs--a rural little spot,
+famous for its elderberry wine, which used to be brought from the cottage
+'roking hot,' and on a cold wintry morning few refused to partake of it.
+George IV. invariably stopped here and took a glass from the hand of Miss
+Jeal as he sat in his carriage. The important business of luncheon took
+place at Reigate, where sufficient time was allowed the passengers to view
+the Baron's Cave, where, it is said, the barons assembled the night
+previous to their meeting King John at Runymeade. The grand halt for
+dinner was made at Staplefield Common, celebrated for its famous black
+cherry-trees, under the branches of which, when the fruit was ripe, the
+coaches were allowed to draw up and the passengers to partake of its
+tempting produce. The hostess of the hostelry here was famed for her
+rabbit-puddings, which, hot, were always waiting the arrival of the coach,
+and to which the travellers never failed to do such ample justice, that
+ordinarily they found it quite impossible to leave at the hour appointed;
+so grogs, pipes, and ale were ordered in, and, to use the language of the
+fraternity, 'not a wheel wagged' for two hours. Handcross was a little
+resting-place, celebrated for its 'neat' liquors, the landlord of the inn
+standing, bottle in hand, at the door. He and several other bonifaces at
+Friars' Oak, etc., had the reputation of being on pretty good terms with
+the smugglers who carried on their operations with such audacity along the
+Sussex coast.
+
+"After walking up Clayton Hill, a cup of tea was sometimes found to be
+necessary at Patcham, after which Brighton was safely reached at 7 p.m. It
+must be understood that it was the custom for the passengers to walk up
+all the hills, and even sometimes in heavy weather to give a push behind
+to assist the jaded horses."
+
+[Sidenote: COMPETITION]
+
+But it was not always so ideal or so idyllic. That there were discomforts
+and accidents is evident from the wordy warfare of advertisements that
+followed upon the starting of the Royal Brighton Four Horse Company in
+1802. As a competitor with older firms, it seems to have aroused much
+jealousy and slander, if we may believe the following contemporary
+advertisement:
+
+    THE ROYAL BRIGHTON Four Horse Coach Company beg leave to return their
+    sincere thanks to their Friends and the Public in general for the very
+    liberal support they have experienced since the starting of their
+    Coaches, and assure them it will always be their greatest study to
+    have their Coaches safe, with good Horses and sober careful Coachmen.
+
+    They likewise wish to rectify a report in circulation of their Coach
+    having been overturned on Monday last, by which a gentleman's leg was
+    broken, &c., no such thing having ever happened to either of their
+    Coaches. The Fact is it was one of the BLUE COACHES instead of the
+    Royal New Coach.
+
+    As several mistakes have happened, of their friends being BOOKED at
+    other Coach offices, they are requested to book themselves at the
+    ROYAL NEW COACH OFFICE, CATHERINE'S HEAD, 47, East Street.
+
+The coaching business grew rapidly, and in an advertisement offering for
+sale a portion of the coaching business at No. 1, North Street, it was
+stated that the annual returns of this firm were more than L12,000 per
+annum, yielding from Christmas, 1794, to Christmas, 1808, seven and a
+half per cent. on the capital invested, besides purchasing the interest of
+four of the partners in the concern. In this last year two new businesses
+were started, those of Waldegrave & Co., and Pattenden & Co. Fares now
+ruled high--23_s._ inside; 13_s._ outside.
+
+The year 1809 marked the beginning of a new and strenuous coaching era on
+this road. Then Crossweller & Co. commenced to run their "morning and
+night" coaches, and William "Miller" Bradford formed his company. This was
+an association of twelve members, contributing L100 each, for the purpose
+of establishing a "double" coach--that is to say, one up and one down,
+each day. The idea was to "lick creation" on the Brighton Road by
+accelerating the speed, and to this end they acquired some forty-five
+horses then sold out of the Inniskilling Dragoons, at that time stationed
+at Brighton. On May Day, 1810, the Brighton Mail was re-established. These
+"Royal Night Mail Coaches" as they were grandiloquently announced, were
+started by arrangement with the Postmaster-General. The speed, although
+much improved, was not yet so very great, eight hours being occupied on
+the way, although these coaches went by what was then the new cut _via_
+Croydon. Like the Dover. Hastings, and Portsmouth mails, the Brighton Mail
+was two-horsed. It ran to and from the "Blossoms" Inn, Lawrence Lane,
+Cheapside, and never attained a better performance than 7 hours 20
+minutes, a speed of 7-1/2 miles an hour. It had, however, _this_
+distinction, if it may so be called: it was the slowest mail in the
+kingdom.
+
+It was on June 25th, 1810, that an accident befell Waldegrave's
+"Accommodation" coach on its up journey. Near Brixton Causeway its hind
+wheels collapsed, owing to the heavy weight of the loaded vehicle. By one
+of those strange chances when truth appears stranger than fiction, there
+chanced to be a farmer's waggon passing the coach at the instant of its
+overturning. Into it were shot the "outsiders," fortunate in this
+comparatively easy fall. Still, shocks and bruises were not few, and one
+gentleman had his thigh broken.
+
+[Sidenote: A COACH ROBBERY]
+
+By June, 1811, traffic had so increased that there were then no fewer than
+twenty-eight coaches running between Brighton and London. On February 5th
+in the following year occurred the only great road robbery known on this
+road. This was the theft from the "Blue" coach of a package of bank-notes
+representing a sum of between three and four thousand pounds sterling.
+Crosswellers were proprietors of the coach, and from them Messrs. Brown,
+Lashmar & West, of the Brighton Union Bank, had hired a box beneath the
+seat for the conveyance of remittances to and from London. On this day the
+Bank's London correspondents placed these notes in the box for
+transmission to London, but on arrival the box was found to have been
+broken open and the notes all stolen. It would seem that a carefully
+planned conspiracy had been entered into by several persons, who must have
+had a thorough knowledge of the means by which the Union Bank sent and
+received money to and from the metropolis. On this morning six persons
+were booked for inside places. Of this number two only made an
+appearance--a gentleman and a lady. Two gentlemen were picked up as the
+coach proceeded. The lady was taken suddenly ill when Sutton was reached,
+and she and her husband were left at the inn there. When the coach arrived
+at Reigate the two remaining passengers went to inquire for a friend.
+Returning shortly, they told the coachman that the friend whom they had
+supposed to be at Brighton had returned to town, therefore it was of no
+use proceeding further.
+
+Thus the coachman and guard had the remainder of the journey to
+themselves, while the cash-box, as was discovered at the journey's end,
+was minus its cash. A reward of L300 was immediately offered for
+information that would lead to recovery of the notes. This was
+subsequently altered to an offer of 100 guineas for information of the
+offender, in addition to L300 upon recovery of the total amount, or "ten
+per cent. upon the amount of so much thereof as shall be recovered." No
+reward money was ever paid, for the notes were never recovered, and the
+thieves escaped with their booty.
+
+In 1813 the "Defiance" was started, to run to and from Brighton and London
+in the daytime, each way six hours. This produced the rival "Eclipse,"
+which belied the suggestion of its name and did not eclipse, but only
+equalled, the performance of its model. But competition had now grown very
+severe, and fares in consequence were reduced to--inside, ten shillings;
+outside, five shillings. Indeed, in 1816, a number of Jews started a coach
+to run from London to Brighton in six hours: or, failing to keep time, to
+forfeit all fares. Needless to say, under such Hebrew management, and with
+that liability, it was punctuality itself; but Nemesis awaited it, in the
+shape of an information laid for furious driving.
+
+The Mail, meanwhile, maintained its ancient pace of a little over six
+miles an hour--a dignified, no-hurry, governmental rate of progression.
+There was, in fact, no need for the Brighton Mail to make speed, for the
+road from the General Post Office is only fifty-three miles in length, and
+all the night and the early morning, from eight o'clock until five or six
+o'clock a.m., lay before it.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+We come now to the "Era of the Amateur," who not only flourished
+pre-eminently on the Brighton Road, but may be said to have originated on
+it. The coaching amateur and the nineteenth century came into existence
+almost contemporaneously. Very soon after 1800 it became "the thing" to
+drive a coach, and shortly after this became such a definite ambition,
+there arose that contradiction in terms, that horsey paradox, the Amateur
+Professional, generally a sporting gentleman brought to utter ruin by
+Corinthian gambols, and taking to the one trade on earth at which he could
+earn a wage. That is why the Golden Age of coaching won on the Brighton
+Road a refinement it only aped elsewhere.
+
+[Sidenote: ARISTOCRATIC COACHMEN]
+
+It is curious to see how coaching has always been, even in its serious
+days, before steam was thought of, the chosen amusement of wealthy and
+aristocratic whips. Of those who affected the Brighton Road may be
+mentioned the Marquis of Worcester, who drove the "Duke of Beaufort," Sir
+St. Vincent Cotton of the "Age," and the Hon. Fred Jerningham, who drove
+the Day Mail. The "Age," too, had been driven by Mr. Stevenson, a
+gentleman and a graduate of Cambridge, whose "passion for the _bench_," as
+"Nimrod" says, superseded all other worldly ambitions. He became a
+coachman by profession, and a good professional he made; but he had not
+forgotten his education and early training, and he was, as a whip,
+singularly refined and courteous. He caused, at a certain change of horses
+on the road, a silver sandwich-box to be handed round to the passengers by
+his servant, with an offer of a glass of sherry, should any desire one.
+Another gentleman, "connected with the first families in Wales," whose
+father long represented his native county in Parliament, horsed and drove
+one side of this ground with Mr. Stevenson.
+
+This was "Sackie," Sackville Frederick Gwynne, of Carmarthenshire, who
+quarrelled with his relatives and took to the road; became part proprietor
+of the "Age," broke off from Stevenson, and eventually lived and died at
+Liverpool as a cabdriver. He drove a cab till 1874, when he died, aged
+seventy-three.
+
+Harry Stevenson's connection with the Brighton Road began in 1827, when,
+as a young man fresh from Cambridge, he brought with him such a social
+atmosphere and such full-fledged expertness in driving a coach that
+Cripps, a coachmaster of Brighton and proprietor of the "Coronet," not
+only was overjoyed to have him on the box, but went so far as to paint his
+name on the coach as one of the licensees, for which false declaration
+Cripps was fined in November, 1827.
+
+The parentage and circumstances of Harry Stevenson are alike mysterious.
+We are told that he "went the pace," and was already penniless at
+twenty-two years of age, about the time of his advent upon the Brighton
+Road. In 1828 his famous "Age" was put on the road, built for him by
+Aldebert, the foremost coach-builder of the period, and appointed in every
+way with unexampled luxury. The gold- and silver-embroidered horse-cloths
+of the "Age" are very properly preserved in the Brighton Museum.
+Stevenson's career was short, for he died in February, 1830.
+
+Coaching authorities give the palm for artistry to whips of other roads:
+they considered the excellence of this as fatal to the production of those
+qualities that went to make an historic name. This road had become
+"perhaps the most nearly perfect, and certainly the most fashionable, of
+all."
+
+With the introduction of this sporting and irresponsible element, racing
+between rival coaches--and not the mere conveying of passengers--became
+the real interest of the coachmen, and proprietors were obliged to issue
+notices to assure the timid that this form of rivalry would be
+discouraged. A slow coach, the "Life Preserver," was even put on the road
+to win the support of old ladies and the timid, who, as the record of
+accidents tells us, did well to be timorous. But accidents _would_ happen
+to fast and slow alike. The "Coburg" was upset at Cuckfield in August,
+1819. Six of the passengers were so much injured that they could not
+proceed, and one died the following day at the "King's Head." The "Coburg"
+was an old-fashioned coach, heavy, clumsy, and slow, carrying six
+passengers inside and twelve outside. This type gave place to coaches
+of lighter build about 1823.
+
+[Illustration: THE "DUKE OF BEAUFORT" COACH STARTING FROM THE "BULL AND
+MOUTH" OFFICE, PICCADILLY CIRCUS, 1826. _From an aquatint after W. J.
+Shayer._]
+
+In 1826 seventeen coaches ran to Brighton from London every morning,
+afternoon, or evening. They had all of them the most high-sounding of
+names, calculated to impress the mind either with a sense of swiftness, or
+to awe the understanding with visions of aristocratic and court-like
+grandeur. As for the times they individually made, and for the inns from
+which they started, you who are insatiable of dry bones of fact may go to
+the Library of the British Museum and find your Cary (without an "e") and
+do your gnawing of them. That they started at all manner of hours, even
+the most uncanny, you must rest assured; and that they took off from the
+(to ourselves) most impossible and romantic-sounding of inns, may be
+granted, when such examples as the strangely incongruous "George and Blue
+Boar," the Herrick-like "Blossoms" Inn, and the idyllic-seeming
+"Flower-pot" are mentioned.
+
+[Sidenote: NAMES OF THE COACHES]
+
+They were, those seventeen coaches, the "Royal Mail," the "Coronet,"
+"Magnet," "Comet," "Royal Sussex," "Sovereign," "Alert," "Dart," "Union,"
+"Regent," "Times," "Duke of York," "Royal George," "True Blue," "Patriot,"
+"Post," and the "Summer Coach," so called, and they nearly all started
+from the City and Holborn, calling at West End booking-offices on their
+several ways. Most of the old inns from which they set out are pulled
+down, and the memory of them has faded.
+
+The "Golden Cross" at Charing Cross, from whose doors started the "Comet"
+and the "Regent" in this year of grace 1826, and at which the "Times"
+called on its way from Holborn, has been wholly remodelled; the "White
+Horse," Fetter Lane, whence the "Duke of York" bowled away, has been
+demolished; the "Old Bell and Crown" Inn, Holborn, where the "Alert," the
+"Union," and the "Times" drew up daily in the old-fashioned galleried
+courtyard, is swept away. Were Viator to return to-morrow, he would
+surely want to return to Hades, or Paradise, wherever he may be, at once.
+Around him would be, to his senses, an astonishing whirl and noise of
+traffic, despite the wood-paving that has superseded macadam, which itself
+displaced the granite setts he knew. Many strange and horrid portents he
+would note, and Holborn would be to him as an unknown street in a strange
+town.
+
+Than 1826 the informative Cary goes no further, and his "Itinerary,"
+excellent though it be, and invaluable to those who would know aught of
+the coaches that plied in the years when it was published, gives no
+particulars of the many "butterfly" coaches and amateur drags that cut in
+upon the regular coaches during the rush and scour of the season.
+
+In 1821 it was computed that over forty coaches ran to and from London and
+Brighton daily; in September, 1822, there were thirty-nine. In 1828 it was
+calculated that the sixteen permanent coaches then running, summer and
+winter, received between them a sum of L60,000 per annum, and the total
+sum expended in fares upon coaching on this road was taken as amounting to
+L100,000 per annum. That leaves the very respectable amount of L40,000 for
+the season's takings of the "butterflies."
+
+An accident happened to the "Alert" on October 9th, 1829, when the coach
+was taking up passengers at Brighton. The horses ran away, and dashed the
+coach and themselves into an area sixteen feet deep. The coach was
+battered almost to pieces, and one lady was seriously injured. The horses
+escaped unhurt. In 1832, August 25th, the Brighton Mail was upset near
+Reigate, the coachman being killed.
+
+[Illustration: THE "AGE," 1829, STARTING FROM CASTLE SQUARE, BRIGHTON.
+_From an engraving after C. Cooper Henderson._]
+
+[Sidenote: STEAM CARRIAGES]
+
+This was the era of those early motor-cars, the steam-carriages, which, in
+spite of their clumsy construction and appalling ugliness, arrived very
+nearly to a commercial success. Many inventors were engaged from 1823 to
+1838 upon this subject. Walter Hancock, in particular, began in 1824, and
+in 1828 proposed a service of his "land-steamers" between London and
+Brighton, but did not actually appear upon this road with his "Infant"
+until November, 1832. The contrivance performed the double journey with
+some difficulty and in slower time than the coaches: but Hancock on that
+eventful day confidently declared that he was perfecting a newer machine
+by which he expected to run down in three and a half hours. He never
+achieved so much, but in October, 1833, his "Autopsy," which had been
+successfully running as an omnibus between Paddington and Stratford, went
+from the works at Stratford to Brighton in eight and a half hours, of
+which three hours were taken up by a halt on the road.
+
+No artist has preserved a view of this event for us, but a print may still
+be met with depicting the start of Sir Charles Dance's steam-carriage from
+Wellington Street, Strand, for Brighton on some eventful morning of that
+same year. A prison-van is, by comparison with this fearsome object, a
+thing of beauty; but in the picture you will observe enthusiasm on foot
+and on horseback, and even four-legged, in the person of the inevitable
+dog. In the distance the discerning may observe the old toll-house on
+Waterloo Bridge, and the gaunt shape of the Shot Tower.
+
+By 1839 the coaching business had in Brighton become concentrated in
+Castle Square, six of the seven principal offices being situated there.
+Five London coaches ran from the Blue Office (Strevens & Co.), five from
+the Red Office (Mr. Goodman's), four from the "Spread Eagle" (Chaplin &
+Crunden's), three from the Age (T. W. Capps & Co.), two from Hine's, East
+Street; two from Snow's (Capps & Chaplin), and two from the "Globe" (Mr.
+Vaughan's).
+
+To state the number of visitors to Brighton on a certain day will give an
+idea of how well this road was used during the decade that preceded the
+coming of steam. On Friday, October 25th, 1833, upwards of 480 persons
+travelled to Brighton by stage-coach. A comparison of this number with the
+hordes of visitors cast forth from the Brighton Railway Station to-day
+would render insignificant indeed that little crowd of 1833; but in those
+times, when the itch of excursionising was not so acute as now, that day's
+return was remarkable; it was a day that fully justified the note made of
+it. Then, too, those few hundreds benefited the town more certainly than
+perhaps their number multiplied by ten does now. For the Brighton visitor
+of a hundred years ago, once set down in Castle Square, had to remain the
+night at least in Brighton; for him there was no returning to London the
+same day. And so the Brighton folks had their wicked will of him for a
+while, and made something out of him; while in these times the greater
+proportion of a day's excursionists find themselves either at home in
+London already, when evening hours are striking from Westminster Ben, or
+else waiting with what patience they may the collecting of tickets at the
+bleak and dismal penitentiary platforms of Grosvenor Road Station; and,
+after all, Brighton is little or nothing advantaged by their visit.
+
+But though the tripper of the coaching era found it impracticable to have
+his morning in London, his day upon the King's Road, and his evening in
+town again, yet the pace at which the coaches went in the '30's was by no
+means despicable. Ten miles an hour now became slow and altogether behind
+the age.
+
+In 1833 the Marquis of Worcester, together with a Mr. Alexander, put three
+coaches on the road: an up and down "Quicksilver" and a single coach, the
+"Wonder." The "Quicksilver," named probably in allusion to its swiftness
+(it was timed for four hours and three-quarters), ran to and from what was
+then a favourite stopping-place, the "Elephant and Castle." But on July
+15th of the same year an accident, by which several persons were very
+seriously injured, happened to the up "Quicksilver" when starting from
+Brighton. Snow, who was driving, could not hold the team in, and they
+bolted away, and brought up violently against the railings by the New
+Steyne. Broken arms, fractured arms and ribs, and contusions were
+plenty. The "Quicksilver," chameleon-like, changed colour after this
+mishap, was repainted and renamed, and reappeared as the "Criterion"; for
+the old name carried with it too great a spice of danger for the timorous.
+
+[Illustration: SIR CHARLES DANCE'S STEAM-CARRIAGE LEAVING LONDON FOR
+BRIGHTON, 1833. _From a print after G. E. Madeley._]
+
+[Sidenote: COACHING RECORDS]
+
+On February 4th, 1834, the "Criterion," driven by Charles Harbour,
+outstripping the old performances of the "Vivid," and beating the previous
+wonderfully quick journey of the "Red Rover," carried down King William's
+Speech on the opening of Parliament in 3 hours and 40 minutes, a coach
+record that has not been surpassed, nor quite equalled, on this road, not
+even by Selby on his great drive of July 13th, 1888, his times being out
+and in respectively, 3 hours 56 minutes, and 3 hours 54 minutes. Then
+again, on another road, on May Day, 1830, the "Independent Tally-ho,"
+running from London to Birmingham, covered those 109 miles in 7 hours 39
+minutes, a better record than Selby's London to Brighton and back drive by
+eleven minutes, with an additional mile to the course. Another coach, the
+"Original Tally-ho," did the same distance in 7 hours 50 minutes. The
+"Criterion" fared ill under its new name, and gained an unenviable
+notoriety on June 7th, 1834, being overturned in a collision with a dray
+in the Borough. Many of the passengers were injured; Sir William Cosway,
+who was climbing over the roof when the collision occurred, was killed.
+
+In 1839, the coaching era, full-blown even to decay, began to pewk and
+wither before the coming of steam, long heralded and now but too sure. The
+tale of coaches now decreased to twenty-three; fares, which had fallen in
+the cut-throat competition of coach proprietors with their fellows in
+previous years to 10_s._ inside, 5_s._ outside for the single journey, now
+rose to 21_s._ and 12_s._ Every man that horsed a coach, seeing now was
+the shearing time for the public, ere the now building railway was opened,
+strove to make as much as possible ere he closed his yards, sold his
+stock, broke his coach up for firewood, and took himself off the road.
+
+Sentiment hung round the expiring age of coaching, and has cast a halo on
+old-time ways of travelling, so that we often fail to note the
+disadvantages and discomforts endured in those days; but, amid regrets
+which were often simply maudlin, occur now and again witticisms true and
+tersely epigrammatic, as thus:
+
+  For the neat wayside inn and a dish of cold meat
+  You've a gorgeous saloon, but there's nothing to eat;
+
+and a contributor to the _Sporting Magazine_ observes, very happily, that
+"even in a 'case' in a coach, it's 'there you are'; whereas in a railway
+carriage it's 'where are you?'" in case of an accident.
+
+On September 21st, 1841, the Brighton Railway was opened throughout, from
+London to Brighton, and with that event the coaching era for this road
+virtually died. Professional coach proprietors who wished to retain the
+competencies they had accumulated were well advised to shun all
+competition with steam, and others had been wise enough to cut their
+losses; for the Road for the next sixty years was to become a discarded
+institution and the Rail was entering into a long and undisputed
+possession of the carrying trade.
+
+The Brighton Mail, however--or mails, for Chaplin had started a Day Mail
+in 1838--continued a few months longer. The Day Mail ceased in October,
+1841, but the Night Mail held the road until March, 1842.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Between 1841, when the railway was opened all the way from London, and
+1866, during a period of twenty-five years, coaching, if not dead, at
+least showed but few and intermittent signs of life. The "Age," which then
+was owned by Mr. F. W. Capps, was the last coach to run regularly on the
+direct road to and from London. The "Victoria," however, was on the
+road, _via_ Dorking and Horsham, until November 8th, 1845.
+
+[Illustration: The BRIGHTON DAY MAILS CROSSING HOOKWOOD COMMON, 1838.
+_From an engraving after W. J. Shayer._]
+
+[Sidenote: THE COACHING AMATEURS]
+
+The "Age" had been one of the best equipped and driven of all the smart
+drags in that period when aristocratic amateur dragsmen frequented this
+road, when the Marquis of Worcester drove the "Beaufort," and when the
+Hon. Fred Jerningham, a son of the Earl of Stafford, a whip of consummate
+skill, drove the day-mail; a time when the "Age" itself was driven by that
+sportsman of gambling memory, Sir St. Vincent Cotton, and by that Mr.
+Stevenson who was its founder, mentioned more particularly on page 37.
+When Mr. Capps became proprietor, he had as coachman several distinguished
+men. For twelve years, for instance, Robert Brackenbury drove the "Age"
+for the nominal pay of twelve shillings per week, enough to keep him in
+whips. It was thus supremely fitting that it should also have been the
+last to survive.
+
+In later years, about 1852, a revived "Age," owned and driven by the Duke
+of Beaufort and George Clark, the "Old" Clark of coaching acquaintance,
+was on the road to London, _via_ Dorking and Kingston, in the summer
+months. It was discontinued in 1862. A picture of this coach crossing Ham
+Common _en route_ for Brighton was painted in 1852 and engraved. A
+reproduction of it is shown here.
+
+From 1862 to 1866 the rattle of the bars and the sound of the guard's yard
+of tin were silent on every route to Brighton; but in the latter year of
+horsey memory and the coaching revival, a number of aristocratic and
+wealthy amateurs of the whip, among whom were representatives of the best
+coaching talent of the day, subscribed a capital, in shares of L10, and a
+little yellow coach, the "Old Times," was put on the highway. Among the
+promoters of the venture were Captain Haworth, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord
+H. Thynne, Mr. Chandos Pole, Mr. "Cherry" Angell, Colonel Armytage,
+Captain Lawrie, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The experiment proved unsuccessful,
+but in the following season, commencing in April, 1867, when the goodwill
+and a large portion of the stock had been purchased from the original
+subscribers, by the Duke of Beaufort, Mr. E. S. Chandos Pole, and Mr.
+Angell, the coach was doubled, and two new coaches built by Holland &
+Holland.
+
+The Duke of Beaufort was chief among the sportsmen who horsed the coaches
+during this season. Mr. Chandos Pole, at the close of the summer season,
+determined to carry on by himself, throughout the winter, a service of one
+coach. This he did, and, aided by Mr. Pole-Gell, doubled it the next
+summer.
+
+The following year, 1869, the coach had so prosperous a season that it
+showed never a clean bill, _i.e._, never ran empty, all the summer, either
+way. The partners this year were the Earl of Londesborough, Mr. Pole-Gell,
+Colonel Stracey Clitherow, Mr. Chandos Pole, and Mr. G. Meek.
+
+From this season coaching became extremely popular on the Brighton Road,
+Mr. Chandos Pole running his coach until 1872. In the following year an
+American amateur, Mr. Tiffany, kept up the tradition with two coaches.
+Late in the season of 1874 Captain Haworth put in an appearance.
+
+In 1875 the "Age" was put upon the road by Mr. Stewart Freeman, and ran in
+the season up to and including 1880, in which year it was doubled. Captain
+Blyth had the "Defiance" on the road to Brighton this year by the
+circuitous route of Tunbridge Wells. In 1881 Mr. Freeman's coach was
+absent from the road, but Edwin Fownes put the "Age" on, late in the
+season. In the following year Mr. Freeman's coach ran, doubled again, and
+single in 1883. It was again absent in 1884-5-6, in which last year it ran
+to Windsor; but it reappeared on the Brighton Road in 1887 as the "Comet,"
+and in the winter of that year was continued by Captain Beckett, who had
+Selby and Fownes as whips. In 1888 Mr. Freeman ran in partnership with
+Colonel Stracey-Clitherow, Lord Wiltshire, and Mr. Hugh M'Calmont, and in
+1889 became partner in an undertaking to run the coach doubled. The two
+"Comets" therefore served the road in this season supported by two
+additional subscribers, the Honourable H. Sandys and Mr. Randolph Wemyss.
+
+[Illustration: THE "AGE," 1852, CROSSING HAM COMMON. _From an engraving
+after C. Cooper Henderson._]
+
+[Sidenote: JIM SELBY]
+
+In 1888 the "Old Times," forsaking the Oatlands Park drive, had appeared
+on the Brighton Road as a rival to the "Comet," and continued throughout
+the winter months, until Selby met his death in that winter.
+
+The "Comet" ran single in the winter season of 1889-90, and in April was
+again doubled for the summer, running single in 1891-2-3, when Mr. Freeman
+relinquished it.
+
+Mention has already been made of the "Old Times," which made such a
+fleeting appearance on this road; but justice was not done to it, or to
+Selby, in that incidental allusion. They require a niche to themselves in
+the history of the revival--a niche to which shall be appended this poetic
+excerpt:
+
+  Here's the "Old Times," it's one of the best,
+  Which no coaching man will deny,
+  Fifty miles down the road with a jolly good load,
+  Between London and Brighton each day.
+  Beckett, M'Adam, and Dickey, the driver, are there,
+  Of old Jim's presence every one is aware,
+  They are all nailing good sorts,
+  And go in for all sports,
+  So we'll all go a-coaching to-day.
+
+It is poetry whose like we do not often meet. Tennyson himself never
+attempted to capture such heights of rhyme. He could, and did, rhyme
+"poet" with "know it," but he never drove such a Cockney team as "deny"
+and "to-dy" to water at the Pierian springs.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+"Carriages without horses shall go," is the "prophecy" attributed to that
+mythical fifteenth century pythoness, Mother Shipton; really the _ex post
+facto_ forgery of Charles Hindley, the second-hand bookseller, in 1862. It
+should not be difficult, on such terms, to earn the reputation of a seer.
+
+Between 1823 and 1838, the era of the steam-carriages, that
+prognostication had already been fulfilled: and again, in another sense,
+with the introduction of railways. But it was not until the close of 1896
+that the real horseless era began to dawn. Railways, extravagantly
+discriminative tolls, and restrictions upon weight and speed killed the
+steam-carriages, and for more than fifty years the highways knew no other
+mechanical locomotion than that of the familiar traction-engines,
+restricted to three miles an hour and preceded by a man with a red flag.
+It is true that a few hardy inventors continued to waste their time and
+money on devising new forms of steam-carriages, and were only fined for
+their pains when they were rash enough to venture on the public roads, as
+when Bateman, of Greenwich, invented a steam-tricycle, and Sir Thomas
+Parkyn, Bart., was fined at Greenwich Police Court, April 8th, 1881, for
+riding it.
+
+That incident appears to have finally quenched the ardour of inventive
+genius in this country; but a new locomotive force already existing
+unsuspected was about this period being experimented with on the Continent
+by one Gottlieb Daimler, whose name--generally mispronounced--is now
+sufficiently familiar to all who know anything of motor-cars.
+
+Daimler was at that time connected with the Otto Gas Engine Works in
+Germany, where the adaptive Germans were exploiting the gas-engine
+principle invented by Crossley many years before.
+
+[Sidenote: MOTOR-CARS]
+
+In 1886 Daimler produced his motor-bicycle, and by 1891 his motor engine
+was adapted by Panhard and Levassor to other types of vehicles. The
+French were thus the first to perceive the great possibilities of it, and
+by 1894 the motor-cars already in use in France were so numerous that the
+first sporting event in the history of them--the 760 miles' race from
+Paris to Bordeaux and back--was run.
+
+[Illustration: THE "OLD TIMES," 1888. _From a painting by Alfred S.
+Bishop._]
+
+The following year Mr. Evelyn Ellis brought over the first motor-car to
+reach England, a 4 h.-p. Panhard, and a little later, Sir David Salomons,
+of Tunbridge Wells, imported a Peugeot. In that town, October 15th, 1895,
+he held the first show of cars--four or five at most--in this country.
+Then began an agitation raised by a few enthusiasts for the removal of the
+existing restrictions upon road traffic. A deputation waited upon the
+Local Government Board, and the Light Locomotives Act of 1896 was passed
+in August, legalising mechanical traction up to a speed of fourteen miles
+an hour, the Act to come into operation on November 14th.
+
+For whatever reason, the Light Locomotives Act was passed so quietly,
+under the aegis of the Local Government Board, as to almost wear the aspect
+of an organised secrecy, and the coming of what is now known as Motor-car
+Day was utterly unsuspected by the bulk of the public. It even caught the
+newspapers unprepared, until the week before.
+
+But the financiers and company-promoters had been busy. They at least
+fully realised the importance of the era about to dawn; and the
+extravagant flotations of the Great Horseless Carriage Company and of many
+others long since bankrupt and forgotten, together with the phenomenal
+over-valuation of patents, very soon discredited the new movement. Never
+has there been a new industry so hardly used by company-promoting sharks
+as that of motor-cars.
+
+[Sidenote: "MOTOR-CAR DAY"]
+
+No inkling of subsequent financial disasters clouded Motor-car Day, and as
+at almost the last moment the Press had come to the conclusion that it was
+an occasion to be written up and enlarged upon, a very great public
+interest was aroused in the Motor-car Club's proposed celebration of the
+event by a great procession of the newly-enfranchised "light locomotives"
+from Whitehall to Brighton, on November 14th.
+
+The Motor-car Club is dead. It was not a club in the proper sense of the
+word, but an organisation promoted and financed by the company-promoters
+who were interested in advertising their schemes. The run to Brighton was
+itself intended as a huge advertisement, but the unprepared condition of
+many of the cars entered, together with the miserable weather prevailing
+on that day, resulted in turning the whole thing into ridicule.
+
+The newspapers had done their best to advertise the event; but no one
+anticipated the immense crowds that assembled at the starting-point,
+Whitehall Place, by nine o'clock on that wet and foggy morning. By
+half-past ten, the hour fixed for the start, there was a maddening chaos
+of hundreds of thousands of sightseers such as no Lord Mayor's Show or
+Royal Procession had ever attracted. Everybody in the crowd wanted a front
+place, and those who got one, being both unable and unwilling to "parse
+away," were nearly scragged by the police, who on the Embankment set upon
+individuals like footballers on the ball; while snap-shotters wasted
+plates on them from the secure altitudes of omnibuses or other vehicles.
+
+Those whose journalistic duties took them to see the start had to fight
+their way down from Charing Cross, up from Westminster, or along from the
+Embankment; contesting inch by inch, and wondering if the starting-point
+would ever be gained.
+
+At length the Metropole hove in sight, but the motor-cars had yet to be
+found. To accomplish this feat it was necessary to hurl oneself into a
+surging tide of humanity, and surge with it. The tide carried the explorer
+away and eventually washed him ashore on the neck of a policeman. Rumour
+got around that an organised massacre of cab-horses was contemplated, and
+myriads of mounted police appeared and had their photographs taken from
+the tops of cabs and other envied positions occupied by amateur
+photographers, who paid dearly to take pictures of the fog, which they
+could have done elsewhere for nothing.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COMET," 1890. _From a painting by Alfred S. Bishop._]
+
+Time went on, the crowd grew bigger, the mud was churned into slush, and
+everybody was treading upon everybody else.
+
+"Ain't this bloomin' fun, sir?" asked the driver of a growler, his sides
+shaking with laughter, "Even my ole 'oss 'as bin larfin'."
+
+"Very intelligent horse," we said, thinking of Mr. Pickwick, and
+determining to ask some searching questions as to his antecedents.
+
+"Interleck's a great p'int, sir. Which 'ud you sooner be in: a runaway
+mortar-caw or a keb?"
+
+"Neither."
+
+"No, I ain't jokin', strite. I've just bin argying wif a bloke as said
+he'd sooner be in a caw. I said I pitied 'is choice, and wouldn't give 'im
+much for his charnce. 'Cos why? 'Cos mortar-caws ain't got no interleck.
+They cawn't tell the dif'rence 'tween nothink an' a brick wall. Now a 'os
+can. If 'e don't turn orf 'e tries ter jump th' wall, but yer mortar
+simply goes fer it, and then where are yer? In 'eaven, if yer lucky, or
+in----"
+
+But the rest of his sentence was lost in the roar that ascended from the
+crowd as the cars commenced their journey to Brighton.
+
+They went beautifully for a few yards, chased the mounted police right
+into the crowd, and then stopped.
+
+"It's th' standin' still as does it--not the standin' still, I mean the
+not going forrard, 'cos they don't stand still," said the cabby,
+excitedly.
+
+"Don't they hum?" he cried.
+
+"They certainly do make a little noise."
+
+"But I mean, don't they whiff?"
+
+"Whiff?"
+
+He held his nose.
+
+"I say, guv'nor." shouted cabby to a fur-coated foreigner, "wot is it
+smells so?"
+
+Meanwhile there was a certain "something lingering with oil in it,"
+permeating the fog, while a sound as of many humming-tops filled the air.
+
+Then the cars moved on a bit, amid the cheers and chaff of a good-humoured
+crowd. Presently another stoppage and more shivering.
+
+"'As thet cove there got th' Vituss dance?" inquired the elated cabby,
+indicating a gentleman who was wobbling like a piece of jelly.
+
+"That's the vibration," explained another.
+
+"'Ow does the vibration agree w' the old six yer 'ad last night?" cabby
+inquired immediately. "I say, Chawlie, don't it make yer sea-sick? Oh my!
+th' smell!" and he gasped and sat on his box, looking bilious.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When all the carriages had wended their way to Westminster we asked cabby
+what he thought of the procession.
+
+"Arsk my 'os," said he, with a look of disgust on his face. "What's yer
+opinion of it, old gal? Failyer? My sentiments. British public won't pay
+to be choked with stinks one moment and shut up like electricity t' next.
+Failyer? Quite c'rect."
+
+Meanwhile the guests of the Motor-car Club were breakfasting at the Hotel
+Metropole, where appropriate speeches were made, the Earl of Winchilsea
+concluding his remarks with the dramatic production of a red flag, which,
+amid applause, he tore in half, to symbolise the passing of the old
+restrictions.
+
+There had been fifty-four entries for this triumphal procession, but not
+more than thirty-three cars put in an appearance. It is significant of the
+vast progress made since then that no car present was more than 6 h.-p.,
+and that all, except the Bollee three-wheeled car, were precisely what
+they were frequently styled, "horseless carriages," vehicles built on
+traditional lines, from which the horses and the customary shafts were
+painfully missed. There had not yet been time sufficient for the evolution
+of the typical motor-car body.
+
+With the combined strategy of a Napoleon, the patience of Job, and the
+strength of Samson, the guests were at length piloted through the crowd
+and inducted into their seats, and the "procession"--which, it was sternly
+ordained, was not to be a "race"--set out.
+
+[Sidenote: THE FIRST CARS]
+
+The President of the Motor-car Club, Harry J. Lawson, since convicted of
+fraud and sentenced to some months' imprisonment, led the way in his
+pilot-car, bearing a purple-and-gold banner, more or less suitably
+inscribed, himself habited in a strange costume, something between that of
+a yachtsman and the conductor of a Hungarian band.
+
+Reigate was reached at 12.30 by the foremost ear, through twenty miles of
+crowded country, when rain descended once more upon the hapless day, and
+late arrivals splashed through in all the majesty of mud.
+
+The honours of the occasion belong to the little Bollee three-wheeler, of
+a type long since obsolete. The inventor, disregarding all rules and
+times, started at 11.30, and, making no stop at Reigate, drove on to
+Brighton, which he reached in the record time of two hours fifty-five
+minutes. The President's car was fourth, in seven hours twenty-two minutes
+thirty seconds.
+
+At Preston Park, on the Brighton boundary, the Mayor was to have welcomed
+the procession, which, headed by the President, was to proceed
+triumphantly into the town. A huge crowd assembled under the dripping elms
+and weeping skies, and there, at five o'clock, in the light of the misty
+lamps, stood and vibrated that presidential equipage and its banner with
+the strange device. By five o'clock only three other cars had arrived; and
+so, wet and miserable, they, the Mayor and Council, and the mounted police
+all splashed into Brighton amid a howling gale.
+
+The rest should be silence, for no one ever knew the number of cars that
+completed the journey. Some said twenty-two, others thirteen; but it is
+certain that the conditions were too much for many, and that while some
+reposed in wayside stables, others, broken down in lonely places, remained
+on the road all through that awful night. The guests, who in the morning
+had been unable to find seats on the "horseless carriages," and so had
+journeyed by special train or by coach, in the end had much to
+congratulate themselves upon.
+
+But, after all, looking back upon the hasty enthusiasm that organised so
+long a journey at such a time of year, at so early a stage in the
+motor-car era, it seems remarkable, not that so many broke down, but that
+so large a proportion reached Brighton at all.
+
+The logical outcome of years of experiment and preparation was reached, in
+the supersession of the horsed London and Brighton Parcel Mail on June
+2nd, 1905, by a motor-van, and in the establishment, on August 30th, of
+the "Vanguard" London and Brighton Motor Omnibus Service, starting in
+summer at 9.30 a.m., and reaching Brighton at 2 p.m.; returning from
+Brighton at 4 p.m., and finally arriving at its starting-point, the "Hotel
+Victoria," Northumberland Avenue, at 9 p.m. With the beginning of
+November, 1905, that summer service was replaced by one to run through the
+winter months, with inside seats only, and at reduced fares.
+
+The first fatality on the Brighton Road in connection with motor-cars
+occurred in 1901, at Smitham Bottom, when a car just purchased by a
+retired builder and contractor of Brighton was being driven by him from
+London. The steering-gear failed, the car turned completely round, ran
+into an iron fence and pinned the owner's leg against it and a tree. The
+leg was broken and had to be amputated, and the unfortunate man died of
+the shock.
+
+But the motor-omnibus accident of July 12th, 1906, was a really
+spectacular tragedy. On that day a "Vanguard" omnibus, chartered by a
+party of thirty-four pleasure seekers at Orpington for a day at Brighton,
+was proceeding down Hand Cross Hill at twelve miles an hour when some
+essential part of the gear broke and the heavy vehicle, dashing down-hill
+at an ever-increasing pace, and swerving from side to side, struck a great
+oak. The shock flung the passengers off violently. Ten were killed and all
+the others injured, mostly very seriously.
+
+Meanwhile, amateur coaching had, in most of the years since the
+professional coaches had been driven off the road, flourished in the
+summer season. The last notable amateur was the American millionaire,
+Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who for several seasons personally drove his own
+"Venture" coach between London and Brighton; at first on the main
+"classic" road, and afterwards on the Dorking and Horsham route. He met
+his death on board the _Lusitania_, when it was sunk by the Germans, May
+7th. 1915.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROAD OF RECORDS]
+
+Robinson Crusoe, weary of his island solitude, sighed, so the poet tells
+us, for "the midst of alarms." He should have chosen the Brighton Road;
+for ever since it has been a road at all it has fully realised the
+Shakespearian stage-direction of "alarums and excursions." Particularly
+the "excursions," for it is the chosen track for most record-breaking
+exploits; and thus it comes to pass that residents fortunate or
+unfortunate enough to dwell upon the Brighton Road have the whole panorama
+of sport unfolded before their eyes, whether they will or no, throughout
+the whirling year, and see strange sights, hear odd noises, and (since the
+coming of the motor-car) smell weird smells.
+
+The Brighton Road has ever been a course upon which the enthusiastic
+exponents of different methods of progression have eagerly exhibited their
+prowess. But to-day, although it affords as good going as, or better than,
+ever, it is not so suitable as it was for these displays of speed.
+Traffic has grown with the growth of villages and townships along these
+fifty-two miles, and sport and public convenience are on the highway
+antipathetic. Yet every kind of sport has its will of the road.
+
+The reasons of this exceptional sporting character are not far to seek.
+They were chiefly sportsmen who travelled it in the days when it began to
+be a road: those full-blooded sportsmen, ready for any freakish wager, who
+were the boon companions of the Prince; and they set a fashion which has
+not merely survived into modern times, but has grown amazingly.
+
+But it would never have been the road for sport it is, had its length not
+been so conveniently and alluringly near an even fifty miles. So much may
+be done or attempted along a fifty miles' course that would be impossible
+on a hundred.
+
+[Sidenote: SPORTING EVENTS]
+
+The very first sporting event on the Brighton Road of which any record
+survives is (with an astonishing fitness) the feat accomplished by the
+Prince of Wales himself on July 25th, 1784, during his second visit to
+Brighthelmstone. On that day he mounted his horse there and rode to London
+and back. He went by way of Cuckfield, and was ten hours on the road: four
+and a half hours going, five and a half hours returning. On August 21st of
+the same year, starting at one o'clock in the morning, he drove from
+Carlton House to the "Pavilion" in four hours and a half. The turn-out was
+a phaeton drawn by three horses harnessed tandem-fashion--what in those
+days was called a "random."
+
+One may venture the opinion that, although these performances were in due
+course surpassed, they were not altogether bad for a "simulacrum," as
+Thackeray was pleased to style him.
+
+Twenty-five years passed before any one arose to challenge the Prince's
+ride, and then only partially and indirectly. In May, 1809, Cornet J.
+Wedderburn Webster, of the 10th (Prince of Wales's Own) Light Dragoons,
+accepted and won a wager of 300 to 200 guineas with Sir B. Graham about
+the performance in three and a half hours of the journey from Brighton to
+Westminster Bridge, mounted upon one of the blood horses that usually ran
+in his phaeton. He accomplished the ride in three hours twenty minutes,
+knocking the Prince's up record into the proverbial cocked hat. The rider
+stopped a while at Reigate to take a glass or two of wine, and compelled
+his horse to swallow the remainder of the bottle.
+
+This spirited affair was preceded in April, 1793, by a curious match which
+seems to deserve mention. A clergyman at Brighton betted an officer of the
+Artillery quartered there 100 guineas that he would ride his own horse to
+London sooner than the officer could go in a chaise and pair, the
+officer's horses to be changed _en route_ as often as he might think
+proper. The Artilleryman accordingly despatched a servant to provide
+relays, and at twelve o'clock on an unfavourable night the parties set out
+to decide the bet, which was won by the clergyman with difficulty. He
+arrived in town at 5 a.m., only a few minutes before the chaise, which it
+had been thought was sure of winning. The driver of the last stage,
+however, nearly became stuck in a ditch, which mishap caused considerable
+delay. The Cuckfield driver performed his nine-miles' stage, between that
+place and Crawley, within the half-hour.
+
+The next outstanding incident was the run of the "Red Rover" coach, which,
+leaving the "Elephant and Castle" at 4 p.m. on June 19th, 1831, reached
+Brighton at 8.21 that evening: time, four hours twenty-one minutes. The
+fleeting era of those precursors of motor-cars, the steam-carriages, had
+by this time arrived, and after two or three had managed, at some kind of
+a slow pace, to get to and from Brighton, the "Autopsy" achieved a record
+of sorts in October, 1833. "Autopsy" was an unfortunate name, suggestive
+of _post-mortem_ examinations and "crowner's quests," but it proved not
+more dangerous than the "Mors" or "Hurtu" cars of to-day. The "Autopsy"
+was Walter Hancock's steam-carriage, and ran from his works at Stratford.
+It reached Brighton in eight hours thirty minutes; from which, however,
+must be deducted three hours for a halt on the road.
+
+In the following year, February 4th, the "Criterion" coach, driven by
+Charles Harbour, took the King's Speech down to Brighton in three hours
+forty minutes--a coach record that not only quite eclipsed that of the
+"Red Rover," but has never yet been equalled, not even by Selby, on his
+great drive of July 13th, 1888; his times being, out and home
+respectively, three hours fifty-six minutes and three hours fifty-four
+minutes.
+
+In March, 1868, the first of the walking records was established, the
+sporting papers of that age chronicling what they very rightly described
+as a "Great Walking Feat": a walk, not merely to Brighton, but to Brighton
+_and back_. This heroic undertaking, which was not repeated until 1902,
+was performed by one "Mr. Benjamin B. Trench, late Oxford University." On
+March 20th, for a heavy wager, he started to walk the hundred miles from
+Kennington Church to Brighton and back in twenty-five hours. Setting out
+on the Friday, at 6 p.m., he was back at Kennington Church at 5 p.m.
+Saturday, having thus won his wager with two hours to spare. It will be
+observed, or guessed, from the absence of odd minutes and seconds that in
+1868, timing, as an exact science, had not been born; but it is evident
+that this stalwart walked his hundred miles on ordinary roads at an
+average rate of a little over four and a quarter miles an hour. "He then,"
+concludes the report, "walked round the Oval several times, till seven
+o'clock."
+
+To each age the inventions it deserves. Cycling would have been impossible
+in the mid-eighteenth century, when Walpole and Burton travelled with such
+difficulty.
+
+When roads began to deserve the name, the Mail Coach was introduced; and
+when they grew hard and smooth, out of their former condition of ruts and
+mud, the quaint beginnings of the bicycle are noticed. The Hobby Horse
+and McAdam, the man who first preached the modern gospel of good roads,
+were contemporary.
+
+[Sidenote: THE HOBBY-HORSE]
+
+I have said the beginnings of the bicycle were quaint, and I think no one
+will be concerned to dispute this alleged quaintness of the Hobby Horse,
+which had a certain strictly limited popularity from 1819 to 1830. I do
+not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these
+machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of
+them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that
+any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human
+endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises,
+and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but
+records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should
+be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. A heavy
+timber frame connected these wheels, and on it the courageous rider
+straddled, his feet touching the ground. The Hobby Horse had no pedals,
+and the rider propelled his hundredweight or so of iron and timber by
+running in this straddling position and thus obtaining a momentum which
+only on the down grade would carry him any distance.
+
+Thus, although the Hobby Horse was a favourite with the "bucks" of George
+the Fourth's time, they exercised upon it in strictly limited doses, and
+it was not until it had experienced a new birth and was born again as the
+"velocipede" of the '60's, that to ride fifty miles upon an ancestor of
+the present safety bicycle, and survive, was possible.[4]
+
+[Sidenote: THE BONESHAKER]
+
+The front-driving velocipede--the well-known "boneshaker"--was invented by
+one Pierre Lallement, in Paris, in 1865-6, and exhibited at the Paris
+Exhibition of 1867. It was to the modern pneumatic-tyred "safety" what the
+roads of 1865 are to those of 1906. It also, like the Hobby Horse, had
+iron-shod wooden wheels, but had cranks and pedals, and could be ridden
+uphill. On such a machine the first cycle ride to Brighton was performed
+in 1869. This pioneer's fame on the Brighton Road belongs to John Mayall,
+junior, a well-known photographer of that period, who died in the summer
+of 1891.
+
+This marks the beginning of so important an epoch that the circumstances
+attending it are worthy a detailed account. They were felt, so long ago as
+1874, to be deserving of such a record, for in the first number of an
+athletic magazine, _Ixion_, published in that year, "J. M., jun.," who, of
+course, was none other than Mayall himself, began to tell the wondrous
+tale. He set out to narrate it at such length that, as an editorial note
+tells us, the concluding portion was reserved for the second number. But
+_Ixion_ never reached a second number, and so Mayall's own account of his
+historic ride was never completed.
+
+He began, as all good chroniclers should, at the very beginning, telling
+how, in the early part of 1869, he was at Spencer's Gymnasium in Old
+Street, St. Luke's. There he saw a packing-case being followed by a Mr.
+Turner, whom he had seen at the Paris Exhibition of 1868, and witnessed
+the unpacking of it. From it came a something new and strange, "a piece of
+apparatus consisting mainly of two wheels, similar to one I had seen, not
+long before, in Paris." It was the first velocipede to reach England.
+
+It is a curious point that, although Mayall rode a "velocipede," and
+although these machines were generally so-called for a year or two after
+their introduction, the word "bicycle" is claimed to have been first used
+in the _Times_ in the early part of 1868; and certainly we find in the
+_Daily News_ of September 7th in that year an allusion, in grotesque
+spelling, to "bysicles and trisicles which we saw at the Champs Elysees
+and the Bois de Boulogne this summer."
+
+But to return to the "velocipede" which had found its way to England at
+the beginning of 1869.
+
+The two-wheeled mystery was helped out of its wrappings and shavings, the
+Gymnasium was cleared, and Mr. Turner, taking off his coat, grasped the
+handles of the machine, and with a short run, to Mayall's intense
+surprise, vaulted on to it. Putting his feet on what were then called the
+"treadles," Turner, to the astonishment of the beholders, made the circuit
+of the room, sitting on this bar above a pair of wheels in line that ought
+to have collapsed so soon as the momentum ceased; but, instead of falling
+down, Turner turned the front wheel at an angle to the other, and thus
+maintained at once a halt and a balance.
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN MAYALL JUNIOR]
+
+Mayall was fired with enthusiasm. The next day (Saturday) he was early at
+the Gymnasium, "intending to have a day of it," and I think, from his
+account of what followed, that he _did_, in every sense, have such a day.
+
+As Spencer had hurt himself by falling from the machine the night before,
+Mayall had it almost wholly to himself, and, after a few successful
+journeys round the room, determined to try his luck in the streets.
+Accordingly, at one o'clock in the afternoon, amid the plaudits of a
+hundred men of the adjacent factory, engaged in the congenial occupation
+of lounging against the blank walls in their dinner-hour, the velocipede
+was hoisted on to a cab and driven to Portland Place, where it was put on
+the pavement, and Mayall prepared to mount. Even nowadays the cycling
+novice requires plenty of room, and as Portland Place is well known to be
+the widest street in London, and nearly the most secluded, it seems
+probable that this intrepid pioneer deliberately chose it in order to have
+due scope for his evolutions.
+
+It was a raw and muddy day, with a high wind. Mayall sprang on to the
+velocipede, but it slipped on the wet road, and he measured his length in
+the mud. The day-out was beginning famously.
+
+Spencer, who had been worsted the night before, contented himself with
+giving Mayall a start when he made another attempt, and this time that
+courageous person got as far as the Marylebone Road, and across it on to
+the pavement of the other side, where he fell with a crash as though a
+barrow had been upset. But again vaulting into the saddle, he lumbered on
+into Regent's Park, and so to the drinking-fountain near the Zoological
+Gardens, where, in attempting to turn round, he fell over again. Mounting
+once more, he returned. Looking round, "there was the park-keeper coming
+hastily towards me, making indignant signs. I passed quickly out of the
+Park gate into the roadway." Thus early began the long warfare between
+Cycling and Authority.
+
+Thence, sometimes falling into the road, with Spencer trotting after him,
+he reached the foot of Primrose Hill, and then, at Spencer's home,
+staggered on to a sofa, and lay there, exhausted, soaked in rain and
+perspiration, and covered with mud. It had been in no sense a light matter
+to exercise with that ninety-three pounds' weight of mingled timber and
+ironmongery.
+
+On the Monday he trundled about, up to the "Angel," Islington, where
+curious crowds assembled, asking the uses of the machine and if the
+falling off and grovelling in the mud was a part of the pastime. The
+following day, very sore, but still undaunted, he re-visited the "Angel,"
+went through the City, and so to Brixton and Clapham, where, at the house
+of a friend, he looked over maps, and first conceived the "stupendous"
+idea of riding to Brighton.
+
+The following morning he endeavoured to put that plan into execution, and
+toiled up Brixton Hill, and so through Croydon, up the "never-ending"
+rise, as it seemed, of Smitham Bottom to the crest of Merstham Hill.
+There, tired, he half plunged into the saddle, and so thundered and
+clattered down hill into Merstham. At Redhill, seventeen and a half miles,
+utterly exhausted, he relinquished the attempt, and retired to the railway
+station, where he lay for some time on one of the seats until he revived.
+Then, to the intense admiration and amusement of the station-master and
+his staff, he rode about the platform, dodging the pillars, and narrowly
+escaping a fall on to the rails, until the London train came in.
+
+On Wednesday, February 17th, Mayall, Rowley B. Turner, and Charles
+Spencer, all three on velocipedes, started from Trafalgar Square for
+Brighton. The party kept together until Redhill was reached, when Mayall
+took the lead, and eventually reached Brighton alone. The time occupied
+was "about" twelve hours. Being a photographer, Mayall of course caused
+himself to be photographed standing beside the instrument of torture on
+which he made that weary ride, and thus we have preserved to us the weird
+spectacle he presented; more like that of a Russian convict than an
+athletic young Englishman. A peaked cap, an attenuated frock-coat, very
+tight in the waist, and stiff and shiny leather leggings, completed a
+costume strange enough to make a modern cyclist shudder. Fearful whiskers
+and oily-looking long hair add to the strangeness of this historic figure.
+
+[Sidenote: RECORDS]
+
+With this exploit athletic competition began, and the long series of
+modern "records" on the Brighton Road were set a-going, for during the
+March of that year two once well-known amateur pedestrian members of the
+Stock Exchange, W. M. and H. J. Chinnery, _walked_ down to Brighton in 11
+hrs. 25 mins., and on April 14th C. A. Booth bettered Mayall's adventure,
+riding down on a velocipede in 9 hrs. 30 mins.
+
+Then came the Amateur Bicycle Club's race, September 19th, 1872. By that
+time not only had the word "velocipede" been discarded for "bicycle," and
+"treadles" become "pedals," but the machine itself, although in general
+appearance very much the same, had been improved in detail. The 36-inch
+front wheel had been increased to 44 inches, the wooden spokes had given
+place to wire, and strips of rubber, nailed on, replaced the iron tyres.
+Probably as a result of these refinements the winner, A. Temple, reached
+Brighton in 5 hrs, 25 mins.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MAYALL, JUNIOR, 1869. _From a contemporary
+photograph._]
+
+By 1872 the bicycle had advanced a further stage towards the giraffe-like
+altitude of the "ordinary," and already there were many clubs in
+existence. On August 16th of that year six members of the Surrey and six
+of the Middlesex Bicycle Clubs rode from Kennington Oval to Brighton and
+back, Causton captain of the Surrey, being the first into Brighton.
+Riding a 50-inch "Keen" bicycle he reeled off the fifty miles in 4 hrs. 51
+mins. The new machine was something to be reckoned with.
+
+On February 9th. 1874, a certain John Revel, junr., backed himself in
+heavy sums to ride a bicycle the whole distance from Brighton to London
+quicker than a Mr. Gregory could walk the 22-1/2 miles from Reigate to
+London. Revel was to leave Brighton at the junction of the London and
+Montpellier roads at the same time as Gregory started from a point between
+the twenty-second and twenty-third milestones. The pedestrian won,
+finishing in 3 hrs. 27 mins. 47 secs., Revel taking 5 hrs. 57 mins. for
+the whole journey.
+
+The bicycle had by this time firmly established itself. It grew more and
+more of an athletic exercise to mount the steadily growing machines, but
+once seated on them the going was easier. April 27th, 1874, found Alfred
+Howard cycling from Brighton to London in 4 hrs. 25 mins., a speed which
+works out at eleven miles an hour.
+
+In 1875 the Brighton Road seems to have been left severely alone, and 1876
+was signalised only by two of the fantastic wagers that have been
+numerously decided on this half-century of miles. In that year, we are
+told, a Mr. Frederick Thompson staked one thousand guineas that Sir John
+Lynton would not wheel a barrow from Westminster Abbey to the "Old Ship"
+at Brighton in fifteen hours; and the knight, accepting the bet, made his
+appearance airily clothed in the "shorts" of the recognised running
+costume and wheeling a barrow made of bamboo, and provided with handles
+six feet long. He won easily, but whether the loser paid the thousand
+guineas, or lodged a protest with referees, does not appear. He should
+have specified the make of barrow, for the kinds range through quite a
+number of varieties, from the coster's barrow to the navvy's and the
+gardener's. But the wager did not contemplate the fancy article with which
+Sir John Lynton made his journey. At any rate, I have my doubts about the
+genuineness of the whole affair, for, seeking this "Sir John Lynton" in
+the usual books of reference of that period, there is no such knight or
+baronet to be discovered.
+
+According to the Sussex newspapers of 1876, over fifteen thousand people
+assembled in the King's Road at Brighton to witness the finish of the
+sporting event between Major Penton and an unnamed competitor. Major
+Penton agreed to give his opponent a start of twenty-seven miles in a
+pedestrian match to Brighton, on the condition that he was allowed a
+"go-as-you-please" method, while the other man was to walk in the fair
+"heel-and-toe" style. The major won by a yard and a half in the King's
+Road, through the excitement of his competitor, who was disqualified at
+the last minute by breaking into a trot.
+
+Freakish sport was at this time decidedly in the ascendant, for the sole
+event of 1877 was the extraordinary escapade of two persons who on
+September 11th undertook to ride, dressed as clowns, on donkeys, from
+London to Croydon, seated backwards with their faces towards the animals'
+tails. From Croydon to Redhill they were to walk the three-legged
+walk--_i.e._, tied together by right and left legs--and thence to Crawley
+(surely a most appropriate place) on hands and knees. From that place to
+the end their pilgrimage was to be made walking in boots each weighted
+with 15 lb. of lead. This last ordeal speedily finished them, for they had
+failed to accomplish more than half a mile when they broke down.
+
+John Granby was another of these fantastic persons, whose proper place
+would be a lunatic ward. He essayed to walk to Brighton with 50 lb. weight
+of sand round his shoulders, in a bag, but he sank under the weight by the
+time of his arrival at Thornton Heath.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE RECORDS]
+
+In 1878 P. J. Burt bettered the performance of the Chinnerys, ten years
+earlier, by thirty-three minutes, walking to the Aquarium in 10 hrs. 52
+mins. Most authorities agree in making his starting-point the Clock Tower
+on the north side of Westminster Bridge. 52-1/4 miles, and thus we can
+figure out his speed at about five miles an hour. All the athletic world
+wondered, and when, in 1884, C. L. O'Malley (pedestrian, swimmer,
+steeplechaser, and boxer), walking against B. Nickels, junr., lowered that
+record by so much as 1 hr. 4 mins., every one thought finality in
+long-distance padding the hoof had been reached.
+
+Meanwhile, however, 1882 had witnessed another odd adventure on the way to
+Brighton. A London clubman declared, while at dinner with a friend, that
+the bare-footed tramps sometimes to be seen in the country were not to be
+pitied. Boots, he said, were after all conventions, and declared it an
+easy matter to walk, say, fifty miles without them. He challenged his
+friend, and a walk to Brighton was arranged. The friend retired on his
+blisters in twelve miles; the challenger, however, with the soles of his
+stockings long since worn away, plodded on until he fainted with pain when
+only four miles from Brighton.
+
+On April 6th. 1886, J. A. M'Intosh, of the London Athletic Club, walked to
+Brighton in 9 hrs. 25 mins. 8 secs., improving upon O'Malley's best by 22
+mins. 52 secs.
+
+The year 1888 was notable. On January 1st the horse "Ginger," in a match
+against time, was driven at a trot to Brighton in 4 hrs. 16 mins. 30
+secs., and another horse, "The Bird," trotted from Kennington Cross to
+Brighton in 4 hrs. 30 mins. On July 13th Selby drove the "Old Times" coach
+from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, to Brighton and back in ten
+minutes under eight hours, thus arousing that competition of cyclists
+which, first directed towards beating his performance, has been continued
+to the present day.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Selby's drive was very widely chronicled. The elaborate reports and
+extensive preliminary arrangements compare oddly with the early sporting
+events undertaken on the spur of the moment and recorded only in meagre,
+unilluminating paragraphs. What would we not give for a report of the
+Prince of Wales's ride in 1784, so elaborated.
+
+A great drive, and a great coachman, worthily carrying on the good old
+traditions of the road. It has, however, been already pointed out that
+neither on his outward journey (3 hrs. 56 mins.), nor on the return (3
+hrs. 54 mins.), did he quite equal the record of the "Criterion" coach,
+which on February 4th, 1834, took the King's Speech from London to
+Brighton in 3 hrs. 40 mins.
+
+Selby did not live long to enjoy the world-wide repute his great drive
+gained him. He died, only forty-four years of age, at the end of the same
+year that saw this splendid feat.
+
+Selby's memorable drive put cyclists upon their mettle, but not at once
+was any determined attempt made to better it. The dwarf rear-driving
+"safety" bicycle, the "Rover," which, introduced in 1885, set the existing
+pattern, was not yet perfected, and cyclists still rode solid or cushion
+tyres, instead of the now universal pneumatic kind.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CYCLISTS]
+
+It was, therefore, not until August, 1889, that after several unsuccessful
+attempts had been made to better the coach-time on that double journey of
+108 miles, a team of four cyclists--E. J. Willis, G. L. Morris, C. W.
+Schafer, and S. Walker, members of the Polytechnic Cycling Club--did that
+distance in 7 hrs. 36 mins. 19-2/5 secs.; or 13 mins. 40-3/5 secs. less;
+and even then the feat was accomplished only by the four cyclists dividing
+the journey between them into four relays. Two other teams, on as many
+separate occasions, reduced the figures by a few minutes, and M. A.
+Holbein and P. C. Wilson singly made unsuccessful attempts.
+
+It was left to F. W. Shorland, a very young rider, to be the first of a
+series of single-handed breakers of the coaching time. He accomplished the
+feat in June, 1890, upon a pneumatic-tyred "Geared Facile" safety, and
+reduced the time to 7 hrs. 19 mins., being himself beaten on July 23rd by
+S. F. Edge, riding a cushion-tyred safety. Edge put the time at 7 hrs. 2
+mins. 50 secs., and, in addition, first beat Selby's outward journey, the
+times being--coach, 3 hrs. 36 mins.; cycle, 3 hrs. 18 mins. 25 secs. Then
+came yet another stalwart, C. A. Smith, who on September 3rd of the same
+year beat Edge by 10 mins. 40 secs. Even a tricyclist--E. P.
+Moorhouse--essayed the feat on September 30th, but failed, his time being
+8 hrs. 9 mins. 24 secs.
+
+To the adventitious aid of pacemakers, fresh and fresh again, to stir the
+record-breaker's flagging energies, much of this success was at first due;
+but at the present day those times have been exceeded on many unpaced
+rides.
+
+Selby's drive had the effect of creating a new and arbitrary point of
+departure for record-making, and "Hatchett's" has thus somewhat confused
+the issues with the times and distances associated with Westminster
+Bridge.
+
+The year 1891 was a blank, so far as cycling was concerned, but on March
+20th an early Stock Exchange pedestrian to walk to Brighton set out to
+cover the distance between Hatchett's and the "Old Ship" in 11 hrs. 15
+mins. This was E. H. Cuthbertson, who backed himself to equal the
+Chinnerys' performance of 1869. Out of this undertaking arose the
+additional and subsidiary match between Cuthbertson and another Stock
+Exchange member, H. K. Paxton, as to which should quickest walk between
+Hatchett's and the "Greyhound," Croydon. Paxton, a figure of
+Brobdingnagian proportions, 6 ft. 4 in. in height, and scaling 17 stone,
+received a time allowance of 23 minutes. Both aspirants went into three
+weeks' severe training, and elaborate arrangements were made for
+attendance, timing, and refreshment on the road. Paxton, urged to renewed
+efforts in the ultimate yards by the strains of a more or less German
+band, which seeing the competitors approach, played "See the Conquering
+Hero Comes,"[5] won the match to Croydon by 1 min. 18 secs., but did not
+stop here, continuing with Cuthbertson to Brighton. Although Cuthbertson
+won his wager, and walked down in 10 hrs. 6 mins. 18 secs. (9 hrs. 55
+mins. 34 secs, from Westminster) and won several heavy sums by this
+performance, he did not equal that of McIntosh in 1886. The old-timer,
+deducting a proportionate time for the difference between the
+finishing-points, the Aquarium and the "Old Ship," was still half an hour
+to the good.
+
+The next four years were exclusively cyclists' years. On June 1st, 1892,
+S. F. Edge made a great effort to regain the record that had been wrested
+from him by C. A. Smith in 1890, and did indeed win it back, but only by
+the fractional margin of 1 min. 3 secs., and only held that advantage for
+three months, Edward Dance, in the last of three separate attempts,
+succeeding on September 6th in lowering Edge's time, but only by 2 mins. 6
+secs. Then three days later, R. C. Nesbit made a "record" for the high
+"ordinary" bicycle, of 7 hrs. 42 mins. 50 secs., the last appearance of
+the now extraordinary "ordinary" on this stage.
+
+The course was from 1893 considerably varied, the Road Record Association
+being of opinion that as the original great object--the breaking of the
+coach time--had been long since attained, there was no need to maintain
+the Piccadilly end, or the Cuckfield route. The course selected,
+therefore, became from Hyde Park Corner to the Aquarium at Brighton, by
+way of Hickstead and Bolney. On September 12th of this year Edge tried for
+and again recaptured this keenly-contested prize, this time by the
+respectable margin of 35 mins. 13 secs., only to have it snatched away on
+September 17th by A. E. Knight, who knocked off 3 mins. 19 secs. Again, in
+another couple of days, the figures were revised, C. A. Smith, on one of
+the few occasions on which he deserted the tricycle for the two-wheeler,
+accomplishing the double journey in 6 hrs. 6 mins. 46 secs. On the 22nd of
+the same busy month Edge for the fourth and last time took the record, on
+this occasion by the margin of 14 mins. 16 secs. The road then knew him no
+more as a record-breaking cyclist, and his achievement lasted--not days,
+but hours, for on the _same day_ Dance lowered it by the infinitesimal
+fraction of 12 seconds. On October 4th W. W. Robertson set up a tricycle
+record of 7 hrs. 24 mins. 2 secs. for the double journey, and then a
+crowded year ended.
+
+The much-worried records of the Brighton Road came in for another turn in
+1894, W. R. Toft, on June 11th, reducing the tricycle time, and C. G.
+Wridgway on September 12th lowering that for the bicycle. This year was
+also remarkable for the appearance of women speed cyclists, setting up
+records of their own, Mrs. Noble cycling to Brighton and back in 8 hrs. 9
+mins., followed on September 20th by Miss Reynolds in 7 hrs. 48 mins. 46
+secs., and on September 22nd by Miss White in 42 mins. shorter time.
+
+The season of 1895 was not very eventful, with the ride by A. A. Chase in
+5 hrs. 34 mins. 58 secs.; 34 secs. better than the previous best, and the
+lowering by J. Parsley of the tricycle record by over an hour; but it was
+notable for an almost incredible eccentricity, that of cycling backwards
+to Brighton. This feat was accomplished by J. H. Herbert in November, as
+an advertising sensation on behalf of the inventor of a new machine
+exhibited at the Stanley Show. He rode facing the hind wheel and standing
+on the pedals. Punctures, mud, rain, and wind delayed him, but he reached
+Brighton in 7 hrs. 45 mins.
+
+On June 26th, 1896, E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood established a
+tandem-cycle record of 5 hrs. 37 mins. 34 secs., demolished September
+15th; while on July 15th C. G. Wridgway regained his lost single record,
+beating Chase's figures by 12 mins. 25 secs. In this year W. Franks, a
+professional pedestrian in his forty-fifth year, beat all earlier walks to
+Brighton, eclipsing McIntosh's walk of 1886 by 18 mins. 18 secs. But, far
+above all other considerations, 1896 was notable for the legalising of
+motor-cars. On Motor-Day, November 14th, a great number of automobiles
+were to go in procession--not a race--from Westminster to Brighton. Most
+of them broke down, but a 6 h.-p. Bollee car (a three-wheeled variety now
+obsolete) made a record journey in 2 hrs. 55 mins.
+
+The year 1897 opened on April 10th with the open London to Brighton walk
+of the Polytechnic Harriers. The start was made from Regent Street, but
+time was taken separately, from that point and from Westminster Clock
+Tower. There were thirty-seven starters. E. Knott, of the Hairdressers'
+A.C.--a quaint touch--finished in 8 hrs. 56 mins. 44 secs. Thirty-one of
+the competitors finished well within twelve hours.
+
+On May 4th W. J. Neason, cycling to Brighton and back, made the distance
+in 5 hrs. 19 mins. 39 secs., and on July 12th Miss M. Foster beat Miss
+White's 1894 record by 20 mins. 37 secs., while on the following day
+Richard Palmer made a better run than Neason's by 9 mins. 45 secs. Neason,
+however, got his own again in the following September, by 3 mins. 3 secs.,
+and on October 27th P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford improved the tandem
+record of 1896 by 25 mins. 41 secs.
+
+By this time the thoroughly artificial character of most of these later
+cycling records had become glaringly apparent. It was not only seen in the
+fact that their heavy cost was largely borne by cycle and tyre-makers, who
+found advertisement in them, but it was obvious also in the arbitrary
+selection of the starting-points, by which a record run to Brighton and
+back might be begun at Purley, run to Brighton, then back to Purley, and
+thence to London and back again, with any variation that might suit the
+day and the rider. It was evident, too, that the growing elaboration of
+pace-making, first by relays of riders and latterly by motors, had
+reduced the thing to an absurdity in which there was no credit and--worse
+still--no advertisement. Then, therefore, a new order of things was set
+agoing, and the era of unpaced records was begun.
+
+On September 27th, 1898, E. J. Steel established a London to Brighton and
+back unpaced cycling record of 6 hrs. 23 mins. 55 secs.; and on the same
+day the new unpaced tricycle record of 8 hrs. 11 mins. 10 secs. for the
+double journey was set up by P. F. A. Gomme.
+
+The South London Harriers' open "go-as-you-please" walking or running
+match of May 6th, 1899, attracted the attention of the athletic world in a
+very marked degree. Cyclists, in especial, were in evidence, to make the
+pace, to judge, to sponge down the competitors or to refresh them by the
+wayside. The start was made from Big Ben soon after seven o'clock in the
+morning, when fourteen aspirants, all clad in the regulation running
+costumes and sweaters, went forth to win the modern equivalent of the
+victor's laurelled crown in the ancient Olympian games. F. D. Randall, who
+won, got away from his most dangerous opponent on the approach to Redhill,
+and, increasing that advantage to a hundred yards' lead when in the midst
+of the town, was not afterwards seriously challenged. He finished in the
+splendid time of 6 hrs. 58 mins. 18 secs. Saward, the second, completed it
+in 7 hrs. 17 mins. 50 secs., and the veteran E. Ion Pool in another 4
+mins.
+
+As if to show the superiority of the cycle over mere pedestrian efforts,
+H. Green on June 30th cycled from London to Brighton and back, unpaced, in
+5 hrs. 50 mins. 23 secs., and on August 12th, 1902, reduced his own record
+by 20 mins. 1 sec. Meanwhile, Harry Vowles, a blind musician of Brighton,
+who had for some years made an annual walk from Brighton to London, on
+October 15th, 1900, accomplished his ambition to walk the distance in one
+day. He left Brighton at 5 a.m. and reached the Alhambra, in Leicester
+Square, at ten o'clock that night.
+
+On October 31st, 1902, the Surrey Walking Club's 104 miles contest to
+Brighton and back resulted in J. Butler winning: time, 21 hrs. 36 mins. 27
+secs., Butler performing the single journey on March 14th the following
+year in 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16 secs. For fair heel-and-toe walking, that was
+considered at the time the ultimate achievement; but it was beaten on
+April 9th, 1904, in the inter-club walk of the Blackheath and Ranelagh
+Harriers, when T. E. Hammond established the existing record of 8 hrs. 26
+mins. 57-2/5 secs.--the astonishing speed of six miles an hour.
+
+[Sidenote: STOCK-EXCHANGE WALKS]
+
+This event was preceded by the famous Stock Exchange Walk of May Day,
+1903. Every one knows the Stock Exchange to be almost as great on sport as
+it is in finance, but no one was prepared for the magnitude finally
+assumed by the match idly suggested on March 16th, during a dull hour on
+the Kaffir Market. Business had long been in a bad way, not in that market
+alone, but in the House in general. The trail of the great Boer War and
+its heritage of debt, taxation, and want of confidence lay over all
+departments, and brokers, jobbers, principals, and clerks alike were so
+heartily tired of going to "business" day after day when there was no
+business--and when there calculating how much longer they could afford
+annual subscriptions and office rent--that any relief was eagerly
+accepted. In three days twenty-five competitors had entered for the
+proposed walk to Brighton, and the House found itself not so
+poverty-stricken but that prize-money to the extent of L35, for three
+silver cups, was subscribed. And then the Press--that Press which is
+growing daily more hysterical and irresponsible--got hold of it and boomed
+it, and there was no escaping the Stock Exchange Walk. By the morning of
+March 25th, when the list was closed, there were 107 competitors entered
+and the prize-list had grown to the imposing total of three gold medals,
+valued, one at L10 10_s._ and two at L5 5_s._, with two silver cups valued
+at L10 10_s._, two at L5 5_s._, and silver commemoration medals for all
+arriving at Brighton in thirteen hours.
+
+Long before May Day the Press had worked the thing up to the semblance of
+a matter of Imperial importance, and London talked of little else. April
+13th had been at first spoken of for the event, but many of the
+competitors wanted to get into training, and in the end May Day, being an
+annual Stock Exchange holiday, was selected.
+
+There were ninety-nine starters from the Clock Tower at 6.30 on that chill
+May morning: not middle-aged stockbrokers, but chiefly young stockbrokers'
+clerks. All the papers had published particulars of the race, together
+with final weather prognostications; hawkers sold official programmes; an
+immense crowd assembled; a host of amateur photographers descended upon
+the scene, and the police kept Westminster Bridge clear. Although by no
+means to be compared with Motor-car Day, the occasion was well honoured.
+
+Advertisers had, as usual, seized the opportunity, and almost overwhelmed
+the start; and among the motor-cars and the cyclists who followed the
+competitors down the road the merits of Somebody's Whisky, and the pills,
+boots, bicycles, beef-tea, and flannels of some other bodies impudently
+obtruded.
+
+"What went ye out for to see?" The public undoubtedly expected to see a
+number of pursy, plethoric City men, attired in frock-coats and silk-hats,
+walking to Brighton. What they _did_ see was a crowd of apparently
+professional pedestrians, lightly clad in the flannels and "shorts" of
+athletics, trailing down the road, with here and there an "unattached"
+walker, such as Mr. Pringle, who, fulfilling the conditions of a wager,
+walked down in immaculate silk hat, black coat, and spats--"immaculate,"
+that is to say, at the start: as a chronicler adds, "things were rather
+different later." They were: for thirteen hours' (more or less) rain and
+mud can work vast changes. The day was, in fact, as unpleasant as well
+could be imagined, and it is said much for the sporting enthusiasm of the
+countryside that the whole length of the road to Brighton was so crowded
+with spectators that it resembled a thronged City thoroughfare.
+
+It said still more for the pluck and endurance of those who undertook the
+walk that of the ninety-nine starters no fewer than seventy-eight finished
+within the thirteen hours' limit qualifying them for the commemorative
+medal. G. D. Nicholas, the favourite, heavily backed by sportsmen, led
+from the beginning, making the pace at the rate of six miles an hour. He
+reached Streatham, six miles, in 59 mins.
+
+And then a craze for walking to Brighton set in. On June 6th the butchers
+of Smithfield Market walked, and doubtless, among the many other
+class-races, the bakers, and the candlestick-makers as well, and the
+proprietors of baked-potato cans and the roadmen, and indeed the Lord
+alone knows who not. Of the sixty butchers, who had a much more favourable
+day than the stockbrokers, the winner, H. F. Otway, covered the distance
+in 9 hrs. 21 mins. 1-4/5 secs., thus beating Broad by some 9 minutes.
+
+Whether the dairymen of London ever executed their proposed daring feat of
+walking to Brighton, each trundling an empty churn, does not appear; but
+it seems likely that many a fantastic person walked down carrying an empty
+head. A German, one Anton Hauslian, even set out on the journey pushing a
+perambulator containing his wife and six-year-old daughter; and on June
+16th an American, a Miss Florence, an eighteen-year-old music-hall
+equilibrist, started to "walk" the distance on a globe. She used for the
+purpose two globes, each made of wood covered with sheepskin, and having a
+diameter of 26 in.; one weighing 20 lb., for uphill work; the other
+weighing 75 lb., for levels and descents. Starting at an early hour on
+June 16th, and "walking" ten hours a day, she reached the Aquarium at the
+unearthly hour of 2.40 on the morning of the 21st.
+
+[Illustration: THE STOCK EXCHANGE WALK: E. F. BROAD AT HORLEY.]
+
+Those who could not rehearse the epic flights of these fifty-two miles
+walked shorter distances; and, while the craze lasted, not only did the
+"midinettes" of Paris take the walking mania severely, but the waitresses
+of various London teashops performed ten-mile wonders.
+
+[Sidenote: MORE PEDESTRIANISM]
+
+On June 20th the gigantic "go-as-you-please" walking or running match to
+Brighton organised by the _Evening News_ took place, in that dismal
+weather so generally associated, whatever the season of the year, with
+sport on the Brighton Road. Two hundred and thirty-eight competitors had
+entered, but only ninety actually faced the starter at 5 o'clock a.m. They
+were a very miscellaneous concourse of professional and amateur "peds";
+some with training and others with no discoverable athletic qualifications
+at all; some mere boys, many middle-aged, one in his fifty-second year,
+and even one octogenarian of eighty-five. Among them was a negro, F. W.
+Craig, known to the music-halls by the poetic name of the "Coffee Cooler";
+and labouring men, ostlers, and mechanics of every type were of the
+number. It was as complete a contrast from the Stock Exchange band as
+could be well imagined.
+
+The wide difference in age, and the fitness and unfitness of the many
+competitors, resulted in the race being won by the foremost while the
+rearmost were struggling fifteen miles behind. The intrepid octogenarian
+was still wearily plodding on, twenty miles from Brighton, six hours after
+the winner, Len Hurst, had reached the Aquarium in the record time--26
+mins. 18 secs. better than Randall's best of May 6th, 1899--of 6 hrs. 32
+mins. Some amazing figures were set up by the more youthful and
+incautious, who reached Croydon, 9-1/2 miles, in 54 mins., but were
+eventually worn down by those who were wise enough to save themselves for
+the later stages.
+
+In the following August Miss M. Foster repeated her ride of July 12th,
+1897, and cycled to Brighton and back, on this occasion, with
+motor-pacing, reducing her former record to 5 hrs. 33 mins. 8 secs.
+
+[Illustration: MISS M. FOSTER, PACED BY MOTOR-BICYCLE, PASSING COULSDON.]
+
+[Sidenote: PEDESTRIAN RECORDS]
+
+On November 7th the Surrey Walking Club's Brighton and back match was won
+by H. W. Horton, in 20 hrs. 31 mins. 53 secs., disposing of Butler's best
+of October 31st, 1902, by a margin of 1 hr. 4 mins. 34 secs.
+
+With 1904 a decline in Brighton Road sport set in, for it was memorable
+only for the Blackheath and Ranelagh Harriers' inter-club walk to
+Brighton of April 9th. But that was indeed a memorable event, for T. E.
+Hammond then abolished Butler's remaining record, of 8 hrs. 43 mins. 16
+secs. for the single trip, and replaced it by his own of 8 hrs. 26 mins.
+57-2/5 secs.
+
+Even the efforts of cyclists seem to for a time have spent themselves, for
+1905 witnessed only the new unpaced record made July 19th by R. Shirley,
+who cycled there and back in 5 hrs. 22 mins. 5 secs., thus shearing off a
+mere 8 mins. 5 secs. from Green's performance of so long as three years
+before. What the future may have in store none may be so hardy as to
+prophesy. Finality has a way of ever receding into the infinite, and when
+the unpaced cyclist shall have beaten the paced record of 5 hrs. 6 mins.
+42 secs. made by Neason in 1897, other new fields will arise to be
+conquered. And let no one say that speed and sport on the Brighton Road
+have finally declined, for, as we have seen, it is abundantly easy in
+these days for a popular Press to "call spirits from the vasty deep," and
+arouse sporting enthusiasm almost to frenzy, whenever and wherever it is
+"worth the while."
+
+Thus, in pedestrianism, other new times have since been set up. On
+September 22nd, 1906, J. Butler, in the Polytechnic Harriers' Open Walk,
+finished to Brighton in 8 hrs. 23 mins. 27 secs. On June 22nd, 1907,
+Hammond performed the double journey, London to Brighton and back, in 18
+hrs. 13 mins. 37 secs. And on May 1st, 1909, he regained the single
+journey record by his performance of 8 hrs. 18 mins. 18 secs. On September
+4th of the same year H. L. Ross further reduced the figures to 8 hrs. 11
+mins. 14 secs.
+
+
+BRIGHTON ROAD RECORDS.
+
+RIDING, DRIVING, CYCLING, RUNNING, WALKING, ETC.
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |     Date.     |                                             | Time.  |
+  |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
+  |               |                                             |h. m. s.|
+  |1784, July 25. |Prince of Wales rode horseback from the      |        |
+  |               |  "Pavilion," Brighton, to Carlton House,    |        |
+  |               |   London, and returned                      |10  0  0|
+  |               |       Going                                 | 4 30  0|
+  |               |       Returning                             | 5 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Aug. 21.   |Prince of Wales drove phaeton, three horses   |        |
+  |               |  tandem, from Carlton House to "Pavilion"   | 4 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1809, May.     |Cornet Webster of the 10th Light Dragoons,   |        |
+  |               |  rode horseback from Brighton to            |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge                         | 3 20  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1831, June 19. |The "Red Rover" coach, leaving the "Elephant |        |
+  |               |  and Castle" at 4 p.m., reached Brighton    |        |
+  |               |  8.21                                       | 4 21  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1833, Oct.     |Walter Hancock's steam-carriage "Autopsy"    |        |
+  |               |  performed the distance between Stratford   |        |
+  |               |  and Brighton                               | 8 30  0|
+  |               |      (Halted 3 hours on road. Actual        |        |
+  |               |       running time, 5 hrs. 30 mins.)        |        |
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1834, Feb. 4.  |"Criterion" coach, London to Brighton        | 3 40  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1868, Mar. 20. |Benjamin B. Trench walked Kennington Church  |        |
+  |               |  to Brighton and back (100 miles)           |23  0  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1869, Feb. 17. |John Mayall, jun., rode a velocipede from    |        |
+  |               |  Trafalgar Square to Brighton in "about"    |12  0  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Mar. 6.    |W. M. and H. J. Chinnery walked from         |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge to Brighton             |11 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  April 14.  |C. A. Booth rode a velocipede London to      |        |
+  |               |  Brighton                                   | 9 30  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1872, Sept. 19.|Amateur Bicycle Club's race, London to       |        |
+  |               |  Brighton; won by A. Temple, riding a 44-in.|        |
+  |               |  wheel                                      | 5 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1873, Aug. 16. |Six members of the Surrey B.C. and six of the|        |
+  |               |  Middlesex B.C. rode to Brighton and back,  |        |
+  |               |  starting from Kennington Oval at 6.1 a.m.  |        |
+  |               |  Causton, captain of the Surrey, reached the|        |
+  |               |  "Albion," Brighton, in 4 hrs. 51 mins.,    |        |
+  |               |  riding a 50-in. Keen bicycle. W. Wood      |        |
+  |               |  (Middlesex) did the 100 miles              |11  8  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1874, April 27.|A. Howard cycled Brighton to London          | 4 25  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1878, --.      |P. J. Burt walked from Westminster Clock     |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                |10 52  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1884, --.      |C. L. O'Malley walked from Westminster Clock |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                | 9 48  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1886, April 10.|J. A. McIntosh walked from Westminster Clock |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Aquarium, Brighton                | 9 25  8|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1888, Jan. 1.  |Horse "Ginger" trotted to Brighton           | 4 16 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1888, July 13. |James Selby drove "Old Times" coach from     |        |
+  |               |  "Hatchett's," Piccadilly, to "Old Ship,"   |        |
+  |               |  Brighton, and back                         | 7 50  0|
+  |               |      Going                                  | 3 56  0|
+  |               |      Returning                              | 3 54  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1889, Aug. 10. |Team of four cyclists--E. J. Willis, G. L.   |        |
+  |               |  Morris, C. W. Schafer, and S. Walker--     |        |
+  |               |  dividing the distance between them, cycled |        |
+  |               |  from "Hatchett's," Piccadilly, to "Old     |        |
+  |               |  Ship," Brighton, and back                  | 7 36 19|
+  |               |                                             |    -2/5|
+  |1890, Mar. 30. |Another team--J. F. Shute, T. W. Girling, R. |        |
+  |               |  Wilson, and A. E. Griffin--reduced first   |        |
+  |               |  team's time by 4 mins. 19-2/5 secs.        | 7 32  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  April 13.  |Another team--E. R. and W. Scantlebury, W. W.|        |
+  |               |  Arnott, and J. Blair                       | 7 25 15|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  June.      |F. W. Shorland cycled from "Hatchett's" to   |        |
+  |               |  "Old Ship" and back ("Geared Facile"       |        |
+  |               |  bicycle, pneumatic tyres)                  | 7 19  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  July 23.   |S. F. Edge cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old  |        |
+  |               |  Ship" and back (safety bicycle, cushion    |        |
+  |               |  tyres)                                     | 7  2 50|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 3.   |C. A. Smith cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old |        |
+  |               |  Ship" (safety bicycle, pneumatic tyres) and|        |
+  |               |  back                                       | 6 52 10|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  30.    |E. P. Moorhouse cycled (tricycle) from       |        |
+  |               |  "Hatchett's" to "Old Ship"                 | 8  9 24|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1891, Mar. 20. |E. H. Cuthbertson walked from "Hatchett's" to|        |
+  |               |  "Old Ship"                                 |10  6 18|
+  |               |      From Westminster Clock Tower           | 9 55 34|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1892, June 1.  |S. F. Edge cycled from "Hatchett's" to "Old  |        |
+  |               |  Ship" and back                             | 6 51  7|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 6.   |E. Dance cycled to Brighton and back         | 6 49  1|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  9.     |R. C. Nesbit cycled (high bicycle) to        |        |
+  |               |  Brighton and back                          | 7 42 50|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1893, Sept. 12.|S. F. Edge cycled to Brighton and back       | 6 13 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  17.  |A. E. Knight      "            "             | 6 10 29|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  19.  |C. A. Smith       "            "             | 6  6 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "  22.  |S. F. Edge        "            "             | 5 52 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "       |E. Dance          "            "             | 5 52 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct. 4.  |W. W. Robertson (tricycle)     "             | 7 24  2|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1894, June 11. |W. R. Toft        "            "             | 6 21 30|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 12.  |C. G. Wridgway    "            "             | 5 35 32|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  20.    |Miss Reynolds cycled to Brighton and back    | 7 48 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "   "  22.    |Miss White cycled to Brighton and back       | 7  6 46|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1895, Sept. 26.|A. A. Chase, Brighton and back               | 5 34 58|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Oct. 17.   |J. Parsley (tricycle)                        | 6 18 28|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Nov.       |J. H. Herbert cycled backwards to Brighton   | 7 45  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1896, June 26. |E. D. Smith and C. A. Greenwood (tandem)     | 5 37 34|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  --.        |W. Franks walked from south side of          |        |
+  |               |  Westminster Bridge to Brighton             | 9  7  7|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  July 15.   |C. G. Wridgway                               | 5 22 33|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Sept. 15.  |H. Green and W. Nelson (tandem)              | 5 20 35|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "  Nov.  14.  |"Motor-car Day." A 6 h.p. Bollee motor       |        |
+  |               |  started from Hotel Metropole, London, at   |        |
+  |               |  11.30 a.m., and reached Brighton at 2.25   |        |
+  |               |  p.m.                                       | 2 55  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1897, April 10.|Polytechnic Harriers' walk, Westminster Clock|        |
+  |               |  Tower to Brighton. E. Knott                | 8 56 44|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    May    4.|W. J. Neason cycled to Brighton and back     | 5 19 39|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    July  12.|Miss M. Foster cycled from Hyde Park Corner  |        |
+  |               |  to Brighton and back                       | 6 45  9|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "    13.|Richard Palmer cycled to Brighton and back   | 5  9 45|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Sept. 11.|W. J. Neason cycled from London to Brighton  |        |
+  |               |  and back                                   | 5  6 42|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct.  27.|P. Wheelock and G. J. Fulford (tandem)       | 4 54 54|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |L. Franks and G. Franks (tandem safety)      | 5  0 56|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1898, Sept. 27.|E. J. Steel cycled London to Brighton and    |        |
+  |               |  back (unpaced)                             | 6 23 55|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "     "     " |P. F. A. Gomme, London to Brighton and back  |        |
+  |               |  (tricycle, unpaced)                        | 8 11 10|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1899, May    6.|South London Harriers' "go-as-you-please"    |        |
+  |               |  running match, Westminster Clock Tower to  |        |
+  |               |  Brighton. Won by F. D. Randall             | 6 58 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    June  30.|H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  back (unpaced)                             | 5 50 23|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1902, Aug.  21.|H. Green cycled from London to Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  Brighton and back (unpaced)                | 5 30 22|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Oct.  31.|Surrey Walking Club's match, Westminster     |        |
+  |               |  Clock Tower to Brighton and back. J. Butler|21 36 27|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1903, Mar.  14.|J. Butler walked from Westminster Clock Tower|        |
+  |               |  to Brighton                                | 8 43 16|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    May    1.|Stock Exchange Walk, won by E. F. Broad      | 9 30  1|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    June  20.|Running Match, Westminster Clock Tower to    |        |
+  |               |  Tower to Brighton. Won by Len Hurst        | 6 32  0|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Aug.     |Miss M. Foster cycled to Brighton and back   |        |
+  |               |  (motor-paced)                              | 5 33  8|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Nov.   7.|Surrey Walking Club's match, Westminster     |        |
+  |               |  Clock Tower to Brighton and back. H. W.    |        |
+  |               |  Horton                                     |20 31 53|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |P. Wheelock and G. Fulford (tandem safety)   | 4 54 54|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |A. C. Gray and H. L. Dixon (tandem safety,   |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5 17 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1904, April  9.|Blackheath and Ranelagh Harriers, inter-club |        |
+  |               |  walk, Westminster Clock Tower to Brighton. |        |
+  |               |  T. E. Hammond                              | 8 26 57|
+  |               |                                             |    -2/5|
+  |1905, July  19.|R. Shirley, Polytechnic C.C., cycled Brighton|        |
+  |               |  and back (unpaced)                         | 5 22  5|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1905, --.      |J. Parsley (tricycle)                        | 6 18 28|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |H. S. Price (tricycle, unpaced)              | 6 53  5|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1906, Sept. 22.|J. Butler walked to Brighton                 | 8 23 27|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |S. C. Paget and M. R. Mott (tandem safety,   |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5  9 20|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |H. Green (safety cycle, unpaced)             | 5 20 22|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |R. Shirley      "          "                 | 5 15 29|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |L. Dralce (tricycle, unpaced)                | 6 24 56|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |J. D. Daymond   "       "                    | 6 19 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1907, June  22.|T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton and back    |18 13 37|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |C. and A. Richards (tandem-safety, unpaced)  | 5  5 25|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |G. H. Briault and E. Ward (tandem-safety,    |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 4 53 48|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1908, --.      |G. H. Briault (tricycle, unpaced)            | 6  8 24|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1909, May    1.|T. E. Hammond walked to Brighton             | 8 18 18|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    Sept.  4.|H. L. Ross      "          "                 | 8 11 14|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |Harry Green cycled Brighton and back         |        |
+  |               |  (unpaced)                                  | 5 12 14|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1910, --.      |L. S. Leake and G. H. Spencer (tandem        |        |
+  |               |  tricycle, unpaced)                         | 5 59 51|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1912, June  19.|Fredk. H. Grubb cycled (paced) Brighton and  |        |
+  |               |  back                                       | 5  9 41|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  | "    --.      |E. H. and S. Hulbert (tandem tricycle,       |        |
+  |               |  unpaced)                                   | 5 42 21|
+  |               |                                             |        |
+  |1913, --.      |H. G. Cook (tricycle, unpaced)               | 6  7  4|
+  |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
+  |NOTE.--The fastest L. B. & S. C. R. train, the 5 p.m. Pulman |        |
+  |Express from London Bridge, reaches Brighton (51 miles) at   |        |
+  |6.0 p.m.                                                     | 1  0  0|
+  +-------------------------------------------------------------+--------+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+We may now, somewhat belatedly, after recounting these varied annals of
+the way to Brighton, start along the road itself, coming from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge to Kennington.
+
+No one scanning the grey vista of the Kennington Road would, on sight,
+accuse Kennington of owning a past; but, as a sheer matter of fact, it is
+an historic place. It is the "Chenintun" of Domesday Book, and the
+Cyningtun or Koeningtun--the King's town--of an even earlier time. It was
+indeed a royal manor belonging to Canute, and the site of the palace where
+his son, Hardicanute, died, mad drunk, in 1042. Edward the Third annexed
+it to his Duchy of Cornwall, and even yet, after the vicissitudes of nine
+hundred years, the Prince of Wales, as Duke of Cornwall, owns house
+property here. Kennington Park, too, has its own sombre romance, for it
+was an open common until 1851, and a favourite place of execution for
+Surrey malefactors. Here the minor prisoners among the Scottish rebels
+captured by the Duke of Cumberland in the '45 were executed, those of
+greater consideration being beheaded on Tower Hill. It is an odd
+coincidence that, among the lesser titles of "Butcher Cumberland" himself
+was that of Earl of Kennington.
+
+At this junction of roads, where the Kennington Road, the Kennington Park
+Road, the Camberwell New Road, and the Brixton Road, all pool their
+traffic, there stood, in times not so far removed but that some yet living
+can remember it, Kennington Gate, an important turnpike at any time, and
+one of very great traffic on Derby Day, when, I fear, the pikeman was
+freely bilked of his due at the hands of sportsmen, noble and ignoble.
+There is a view of this gate on such a day drawn by James Pollard, and
+published in 1839, which gives a very good idea of the amount of traffic
+and, incidentally, of the curious costumes of the period. You shall also
+find in the "Comic Almanack" for 1837 an illustration by George
+Cruikshank of this same place, one would say, although it is not mentioned
+by name, in which is an immense jostling crowd anxious to pass through,
+while the pikeman, having apparently been "cheeked" by the occupants of a
+passing vehicle, is vulgarly engaged, I grieve to state, in "taking a
+sight" at them. That is to say, he has, according to the poet, "Put his
+thumb unto his nose and spread his fingers out."
+
+[Sidenote: KENNINGTON GATE]
+
+Kennington Gate was swept away, with other purely Metropolitan turnpike
+gates, October 31st. 1865, and is now to be found in the yard of Clare's
+Depository at the crest of Brixton Hill. It was one of nine that barred
+this route from London to the sea in 1826. The others were at South End,
+Croydon: Foxley Hatch, or Purley Gate, which stood near Purley Corner, by
+the twelfth milestone, until 1853; and Frenches, 19 miles 4 furlongs from
+London--that is to say, just before you come into Redhill streets. Leaving
+Redhill behind, another gate spanned the road at Salfords, below Earlswood
+Common, while others were situated at Horley, Ansty Cross, Stonepound, one
+mile short of Clayton; and at Preston, afterwards removed to Patcham.[6]
+
+Not the most charitable person could lay his hand upon his heart and
+declare, honestly, that the church of St. Mark, Kennington, which stands
+at this beginning of the Brixton Road, is other than extremely hideous.
+Fortunately, its pagan architecture, once fondly thought to revive the
+glories of old Greece, is largely screened from sight by the thriving
+trees of its churchyard, and so nervous wayfarers are spared something of
+the inevitable shock.
+
+The story of Kennington Church does not take us very far back, down the
+dim alleys of history, for it was built so recently as the first quarter
+of the nineteenth century, when it was thought possible to emulate the
+marble beauties of the Parthenon and other triumphs of classic
+architecture in plebeian brick and stone. Those materials, however, and
+the architects themselves, were found to be somewhat inferior to their
+models, and eventually the public taste became so outraged with the
+appalling ugliness of the pagan temples arising on every hand that at
+length the Gothic revival of the mid-nineteenth century set in.
+
+But if its history is not long, its site has a horrid kind of historic
+association, for the building stands on what was a portion of Kennington
+Common, the exact spot where the unhappy Scottish rebels were executed in
+1746, and where Jerry Abershawe, the highwayman, was hanged in 1795. The
+remains of the gibbet on which the bodies of some of his fellow knights of
+the road were exposed were actually found when the foundations for the
+church were being dug out.
+
+The origin of Kennington Church, like that of Brixton, is so singular that
+it is very well worth while to inquire into it. It was a direct outcome of
+the Napoleonic wars. England had been so long engaged in those European
+struggles, and was so wearied and impoverished by them, that Parliament
+could think of nothing better than to celebrate the peace of 1815 by
+voting a million and a half of money to the clergy as a "thank-offering."
+This sum took the shape of a church-building fund. Wages were low, work
+was scarce, and bread was so dear that the people were starving. That good
+paternal Parliament, therefore, when they asked for bread gave them stone
+and brick, and performed the heroic feat of picking their impoverished
+pockets as well. It was accomplished in this wise. There was that Lucky
+Bag, the million and a half sterling of the Thanksgiving Fund; but it
+could not be dipped into unless you gave an equal sum to that you took
+out, and then expended the whole on building churches. And yet it has been
+said that Parliament has no sense of the ridiculous! Why, it was the most
+stupendous of practical jokes!
+
+[Illustration: KENNINGTON GATE: DERBY DAY, 1839. _From an engraving after
+J. Pollard._]
+
+[Sidenote: HALF-PRICE CHURCHES]
+
+Lambeth was at that time a suburban and a greatly expanding parish, and
+was one of those that accepted this offer, and took what came eventually
+to be called Half Price Churches. It gave a large order, and took four:
+those of Kennington, Waterloo, Brixton, and Norwood, all ferociously
+hideous, and costing L15,000 apiece; the Government granting one moiety
+and the other being raised by a parish rate on all, without distinction of
+creed. The Government also remitted the usual taxes on the building
+materials, and in some instances further helped the people to rejoice by
+imposing a compulsory rate of twopence in the pound, to pay the rector or
+vicar. All this did more to weaken the Church of England than even a
+century of scandalous inefficiency:
+
+  Abuse a man, and he may brook it,
+  But keep your hands out of his breeches pocket.
+
+The major part of these grievances was adjusted by the Act of 1868,
+abolishing all Church rates, excepting those levied under special Acts;
+but the eyesores will not be redressed until the temples are pulled down
+and rebuilt.
+
+Brixton appears in Domesday as "Brixistan," which in later ages became
+"Brixtow"; and the Brixton Road follows the line of a Roman way on which
+Streatham stood. Both the Domesday name of Brixton and the name of
+Streatham are significant, indicating their position on the stones and the
+street, _i.e._, the paved thoroughfare alluded to in "Brixton causeway,"
+marked on old suburban maps.
+
+The Brixton Road, even down to the middle of the nineteenth century, was a
+pretty place. On the left-hand side, as you made for Streatham, ran the
+river Effra. It was a clear and sparkling stream, twelve feet wide,
+which, rising at Norwood, eventually found its way into the Thames at
+Vauxhall. Its course ran where the front gardens of the houses on that
+side of the road are now situated, and at that period every house was
+fronted by its little bridge; but the unfortunate Effra has long since
+been thrust underground in a sewer-pipe, and the sole reminiscence of it
+to be seen is the name of Effra Road, beside Brixton Church.
+
+The "White Horse" public-house, where the omnibuses halt, was in those
+times a lonely inn, neighboured only by a farm; but with the dawn of the
+nineteenth century a new suburb began to spring up, where Angell Road now
+stands, called "Angell Town," and then the houses of Brixton Road began to
+arise. It is curious to note that the last of the old watchmen's wooden
+boxes was standing in front of Claremont Lodge, 168, Brixton Road, until
+about 1875.
+
+There is little in the Lower Brixton Road that is reminiscent of the
+Regency, but a very great deal of early suburban comfort evident in the
+old mansions of the Rise and the Hill, built in days when by a "suburban
+villa" you did not mean a cheap house in a cheap suburban road, but--to
+speak in the language of auctioneers--a "commodious residence situate in
+its own ornamental grounds, replete with every convenience," or something
+in that eloquent style. For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon
+Marche, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the
+continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of
+semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in
+the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the
+gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel
+drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! Solid
+comfort resides within those four-square walls, and reclines in saddle-bag
+armchairs, thinking complacently of big bank balances, all derived from
+wholesale dealing in the City, and now enjoyed, and added to, in the third
+and fourth generations; for these solid houses were built a century ago,
+or thereby. They are not beautiful, nor indeed are they ugly. Built of
+good yellow stock brick, grown decorously neutral-tinted with age, and
+sparsely relieved, it may be, with stucco pilasters picked out with raised
+medallions or plaster wreaths. Supremely unimaginative, admirably free
+from tawdry affectations of Art, unquestionably permanent--and large. They
+are, indeed, of such spaciousness and commodious quality that an
+auctioneer who all his life long has been ascribing those characteristics
+to houses which do not possess them feels a vast despair possess his soul
+when it falls to his lot to professionally describe such an one. And yet I
+think few ever realise the scale of these villas and their grounds until
+the houses themselves are pulled down and the grounds laid out as building
+plots for what we now understand by "villas"--a fate that has lately
+befallen a few. When it is realised that the site lately occupied by one
+of these staid mansions and its surrounding gardens will presently harbour
+thirty or forty little modern houses--why, then an unwonted respect is
+felt for it and its kind.
+
+[Sidenote: BRIXTON HILL]
+
+Brixton Hill brings one up out of the valley of the Thames. The hideous
+church of Brixton stands on the crest of it, with the hulking monument of
+the Budd family, all scarabei and classic emblems of death, prominent at
+the angle of the roads--a _memento mori_, ever since the twenties, for
+travellers down the road.
+
+Among the mouldering tombstones, whose neglect proves that grief, as well
+as joy and everything else human, passes, is one in shape like a
+biscuit-box, to John Miles Hine, who died, aged seventeen, in 1824. A
+verse, plainly to be read by the wayfarer along the pavements of Brixton
+Hill, accompanies name and date:
+
+  O Miles! the modest, learned and sincere
+  Will sigh for thee, whose ashes slumber here;
+  The youthful bard will pluck a floweret pale
+  From this sad turf whene'er he reads the tale,
+  That one so young and lovely--died--and last,
+  When the sun's vigour warms, or tempests rave,
+  Shall come in summer's bloom and winter's blast,
+  A Mother, to weep o'er this hopeless grave.
+
+An inscription on another side shows us that her weeping was ended in
+1837, when she died, aged fifty-two; and now there is no turf and no
+flowerets, and the tomb is neglected, and the cats make their midnight
+assignations on it when the electric trams have gone to bed and Brixton
+snores.
+
+On the right hand side, at the summit of Brixton Hill, there still remains
+an old windmill. It is in Cornwall Road. True, the sails of its tall black
+tower are gone, and the wind-power that drove the machinery is now
+replaced by a gas-engine; but in the old building corn is yet ground, as
+it has been since in 1816 John Ashby, the Quaker grandfather of the
+present millers, Messrs. Joshua & Bernard Ashby, built that tower. Here,
+unexpectedly, amid typical modern suburban developments, you enter an
+old-world yard, with barns, stables and cottage, pretty much the same as
+they were over a hundred years ago, when the mill first arose on this
+hill-top, and London seemed far away.
+
+And so to Streatham, once rightly "Streatham, Surrey," in the postal
+address, but now merely "Streatham, S.W." A world of significance lies in
+that apparently simple change, which means that it is now in the London
+Postal District. Even so early as 1850 we read in Brayley's "History of
+Surrey" that "the village of Streatham is formed by an almost continuous
+range of villas and other respectable dwellings." Respectable! I should
+think so, indeed! Conceive the almost impious inadequacy of calling the
+Streatham Hill mansions of City magnates "respectable." As well might one
+style the Alps "pretty"!
+
+But this spot was not always of such respectability, for about 1730 there
+stood a gibbet on Streatham Hill, by the fifth milestone, and from it hung
+in chains the body of one "Jack Gutteridge," a highwayman duly executed
+for robbing and murdering a gentleman's servant here. The place was long
+afterwards known as "Jack Gutteridge's Gate."
+
+[Illustration: Streatham Common]
+
+Streatham--the Ham (that is to say the home, or the hamlet) on the
+Street--emphatically in those Saxon times when it first obtained its name,
+_the_ Street--was probably so named to distinguish it from some other
+settlement situated in the mud. In that era, when hard roads were few, a
+paved way could be, and very often was, made to stand godfather to a
+place, and thus we find so many Streatleys, Stratfords, Strattons,
+Streets, and Stroods on the map. Those "streets" were Roman roads. The
+particular "street" on which Streatham stood seems to have been a Roman
+road which came up from the coast by Clayton, St. John's Common, Godstone,
+and Caterham, a branch of the road to _Portus Adurni_, the Old Shoreham of
+to-day. Portions of it were discovered in 1780, on St. John's Common, when
+the Brighton turnpike road through that place was under construction. It
+was from 18 to 20 feet wide, and composed of a bed of flints, grouted
+together, 8 inches thick. Narrowly avoiding Croydon, it reached Streatham
+by way of Waddon (where there is one of the many "Cold Harbours"
+associated so intimately with Roman roads) and joined the present Brighton
+Road midway between Croydon and Thornton Heath Pond, at what used to be
+Broad Green.
+
+[Sidenote: DOCTOR JOHNSON]
+
+There are no Roman remains at twentieth-century Streatham, and there are
+very few even of the eighteenth century. The suburbs have absorbed the
+village, and Dr. Johnson himself and Thrale Place are only memories. "All
+flesh is grass," said the Preacher, and therefore Dr. Johnson, whose bulky
+figure we may put at the equivalent of a truss of hay, is of course but an
+historic name; but bricks and mortar last immeasurably longer than those
+who rear them, and his haunts might have been still extant but for the
+tragical nearness of Streatham to London and that "ripeness" of land for
+building which has abolished many a pleasant and an historic spot.
+
+But while the broad Common of Streatham remains unfenced, the place will
+keep a vestige of its old-time character of roadside village. A good deal
+earlier than Dr. Samuel Johnson's visits to Streatham and Thrale Place,
+the village had quite a rosy chance of becoming another Tunbridge Wells or
+Cheltenham, for in the early years of the eighteenth century it became
+known as a Spa, and real and imaginary invalids flocked to drink the
+disagreeable waters issuing from what quaint old Aubrey calls the "sower
+and weeping ground" by the Common. Whether the waters were too nasty, or
+not nasty enough, does not appear, but it is certain that the rivalry of
+Streatham to those other Spas was neither long-continued nor serious.
+
+Streatham is content to forget its waters, but the memory of Dr. Johnson
+will not be dropped, for if it were, no one knows to what quarter
+Streatham could turn for any history or traditions at all. As it is, the
+mind's-eye picture is cherished of that grumbling, unwieldy figure coming
+down from London to Thrale's house, to be lionised and indulged, and in
+return to give Mrs. Thrale a reflected glory. The lion had the manners of
+a bear, and, like a dancing bear, performed clumsy evolutions for buns and
+cakes; but he had a heart as tender as a child's, and a simple vanity as
+engaging, beneath that unpromising exterior and those pompous ways. Wig
+awry and singed in front from his short-sighted porings over the midnight
+oil, clothes shabby, and linen that journeyed only at long intervals to
+the wash-tub, his was not the aspect of a carpet-knight, and those he met
+at the literary-artistic tea-table of Thrale Place murmured that he was an
+"original."
+
+He met a brilliant company over those teacups: Reynolds and Garrick, and
+Fanny Burney--the readiest hand at the "management" of one so difficult
+and intractable--and many lesser lights, and partook there of innumerable
+cups of tea, dispensed at that hospitable board by Mrs. Thrale. That
+historic teapot is still extant, and has a capacity of three quarts;
+specially chosen, doubtless, in view of the Doctor's visits. Ye gods! what
+floods of Bohea were consumed within that house in Thrale Park!
+
+They even seated the studious Johnson on horseback and took him hunting;
+and, strange to say, he does not merely seem to have only just saved
+himself from falling off, but is said to have acquitted himself as well as
+any country squire on that notable occasion.
+
+But all things have an end, and the day was to come when Johnson should
+bid a last farewell to Streatham. He had broken with the widowed Mrs.
+Thrale on the subject of her marriage with Piozzi, and he could no longer
+bear to see the place. So, in one endearing touch of sentiment, he gave it
+good-bye, as his diary records:
+
+"Sunday, went to church at Streatham. _Templo valedixi cum osculo._" Thus,
+kissing the old porch of St. Leonard's, the lexicographer departed with
+heavy heart. Two years later he died.
+
+This Church of St. Leonard still contains the Latin epitaph he wrote to
+commemorate the easy virtues of his friend Henry Thrale, who died in 1781,
+but alterations and restorations have changed almost all else. It is, in
+truth, a dreadful example, externally, of the Early Compo Period, and
+internally of the Late Churchwarden, or Galleried, Style.
+
+It is curious to note the learned Doctor's indignation when asked to write
+an English epitaph for setting up in Westminster Abbey. The great
+authority on the English language, the compiler of that monumental
+dictionary, exclaimed that he would not desecrate its walls with an
+inscription in his own tongue. Thus the pedant!
+
+There is one Latin epitaph at Streatham that reads curiously. It is on a
+tablet by Richard Westmacott to Frederick Howard, who _in pugna
+Waterlooensi occiso_. The battle of Waterloo looks strange in that garb.
+
+But Latin is frequent here, and free. The tablets that jostle one another
+down the aisles are abounding in that tongue, and the little brass to an
+ecclesiastic, nailed upon the woodwork toward the west end of the north
+aisle, is not free from it. So the shade of the Doctor, if ever it
+revisits these scenes, might well be satisfied with the quantity, although
+it is not inconceivable he would cavil at the quality.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Thrale Park has gone the way of all suburban estates in these days of the
+speculative builder. The house was pulled down so long ago as 1863, and
+its lands laid out in building plots. Lysons, writing of its demesne in
+1792, says that "Adjoining the house is an enclosure of about 100 acres,
+surrounded with a shrubbery and gravel-walk of nearly two miles in
+circumference." Trim villas and a suburban church now occupy the spot, and
+the memory of the house itself has faded away. Save for its size, the
+house made no brave show, being merely one of many hundreds of mansions
+built in the seventeenth century, of a debased classic type.
+
+[Sidenote: GIBBETS BY THE WAY]
+
+Streatham Common and Thornton Heath were still, in Johnston's time, and
+indeed for long after, good places for the highwaymen and for the Dark
+Lurk of the less picturesque, but infinitely more dangerous, foot-pad.
+Law-abiding people did not care to travel them after nightfall, and when
+compelled to do so went escorted and armed. Ogilby, in his "Britannia" of
+1675, showed the pictures of a gallows on the summit of Brixton Hill and
+another (a very large one) at Thornton Heath; and according to a later
+editor, who issued an "Ogilby Improv'd" in 1731, they still decorated the
+wayside. They were no doubt retained for some time longer, in the hope of
+affording a warning to those who robbed upon the highway.
+
+At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and
+eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used
+to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where
+the extra large and permanent gallows stood, like a football goal, at
+what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden
+and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later
+years been persuaded to play.
+
+Midway between Norbury and Thornton Heath stands, or stood, Norbury Hall,
+the delightful park and mansion where J. W. Hobbs, ex-Mayor of Croydon,
+resided until he was convicted of forgery at the Central Criminal Court in
+March, 1893, and sentenced to twelve years penal servitude. "T 180," as he
+was known when a convict, was released on licence on January 18th, 1898,
+and returned to his country-seat. Meanwhile, the Congregational Chapel he
+had presented to that sect was paid for, to remove the stigma of being his
+gift; just as the Communion-service presented to St. Paul's Cathedral by
+the company-promoting Hooley was returned when his bankruptcy scandalised
+commercial circles.
+
+The estate of Norbury Hall has since T 180's release become "ripe for
+building," and the mansion, the lake, and the beautiful grounds have been
+"developed" away. Soon all memory of the romantic spot will have faded.
+
+Prominently over the sea of roofs in the valley, and above the white
+hillside villas of Sydenham and Gipsy Hill, rise the towers and the long
+body of the Crystal Palace; that bane and obsession of most view-points in
+South London, "for ever spoiling the view in all its compass," as Ruskin
+truly says in "Praeterita."
+
+I do not like the Crystal Palace. The atmosphere of the building is
+stuffily reminiscent of half a century's stale teas and buttered toast,
+and the views of it, near or distant, are very creepily and awfully like
+the dreadful engravings after Martin, the painter of such scriptural
+scenes as "Belshazzar's Feast" and horribly-conceived apocalyptic subjects
+from Revelation.
+
+[Illustration: STREATHAM.]
+
+At Thornton Heath--where there has been nothing in the nature of a heath
+for at least eighty years past--the electric trams of Croydon begin, and
+take you through North End into and through Croydon town, along a
+continuous line of houses. "Broad Green" once stood by the wayside, but
+nowadays the sole trace of it is the street called Broad Green Avenue. At
+Thornton Heath, however, there is just one little vestige of the past
+left, in "Colliers' Water Lane." The old farmhouse of Colliers' Water,
+reputed haunt of the phenomenally ubiquitous Dick Turpin, was demolished
+in 1897. Turpin probably never knew it, and the secret staircase it
+possessed was no doubt intended to hide fugitives much more respectable
+than highwaymen.
+
+The name of that lane is now the only reminder of the time when Croydon
+was a veritable Black Country.
+
+The "colliers of Croydon," whose black trade gave such employment to
+seventeenth-century wits, had no connection with what our ancestors of
+very recent times still called "sea-coal"--that is to say, coal shipped
+from Newcastle and brought round by water, in days before railways. The
+Croydon coal was charcoal, made from the wood of the dense forests that
+once overspread the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and was supplied very
+largely to London from the fifteenth century down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth.
+
+Grimes, the collier of Croydon, first made the Croydon colliers famous. We
+are not to suppose that his name was really Grimes: that was probably a
+part of the wit already hinted at. He was a master collier, who in the
+time of Edward the Sixth made charcoal on so large a scale that the smoke
+and the grime of it became offensive to his Grace the Archbishop of
+Canterbury in his palace of Croydon, who made an unsuccessful attempt to
+abolish the kilns. I think we may sympathise with his Grace and his soiled
+lawn-sleeves.
+
+We first find Croydon mentioned in A.D. 962, when it was "Crogdoene." In
+Domesday Book it is "Croindene." Whether the name means "crooked vale,"
+"chalk vale," or "town of the cross," I will not pretend to say, and he
+would be rash who did. The ancient history of the place is bound up with
+the archbishopric of Canterbury, for the manor was given by the Conqueror
+to Lanfranc, who is supposed to have been the founder of the palace, which
+still stands next the parish church, and was a residence of the Primate
+until 1750.
+
+[Sidenote: GROWTH OF CROYDON]
+
+By that time Croydon had begun to grow, and not only had the old buildings
+become inconvenient, but a population surrounded those dignified
+churchmen, who, after the manner of archbishops, retired to a more
+secluded home. They not only flew from contact with the people, whose
+spiritual needs might surely have anchored them to the spot, but by the
+promotion of the Enclosure Act of 1797 they robbed the people of the
+far-spreading common lands in the parish. Croydon by that time numbered
+between five and six thousand inhabitants, and was thought quite a
+considerable place. A hundred and ten years have added a hundred and
+twenty-five thousand more to that considerable population, and still
+Croydon grows.
+
+In those times the woodlands closely encircled the little town. In 1620
+they came up to the parish church and the palace, which was then said to
+be a "very obscure and darke place." Archbishop Abbot "expounded" it by
+felling the timber. It was in those times surrounded by a moat, fed by the
+headspring of the Wandle; but the moat is gone, and the first few yards of
+the Wandle are nowadays made to flow underground.
+
+The explorer of the Brighton Road who comes, by whatever method of
+progression he pleases, into Croydon, finds its busy centre at what is
+still called North End. The name survives long after the circumstances
+that conferred it have vanished into the limbo of forgotten things. It
+_was_ the North end of the town, and here, on what was then a country
+site, the good Archbishop Whitgift founded his Hospital of the Holy
+Trinity in 1593. It still stands, although sorely threatened in these last
+few years; but it is now the one quiet and unassuming spot in a narrow, a
+busy, and a noisy street. Fronting the main thoroughfare, it blocks
+"improvement"; occupying a site grown so valuable, its destruction, and
+the sale of the ground for building upon, would immensely profit the good
+Whitgift's noble charity. What would Whitgift himself do? When we have
+advanced still farther into the Unknown and can communicate with the sane
+among the departed, instead of the idiot spirits who can do nothing better
+than levitate chairs and tables, rap silly messages, and play
+monkey-tricks--when we can ring up whom we please at the Paradise or the
+Inferno Exchange, as the case may be, we shall be able to ascertain the
+will of Pious Benefactors, and much bitterness will cease out of the land.
+
+Meanwhile the old building for the time survives, and its name, "The
+Hospital of the Holy Trinity," inscribed high up on the wall, seems
+strange and reverend amid the showy shop-signs of a latter-day commerce.
+
+There is, of course, no reason why, if widening is to take place, the
+_opposite_ side of the street should not be set back, and, indeed, any one
+standing in that street will readily perceive it to be that side which
+should be demolished, to make a straighter and a broader thoroughfare. It
+is therefore quite evident that the agitation for demolishing the Hospital
+is unreal and artificial, and only prompted by greed for the site.
+
+It is a solitude amid the throng, remarkable in the collegiate character
+of its walls of dark and aged red brick, pierced only by the doorway and
+as jealously as possible by the few mullioned windows. Once within the
+outer portal, ornamented overhead with the arms of the See of Canterbury
+and eloquent with the motto _Qui dat pauperi non indigebit_, the stranger
+has entered from a striving into a calm and equable world. It is, as old
+Aubrey quaintly puts it, "a handsome edifice, erected in the manner of a
+college, by the Right Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, late
+Archbishop of Canterbury." The dainty quadrangle, set about with grass
+lawns and bright flowers, is formed on three sides by tiny houses of two
+floors, where dwell the poor brothers and sisters of this old foundation:
+twenty brothers and sixteen sisters, who, beside lodging, receive each L40
+and L30 a year respectively. They enjoy all the advantages of the Hospital
+so long as of good behaviour, but "obstinate heresye, sorcerye, any kinde
+of charmmynge, or witchcrafte" are punished by the statutes with
+expulsion.
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING HALL, WHITGIFT HOSPITAL.]
+
+The fourth side of the quadrangle is occupied by the Hall, the Warden's
+rooms, and the Chapel, all in very much the same condition as at their
+building. The old oak table in the Hall is dated 1614, and much of the
+stained glass is of sixteenth century date.
+
+But it is in the Warden's rooms, above, that the eye is feasted with old
+woodwork, ancient panelling, black with lapse of time, quaint muniment
+chests, curious records, and the like. These were the rooms specially
+reserved for his personal use during his lifetime by the pious Archbishop
+Whitgift.
+
+Here is a case exhibiting the original titles to the lands on which the
+Hospital is built, and with which it is endowed; formidable sheets of
+parchment, bearing many seals, and, what does duty for one, a gold angel
+of Edward VI.
+
+These are ideal rooms; rooms which delight with their unspoiled
+sixteenth-century air. The sun streams through the western windows over
+their deep embrasures, lighting up so finely the darksome woodwork into
+patches of brilliance that there must be those who envy the Warden his
+lodging, so perfect a survival of more spacious days.
+
+[Illustration: The CHAPEL, Hospital of the Holy Trinity.]
+
+A little chapel duly completes the Hospital, and here is not pomp of
+carving nor vanity of blazoning, for the good Archbishop, mindful of
+economy, would none of these. The seats and benches are contemporary with
+the building, and are rough-hewn. On the western wall hangs the founder's
+portrait, black-framed and mellow, rescued from the boys of the Whitgift
+schools ere quite destroyed, and on the other walls are the portrait of a
+lady, supposed to be the Archbishop's niece, and a ghastly representation
+of Death as a skeleton digging a grave. But all these things are seen but
+dimly, for the light is very feeble.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The High Street of Croydon really _is_ high, for it occupies a ridge and
+looks down on the right hand on the Old Town and the valley of the Wandle,
+or "Wandel." The centre of Croydon has, in fact, been removed from down
+below, where the church and palace first arose, on the line of the old
+Roman road, to this ridge, where within the historic period the High
+Street was only a bridle-path avoiding the little town in the valley.
+
+The High Street, incidentally the Brighton Road as well, is nowadays a
+very modern and commercial-looking thoroughfare, and owes that appearance,
+and its comparative width, to the works effected under the Croydon
+Improvement Act of 1890. Already Croydon, given a Mayor and Town Council
+in 1883, had grown so greatly that the narrow street was incapable of
+accommodating the traffic; while the low-lying, and in other senses low,
+quarter of Market Street and Middle Row offended the dignity and
+self-respect of the new-born Corporation. The Town Hall stood at that time
+in the High Street: a curious example of bastard classic architecture,
+built in 1808. Near by was the "Greyhound," an old coaching and posting
+inn, with one of those picturesque gallows signs straddling across the
+street, of which those of the "George" at Crawley and the "Greyhound" at
+Sutton are surviving examples. That of the "Cock" at Sutton disappeared in
+1898, and the similar signs of the "Crown," opposite the Whitgift
+Hospital, and of the "King's Arms" vanished many years ago.
+
+The "Greyhound" was the principal inn of Croydon in the old times. The
+first mention of it is found in 1563, the parish register of that year
+containing the entry, "Nicholas Vode (Wood) the son of the good wyfe of
+the grewond was buryed the xxix day of January." The voluminous John
+Taylor mentions it in 1624 as one of the two Croydon inns, and it was the
+headquarters of General Fairfax in 1645, when Cromwell vehemently disputed
+with him under its roof on the conduct of the campaign, urging more severe
+measures.
+
+Following upon the alteration, the "Greyhound" was rebuilt. Its gallows
+sign disappeared at the same time, when a curious point arose respecting
+the post supporting it on the opposite pavement. Erected in the easy-going
+times when such a matter was nothing more than a little friendly and
+neighbourly concession, the square foot of ground it occupied had by lapse
+of time become freehold property, and as such it was duly scheduled and
+purchased by the Improvements Committee. A sum of L400 was claimed for
+freehold and loss of advertisement, and eventually L350 was paid.
+
+[Sidenote: RUSKIN]
+
+I suppose there can be no two opinions about the slums cleared away under
+that Improvement Act; but they were very picturesque, if also very dirty
+and tumble-down: all nodding gables, cobblestoned roads, and winding ways.
+I sorrow, in the artistic way, for those slums, and in the literary way
+for a house swept away at the same time, sentimentally associated with
+John Ruskin. It was the inn kept by his maternal grandmother, and is
+referred to in "Praeterita":
+
+"... Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more than
+that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the 'Old King's Head' in
+Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint
+her Simone Memmi's 'King's Head' for a sign." And he adds: "Meantime my
+aunt had remained in Croydon and married a baker.... My aunt lived in the
+little house still standing--or which was so four months ago[7]--the
+fashionablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop,
+in the second story" (_sic_).
+
+There are slums at Croydon even now, for Croydon is a highly civilised
+progressive place, and slums and slum populations are the exclusive
+products of civilisation and progress, and a very severe indictment of
+them. But they are new slums; those poverty-stricken districts created _ad
+hoc_, which seem more hopeless than the ancient purlieus, and appear to be
+as inevitable to and as inseparable from modern great towns as a hem to a
+handkerchief.
+
+The old quarter of Croydon began to fall into the slum condition at about
+the period of Croydon's first expansion, when the [Greek: ohi polloi]
+impinged too closely upon the archiepiscopal precincts, and their Graces,
+neglecting their obvious duty in the manner customary to Graces spiritual
+and temporal, retired to the congenial privacy of Addington.
+
+Here stands the magnificent parish church of Croydon; its noble tower of
+the Perpendicular period, its body of the same style, but a restoration,
+after the melancholy havoc caused by the great fire of 1867. It is one of
+the few really satisfactory works of Sir Gilbert Scott; successful because
+he was obliged to forget his own particular fads and to reproduce exactly
+what had been destroyed. Another marvellous replica is the elaborate
+monument of Archbishop Whitgift, copied exactly from pictures of that
+utterly destroyed in the fire. Archbishop Sheldon's monument, however,
+still remains in its mutilated condition, with a scarred and horrible face
+calculated to afflict the nervous and to be remembered in their dreams.
+
+The vicars of Croydon have in the long past been a varied kind. The
+Reverend William Clewer, who held the living from 1660 until 1684, when he
+was ejected, was a "smiter," an extortioner, and a criminal; but Roland
+Phillips, a predecessor by some two hundred years, was something of a
+seer. Preaching in 1497, he declared that "we" (the Roman Catholics) "must
+root out printing, or printing will root out us." Already, in the twenty
+years of its existence, it had undermined superstition, and was presently
+to root out the priests, even as he foresaw.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ARCHBISHOP'S PALACE]
+
+Unquestionably the sight best worth seeing in Croydon is that next-door
+neighbour of the church, the Archbishop's Palace. Comparatively few are
+those who see it, because it is just a little way off the road and is
+private property and shown only by favour and courtesy. When the
+Archbishops deserted the place it was sold under the Act of Parliament of
+1780 and became the factory of a calico-printer and a laundry. Some
+portions were demolished, the moat was filled up, the "minnows and the
+springs of Wandel" of which Ruskin speaks, were moved on, and mean little
+streets quartered the ground immediately adjoining. But, although all
+those facts are very grim and grey, it remains true that the old palace is
+a place very well worth seeing.
+
+It was again sold in 1887, and purchased by the Duke of Newcastle, who
+made it over to the so-called "Kilburn Sisters," who maintain it as a
+girls' school. I do not know, nor seek to inquire, by what right, or with
+what object, the "Sisters" who conduct the school affect the dress of
+Roman Catholics, while professing the tenets of the Church of England; but
+under their rule the historic building has been well treated, and the
+chapel and other portions repaired, with every care for their interesting
+antiquities, under the eyes of expert and jealous anti-restorers. The
+Great Hall, chief feature of the place, still maintains its fifteenth
+century chestnut hammerbeam roof and armorial corbels; the Long Gallery,
+where Queen Elizabeth danced, the State bedroom where she slept, the Guard
+Room, quarters of the Archbishops' bodyguard, are all existing; and the
+Chapel, with oaken bench-ends bearing the sculptured arms of Laud, of
+Juxon, and others, and the Archbishops' pew, has lately been brought back
+to decent condition. Here, too, is the exquisite oaken gallery at the
+western end, known as "Queen Elizabeth's Pew."
+
+That imperious queen and indefatigable tourist paid several visits to
+Croydon Palace, and her characteristic insolence and freedom of speech
+were let loose upon the unoffending wife of Archbishop Parker when she
+took her leave. "Madam," she said, "I may not call you; mistress I am
+ashamed to call you; and so I know not what to call you; but, however, I
+thank you." It seems evident that the daughter of Henry the Eighth had,
+despite her Protestantism, an historic preference for a celibate clergy.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Down amid what remains of the old town is a street oddly named "Pump
+Pail." Its strange name causes many a visit of curiosity, but it is a
+common-place street, and contains neither pail nor pump, and nothing more
+romantic than a tin tabernacle. But this, it appears, is not an instance
+of things not being what they seem, for in the good old days before the
+modern water-supply, one of the parish pumps stood here, and from it a
+woman supplied a house-to-house delivery of water in pails. The
+explanation seems too obvious to be true, and sure enough, a variant kicks
+the "pail" over, and tells us that it is properly Pump Pale, the Place of
+the Pump, "pale" being an ancient word, much used in old law-books to
+indicate a district, limit of jurisdiction, and so forth.
+
+[Sidenote: JABEZ BALFOUR]
+
+The modern side of all these things is best exemplified by the beautiful
+Town Hall which Croydon has provided for itself, in place of the ugly old
+building, demolished in 1893. It is a noble building, and stands on a site
+worthy of it, with broad approaches that permit good views, without which
+the best of buildings is designed in vain. It marks the starting point of
+the history of modern Croydon, and is a far cry from the old building of
+the bygone Local Board days, when the traffic of the High Street was
+regulated--or supposed to be regulated--by the Beadle, and the rates were
+low, and Croydon was a country town, and everything was dull and humdrum.
+It was a little unfortunate that the first Mayor of Croydon and Liberal
+Member of Parliament for Tamworth, that highly imaginative financier Jabez
+Spencer Balfour, should have been wanted by the police, a fugitive from
+justice brought back from the Argentine, and a criminal convicted of fraud
+as a company promoter; but accidents will happen, and the Town Council did
+its best, by turning his portrait face to the wall, and by subsequently
+(as it is reported) losing it. He was sent in 1895, a little belatedly, to
+fourteen years' penal servitude, and the victims of his "Liberator" frauds
+went into the workhouse for the most part, or died. He ceased to be V 460
+on release on licence, and became again Jabez Spencer Balfour, and so
+died, obscurely.
+
+The Liberal Party in the Government had, over Jabez Balfour, one of its
+several narrow escapes from complete moral ruin; for Balfour was on
+extremely friendly terms with the members of Gladstone's ministry,
+1892-94, and was within an ace of being given a Cabinet post. Let us pause
+to consider the odd affinity between Jabez Balfour and Trebitsch Lincoln
+and Liberal politics.
+
+The Town Hall--ahem! Municipal Buildings--stands on the site of the
+disused and abolished Central Croydon station, and the neighbourhood of it
+is glimpsed afar off by the fine tower, 170 ft. in height. All the
+departments of the Corporation are housed under one roof, including the
+fine Public Library and its beautiful feature, the Braithwaite Hall. The
+Town Council is housed in that municipal splendour without which no civic
+body can nowadays deliberate in comfort, and even the vestibule is worthy
+of a palace. I take the following "official" description of it.
+
+[Illustration: CROYDON TOWN HALL.]
+
+"On either side of the vestibule are rooms for Porter and telephone.
+Beyond are the hall and principal staircase, the shafts of the columns
+and the pilasters of which are of a Spanish marble, a sort of jasper,
+called Rose d'Andalusia; the bases and skirtings are of grand antique. The
+capitals, architrave, cornices, handrails, etc., are of red Verona
+marble; the balusters, wall-lining and frieze of the entablature of
+alabaster, and the dado of the ground floor is gris-rouge marble. The
+flooring is of Roman mosaic of various marbles, purposely kept simple in
+design and quiet in colouring. One of the windows has the arms of H.R.H.
+the Prince of Wales, and the other the Borough arms, in stained glass.
+Above the dado at the first floor level the walls are painted a delicate
+green tint, relieved by a powdering of C's and Civic Crowns. The doors and
+their surroundings are of walnut wood."
+
+[Sidenote: THE RATEPAYER'S HOME]
+
+Very beautiful indeed. Now let us see the home of one of Croydon's poorer
+ratepayers:
+
+On one side of the hall are two rooms, called respectively the parlour and
+the kitchen. Beyond is the scullery. The walls of the staircase are
+covered with a sort of plaster called stucco, but closely resembling
+road-scrapings: the skirtings are of pitch-pine, the balusters of the same
+material. The floorings are of deal. The roof lets in the rain. One of the
+windows is broken and stuffed with rags, the others are cracked. The walls
+are stained a delicate green tint relieved by a film of blue mould, owing
+to lack of a damp-course. None of the windows close properly, the flues
+smoke into the rooms instead of out of the chimney-pots, the doors jam,
+and the surroundings are wretched beyond description.
+
+Electric tramways now conduct along the Brighton Road to the uttermost end
+of the great modern borough of Croydon, at Purley Corner. Here the
+explorer begins to perceive, despite the densely packed houses, that he is
+in that "Croydene," or crooked vale, of Saxon times from which, we are
+told, Croydon takes its name; and he can see also that nature, and not
+man, ordained in the first instance the position and direction of what is
+now the road to Brighton, in the bottom, alongside where the Bourne once
+flowed, inside the fence of Haling Park. It is, in fact, the site of a
+prehistoric track which led the most easy ways across the bleak downs,
+severally through Smitham Bottom and Caterham.
+
+Beside that stream ran from 1805 until about 1840 the rails of that
+long-forgotten pioneer of railways in these parts, the "Surrey Iron
+Railway." This was a primitive line constructed for the purpose of
+affording cheap and quick transport for coals, bricks, and other heavy
+goods, originally between Wandsworth and Croydon, but extended in 1805 to
+Merstham, where quarries of limestone and beds of Fuller's earth are
+situated.
+
+This railway was the outcome of a project first mooted in 1799, for a
+canal from Wandsworth to Croydon. It was abandoned because of the injury
+that might have been caused to the wharves and factories already existing
+numerously along the course of the Wandle, and a railway substituted. The
+Act of Parliament was obtained in 1800, and the line constructed to
+Croydon in the following year, at a cost of about L27,000. It was not a
+railway in the modern sense, and the haulage was by horses, who dragged
+the clumsy waggons along at the rate of about four miles an hour. The
+rails, fixed upon stone blocks, were quite different from those of modern
+railways or tramways, being just lengths of angle-iron into which the
+wheels of the waggons fitted: |_ _|. Thus, in contradistinction from all
+other railway or tramway practice, the flanges were not on the wheels, but
+on the rails themselves. The very frugal object of this was to enable the
+waggons to travel on ordinary roads, if necessity arose.
+
+From the point where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at Wandsworth,
+along the levels past Earlsfield and Garratt, the railway went in double
+track; continuing by Merton Abbey, Mitcham (where the present lane called
+"Tramway Path" marks its course) and across Mitcham Common into Croydon by
+way of what is now called Church Street, but was then known as "Iron
+Road." Thence along Southbridge Lane and the course of the Bourne, it was
+continued to Purley, whence it climbed Smitham Bottom and ran along the
+left-hand side of the Brighton Road in a cutting now partly obliterated by
+the deeper cutting of the South Eastern line. The ideas of those old
+projectors were magnificent, for they cherished a scheme of extending to
+Portsmouth; but the enterprise was never a financial success, and that
+dream was not realised. Nearly all traces of the old railway are
+obliterated.
+
+The marvel-mongers who derive the name of Waddon from "Woden" find that
+Haling comes from the Anglo-Saxon "halig," or holy; and therefrom have
+built up an imaginary picture of ancient heathen rites celebrated here.
+The best we can say for those theories is that they _may_ be correct or
+they may not. Of evidence there is, of course, none whatever; and
+certainly it is to be feared that the inhabitants of Croydon care not one
+rap about it; nor even know--or knowing, are not impressed--that here, in
+1624, died that great Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham.
+It is much more real to them that the tramcars are twopence all the way.
+
+At the beginning of Haling Park, immediately beyond the "Swan and
+Sugarloaf," the Croydon toll-gate barred the road until 1865. Beyond it,
+all was open country. It is a very different tale to-day, now the stark
+chalk downs of Haling and Smitham are being covered with houses, and the
+once-familiar great white scar of Haling Chalk Pit is being screened
+behind newly raised roofs and chimney-pots.
+
+The beginning of Purley is marked by a number of prominent public-houses,
+testifying to the magnificent thirst of the new suburb. You come past the
+"Swan and Sugarloaf" to the "Windsor Castle," the "Purley Arms," the "Red
+Deer," and the "Royal Oak"; and just beyond, round the corner, is the "Red
+Lion." At the "Royal Oak" a very disreputable and stony road goes off to
+the left. It looks like, and is, a derelict highway: once the main road to
+Godstone and East Grinstead, but now ending obscurely in a miserable
+modern settlement near the newly built station of Purley Oaks, so called
+by the Brighton Railway Company to distinguish it from the older Purley
+station--ex "Caterham Junction"--of the South Eastern line.
+
+It was here, at Purley House, or Purley Bury as it is properly styled,
+close by the few poor scrubby and battered remains of the once noble
+woodland of Purley Oaks, that John Horne Tooke, contentious partisan and
+stolid begetter of seditious tracts, lived--when, indeed, he was not
+detained within the four walls of some prison for political offences.
+
+[Sidenote: HORNE TOOKE]
+
+Tooke, whose real name was Horne, was born in 1736, the son of a
+poulterer. At twenty-four years of age he became a clergyman, and was
+appointed to the living of New Brentford, which he held until 1773, when,
+clearly seeing how grievously he had missed his vocation, he studied for
+the Bar. Thereafter his life was one long series of battles, hotly
+contested in Parliament, in newspapers, books and pamphlets, and on
+platforms. He was in general a wrong-headed, as well as a hot-headed,
+politician; but he was sane enough to oppose the American War when King
+and Government were so mad as to provoke and continue it. Describing the
+Americans killed and wounded by the troops at Lexington and Concord as
+"murdered," he was the victim of a Government prosecution for libel, and
+was imprisoned for twelve months and fined L200. He took--no! that will
+not do--he "assumed" the name of Tooke in 1782, in compliment to his
+friend William Tooke, who then resided here in this delightful old country
+house of Purley. The idea seems to have been for them to live together in
+amity, and that William Tooke, the elder of the two, should leave his
+property to his friend. But quarrels arose long before that, and Horne at
+his friend's death received only L500, while other disputed points arose,
+leading to bitter law-suits.
+
+In 1801 he was Member of Parliament for Old Sarum; but how he reconciled
+the representation of that rottenest of rotten boroughs with his
+profession of reforming Whig does not appear.
+
+He was a many-sided man, of fierce energies and strong prejudices, but a
+scholar. While his political pamphlets are forgotten, his "[Greek: EPEA
+PTEROENTA]; or, the Diversions of Purley," which is not really a book of
+sports, is still remembered for its philological learning. It is a
+disquisition on the affinities of prepositions, the relationships of
+conjunctions, and the intimacies of other parts of speech. His other
+diversions appear to have been less reputable, for he was the father of
+one illegitimate son and two daughters.
+
+His intention was to have been buried in the grounds of Purley House, but
+when he died, in 1812, at Wimbledon, his mortal coil was laid to rest at
+Ealing; and so it chanced that the vault he had constructed in his garden
+remained, after all, untenanted, with the unfinished epitaph:
+
+  JOHN HORNE TOOKE,
+  Late Proprietor and now Occupier
+  of this spot,
+  was born in June 1736,
+  Died in
+  Aged    years,
+  Contented and Grateful.
+
+Purley House is still standing, though considerably altered, and presents
+few features reminiscent of the eighteenth-century politician, and fewer
+still of the Puritan Bradshaw, the regicide, who once resided here. It
+stands in the midst of tall elms, and looks as far removed from political
+dissensions as may well be imagined, its trim lawn and trellised walls
+overgrown in summer by a tangle of greenery.
+
+But suburban expansion has at last reached Tooke's rural retreat from
+political strife, and the estate is now "developed," with roads driven
+through and streets of villas planned, leaving only the old house and some
+few acres of gardens around it.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+Returning to the main road, we come, just before reaching Godstone Corner,
+to the site of the now-forgotten Foxley Hatch, a turnpike-gate, which
+stood at this point until 1865. Paying toll here "cleared," or made the
+traveller free of, the gates and bars to Merstham, on the main road, and
+as far as Wray Common, on the Reigate route, as the following copy of a
+contemporary turnpike-ticket, shows:
+
+  .............................
+  .     Foxley Hatch Gate     .
+  .              R            .
+  .clears Wray common, Gatton,.
+  .  Merstham and Hooley lane .
+  .        gates and bars     .
+  .............................
+
+"To Riddlesdown, the prettiest spot in Surrey," says a sign-post on the
+left hand. It is not true that it is the prettiest place, but, of course
+(as the proverb truly says), "every eye forms its own beauty," and
+Riddlesdown is a Beanfeasters' Paradise, where tea-gardens, swings, and I
+know not what temerarious delights await the tripper who accepts the
+invitation, boldly displayed, "Up the Steps for Home Comforts."
+
+[Sidenote: MILESTONES]
+
+Here an aged milestone, in addition, proclaims it to be "XIII Miles from
+the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1743," and "XII Miles From Westminster
+Bridge." This is, doubtless, one of the stones referred to in the _London
+Evening Post_ of September 10th, 1743, which says: "On Wednesday they
+began to measure the Croydon Road from the Standard in Cornhill and stake
+the places for erecting milestones, the inhabitants of Croydon having
+subscribed for 13, which 'tis thought will be carried on by the Gentlemen
+of Sussex."
+
+I know nothing of what those Sussex gentlemen did, but that the milestones
+_were_ carried on is evident enough to all who care to explore the old
+Brighton Road through Godstone, up Tilburstow Hill, and so on to East
+Grinstead, Uckfield, and Lewes, where this fine bold series, dated 1744,
+is continued. What, however, has become of the series so liberally
+provided in 1743 by the "inhabitants of Croydon"? What indeed? Only this
+one, the thirteenth, remains; the other twelve, marking the distance from
+the "Standard" in Cornhill, in addition to Westminster Bridge, have been
+spirited away, and their places have been taken by others, themselves old,
+but chiefly marking the mileage from Whitehall and the Royal Exchange.
+
+We all know that the Brighton Road is nowadays measured from the south
+side of Westminster Bridge, but it is not generally known--nor possibly
+known to one person in every ten thousand of those who consider they have
+worn the Brighton Road threadbare--that it was measured from "Westminster
+Bridge" before ever there was a bridge. No bridge existed across the
+Thames anywhere between London Bridge and Putney until November 10th,
+1750, when Westminster Bridge, after being for many years under
+construction, was opened, superseding the ancient ferry which from time
+immemorial had plied between Horseferry Stairs, Westminster, and Stangate
+on the Surrey side, the site of the present Lambeth Bridge. The way to
+Brighton (and to all southern roads) lay across London Bridge.
+
+The old stones dated 1743 and 1744, and giving the mileage from the
+bridge, were thus displaying that "intelligent anticipation of events"
+which is, perhaps, even more laudable in statesmen than in
+milestones--and as rarely found.
+
+To this day no man knoweth the distance between London and Brighton.
+Convention fixes the distance as 51-1/2 miles from the south side of
+Westminster Bridge to the Aquarium, by the classic route; but where is he
+who has chained it in proper surveyorly manner? The milestones themselves
+are a curious miscellany, and form an interesting study. They might
+profitably have been made a subject for the learned deliberations of the
+Pickwick Club, but the opportunity was unfortunately missed, and the world
+is doubtless the loser of much curious lore.
+
+Where is he who can, offhand, describe the first milestone on the Brighton
+Road, and tell where it stands? It ought to be no difficult matter, for
+miles are not--or should not be--elastic.
+
+It stands, in fact, on the kerb at the right-hand side of Kennington Road,
+between Nos. 230 and 232, just short of Lower Kennington Lane, and is a
+poor old battered relic, set anglewise and with the top broken away,
+bearing the legend, in what was once bold lettering:
+
+  . . . . . . . MILE
+  HORSEGUARDS
+  WHITEHALL
+
+That is the first milestone on the Brighton Road. Sterne, were he here
+to-day, would shed salt tears of sentiment upon it, we may be sure. It
+says nothing whatever about Brighton, and is probably the one and only
+stone that takes the Horseguards as a datum.
+
+About forty yards beyond this initial landmark is another "first"
+milestone: a tall, upstanding affair, certainly a century old, with three
+blank sides, and a fourth inscribed:
+
+  I
+  MILE
+  FROM
+  WESTMINSTER
+  BRIDGE
+
+This is followed by a long series of stones of one pattern, probably
+dating from 1800, marking every _half_ mile. The series starts with the
+stone on the kerb close by the tramway office at the triangle, where the
+Brixton Road begins. It records on two sides "Royal Exchange 2-1/2 miles,"
+and on a third "Whitehall 2 miles," and is followed, opposite No. 158,
+Brixton Road, by a stone carrying on the tale by another half a mile.
+These silent witnesses may be traced nearly into Croydon, with sundry gaps
+where they have been removed. Those recording the 4th, 6th, 8-1/2th,
+9-1/2th, and 10th miles from Whitehall are missing, the last of the series
+now extant being that at the corner of Broad Green Avenue, making
+"Whitehall 9 miles, Royal Exchange 9-1/2 miles." The 10th from Whitehall,
+ending the series, stood at the corner of the Whitgift Hospital.
+
+These were succeeded by one of the old eighteenth-century series, marking
+eleven miles from Westminster Bridge and twelve from the "Standard," but
+neither new nor old stone is there now, and the only one of the thirteen
+mentioned by the _London Evening Post_ of 1743 is this near Purley Corner.
+
+This, marking the 13th mile from the "Standard" and the 12th from
+Westminster Bridge is common to both routes, but is followed by the first
+of a new series some way along Smitham Bottom, on which Brighton is for
+the first time mentioned:
+
+  XIII
+  MILES
+  FROM
+  WESTMINSTER
+  BRIDGE
+   --
+  38-1/2
+  MILES
+  TO
+  BRIGHTON
+
+The character of the lettering and the general style of this series would
+lead to the supposition that they are dated about 1820. There are three
+stones in all of this kind, the third marking 15 miles from Westminster
+Bridge and 36-1/2 to Brighton, followed by a series of triangular
+cast-iron marks, continued through Redhill, of which the first bears the
+legend, "Parish of Merstham." On the north side is "16 from Westminster
+Bridge, 35 to Brighton," and on the south "35 from Brighton, 16 to
+Westminster Bridge." It will be observed that in this first one of a new
+series half a mile is dropped, and henceforward the mileage to Brighton
+becomes by authority 51 miles. Like the confectioner who "didn't make
+ha'porths," the turnpike trust which erected these mile-"stones" refused
+to deal in half miles.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+The tramway terminus at Purley Corner is now a busy place. Those are only
+the "old crocks" who can remember the South Eastern railway-station of
+Caterham Junction and the surrounding lonely downs; and to them the change
+to "Purley" and the appearance in the wilderness of a mushroom town, with
+its parade of brilliantly lighted shops, its Queen Victoria memorial, its
+public garden and penny-squirt fountain, and--not least--its hideous
+waterworks, are things for wonderment. "How strange it seems, and new," as
+Browning--not writing of Purley--remarks. Even the ghastly loneliness of
+the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more,
+for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and
+tradesmen's carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall
+kill and maim most travellers along the highway.
+
+The numerous railway-bridges, embankments, cuttings, and retaining-walls
+that disfigure the crest of Smitham Bottom are chiefly the results of
+latter-day activities. The first bridge is that of the Chipstead Valley
+Railway--now merged in the South Eastern and Chatham--from South Croydon
+to Chipstead and Epsom, 1897-1900, with its wayside station of "Smitham."
+This is immediately followed by the London, Brighton, and South Coast's
+station of Stoat's Nest, a transformed and transported version of the old
+station of the same name some distance off, and beyond it are the bridges
+and embankments of the same company's works of 1896-8; themselves almost
+inextricably confused, to the non-technical mind, with the adjoining South
+Eastern roadside station of Coulsdon.
+
+The chapters of railway history which produced all this unlovely medley of
+engineering works are in themselves extremely interesting, and have an
+additional interest to those who trace the story of the Brighton Road, for
+they are concerned with the solution of the old problem which faced the
+coach proprietors--how best and quickest to reach Brighton.
+
+[Sidenote: RAILWAY POLITICS]
+
+Few outside those intimately concerned with railway politics know that
+although the Brighton line was opened throughout in 1842, it was not until
+1898 that the company owned an uninterrupted route between London and
+Brighton. The explanation of that singular condition of affairs is found
+in the curious reluctance of Parliament, two generations ago, to give any
+one railway company the sole control of any particular route. Few in those
+times thought the increase of population, and still more the increase of
+travelling, would be so great that competitive railways would be
+established to many places; and thus to sanction the making of a railway
+to be owned by one company throughout seemed like the granting of a
+perpetual monopoly.
+
+Following this reasoning, a break was made in the continuity of the
+Brighton Railway between Stoat's Nest and Redhill, a distance of five
+miles, and that stretch of territory given to the South Eastern Railway,
+with running powers only over it granted to the Brighton Company.
+Similarly, between Croydon and Stoat's Nest, the South Eastern had only
+running powers over that interval owned by the Brighton.
+
+In 1892 and 1894, however, the Brighton Company approached Parliament and,
+proving the growing confusion, congestion, and loss of time at Redhill
+Junction, owing to this odd condition of things, obtained powers to
+complete that missing link by the construction of an entirely new railway
+between Stoat's Nest and a point just within a quarter of a mile of
+Earlswood Station, beyond Redhill, and also to double the existing line
+between East and South Croydon and Purley. The works were completed and
+opened for traffic in 1898, when for the first time the Brighton Railway
+had a complete and uninterrupted route of its own to the sea.
+
+The hamlet of Smitham Bottom, which paradoxically stands at the top of the
+pass of that name, in this ancient way across the North Downs, can never
+have been beautiful. It was lonely when Jackson and Fewterel fought their
+prize-fight here, before that distinguished patron of sport the Prince of
+Wales and a more or less distinguished company, on June 9th, 1788; when
+the only edifice of "Smith-in-the-Bottom," as the sporting accounts of
+that time style it, appears to have been the ominous one of a gibbet. The
+Jackson who that day fought, and won, his first battle in the prize-ring
+was none other than that Bayard of the noble art, "Gentleman Jackson,"
+afterwards the friend of Byron and of the Prince Regent himself, and
+subsequently landlord of the "Cock" at Sutton. On this occasion Major
+Hanger rewarded the victor with a bank-note from the enthusiastic Prince.
+
+[Sidenote: SMITHAM]
+
+Until 1898 Smitham Bottom remained a fortuitous concourse of some twenty
+mean houses on a windswept natural platform, ghastly with the chalky
+"spoil-banks" thrown up when the South Eastern Railway engineers excavated
+the great cuttings in 1840; but when the three railway-stations within one
+mile were established that serve Smitham Bottom--the stations of Coulsdon,
+Stoat's Nest, and Smitham--the place, very naturally, began to grow with
+the magic quickness generally associated with Jonah's Gourd and Jack's
+Beanstalk, and now Smitham Bottom is a town. Most of the spoil-banks are
+gone, and those that remain are planted with quick-growing poplars; so
+that, if they can survive the hungry soil, there will presently be a leafy
+screen to the ugly railway sidings. Showy shops, all plate-glass and
+nightly glare of illumination, have arisen; the old "Red Lion" inn has got
+a new and very saucy front; and, altogether, "Smitham" has arrived. The
+second half of the name is now in process of being forgotten, and the only
+wonder is that the first part has not been changed into "Smytheham" at the
+very least, or that an entirely new name, something in the way of "ville"
+or "park," suited to its prospects, has not been coined. For Smitham, one
+can clearly see, has a Future, with a capital F, and the historian
+confidently expects to see the incorporation of Smitham, with Mayor, Town
+Council, and Town Hall, all complete.
+
+It is here, at Marrowfat, now "Marlpit," Lane, that the new link of the
+Brighton line branches off from Stoat's Nest.[8] One of the first trials
+of the engineers was the removal of three-quarters of a million cubic
+yards of the "spoil," dumped down by the roadside over half a century
+earlier; and then followed the spanning of the Brighton Road by a
+girder-bridge. The line then entered the grounds of the Cane Hill Lunatic
+Asylum, through which it runs in a covered way, the London County Council,
+under whose control that institution is carried on, obtaining a clause in
+the Company's Act, requiring the railway to be covered in at this point,
+in case the lunatics might find means of throwing themselves in front of
+passing trains.
+
+Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous
+skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and
+retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern,
+to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter
+in length--the new Merstham tunnel--running parallel with the old tunnel
+of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the
+southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham,
+where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and
+Redhill.
+
+At Merstham one of the odd problems of the new line was reached, for there
+it had to be constructed over a network of ancient tunnels made centuries
+ago in the hillside--quarry-tunnels whence came much of the limestone that
+went towards the building of Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The
+old workings are still accessible to the explorer who dares the
+accumulation of gas in them given off by the limestone rock.
+
+The geology of these five miles of new railway is peculiarly varied,
+limestone and chalk giving place suddenly to the gault of the levels, and
+followed again by a hillside bed of Fuller's earth, succeeded in turn by
+red sand. The Fuller's earth, resting upon a slippery substratum of gault,
+only required a little rain and a little disturbance to slide down and
+overwhelm the railway works, and retaining-walls of the heaviest and most
+substantial kind were necessary in the cuttings where it occurred.
+Tunnelling for a quarter of a mile through the sand that gives Redhill its
+name, the railway crosses obliquely under the South Eastern, and then
+joins the old Brighton line territory just before reaching Earlswood
+station.
+
+[Illustration: CHIPSTEAD CHURCH.]
+
+All these engineering manifestations give the old grim neighbourhood of
+Smitham Bottom a new grimness. The trains of the Brighton line boom,
+rattle, and clank overhead into the covered way, whose ventilators spout
+steam like some infernal laundry, and from the 80-foot deep cuttings close
+beside the road, steamy billows arise very weirdly. Presiding over all are
+the beautiful grounds and vast ranges of buildings of the Cane Hill
+Lunatic Asylum, housing an ever-increasing population of lunatics, now
+numbering some three thousand. Sometimes the quieter members of that
+unfortunate community are seen, being given a walk along the road, outside
+their bounds, and the sight and the thoughts they engender are not
+cheering.
+
+Along the road, where the walls of the cutting descend perpendicularly, is
+the severely common-place hamlet of Hooley, formerly Howleigh, consisting
+of the "Star" inn and some twenty square brick cottages. Just beyond it,
+where a modern Cyclists' Rest and tea-rooms building stands to the left of
+the road, the first traces of the old Surrey Iron Railway, which crossed
+the highway here, are found, in the shallower cutting, still noticeable,
+although disused seventy years ago. Alders, hazels, and blackberry
+brambles grow on the side of it, and its bridges are ivy-grown: primroses
+and violets, too, grow there wondrously profuse.
+
+[Sidenote: CHIPSTEAD]
+
+And here we will, by way of interlude, turn aside, up a lane to the right
+hand, toward the village of Chipstead, in whose churchyard lies Sir Edward
+Banks, who began life in the humblest manner, working as a navvy upon this
+same forgotten railway, afterwards rising, as partner in the firm of
+Jolliffe & Banks, to be an employer of labour and contractor to the
+Government: in short, another Tom Brassey. All these things are recorded
+of him upon a memorial tablet in the church of Chipstead--a tablet which
+lets nothing of his worth escape you, so prolix is it.[9]
+
+It was while delving amid the chalk of this tramway cutting that Edward
+Banks first became acquainted with this village, and so charmed with it
+was he that he expressed a desire, when his time should come, to be laid
+at rest in its quiet graveyard. When he died, after a singularly
+successful career, his wish was carried out, and here, in this quiet spot
+overlooking the highway, you may see his handsome tomb, begirt with iron
+railings, and overshadowed with ancient trees.
+
+The little church of Chipstead is of Norman origin, and still shows some
+interesting features of that period, with some unusual Early English
+additions that have presented architectural puzzles even to the minds of
+experts. Many years ago the late Mr. G. E. Street, the architect of the
+present Royal Courts of Justice in London, read a paper upon this
+building, advancing the theory that the curious pedimental windows of the
+chancel and the transept door were not the Saxon work they appeared to be,
+but were the creation of an architect of the Early English period who had
+a fancy for reviving Saxon features, and who was the builder and designer
+of a series of Surrey churches, among which is included that of Merstham.
+
+Within the belfry here is a ring of fine bells, some of them of a
+respectable age, and three bearing the inscription, with variations:
+
+  "OUR HOPE IS IN THE LORD, 1595."
+             R  E
+
+From here a bye-lane leads steeply once more into the high road, which
+winds along the valley, sloping always towards the Weald. Down the long
+descent into Merstham village tall and close battalions of fir-trees lend
+a sombre colouring to the foreground, while "southward o'er Surrey's
+pleasant hills" the evening sunlight streams in parting radiance. On the
+left hand as we descend are the eerie-looking blow-holes of the Merstham
+tunnel, which here succeeds the cutting. Great heaps of chalk, by this
+time partly overgrown with grass, also mark its course, and in the
+distance, crowned as many of them are with telegraph poles, they look by
+twilight curiously and awfully like so many Calvarys.
+
+Beside the descent into Merstham was situated the terminus of the old Iron
+Railway, in the great excavated hollow of the Greystone lime-works, where
+the lime-burners still quarry the limestone and the smoke of their burning
+ascends day and night. The old "Hylton Arms," down below, that served the
+turn of the lime-burners when they wanted to slake their thirst, has been
+ornately rebuilt in the modern-Elizabethan Public House Style, alongside
+the road, to catch the custom of the world at large, and is named the
+"Jolliffe Arms." Both signs reflect the ownership of Merstham, for
+Jolliffe has long been the family name of the holders of the modern Barony
+of Hylton. Formerly "Jolly," it was presumably too bacchanalian and not
+sufficiently aristocratic, and so it was changed, just as your "Smythe"
+was once Smith, and "Johnes" Jones.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+[Sidenote: MERSTHAM]
+
+Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English.
+Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great
+measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end
+of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are
+the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed
+aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the
+public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses over the
+pond where rise fitfully the springs of Merstham Brook, a congener of the
+Kentish "Nailbournes," and one of the many sources of the River Mole. To
+the marshy ground by this brook, and to its stone-quarries, the place
+owes its name. It was in Domesday Book "Merstan" = Mere-stan, the stone
+(house) by the lake.
+
+[Illustration: MERSTHAM.]
+
+Beyond the brook, above the tall trees, is seen the shingled spire of the
+church, an Early English building dedicated to St. Catherine, not yet
+spoiled, despite restorations and the scraping which its original lancet
+windows have undergone, in misguided efforts to endue them with an air of
+modernity.
+
+The church is built of that limestone or "firestone" found so freely in
+the neighbourhood--a famed speciality which entered largely into the
+building and ornamentation of Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster.
+Those wondrously intricate and involved carvings and traceries, whose
+decadent Gothic delicacy is the despair of present-day architects and
+stone-carvers, were possible only in this stone, which, when quarried, is
+of exceeding softness, but afterwards, on exposure to the air, assumes a
+hardness equalling that of any ordinary building-stone, and has, in
+addition, the merit of resisting fire, whence its name. From the softer
+layers comes that article of domestic use, the "hearthstone," used to
+whiten London hearths and doorsteps.
+
+Merstham Church is even yet of considerable interest. It contains brasses
+to the Newdegate. Best, and Elmebrygge families, one recording in black
+letter:
+
+  "Hic iacet Johesi Elmebrygge, armiger, qui obiit biij die
+  ffebruarij; Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxij, et Isabella uxor eius
+  quae fuit filia Nichi Jamys quonda Maioris et
+  Alderman London: quae obiit bijº die Septembris
+  Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxijº et Annae uxor ei: quae
+  fuit filia Johes Prophete Gentilman quae obiit ...
+  Aº Dni Mºcccº ... quoru animabus
+  ppicietur Deus."
+
+The date of the second wife's death has never been inserted, showing that
+the brass was engraved and set during her lifetime, as in so many other
+examples of monumental brasses throughout the country. The figure of John
+Elmebrygge is wanting, it having been at some time torn from its matrix,
+but above his figure's indent remains a label inscribed _Sancta Trinitas_,
+and from the mouths of the remaining figures issue labels inscribed _Unus
+Deus--Miserere nobis_. Beneath is a group of seven daughters; the group of
+four sons is long since lost.
+
+A transitional Norman font of grey Sussex marble remains at the western
+end of the church, and on an altar-tomb in the southern chapel are the
+poor remains of an ancient stone figure of the fifteenth century,
+presumably the effigy of a merchant civilian, as he is represented wearing
+the _gypciere_. It is hacked out of almost all significance at the hands
+of some iconoclasts; their chisel-marks are even now distinct and bear
+witness against the Puritan rage that defaced and buried it face
+downwards, the reverse side of the stone forming part of the chapel
+pavement until 1861, when it was discovered during the restoration of the
+church.
+
+Before that restoration this was an interior of Georgian high pews. Among
+them the "squire's parlour" was pre-eminent, with its fireplace, its
+well-carpeted floor, its chairs and tables: a snuggery wherein that good
+man snored unobserved, or partook critically of his snuff during the
+parson's discreet discourse. But now the parlour is gone, and the squire
+must slumber, if he can, with the other sinners.
+
+[Sidenote: GATTON]
+
+In Merstham village, just beyond the "Feathers" inn, stood Merstham
+toll-gate, followed by that of Gatton, at Gatton Point, a mile distant,
+where the old route through Reigate goes off to the right, and the
+new--the seven miles between Gatton Point and Povey Cross, through
+Redhill--continues, straight as an arrow, ahead. The way is bordered on
+the right hand by Gatton Park, a spot the country folk rightly describe as
+an "old arnshunt place." The history of Gatton, in truth, goes back to
+immemorial times, and has no beginning: for where history thins out and
+becomes a mere scatter of disjointed scraps purporting to be facts,
+tradition carries back the tale into a very fog of legend and conjecture.
+It was "Gatone" when the Domesday survey was made: the Saxon "Geat-ton,"
+the town in the "gate," passage, or road through the North Downs, just as
+Reigate is the Saxon "Rige-geat," the road over the ridge. The "ton" or
+town in the place-name does not necessarily mean what we moderns would
+understand by the word, and here doubtless indicated an enclosed, hedged,
+or walled-in tract of land redeemed and cultivated out of the then
+encompassing wilderness of the Downs.
+
+Who first broke the land of Gatton to the plough? History and tradition
+are silent. No voice speaks out of the grave of the centuries. But both
+Reigate and Gatton are older than Anglo-Saxon times, for a Roman way,
+itself following the course of an even earlier savage trail, came up out
+of the stodgy clay of Holmesdale, over the chalky hills, to Streatham and
+London. It was a branch of the road leading from _Portus Adurni_--the
+present Old Shoreham, on the river Adur--and doubtless, in the long
+centuries of Romano-British civilisation, it was bordered here and there
+by settlements and villas. Prominent among them was Gatton. There can
+scarcely be a doubt of it, for, although Roman relics are not found here
+now, Camden, writing in the time of Henry the Eighth, tells of "Roman
+Coynes digged forth of the Ground." It was ever a desirable site, for here
+unfailing springs well out of the chalk and give an abounding fertility,
+while another road--the ancient Pilgrims' Way--running west and east,
+crossed the other highway, and thus gave ready communication on every
+side.
+
+Gatton has, within the historic period, never been more than a manorial
+park, but an unexplained something, like the echo of a vanished greatness,
+has caused strangely unmerited honours to be granted it. Who shall say
+what induced Henry the Sixth in 1451 to make this mere country park a
+Parliamentary borough, returning two members? There must have been some
+adequate reason or excuse, even if only the one of its ancient renown;
+for there _must_ always be an apology of sorts for corruption; no job is
+jobbed without at least some shadowy semblance of legality. But no one
+will ever pluck out the heart of its mystery.
+
+[Sidenote: THE ROTTEN BOROUGH]
+
+A Parliamentary borough Gatton remained until 1832, when the first Reform
+Act swept away the representation of it, together with that of many
+another "rotten borough." Rightly had Cobbett termed it "a very rascally
+spot of earth," for certainly from 1541, when Sir Roger Copley owned the
+property and was the sole elector of the place, the election was a
+scandalous farce, and never at any time did the "burgesses" exceed twenty.
+They were always tenants of the lord of the manor and the mere marionettes
+that danced to his will.
+
+Gatton, returning its two members to Parliament, as of old, was early in
+the nineteenth century purchased by Mark Wood, Esq., who was soon after
+created a Baronet. It was then recorded that in this borough there were
+six houses and only one freeholder: Sir Mark Wood himself. The other five
+houses he let by the week; and thus, paying the taxes, he was the only
+elector of the two representatives. At the election, he and his son Mark
+were the candidates, and the father duly elected himself and his son!
+Scandalous, no doubt; but those members must have represented the
+constituency better than could those of a larger electorate.
+
+The landowner who possessed such a pocket-borough as this, and could send
+whomsoever he liked to Parliament, to vote as he wished, was, of course, a
+very important personage. His opposition was a serious matter to
+Governments; his support of the highest value, both politically and in a
+pecuniary sense; and thus place, honours, riches, could be, and were,
+secured. The manor of Gatton actually, in the cynical recognition of these
+things, was valued at twice its worth without that Parliamentary
+representation, and Lord Monson, who purchased the property in 1830, gave
+as much as L100,000 for it, solely as an investment in jobbery and
+corruption, by which he hoped, in the course of shrewd political
+wire-pulling, to obtain a cent per cent return.
+
+[Illustration: GATTON HALL AND "TOWN HALL."]
+
+He was a humorist of a cynical turn who built in front of the great
+mansion in midst of the park a "Town Hall" for the non-existent town, and
+inscribed on the urn which stands by this freakish, temple-like structure
+the motto, satirical in this setting, "_Salus populi suprema lex esto_,"
+together with other sardonic Latin, to the effect that no votes sullied by
+bribery should be given.
+
+Less than two years after Lord Monson's purchase of the estate, Reform had
+destroyed the value of Gatton Park, for it was disfranchised. We can only
+wonder that he did not claim compensation for the abolition of his "vested
+interests."
+
+[Sidenote: MUSTARD]
+
+There is a remarkable appropriateness in Gatton Hall being designed in the
+classic style, for its marble hall and Corinthian hexastyle colonnade no
+doubt revive the glories of the Roman villa of sixteen hundred years ago.
+It is magnificence itself, being indeed designed something after the
+manner of the Vatican at Rome, and decorated with rare and costly marbles
+and frescoes; but perhaps, to any one less than an emperor or a pope, a
+little unhomely and uncomfortable to live in. Since 1888 it has been the
+seat of Sir Jeremiah Colman, of Colman's Mustard, created a Baronet, 1907:
+
+  Mother, get it if you're able,
+  See the trade mark on the label,
+  Colman's Mustard is the Best----[Advt.],
+
+as some unlaurelled bard of the grocery trade once sang, in deathless
+verse.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet
+another toll-gate. "Frenches" Gate took its title from the old manor on
+which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the
+unenclosed or free (_franche_) land of which it was wholly or largely
+composed.
+
+Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history.
+When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816,
+Redhill was--a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough
+knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes;
+but since that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000
+persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we
+mean--not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain
+commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction
+where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and
+quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.
+
+The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really
+in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the
+'40's, it was called "Warwick Town," after the then Countess of Warwick,
+the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear
+witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is,
+and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and "Redhill" this
+"Warwick Town," by natural selection, became.
+
+There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious
+of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town
+of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient
+castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both _look_
+their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still
+living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may
+be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the
+most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only
+frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute
+for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, "Mrs. Partington's" remark that
+"comparisons is odorous" would be altogether in order.
+
+Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from
+that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne's Asylum, housing between four
+and five hundred children of the poor.
+
+"The Cutting" through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by
+high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons,
+where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded
+only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in
+another.
+
+It is Holmesdale--the vale of holms, or oak woods--upon which you gaze
+from here; that
+
+  Vale of Holmesdall
+  Never wonne, ne never shall,
+
+as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and
+slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley A.D. 851.
+
+In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of
+London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top
+for the erection of a fort, and--in a burst of confidence--sold it again.
+The time is probably near when the War Office, like another "Sister Anne,"
+will "see somebody coming," when this or another site will be re-purchased
+at a much enhanced, or scare, price.
+
+[Sidenote: EARLSWOOD]
+
+Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of
+elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from
+the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road
+across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect "switchback," as the cyclist
+who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from
+this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective
+it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do
+the trees look from this distance.
+
+It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a
+Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.
+
+He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in
+these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found
+outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin,
+his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands
+gnarled and twisted with toil and rheumatism, he sat there in
+smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage
+brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the
+"round frock" of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore
+and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she
+who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and
+precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to
+the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild
+wonder at their oddity and complication.
+
+[Illustration: THE SWITCHBACK ROAD, EARLSWOOD COMMON.]
+
+He was, it seemed, a "hedger and ditcher," and his leathern gauntlets and
+billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.
+
+"I've worked at this sort o' thing," said he, in conversation, "for the
+last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for't
+too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an' works from seven o'marnings to
+half-past five in the afternoon for that. You'll be gettin' more than two
+and twopence a day when you're at work, I reckon."
+
+To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to
+existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for
+he had visited London, and "a dirty place it was, sure-ly." Also he had
+been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called
+"Madame Two Swords": places that Londoners generally leave to provincials.
+Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock
+sights of town than townsfolk themselves.
+
+From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and
+Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last
+turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the
+midnight of October 31st, 1881.
+
+At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by
+Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield
+Castle.
+
+[Sidenote: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE]
+
+Thunderfield Castle should--if tremendous names go for aught--be a
+stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing
+of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over
+the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the
+estate of Harrowslea--"Harsley," as the countryfolk call it--supposed to
+have once belonged to King Harold.
+
+There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons _did_ name the
+place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of
+Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that
+matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it.
+It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of
+the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and
+palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and
+bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who could
+often remain a "passive resister" and see the invaders struggling with the
+sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.
+
+[Illustration: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE.]
+
+The history of Thunderfield will never be written, but if a guess may be
+hazarded, the final catastrophe, which was the prime cause of the
+half-burnt timbers and the many human remains discovered here long ago,
+was a storming of the place by the forces of the neighbouring de
+Warennes, ancient and bitter enemies of the de Clares; probably in the
+wars of the twelfth century, between King Stephen and the Empress Maud.
+
+[Illustration: THE "CHEQUERS," HORLEY.]
+
+It is an eminently undesirable situation for a residence, however suitable
+it may have been for defence; and the Saxons who occupied it must have
+known what rheumatism is. Dark woods now enclose the place, and cluttering
+wildfowl form its garrison.
+
+The "Chequers" at Horley is not quite half way to Brighton, but in default
+of another it is the halfway house. Its name derives from the old chequy,
+or chessboard, arms of the Earls of Warren, chequered in gold and blue.
+They were not only great personages in this vale, but enjoyed in mediaeval
+times the right of licensing ale-houses: hence the many "Chequers"
+throughout the country. The newer portions of the house are typically
+suburban, but the old-world front, with its quaint portico, the whole
+shaded by a group of ancient oaks, remains untouched.
+
+Horley--the "Hurle" of old maps--is very scattered: a piece here, another
+there, and the parish church standing isolated at the extreme southern end
+of the wide parish. It is situated on an extensive flat, reeking like a
+sponge with the waters of the Mole, but, although so entirely undesirable
+a place, is under exploitation for building purposes. A stranger first
+arriving at Horley late at night, and seeing its long lines of lighted
+streets radiating in several directions, would think he had come to a
+town; but morning would show him that long perspectives of gas-lamps do
+not necessarily mean houses to correspond. Evidently those responsible for
+the lamps expect a coming expansion of Horley; but that expectation is not
+very likely to be realised.
+
+Much of Horley belongs to Christ's Hospital, which is said to be under
+obligation to educate two children of poor widows, in return for the great
+tithes long since bequeathed to it, and is additionally accused of having
+consistently betrayed that trust.
+
+[Illustration: THE "SIX BELLS," HORLEY.]
+
+The parish church, chiefly of the Early English and Decorated periods of
+Gothic architecture, contains some brasses and a poor old stone effigy of
+a bygone lord of the manor, broken-nosed and chipped, but not without its
+interest. The double-headed eagle on his shield is still prominent, and
+the crowded detail of his mailed armour and the lacings of his surcoat are
+as distinct as when sculptured six centuries ago. He wears the little
+misericorde, or dagger, at his belt, the "merciful" instrument with which
+gentle knights finished off their wounded enemies in the chivalric days of
+old.
+
+Many years ago some person unknown stole the old churchwardens'
+account-book, dating from the sixteenth century. After many wanderings in
+the land, it was at length purchased at a second-hand bookseller's and
+presented to the British Museum, in which mausoleum of literature, in the
+Department of Manuscripts, it is now to be found. It contains a curious
+item, showing that even in the rigid times that produced the great Puritan
+upheaval, congregations were not unapt for irreverence. Thus in 1632 "John
+Ansty is chosen by the consent of y{e} minister and parishioners to see
+y{t} y{e} younge men and boyes behave themselves decently in y{e} church
+in time of divine service and sermon, and he is to have for his paines
+ij{s.}"
+
+The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient "Six
+Bells" inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church
+tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been
+eight in the belfry.
+
+The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the "Six Bells," and
+missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been
+replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those
+matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that "ye wooden tark so ef ye had to
+live in un." A typical rustic had "comic brown-titus" acquired in one of
+those damp old cottages, and has "felt funny" ever since. One with
+difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as funny as he
+felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who
+pose as jesters.
+
+Opposite Horley church is Gatwick Park, since 1892 converted into a
+racecourse, with a railway station of its own. Less than a mile below it,
+at Povey Cross, the Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton joins the main
+road.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+The Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton, instead of branching off along
+the Brixton Road, pursues a straight undeviating course down the Clapham
+Road, through Balham and Upper and Lower Tooting, where it turns sharply
+to the left at the Broadway, and in half a mile right again, at Amen
+Corner. Thence it goes, by Figg's Marsh and Mitcham, to Sutton.
+
+[Sidenote: MITCHAM COMMON]
+
+It is not before Mitcham is reached that, in these latter days, the
+pilgrim is conscious of travelling the road to anywhere at all. It is all
+modern "street"--and streets, to this commentator at least, have a strong
+resemblance to rows of dog-kennels. They are places where citizens live on
+the chain. They lack the charm of obviously leading elsewhere: and even
+although electric tramcars speed multitudinously along them, to some near
+or distant terminus, they do but arrive there at other streets.
+
+Mitcham is at present beyond these brick and mortar tentacles, and is
+grouped not unpicturesquely about a village green and along the road to
+the Wandle. Pleasant, ruddy-faced seventeenth and eighteenth-century
+mansions look upon that green, notable in the early days of Surrey
+cricket; and away at the further end of it is the vast flat of Mitcham
+Common, that dreary, long-drawn expanse which is at once the best
+illustration of eternity and of a Shakespearian "blasted heath" that can
+readily be thought of.
+
+"Mitcham lavender" brings fragrant memories, and indeed the only thing
+that serves to render the weary length of Mitcham Common at all endurable
+is the scent of it, borne on the breeze from the distillery, midway
+across: the distillery that no one would remember to be Jakson's, except
+for the eccentricity of spelling the name.
+
+This by the way; for one does not cross Mitcham Common to reach Sutton.
+But there is, altogether, a sweet savour pervading Mitcham, a scent of
+flowers that will not be spoiled even by the linoleum works, which are apt
+to be offensive; for Mitcham is still a place where those sweet-smelling
+and other "economic" plants, lavender, mint, chamomile, aniseed,
+peppermint, rosemary, and liquorice, are grown for distillation. The place
+owes this distinction to no mere chance, but to its peculiar black mould,
+found to be exceptionally suited to this culture.
+
+Folk-rhymes are often uncomplimentary, and that which praises Sutton for
+its mutton and Cheam for juicy beef, is more severe than one cares to
+quote on Epsom; and, altogether ignoring the mingled fragrances of
+Mitcham, declares it the place "for a thief." We need not, however, take
+the matter seriously: the rhymester was only at his wit's end for a rhyme
+to "beef."
+
+Mitcham station, beside the road, is a curious example of what a railway
+company can do in its rare moments of economy; for it is an early
+nineteenth-century villa converted to railway purposes by the process of
+cutting a hole through the centre. It is a sore puzzle to a stranger in a
+hurry.
+
+[Sidenote: SUTTON]
+
+From Mitcham one ascends a hill past the woodland estate of Ravensbury,
+crossing the abundantly-exploited Wandle; and then, along a still rural
+road, to the modern town of Sutton.
+
+On the fringe of that town, at the discreet "residential" suburb of
+Benhilton, is a scenic surprise in the way of a deep cutting in the hilly
+road. Spanned by a footbridge, graced with trees, and neighboured by the
+old "Angel" inn, "Angel Bridge," as it is called, is a pretty spot. The
+rise thus cut through was once known as Been Hill, and on that basis
+was fantastically reared the name of Benhilton. One cannot but admire the
+ingenuity of it.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COCK," SUTTON 1789. _From an aquatint after
+Rowlandson._]
+
+"Sutton for mutton": so ran the old-time rhyme. The reason of that ancient
+repute is found in the downs in whose lap the place is situated; those
+thymy downs that afforded such splendid pasturage for sheep. Sutton Common
+is gone, enclosed in 1810, but the downs remain; and yet that rhyme has
+lost its reason, and Sutton is no longer celebrated for anything above its
+fellow towns. Even the famous "Cock" is gone--that old coaching-inn kept
+by the ex-pugilist, "Gentleman Jackson." Long threatened, it was at last
+demolished in 1898, and with the old house went the equally famous sign
+that straddled across the road. The similar sign of the "Greyhound" still
+remains; the last relic of narrower streets and times more spacious.
+
+Leaving Sutton "town," as we call it nowadays, the road proceeds to climb
+steadily uphill to the modern suburb of "Belmont," where stands an old,
+but very well cared-for, milestone setting forth that it is distant "XIII.
+miles from the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1745," from the Royal
+Exchange the same distance, and from Whitehall twelve miles and a half.
+The neighbourhood is now particularly respectable, but I grieve to say
+that the spot is marked on the maps of 1796 as "Little Hell," which seems
+to indicate that the character of the people living in the three houses
+apparently then standing here would not bear close inspection. With the
+"Angel" placed at one end, and this vestibule into Inferno situated at the
+other, Sutton seems to have been accorded exceptional privileges.
+
+"Cold Blow," which succeeds to Little Hell, is a tremendous transition,
+and well deserves its name, perched as it is on the shivery, bare, and
+windy heights that lead to Burgh Heath and Banstead Downs "famous," says
+an annotated map of 1716, "for its wholesome Air, once prescribed by
+Physicians as the Patients' last refuge." The feudal-looking wrought-iron
+gates newly built beside the road here, surmounted by a gorgeous shield of
+arms crested with a helmet and enveloped in mantling, form the entrance to
+Nork Park, the seat of one of the Colman family, who have mustered very
+strongly in Surrey of late years.
+
+At the right-hand turning, in midst of a group of fir-trees, stands the
+prehistoric tumulus known to the rustics as "Tumble Beacon." "Tumble" is
+probably the rural version of "tumulus."
+
+Beyond this point, on a site now occupied by a cottage, stood the
+once-famed "Tangier" inn. Originally a private residence, the seat of
+Admiral Buckle,[10] who named it "Tangier," in memory of his cruises on
+the north coast of Africa, it became a house of call for coaches, and
+especially for post-chaises. Here, we are told, George the Fourth
+invariably halted for a glass of Miss Jeal's celebrated "alderbury"--that
+is to say elderberry-wine--"roking hot," to keep out the piercing cold,
+and Miss Jeal brought it forth with her own fair hands. Other travellers,
+who were merely persons, and not personages, had to be content with the
+less fair hands of the waiter.
+
+The "Tangier" was burnt down about 1874. For some years after its
+destruction a platform that led from the house to the roadside, on a level
+with the floors of the coaches and post-chaises, survived; but only the
+cellars now remain. The woods at the back are, however, still locally
+known as "Tangier Woods."
+
+Burgh Heath, at the summit of these downs, is a curious place called
+usually "Borough" Heath: it is in Domesday "Berge." As its name not
+obscurely hints, and the half-obliterated barrows show, it is a place of
+ancient habitation and sepulture; but nowadays it is chiefly remarkable
+for the descendants of the original squatters of about a century ago, who,
+braving the cold of these heights, settled on what was then an exceedingly
+lonely heath and stole whatever land they pleased. That was the origin of
+the hamlet of Burgh Heath. The descendants of those filibusters have in
+most cases rebuilt the original hovels, but it is still a somewhat forlorn
+place, made sordid by the tumbledown pigsties and sheds on the heath in
+which they have acquired a prescriptive freehold.
+
+[Sidenote: RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN]
+
+Passing Lion Bottom, or Wilderness Bottom, we come to Tadworth Corner,
+past the grounds of Tadworth Court, late the seat of Lord Russell of
+Killowen, better known as Sir Charles Russell. He was created a Baron in
+1894, on his becoming Lord Chief Justice: but the title was--at his own
+desire--limited to a life-peerage, and consequently at his death in 1900
+became extinct. At Tadworth, in the horsey neighbourhood of Epsom, he was
+as much at home as in the Law Courts, and neither so judicial nor
+restrained, as those who remember his peppery temper and the objurgatory
+language of his "Here, you, where the ---- -- are you ---- -- coming to,
+you ---- ----, you!" will admit. There seems, in fact, an especial fitness
+in his residence on this Regency Road, for his speech was the speech
+rather of that, than of the more mealy mouthed Victorian, period.
+
+At Tadworth Court, where the ways divide, and a most picturesque view of
+long roads, dark fir trees, and a weird-looking windmill unfolds itself,
+formerly stood a toll-gate. A signpost directs on the right to Headley and
+Walton, and on the left to Reigate and Redhill, and a battered milestone
+which no one can read stands at the foot of it. The church spire on the
+left is that of Kingswood.
+
+From London to Reigate, through Sutton, is, according to Cobbett, "about
+as villainous a tract as England contains. The soil is a mixture of gravel
+and clay, with big yellow stones in it, sure sign of really bad land." The
+greater part of this is, of course, now covered by the suburbs of "the
+Wen," as Cobbett delighted to style London; and it is both unknown to and
+immaterial to most people what manner of soil their houses are built on;
+but the truth of Cobbett's observations is seen readily enough here, on
+these warrens, which owe their preservation as open spaces to that
+mixture, worthless to the farmer, and not worth the stealing in those
+times when land could be stolen with impunity.
+
+[Illustration: KINGSWOOD WARREN.]
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
+
+Past the modern village of Kingswood, almost lost in, and certainly
+entirely overshadowed by, the wild heaths of Walton and Kingswood Warren
+the road comes at last to Reigate Hill, where, immediately past the
+suspension bridge that overhangs the cutting, it tilts very suddenly and
+alarmingly over the edge of the Downs. The suddenness of it makes the
+stranger gasp with astonishment; the beauty of that wonderful view from
+this very rim and edge of the hills compels his admiration. It is the
+climax up to which he has been toiling all these long, ascending gradients
+from Sutton; and it is worth the toil.
+
+The old writers of road-books do more justice to this view than any modern
+writer dare. To them it was "a remarkably bold elevation, from whence is a
+delightful prospect of the South Downs in Sussex. But near the road, which
+is scooped out of the hill, the declivity is so steep and abrupt that the
+spectator cannot help being struck with terror, though softened by
+admiration. The Sublime and the Beautiful are here perfectly united;
+imagination is fully exercised, and the mind delighted."
+
+How would this person have described the Alps?
+
+A milestone just short of this drop--one of a series starting at Sutton
+Downs and dealing in fractions of miles--says, very curtly: "London 19,
+Sutton 8, Brighton 32-5/8, Reigate 1-3/8."
+
+[Illustration: THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE, REIGATE HILL.]
+
+The suspension bridge, carried overhead, spanning the cutting made through
+the crest of the hill, is known to the rustics--who will always invent
+simple English words of one syllable, whenever possible, to take the place
+of difficult three-syllabled words of Latin extraction--as the "Chain
+Pier." It does not, as almost invariably is the case with these bridges,
+connect two portions of an estate severed by the cutting, but forms part
+of a public path which was cut through. It is very well worth the
+traveller's attention, for it joins the severed ends of no less a road
+than the ancient Pilgrims' Way, and is a very curious instance of
+modernity helping to preserve antiquity. The Way is clearly seen above,
+coming from Box Hill as a hollow road, crossing the bridge and going in
+the direction of Gatton Park, through a wood of beech trees.
+
+The roadway of Reigate Hill is made to wind circuitously, in an attempt to
+mitigate the severity of the gradient; but for all the care taken, it
+remains one of the steepest hills in England, and is one of the very few
+provided with granite kerbs intended to ease the pull-up for horses. None
+but a very special fool among cyclists in the old days attempted to ride
+down the hill; and many, even in these times of more efficient brakes,
+prefer to walk down. Only motor-cars, like the Gadarene swine of the
+Scriptures, "rushing violently down a steep place," attempt it; and those
+who are best acquainted with the hill live in daily expectation of a
+recklessly driven car spilling over the rim.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the
+downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story.
+It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of
+"Cherchefelle," and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until
+nearly two hundred years later.
+
+Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the
+possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an
+enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a clearing of the Holmesdale
+woods; but it had not long passed into the hands of William de Varennes,
+who had married Gundrada the Conqueror's daughter and was one of his most
+intimate henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became the site of
+the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. The manors granted to William de
+Varennes comprehended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included others in
+Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were the splendours that fell to the
+son-in-law and the companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He became
+somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl of Warenne, and the ancestor
+of a line of seven Earls, of whom the last died in 1347, when the family
+became firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the Mowbrays, and
+finally in that of the alternately absorbent and fissiparous Howards.
+
+Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the warlike sort. It
+frowned terribly upon its sandstone ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216
+when the foreign allies of the discontented subjects of King John
+approached: and when the seventh Earl, who had murdered Baron de la Zouche
+at Westminster, was attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a
+grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks (equal to L24,000)
+demanded. In 1550, when Lambarde wrote, only "the ruyns and rubbishe of an
+old castle which some call Homesdale" were left, and even those were
+cleared away by order of the Parliament in 1648. Now, after many centuries
+of change in ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is
+contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road through the town.
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
+
+In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate through Sutton in 1823, is
+highly entertaining. The tunnel was then being made, and it did not please
+him. "They are," he vociferates, "in order to save a few hundred yards'
+length of road, cutting through a hill. They have lowered a little hill on
+the London side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country actually
+thrown away: the produce of labour is taken from the industrious and given
+to the idlers. Mark the process; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty
+miles from the Wen, is on the seaside, and is thought by the stockjobbers
+to afford a _salubrious air_. It is so situated that a coach which leaves
+it not very early in the morning reaches London by noon; and, starting to
+go back in two hours and a half afterwards, reaches Brighton not very late
+at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women
+and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches, and actually
+carry on stock-jobbing in Change Alley, though they reside at Brighton.
+The place is, besides, a great resort with the _whiskered_ gentry. There
+are not less than about twenty coaches that leave the Wen every day for
+this place; and, there being three or four different roads, there is a
+great rivalship for the custom. This sets the people to work to shorten
+and to level the roads; and here you see hundreds of men and horses
+constantly at work to make pleasant and quick travelling for the Jews and
+jobbers. The Jews and jobbers pay the turnpikes, to be sure; but they get
+the money from the land and labourers. They drain these, from John o'
+Groat's House to the Land's End, and they lay out some of the money on the
+Brighton roads."
+
+Cobbett is dead, and the Reform Act is an old story, but the Jews and the
+jobbers swarm more than ever.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CASTLE CAVES]
+
+The tunnel through the castle hill was made by consent of the then owner,
+Earl Somers, as a tablet informs all who care to know. The entrance
+towards the town is faced with white brick, in a style supposed to be
+Norman. Above are the grounds, now public, where a would-be mediaeval
+gateway, erected in 1777, quite illegitimately impresses many innocents,
+and below is the so-called Barons' Cave, an ancient excavation in the soft
+sandstone where the Barons are (quite falsely) said to have assembled in
+conclave before forcing their will upon King John at Runnymede. Unhappily
+for that tradition, the then Earl Warenne was a supporter of the tyrant
+king, and any reforming barons he might possibly have entertained at
+Reigate Castle would have been kept on the chain as enemies, and treated
+to the cold comfort of bread and water.
+
+[Illustration: THE TUNNEL, REIGATE.]
+
+There are deeper depths than these castle caves, for dungeon-like
+excavations exist beside and underneath the tunnel; but they are not so
+very terrible, exuding as they do strong vinous and spirituous odours,
+proving that the only prisoners languishing there are hogsheads and
+kilderkins.
+
+Reigate, dropping its intermediate name of Cherchefelle on Ridgegate,
+became variously Reigate, Riggate, and Reygate in the thirteenth century.
+The name obviously indicates a gate--that is to say, a road--over the
+ridge of the downs; presumably that road upon which Gatton, the
+"gate-town," stood. Strongly supporting this theory, Wray Common and Park
+are found on the line of road between Reigate and Gatton. If we select
+"Reygate" from the many variants of the place-name, and place it beside
+that of Wray Common, we get at once the phonetic link.
+
+When Reigate lost the two members it sent to Parliament, it lost much more
+than the mere distinction of being represented. It lost free drinks and
+money to jingle in its pockets, for it was openly corrupt--in fact,
+neither better nor worse than most other constituencies. What else, when
+you consider it, could be expected when the franchise was so limited that
+the electors were a mere handful, and votes by consequence were
+individually valuable. In short, the best safeguard against bribery is to
+so increase the electorate that the purchase of votes is beyond the
+capacity of a candidate's pockets.
+
+Modern circumstances have, indeed, so wrought with country towns of the
+Reigate type that they are merely the devitalised spooks of their former
+selves, and Reigate would long ere this have been on the verge of
+extinction, had it not been within the revivifying influence of the
+suburban area. It is due to the Wen, as Cobbett would call it, that
+Reigate is still at once so old-world and so prosperous. It is surrounded
+by semi-suburban estates, but is in its centre still the Reigate of that
+time when the coaches came through, when royalty and nobility lunched at
+the still-existing "White Hart," and when fifty miles made a long day's
+journey.
+
+Reigate town was the property, almost exclusively, of the late Lady Henry
+Somerset. By direction of her heir, Somers Somerset, it was, in October,
+1921, sold at auction in several lots.
+
+There are some in Reigate who dwell in imagination upon old times. Not by
+any means the obvious people, the clergy and the usual kidney; they find
+existence there a vast yawn. The antiquarian taste revealed itself by
+chance to the present inquirer in the person of a policeman on duty by the
+tunnel, who knew all about Reigate's one industry of digging silver-sand,
+who could speak of the "Swan" inn having once possessed a gallows sign
+that spanned the road, and knew all about the red brick market-house or
+town hall being built in 1708 on the site of a pilgrims' chapel dedicated
+to St. Thomas a Becket. He could tell, too, that wonderful man, of a
+bygone militant parson of Reigate, who, warming to some dispute, took off
+his coat in the street and saying, "Lie there, divinity," handsomely
+thrashed his antagonist. "I like them old antidotes," said my constable;
+and so do I.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+[Sidenote: REIGATE CHURCH]
+
+Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments
+have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was
+originally placed, and very few are complete.
+
+The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its
+original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It
+is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a
+scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved,
+as in some sort an illustration of bygone social conditions. But the usual
+obliterators of history and of records made their usual clean sweep, and
+it has disappeared.
+
+It was a heart-shaped monument, inscribed, "Near this place lieth Edward
+Bird, Esq., Gent. Dyed the 23rd of February, 1718/9. His age 26," and was
+surmounted by a half-length portrait effigy of him in armour, with a full
+flowing wig; a truncheon in his right hand, and in the background a
+number of military trophies.
+
+The especial scandal attaching to the fact of this monument ever having
+been placed in the church arises from the fact that Edward Bird was hanged
+for murder. Some particulars are gleaned from one of the many catchpenny
+leaflets issued at the time by the Ordinary--that is to say, the
+Chaplain--of Newgate, who was never averse from adding to his official
+salary by writing the "last dying words" of interesting criminals; but his
+flaring front pages were, at the best--like the contents bills of modern
+sensational evening newspapers--indifferent honest, and his account of
+Bird is meagre.
+
+It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting
+young man had been given the advantages of "a Christian and Gentlemanlike
+Education," which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy
+under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This
+finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester's
+Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year
+later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London.
+
+One evening in September, 1718, he was driven "with a woman in a coach and
+a bottle of Champain wine" to a "bagnio" in Silver Street, Golden Square,
+and there "had the misfortune" to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through
+the body with his sword. "G--d d--n you, I will murder you all," he is
+reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the
+subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this
+martial spirit.
+
+Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not
+only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The
+historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were
+in those times very much what German officers became--privileged
+murderers--and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.
+
+[Sidenote: AN EXIT AT TYBURN]
+
+At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the
+Ordinary, saying "He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected
+Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses." The Ordinary does not tell us
+in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go
+to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not
+even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the
+rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution,
+taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that
+interesting event.
+
+He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of
+poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning
+coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by
+the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the
+threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree,
+talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so
+swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines
+prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles'
+Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available,
+he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your
+health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the
+Mouth or Nose, or both."
+
+The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is
+explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both
+patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was
+once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him.
+Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his
+execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.
+
+The date of the monument's disappearance is not clearly established, but
+old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen,
+during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of
+the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.
+
+For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed,
+the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen
+hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun
+in 1701 by the then vicar.
+
+A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a
+year lived here, in a cottage oddly named "Upper Repentance."
+
+[Illustration: TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.]
+
+The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, passes a couple of
+cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device
+intended to represent bats' wings, and inscribed "J. T. 1815." They are
+known as "Batswing Cottages," but what induced "J. T." to call them so,
+and even who he was, seems to be unknown.
+
+Over the rise of Cockshut Hill and through a wooded cutting the road comes
+to Woodhatch and the "Old Angel" inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and
+where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.
+
+Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, illustrates the ancient times when the
+De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the
+woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears
+only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down
+in these levels ending in "wood" recall the dense forests that once
+overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood,
+Hookwood--vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the
+prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of
+the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The
+scattered "leys"--Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like--allude to the
+clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old
+bosquets may be traced on the map--Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk's Gate and
+Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but
+memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either
+side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole
+sluggishly winding through them--a scene not unbeautiful in its placid
+way.
+
+The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862,
+marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the
+flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the
+Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the
+"Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the
+same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands
+to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.
+
+[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]
+
+Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past
+the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath,
+referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes
+at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet,
+and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by
+enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat,
+low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous
+error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."
+
+The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at
+times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many
+tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following
+upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless
+arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the
+nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with
+trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to
+wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley
+churchyard was flooded.
+
+[Illustration: The Floods at Horley.]
+
+A repetition of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the
+dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be
+performed, the roads being four feet under water.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]
+
+The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard
+high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the
+byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.
+
+Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay,
+thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous
+sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their
+inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian
+blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some
+unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and
+disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.
+
+The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross
+and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the
+valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen
+from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms
+forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home
+counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh
+century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its
+interior assorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan
+cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of
+village church, and presents many features of interest to the
+archaeologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the
+fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late
+brass, now mural, in the chancel, dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and
+Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously,
+Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early
+period those of Purley and Sandersted--Sander's-stead, or dwelling. Sir
+Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth's time,
+bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in
+1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where,
+in happier times, they ruled.
+
+[Illustration: Charlwood.]
+
+[Sidenote: NEWDIGATE]
+
+One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on
+a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the "Surrey
+Oaks," fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the
+county, and is worth visiting, if only for a peep into the curious timber
+belfry of its little church, which contains a hoary chest, contrived out
+of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.
+
+[Illustration: A Corner in Newdigate Church.]
+
+But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and
+attractions. Here a primitive pavement or causeway is very noticeable,
+formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the grassy margins of
+the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even
+now) of the time when
+
+  Essex full of good housewyfes,
+  Middlesex full of stryves,
+  Kentshire hoot as fire,
+  Sowseks full of dirt and mire
+
+was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the
+Wealden clay asserted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for
+pedestrians were necessities.
+
+The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from
+local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a
+yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble,
+fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built
+of Charlwood stone.
+
+Ifield is just within the Sussex boundary. A beautiful way to it lies
+through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It
+has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly
+favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county
+where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--grass, wheat,
+and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Sussex alone could furnish
+forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding
+the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.
+
+[Sidenote: IFIELD]
+
+In the church of St. Margaret, Ifield, whose somewhat unprepossessing
+exterior gives no hint of its inward beauty, is an oaken screen made from
+the wood of an old tree which stood for centuries on the Brighton Road at
+Lowfield Heath, where the boundary lines of Surrey and Sussex meet, and
+was cut down in the "forties." The tree was known far and wide as "County
+Oak."
+
+[Illustration: On the Road to Newdigate.]
+
+For the rest, the church is interesting enough by reason of its
+architecture to warrant some lingering here, but it is, beside this
+legitimate attraction, also very much of a museum of sepulchral
+curiosities. A brass for two brothers, with a curious metrical
+inscription, lurks in the gloom of the south aisle on the wall, and sundry
+grim and ghastly relics, in the shape of engraved coffin-plates, grubbed
+up by ghoulish antiquaries from the vaults below, form a perpetual
+_memento mori_ from darksome masonry. On either side the nave, by the
+chancel, beneath the graceful arches of the nave arcade, are the recumbent
+effigies of Sir John de Ifield and his lady. The knight died in 1317. He
+is represented as an armed Crusader, cross-legged, "a position," to quote
+"Thomas Ingoldsby," "so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in
+modern days." The old pews came from St. Margaret's, Westminster. But so
+dark is the church that details can only with difficulty be examined, and
+to emerge from the murk of this interior is to blink again in the light of
+day, however dull that day may be.
+
+From Ifield Church, a long and exceeding straight road leads in one mile
+to Ifield Hammer Pond. Here is one of the many sources of the little river
+Mole, whose trickling tributaries spread over all the neighbouring valley.
+The old mill standing beside the hatch bears on its brick substructure the
+date 1683, but the white-painted, boarded mill itself is evidently of much
+later date.
+
+[Illustration: IFIELD MILL POND.]
+
+[Sidenote: SUSSEX IRON]
+
+Before a mill stood here at all, this was the site of one of the most
+important ironworks in Sussex, when Sussex iron paid for the smelting.
+
+Ironstone had been known to exist here even in the days of the Roman
+occupation, when Anderida, extending from the sea to London, was all one
+vast forest. Heaps of slag and cinders have been found, containing Roman
+coins and implements of contemporary date, proving that iron was smelted
+here to some extent even then. But it was not until the latter part of the
+Tudor period that the industry attained its greatest height. Then,
+according to Camden, "the Weald of Sussex was full of iron-mines, and the
+beating of hammers upon the iron filled the neighbourhood round about with
+continual noise." The ironstone was smelted with charcoal made from the
+forest trees that then covered the land, and it was not until the first
+year or two of the last century that the industry finally died out. The
+last remaining ironworks in Sussex were situated at Ashburnham, and ceased
+working about 1820, owing to the inability of iron-masters to compete with
+the coal-smelted ore of South Wales.
+
+By that time the great forest of Anderida had almost entirely disappeared,
+which is not at all a wonderful thing to consider when we learn that one
+ironworks alone consumed 200,000 cords of wood annually. Even in Drayton's
+time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.
+
+Relics of those days are plentiful, even now, in the ancient farmhouses;
+relics in the shape of cast-iron chimney-backs and andirons, or
+"fire-dogs," many of them very effectively designed; but, of course, in
+these days of appreciation of the antique, numbers of them have been sold
+and removed.
+
+The water-power required by the ironworks was obtained by embanking small
+streams, to form ponds; as here at Ifield, where a fine head of water is
+still existing. Very many of these "Hammer Ponds" remain in Sussex and
+Surrey, and were long so called by the rustics, whose unlettered and
+traditional memories were tenacious, and preserved local history much
+better than does the less intimate book-learning of the reading classes.
+But now that every ploughboy reads his "penny horrible," and every gaffer
+devours his Sunday paper, they have no memories for "such truck," and
+local traditions are fading.
+
+Ifield ironworks became extinct at an early date, but from a very
+arbitrary cause. During the conflicts of the Civil War the property of
+Royalists was destroyed by the Puritan soldiery wherever possible; and
+after the taking of Arundel Castle in 1643, a detachment of troops under
+Sir William Waller wantonly wrecked the works then situated here, since
+when they do not appear to have been at any time revived.
+
+It is a pretty spot to-day, and extremely quiet.
+
+From here Crawley is reached through Gossop's Green.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+[Sidenote: CRAWLEY]
+
+The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of
+Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the "White Lion," and a few
+attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the
+farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains
+to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now
+under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the
+wayfarers' attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. A
+mean little house called "Casa querca"--by which I suppose the author
+means Oak House--is "refinement," as imagined in the suburbs, and excites
+the passing sneer, "Is not the English language good enough?" If the
+Italians will only oblige, and call their own "Bella Vistas" "Pretty
+View," and so forth, while we continue the reverse process here, we shall
+effect a fair exchange, and find at last an Old England over-sea.
+
+[Illustration: CRAWLEY: LOOKING SOUTH.]
+
+At the beginning of Crawley stands the "Sun" inn, and away at the other
+end is the "Half Moon"; trivial facts not lost upon the guards and
+coachmen of the coaching age, who generally propounded the stock conundrum
+when passing through, "Why is Crawley the longest place in existence?"
+Every one unfamiliar with the road "gave it up"; when came the answer,
+"Because the sun is at one end and the moon at the other." It is evident
+that very small things in the way of jokes satisfied the coach-passengers.
+
+We have it, on the authority of writers who fared this way in early
+coaching days, that Crawley was a "poor place," by which we may suppose
+that they meant it was a village. But what did they expect--a city?
+
+Crawley in these times still keeps some old-world features, but it has
+grown, and is still growing. Its most striking peculiarity is the
+extraordinary width of the road in midst of what I do not like to call a
+town, and yet can scarce term a village; and the next most remarkable
+thing is the bygone impudence of some forgotten land-snatchers who seized
+plots in midst of this street, broad enough for a market-place, and built
+houses on them. By what slow, insensible degrees these sites, doubtless
+originally those of market-stalls, were stolen, records do not tell us;
+but we may imagine the movable stalls replaced by fixed wooden ones, and
+those in course of time giving place to more substantial structures, and
+so forth, in the time-honoured way, until the present houses, placed like
+islands in the middle of the street, sealed and sanctified the long-drawn
+tale of grab.
+
+Even Crawley's generous width of roadway cannot have been an inch too wide
+for the traffic that crowded the village when it was a stage at which
+every coach stopped, when the air resounded with the guards' winding of
+their horns, or the playing of the occasional key-bugle to the airs of
+"Sally in our Alley" or "Love's Young Dream." Then the "George" was the
+scene of a continual bustling, with the shouting of the ostlers, the
+chink and clashing of harness, and all the tumults of travelling, when
+travelling was no light affair of an hour and a fraction, railway time,
+but a real journey, of five hours.
+
+[Illustration: CRAWLEY, 1789.]
+
+Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap.
+Occasionally some great cycle "scorch" is in progress, when whirling
+enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of
+the "George" spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on
+which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very
+invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen _and_
+bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in
+cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the
+roads are peopled again.
+
+There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey,
+embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there
+is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered
+frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of
+that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her
+so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.
+
+They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs
+that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse
+of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk
+obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad.
+Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as
+might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter
+and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with
+flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very
+attractive ruin indeed.
+
+Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789,
+when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead,
+took notes for his book, "An Excursion to Brighthelmstone." It is a work
+of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist's
+illustrations. That _they_ should have lived, you who see the reproduction
+will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is
+otherwise greatly changed.
+
+[Illustration: AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.]
+
+An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that
+the greater part of "Crawley" is not in that parish at all, but in the
+adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same
+side of the street belong to Crawley.
+
+In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally
+open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the
+nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in
+this admonitory fashion:
+
+  Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde
+  He war be for whate comyth be hynde.
+
+When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone,
+it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton,
+"be hynde," remarking that it is "arnshunt."
+
+[Illustration: THE "GEORGE," CRAWLEY.]
+
+The sturdy old tower is crowned with a gilded weather vane representing
+Noah's dove returning to the Ark with the olive-leaf, when the waters were
+abated from off the earth: a device peculiarly appropriate, intentionally
+or not, to Crawley, overlooking the oft-flooded valley of the Mole.
+
+But the most interesting feature of this church is the rude representation
+of the Trinity carved on the western face of the tower: three awful
+figures of very ancient date, on a diminishing scale, built into
+fifteenth-century niches. Above, on the largest scale, is the Supreme
+Being, holding what seems to be intended for a wheel, one of the ancient
+symbols of eternity. The sculptor, endeavouring to realise the grovelling
+superstition of his remote age, has put his "fear of God," in a very
+literal sense, into the grim, truculent, merciless, all-judging smile of
+the image; and thus, in enduring stone, we have preserved to us the
+terrified minds of the dark ages, when God, the loving Father, was
+non-existent, and was only the Judge, swift to punish. The other figures
+are merely like infantile grotesques.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+There is but one literary celebrity whose name goes down to posterity
+associated with Crawley. At Vine Cottage, near the railway station,
+resided Mark Lemon, editor of _Punch_, who died here on May 20th, 1870.
+Since his time the expansion of Crawley has caused the house to be
+converted into a grocer's shop.
+
+[Sidenote: PRIZE-FIGHTS]
+
+[Illustration: SCULPTURED EMBLEM OF THE HOLY TRINITY, CRAWLEY CHURCH.]
+
+The only other inhabitant of Crawley whose deeds informed the world at
+large of his name and existence was Tom Cribb, the bruiser. But though I
+lighted upon the statement of his residence here at one time, yet, after
+hunting up details of his life and of the battles he fought, after
+pursuing him through the classic pages of "Boxiana" and the voluminous
+records of "Pugilistica," after consulting, too, that sprightly work "The
+Fancy"; after all this I find no further mention of the fact. It was
+fitting, though, that the pugilist should have his home near Crawley
+Downs, the scene of so many of the Homeric combats witnessed by thousands
+upon thousands of excited spectators, from the Czar of Russia and the
+great Prince Regent, downwards to the lowest blackguards of the
+metropolis. An inspiring sight those Downs must have presented from time
+to time, when great multitudes--princes, patricians, and plebeians of
+every description--hung with beating hearts and bated breath upon the
+performances of two men in a roped enclosure battering one another for so
+much a side.
+
+It is thus no matter for surprise that the Brighton Road, on its several
+routes, witnessed brilliant and dashing turn-outs, both in public coaches
+and private equipages, during that time when the last of the Georges
+flourished so flamboyantly as Prince, Prince Regent, and King. How else
+could it have been with the Court at one end of it and the metropolis at
+the other, and between them the rendezvous of all such as delighted in the
+"noble art"?
+
+Many were the merry "mills" which "came off" at Crawley Downs, Copthorne
+Common, and Blindley Heath, attended by the Prince and his merry men,
+conspicuous among whom at different times were Fox, Lord Barrymore, Lord
+Yarmouth ("Red Herrings"), and Major George Hanger. As for the tappings of
+claret, the punchings of conks and bread-baskets, and the tremendous
+sloggings that went on in this neighbourhood in those virile times, are
+they not set forth with much circumstantial detail in the pages of
+"Fistiana" and "Boxiana"? There shall you read how the Prince Regent
+witnessed with enthusiasm such merry sets-to as this between Randall and
+Martin on Crawley Downs. "Boxiana" gives a full account of it, and is even
+moved to verse, in this wise:
+
+  THE FIGHT AT CRAWLEY
+  BETWEEN
+  THE NONPAREIL
+  AND
+  THE OUT-AND-OUTER.
+
+  Come, won't you list unto my lay
+  About the fight at Crawley, O!...
+
+with the refrain--
+
+  With his filaloo trillaloo,
+  Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!
+
+For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be
+referred to the classic pages of "Boxiana" itself.
+
+Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the
+"Master of the Rolls," one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades
+went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871.
+He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the
+usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican.
+He was landlord successively of the "Crown" at Croydon, and the "Horns"
+tavern, Kennington.
+
+As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which
+Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man," came off victor, they are not for these
+pages. How the combatants "fibbed" and "countered," and did other things
+equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the
+pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing
+of all the blows given and received.
+
+This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but
+see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered
+those times. What diversions went forward on the roads--such roads as they
+were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the
+morning following the "battle," the remains of several carriages,
+phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where
+they had collided in the darkness.
+
+[Sidenote: THE REGENCY]
+
+The House of Hanover, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, was
+not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the
+gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the
+family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at
+least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will
+ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical
+periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of
+romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and
+will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation
+to the words "Regent" and "Regency"; and his wild escapades have sufficed
+to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and
+greasy vulgarity.
+
+The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous
+_bourgeois_ respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince's
+surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his _entourage_ were
+dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting
+prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the
+blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings, they
+were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.
+
+Thackeray, in his "Four Georges," has little that is pleasant to say of
+any one of them, but is astonishingly severe upon this last, both as
+Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that
+book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake,
+nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him
+to be a man, as witness this passage: "To make a portrait of him at sight
+seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig,
+his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I
+could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet,
+after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old
+magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public
+dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing
+but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great
+simulacrum."
+
+Poor fat Adonis!
+
+But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm
+of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed,
+although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those
+thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that
+Thackeray wrote so intimately of snobs: in those unworthy sneers speaks
+one of the race.
+
+One curious little item of praise the author of the "Four Georges" was
+constrained to allow the Regent: "Where my Prince did actually distinguish
+himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from
+Brighton to Carlton House--fifty-six miles."[11]
+
+So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in
+the abuse levelled at the "simulacrum."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway
+level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of
+public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good
+idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their
+excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of
+Crawley--the residential and superior modern district of country houses,
+each in midst of its own little pleasance.
+
+[Sidenote: PEASE POTTAGE]
+
+The cutting in the rise at Hog's Hill passed, the road goes in a long
+incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a
+post-office which spells the name wrongly, "Peas." No one _knows_ how the
+place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and
+tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their
+route-marching and fed with "pease-pottage," the old name for
+pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way
+to trial at the assizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead
+alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate,
+from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the "Gate" has
+latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and
+the old "Black Swan" inn still standing at the back. The green is not
+improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising
+the inn as an "hotel." The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to
+whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be)
+is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any
+question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question
+arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in
+particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful
+defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or
+private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful
+distant views of the South Downs are utterly damned by gigantic black
+hoardings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor
+garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been
+written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to
+say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes,
+while America itself is retrieving its reputation.
+
+This is the Forest Ridge of Sussex, where the Forest of St. Leonards still
+stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely
+beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and
+on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge
+is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow
+north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Sussex Ouse south, towards the
+English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it
+is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.
+
+At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining
+the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left.
+Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house
+where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all
+manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.
+
+Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom
+then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh,
+Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm's
+Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years
+pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging
+to customers--forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest
+and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to L70,000, might
+have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the
+bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824,
+when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the
+14th the bank suspended payment.
+
+[Illustration: PEASE POTTAGE.]
+
+The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the
+partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman;
+but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were
+quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been
+entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of
+complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men.
+Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to
+prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old
+Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th,
+in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among
+connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose
+its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged
+him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the
+secret died with him.
+
+No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or
+without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed--or been
+afflicted with--the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is,
+by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar
+notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood
+here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only
+scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the
+wayfarers' friend.
+
+"Squire Powlett" is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is
+more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of
+springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has
+fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists
+and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they
+have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fashioned
+spook.
+
+_Why_ "Squire Powlett" should haunt these nocturnal glades is not so
+easily to be guessed. He was not, so far as can be learned, an evildoer,
+and he certainly was not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a captain
+in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the Forest of St. Leonards, who
+seems to have led an exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under
+an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+[Sidenote: HAND CROSS]
+
+Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where
+several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives,
+of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and
+wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely
+cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest
+habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where,
+very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish
+is very extensive, stretching as far as Crawley; and the hamlet of Hand
+Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent village itself, is
+only a mere mushroom excrescence called into existence by the road travel
+of the last two centuries.
+
+It is the being on the main road, and on the junction of several routes,
+that has made Hand Cross what it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham
+itself; just as in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare will
+make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps ruin those of some other
+route.
+
+Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing to the eye; for,
+after all, it is a _parvenu_ of a place, and lacks the Domesday descent
+of, for instance, Cuckfield. Now, the _parvenu_, the man of his hands, may
+be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity grates upon the nerves.
+So it is with Hand Cross, for its prosperity, which has not waned with
+the coaching era, has incited to the building of cottages of that cheap
+and yellow brick we know so well and loathe so much. Also, though there is
+no church, there are two chapels; one of retiring position, the other
+conventicle of aggressive and red, red brick. One could find it in one's
+heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy
+building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the
+hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists
+foregather by the "Red Lion," are the most striking features of the place.
+
+The "Red Lion" is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand
+Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the
+roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands
+of another age of wheels. Shergold tells us that its landlords in olden
+times knew more of smuggling than hearsay, and dispensed from many an
+anker of brandy that had not rendered duty.
+
+At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in
+1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better
+surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two
+miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the
+"record route" for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed
+between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the
+classic route at Pyecombe.
+
+For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to
+Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern
+face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses,
+cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or
+transmuting commonplace glazier's work into sparkling diamonds.
+
+At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway,
+with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the "Jolly
+Farmers" inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield,
+under whose boughs the coach passengers of a century ago feasted off the
+"black-hearts"; where are the "Dun Cow" and its equally famous
+rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they
+had never been.
+
+[Illustration: THE "RED LION," HAND CROSS.]
+
+Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of
+hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman's Green to Cuckfield. From the
+hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards
+Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows,
+mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient
+Rome.
+
+Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was
+the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in
+others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and
+fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older
+rustics know it, if the younger and the passing stranger do not: they tell
+you "'tis wheer th' owd hroad tarned arff."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no
+manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the
+coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always
+thus, for in those centuries--from the fourteenth until the early part of
+the eighteenth--when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted
+on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given
+over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks.
+
+[Illustration: CUCKFIELD, 1789. _From an aquatint after Rowlandson._]
+
+All this was so long ago that nature has healed the scars made by that
+busy time. Wooded hills replace the uplands made bare by the smelters, the
+cinder-heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures, the
+"hammer-ponds" of the smelteries and foundries have become the resorts of
+artists seeking the picturesque, and the descendants of the old
+iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have for generations past
+been numbered among the county families.
+
+[Sidenote: CUCKFIELD]
+
+Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directly on the route of the
+Brighton railway, but it pleased the engineers to bring their line no
+nearer than Hayward's Heath, some two miles distant. They built a station
+there, on the lone heath, "for Cuckfield," with the result, sixty years
+later, that the sometime solitude is a town and still growing, while
+Cuckfield declines. Hayward's Heath, curiously enough, is, or was until
+December, 1894, in the parish of Cuckfield, but the time is at hand when
+the two will be joined by the spread of that railway upstart; and then
+will be the psychological moment for abolishing the name of Hayward's
+Heath--which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitchless--and adopting
+that of the parental "Cookfield."
+
+Meanwhile, I shall drop no sentimental tears over the chance that
+Cuckfield lost, sixty years ago, of becoming a railway junction and a
+modern town. Of junctions and mushroom towns we have a sufficiency, but of
+surviving sweet old country townlets very few.
+
+To see Cuckfield thoroughly demands some little leisure, for although it
+is small one must needs have time to assimilate the atmosphere of the
+place, if it is to be appreciated at its worth; from the grey old church
+with its tall shingled spire and its monuments of Burrells and Sergisons
+of Cuckfield Place, to the staid old houses in the quiet streets, and
+those two fine old coaching inns, the "Talbot" and the "King's Head."
+Rowlandson made a picture of the town in 1789, and it is not wholly unlike
+that, even now, but where is that Fair we see in progress in his spirited
+rendering? Gone, together with the smart fellow driving the curricle, and
+all the other figures of that scene, into the forgotten. There, in one
+corner, you see the Recruiting Sergeant and the drummer, impressing with
+military glory a typical smock-frocked Hodge, gaping so outrageously that
+he seems to be opening his face rather than merely his mouth; the artist's
+idea seems to have been that, like a dolphin, he would swallow anything,
+either in the way of food or of stories. There are no full-blooded
+Sergeant Kites and gaping yokels nowadays.
+
+Cuckfield is evidently feeling, more and more, the altered condition of
+affairs. Motorists, who are supposed to bring back prosperity to the road,
+do nothing of the kind on the road to Brighton; for those who live at
+Brighton or London merely want to reach the other end as quickly as
+possible, and, with a legal limit up to twenty miles an hour, can cover
+the distance in two hours and a half, and, with an occasional illegal
+interval, easily in two hours. Except in case of a breakdown, the wayside
+hostelries do not often see the colour of the motorists' money, but they
+smell the stink, and are choked with the dust of them, and landlords and
+every one else concerned would be only too glad if the project for
+building a road between London and Brighton, exclusively for motor
+traffic, were likely to be realised. Then ordinary users of the highway
+might once more be able to discern the natural scenery of the road, at
+present obscured with dust-clouds.
+
+The text for these remarks is furnished by the recent closing, after a
+hundred and fifty years or more, of the once chief inn of Cuckfield: the
+fine and stately "Talbot," now empty and "To Let"; the hospitable
+quotation "You're welcome, what's your will," from _The Merry Wives of
+Windsor_ on its fanlight, reading like a bitter mockery.
+
+The interior of Cuckfield Church is crowded with monuments of the
+Sergisons and the Burrells. Pride of place is given in the chancel to the
+monument of Charles Sergison, who died in 1732, aged 78. It is a very fine
+white marble monument, with a figure of Truth gazing into her mirror, and
+holding with one hand a medallion partly supported by a Cupid,
+displaying a portrait of the lamented Sergison, who, we learn from a
+sub-acid inscription, was "Commissioner of the Navy forty-eight years,
+till 1719, to the entire satisfaction of the King and his Ministers." "The
+civil government of the Navy then being put into military hands, he was
+esteemed by them not a fit person to serve any longer." He was, in short,
+like those "rulers of the Queen's (or King's) Navee" satirised by Sir W.
+S. Gilbert in modern times, and "never went to sea." At the period of his
+compulsory retirement it seems to have rather belatedly occurred to the
+authorities that such an one could not be well acquainted with the needs
+of the Navy; so the "Capacity, Penetration, exact Judgment" of this "true
+patriot" were shelved; but, at any rate, he had had his whack, and it was
+surely high time for the exact judgment, true patriotism, capacity and
+penetration of others to have a chance of making something out of the
+nation.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROAD OUT OF CUCKFIELD.]
+
+A few monuments are hidden behind the organ, among them one to Guy
+Carleton, "son of George, Lord Bishop of Chichester." He, it seems, "died
+of a consumption, cl=c=l=c=cxxiv," which appears to be the highly esoteric
+way of writing 1624. "_Mors vitae initium_" he tells us, and illustrates it
+with the pleasing fancy of a skull mounted on an hour-glass, with ears of
+wheat sprouting from the eyeless sockets. Other equally pleasant devices,
+encircled with fragments of Greek, are plentiful, the whole concluding
+with the announcement that "The end of all things is at hand." Holding
+that opinion, it would seem to have been hardly worth while to erect the
+monument, but in the result it survives to show what a very gross mistake
+he made.
+
+Two illustrations of the quiet annals of Cuckfield, widely different in
+point of time, are the old clock and the wall-plate memorial to one Frank
+Bleach of the Royal Sussex Volunteer Company, who died at Bloemfontein in
+1901. The ancient hand-wrought clock, made in 1667 by Isaac Leney,
+probably of Cuckfield, finally stopped in 1867, and was taken down in
+1873. After lying as lumber in the belfry for many years, it was in 1904
+fixed on the interior wall of the tower.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+[Sidenote: "ROOKWOOD"]
+
+Cuckfield Place, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of
+his "Rookwood," stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in
+midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition
+is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands
+the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place.
+
+Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches,
+beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, many-gabled
+mansion looking down upon the whole.
+
+[Sidenote: AINSWORTH]
+
+"Rookwood," the fantastic and gory tale that first gave Harrison Ainsworth
+a vogue, was commenced in 1831, but not completed until 1834. Ainsworth
+died at Reigate, January 3, 1882. Thus in his preface he acknowledges his
+model:
+
+"The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads
+which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is
+ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon
+whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge
+girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved.
+Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I
+may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I
+have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat
+and domains of that fated family. The general features of the venerable
+structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular,
+the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the
+hall, 'like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe' (as the poet Shelley once observed of
+the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly
+tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves
+are carefully delineated."
+
+[Illustration: CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
+
+"Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar
+convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and
+"Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in
+gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
+Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years
+of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon
+Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her
+favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions,
+death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one,"
+daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary
+ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising
+romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured
+water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his
+verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys
+refuse any longer to be thrilled. He "wants to make yer blood run cold,"
+but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be
+impossible to burlesque "Rookwood"; it burlesques itself, and shall be
+allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the
+family vault, to his tragic end:
+
+[Illustration: THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE, CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
+
+[Illustration: HARRISON AINSWORTH. _From the Fraser portrait._]
+
+"He then walked beneath the shadow of one of the yews, chanting an odd
+stanza or so of one of his wild staves, wrapped the while, it would seem,
+in affectionate contemplation of the subject-matter of his song:
+
+  THE CHURCHYARD YEW.
+
+      '----Metuendaque succo
+        Taxus.'
+
+  A noxious tree is the churchyard yew,
+  As if from the dead its sap it drew;
+  Dark are its branches, and dismal to see,
+  Like plumes at Death's latest solemnity.
+  Spectral and jagged, and black as the wings
+  Which some spirit of ill o'er a sepulchre flings:
+  Oh! a terrible tree is the churchyard yew;
+  Like it is nothing so grimly to view.
+
+  Yet this baleful tree hath a core so sound,
+  Can nought so tough in a grove be found:
+  From it were fashioned brave English bows,
+  The boast of our isle, and the dread of its foes.
+  For our sturdy sires cut their stoutest staves
+  From the branch that hung o'er their fathers' graves;
+  And though it be dreary and dismal to view,
+  Staunch at the heart is the churchyard yew.
+
+"His ditty concluded, Alan entered the church, taking care to leave the
+door slightly ajar, in order to facilitate his grandson's entrance. For an
+instant he lingered in the chancel. The yellow moonlight fell upon the
+monuments of his race; and, directed by the instinct of hate, Alan's eye
+rested upon the gilded entablature of his perfidious brother Reginald, and
+muttering curses, 'not loud, but deep,' he passed on. Having lighted his
+lantern in no tranquil mood, he descended into the vault, observing a
+similar caution with respect to the portal of the cemetery, which he left
+partially unclosed, with the key in the lock. Here he resolved to abide
+Luke's coming. The reader knows what probability there was of his
+expectations being realised.
+
+[Sidenote: FARCICAL ROMANCE]
+
+"For a while he paced the tomb, wrapped in gloomy meditation, and
+pondering, it might be, upon the result of Luke's expedition, and the
+fulfilment of his own dark schemes, scowling from time to time beneath his
+bent eyebrows, counting the grim array of coffins, and noticing, with
+something like satisfaction, that the shell which contained the remains of
+his daughter had been restored to its former position. He then bethought
+him of Father Checkley's midnight intrusion upon his conference with Luke,
+and their apprehension of a supernatural visitation, and his curiosity was
+stimulated to ascertain by what means the priest had gained admission to
+the spot unperceived and unheard. He resolved to sound the floor, and see
+whether any secret entrance existed; and hollowly and dully did the hard
+flagging return the stroke of his heel as he pursued his scrutiny. At
+length the metallic ringing of an iron plate, immediately behind the
+marble effigy of Sir Ranulph, resolved the point. There it was that the
+priest had found access to the vault; but Alan's disappointment was
+excessive when he discovered that this plate was fastened on the
+under-side, and all communication thence with the churchyard, or to
+wherever else it might conduct him, cut off; but the present was not the
+season for further investigation, and tolerably pleased with the discovery
+he had already made, he returned to his silent march around the sepulchre.
+
+"At length a sound, like the sudden shutting of the church door, broke
+upon the profound stillness of the holy edifice. In the hush that
+succeeded a footstep was distinctly heard threading the aisle.
+
+"'He comes--he comes!' exclaimed Alan joyfully; adding, an instant after,
+in an altered voice, 'but he comes alone.'
+
+"The footstep drew near to the mouth of the vault--it was upon the stairs.
+Alan stepped forward to greet, as he supposed, his grandson, but started
+back in astonishment and dismay as he encountered in his stead Lady
+Rookwood. Alan retreated, while the lady advanced, swinging the iron door
+after her, which closed with a tremendous clang. Approaching the statue of
+the first Sir Ranulph she passed, and Alan then remarked the singular and
+terrible expression of her eyes, which appeared to be fixed upon the
+statue, or upon some invisible object near it. There was something in her
+whole attitude and manner calculated to impress the deepest terror on the
+beholder, and Alan gazed upon her with an awe which momently increased.
+Lady Rookwood's bearing was as proud and erect as we have formerly
+described it to have been, her brow was as haughtily bent, her chiselled
+lip as disdainfully curled; but the staring, changeless eye, and the
+deep-heaved sob which occasionally escaped her, betrayed how much she was
+under the influence of mortal terror. Alan watched her in amazement. He
+knew not how the scene was likely to terminate, nor what could have
+induced her to visit this ghostly spot at such an hour and alone; but he
+resolved to abide the issue in silence--profound as her own. After a time,
+however, his impatience got the better of his fears and scruples, and he
+spoke.
+
+"'What doth Lady Rookwood in the abode of the dead?' asked he at length.
+
+"She started at the sound of his voice, but still kept her eye fixed upon
+the vacancy.
+
+"'Hast thou not beckoned me hither, and am I not come?' returned she, in a
+hollow tone. 'And now thou askest wherefore I am here. I am here because,
+as in thy life I feared thee not, neither in death do I fear thee. I am
+here because----'
+
+"'What seest thou?' interrupted Alan, with ill-suppressed terror.
+
+"'What see I--ha--ha!' shouted Lady Rookwood, amidst discordant laughter;
+'that which might appal a heart less stout than mine--a figure
+anguish-writhen, with veins that glow as with a subtle and consuming
+flame. A substance, yet a shadow, in thy living likeness. Ha--frown if
+thou wilt; I can return thy glances.'
+
+[Sidenote: MELODRAMA POUR RIRE]
+
+"'Where dost thou see this vision?' demanded Alan.
+
+"'Where?' echoed Lady Rookwood, becoming for the first time sensible of
+the presence of a stranger. 'Ha--who are you that question me?--what are
+you?--speak!'
+
+"'No matter who or what I am,' returned Alan; 'I ask you what you behold?'
+
+"'Can you see nothing?'
+
+"'Nothing,' replied Alan.
+
+"'You knew Sir Piers Rookwood?'
+
+"'Is it he?' asked Alan, drawing near her.
+
+"'It is,' replied Lady Rookwood; 'I have followed him hither, and I will
+follow him whithersoever he leads me, were it to----'
+
+"'What doth he now?' asked Alan; 'do you see him still?'
+
+"'The figure points to that sarcophagus,' returned Lady Rookwood--'can you
+raise up the lid?'
+
+"'No,' replied Alan; 'my strength will not avail to lift it.'
+
+"'Yet let the trial be made,' said Lady Rookwood; 'the figure points there
+still--my own arm shall aid you.'
+
+"Alan watched her in dumb wonder. She advanced towards the marble
+monument, and beckoned him to follow. He reluctantly complied. Without any
+expectation of being able to move the ponderous lid of the sarcophagus, at
+Lady Rookwood's renewed request he applied himself to the task. What was
+his surprise when, beneath their united efforts, he found the ponderous
+slab slowly revolve upon its vast hinges, and, with little further
+difficulty, it was completely elevated, though it still required the
+exertion of all Alan's strength to prop it open and prevent its falling
+back.
+
+"'What does it contain?' asked Lady Rookwood.
+
+"'A warrior's ashes,' returned Alan.
+
+"'There is a rusty dagger upon a fold of faded linen,' cried Lady
+Rookwood, holding down the light.
+
+"'It is the weapon with which the first dame of the house of Rookwood was
+stabbed,' said Alan, with a grim smile:
+
+  'Which whoso findeth in the tomb
+  Shall clutch until the hour of doom;
+  And when 'tis grasped by hand of clay
+  The curse of blood shall pass away.
+
+So saith the rhyme. Have you seen enough?'
+
+"'No,' said Lady Rookwood, precipitating herself into the marble coffin.
+'That weapon shall be mine.'
+
+"'Come forth--come forth,' cried Alan. 'My arm trembles--I cannot support
+the lid.'
+
+"'I will have it, though I grasp it to eternity,' shrieked Lady Rookwood,
+vainly endeavouring to wrest away the dagger, which was fastened, together
+with the linen upon which it lay, by some adhesive substance to the bottom
+of the shell.
+
+"At this moment Alan Rookwood happened to cast his eye upward, and he
+then beheld what filled him with new terror. The axe of the sable statue
+was poised above its head, as in the act to strike him. Some secret
+machinery, it was evident, existed between the sarcophagus lid and this
+mysterious image. But in the first impulse of his alarm Alan abandoned his
+hold of the slab, and it sunk slowly downwards. He uttered a loud cry as
+it moved. Lady Rookwood heard this cry. She raised herself at the same
+moment--the dagger was in her hand--she pressed it against the lid, but
+its downward force was too great to be withstood. The light was within the
+sarcophagus and Alan could discern her features. The expression was
+terrible. She uttered one shriek, and the lid closed for ever.
+
+"Alan was in total darkness. The light had been enclosed with Lady
+Rookwood. There was something so horrible in her probable fate that even
+_he_ shuddered as he thought upon it. Exerting all his remaining strength,
+he essayed to raise the lid; but now it was more firmly closed than ever.
+It defied all his power. Once, for an instant, he fancied that it yielded
+to his straining sinews, but it was only his hand that slided upon the
+surface of the marble. It was fixed--immovable. The sides and lid rang
+with the strokes which the unfortunate lady bestowed upon them with the
+dagger's point; but these sounds were not long heard. Presently all was
+still; the marble ceased to vibrate with her blows. Alan struck the lid
+with his knuckles, but no response was returned. All was silent.
+
+[Sidenote: FRENZY]
+
+"He now turned his attention to his own situation, which had become
+sufficiently alarming. An hour must have elapsed, yet Luke had not
+arrived. The door of the vault was closed--the key was in the lock, and on
+the outside. He was himself a prisoner within the tomb. What if Luke
+should _not_ return? What if he were slain, as it might chance, in the
+enterprise? That thought flashed across his brain like an electric shock.
+None knew of his retreat but his grandson. He might perish of famine
+within this desolate vault.
+
+"He checked this notion as soon as it was formed--it was too dreadful to
+be indulged in. A thousand circumstances might conspire to detain Luke. He
+was sure to come. Yet the solitude, the darkness, was awful, almost
+intolerable. The dying and the dead were around him. He dared not stir.
+
+"Another hour--an age it seemed to him--had passed. Still Luke came not.
+Horrible forebodings crossed him; but he would not surrender himself to
+them. He rose, and crawled in the direction, as he supposed, of the
+door--fearful even of the stealthy sound of his own footsteps. He reached
+it, and his heart once more throbbed with hope. He bent his ear to the
+key; he drew in his breath; he listened for some sound, but nothing was to
+be heard. A groan would have been almost music in his ears.
+
+"Another hour was gone! He was now a prey to the most frightful
+apprehensions, agitated in turns by the wildest emotions of rage and
+terror. He at one moment imagined that Luke had abandoned him, and heaped
+curses upon his head; at the next, convinced that he had fallen, he
+bewailed with equal bitterness his grandson's fate and his own. He paced
+the tomb like one distracted; he stamped upon the iron plate; he smote
+with his hands upon the door; he shouted, and the vault hollowly echoed
+his lamentations. But Time's sand ran on, and Luke arrived not.
+
+"Alan now abandoned himself wholly to despair. He could no longer
+anticipate his grandson's coming--no longer hope for deliverance. His fate
+was sealed. Death awaited him. He must anticipate his slow but inevitable
+stroke, enduring all the grinding horrors of starvation. The contemplation
+of such an end was madness, but he was forced to contemplate it now; and
+so appalling did it appear to his imagination, that he half resolved to
+dash out his brains against the walls of the sepulchre, and put an end at
+once to his tortures; and nothing, except a doubt whether he might not, by
+imperfectly accomplishing his purpose, increase his own suffering,
+prevented him from putting this dreadful idea into execution. His dagger
+was gone, and he had no other weapon. Terrors of a new kind now assailed
+him. The dead, he fancied, were bursting from their coffins, and he
+peopled the darkness with grisly phantoms. They were round about him on
+each side, whirling and rustling, gibbering, groaning, shrieking,
+laughing, and lamenting. He was stunned, stifled. The air seemed to grow
+suffocating, pestilential; the wild laughter was redoubled; the horrible
+troop assailed him; they dragged him along the tomb, and amid their howls
+he fell, and became insensible.
+
+[Sidenote: TORMENT]
+
+"When he returned to himself, it was some time before he could collect his
+scattered faculties; and when the agonising consciousness of his terrible
+situation forced itself upon his mind, he had nigh relapsed into oblivion.
+He arose. He rushed towards the door: he knocked against it with his
+knuckles till the blood streamed from them; he scratched against it with
+his nails till they were torn off by the roots. With insane fury he
+hurled himself against the iron frame: it was in vain. Again he had
+recourse to the trap-door. He searched for it; he found it. He laid
+himself upon the ground. There was no interval of space in which he could
+insert a finger's point. He beat it with his clenched hand; he tore it
+with his teeth; he jumped upon it; he smote it with his heel. The iron
+returned a sullen sound.
+
+"He again essayed the lid of the sarcophagus. Despair nerved his strength.
+He raised the slab a few inches. He shouted, screamed, but no answer was
+returned; and again the lid fell.
+
+"'She is dead!' cried Alan. 'Why have I not shared her fate? But mine is
+to come. And such a death!--oh, oh!' And, frenzied at the thought, he
+again hurried to the door, and renewed his fruitless attempts to escape,
+till nature gave way, and he sank upon the floor, groaning and exhausted.
+
+"Physical suffering now began to take the place of his mental tortures.
+Parched and consumed with a fierce internal fever, he was tormented by
+unappeasable thirst--of all human ills the most unendurable. His tongue
+was dry and dusty, his throat inflamed; his lips had lost all moisture. He
+licked the humid floor; he sought to imbibe the nitrous drops from the
+walls; but, instead of allaying his thirst, they increased it. He would
+have given the world, had he possessed it, for a draught of cold
+spring-water. Oh, to have died with his lips upon some bubbling fountain's
+marge! But to perish thus!
+
+"Nor were the pangs of hunger wanting. He had to endure all the horrors of
+famine as well as the agonies of quenchless thirst.
+
+"In this dreadful state three days and nights passed over Alan's fated
+head. Nor night nor day had he. Time, with him, was only measured by its
+duration, and that seemed interminable. Each hour added to his suffering,
+and brought with it no relief. During this period of prolonged misery
+reason often tottered on her throne. Sometimes he was under the influence
+of the wildest passions. He dragged coffins from their recesses, hurled
+them upon the ground, striving to break them open and drag forth their
+loathsome contents. Upon other occasions he would weep bitterly and
+wildly; and once--once only--did he attempt to pray; but he started from
+his knees with an echo of infernal laughter, as he deemed, ringing in his
+ears. Then, again, would he call down imprecations upon himself and his
+whole line, trampling upon the pile of coffins he had reared; and, lastly,
+more subdued, would creep to the boards that contained the body of his
+child, kissing them with a frantic outbreak of affection.
+
+"At length he became sensible of his approaching dissolution. To him the
+thought of death might well be terrible; but he quailed not before it, or
+rather seemed, in his latest moments, to resume all his wonted firmness of
+character. Gathering together his remaining strength, he dragged himself
+towards the niche wherein his brother, Sir Reginald Rookwood, was
+deposited, and, placing his hand upon the coffin, solemnly exclaimed, 'My
+curse--my dying curse--be upon thee evermore!'
+
+"Falling with his face upon the coffin, Alan instantly expired. In this
+attitude his remains were discovered."
+
+How to repress a smile at the picture conjured up of Lady Rookwood
+"precipitating herself into the marble coffin"! How not to refrain from
+laughing at the fantastic description of Alan piling up coffins in the
+vault and jumping upon them!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+Half a mile below Cuckfield stands Ansty Cross, (the "Handstay" of old
+road-books, and said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon, _Heanstige_, meaning
+highway), a cluster of a few cottages and the "Green Cross" inn, once old
+and picturesque, now rebuilt in the Ready-made Picturesque order of
+architecture. Here stood one of the numerous turnpike-gates.
+
+Close by is Riddens Farm, a picturesque little homestead, with tile-hung
+front and clustered chimneys. It still contains one of those old Sussex
+cast-iron firebacks mentioned in an earlier page, dated 1622.
+
+Below Ansty, two miles or thereby down the road, the little river Adur is
+passed at Bridge Farm, and the twin towns of St. John's Common and Burgess
+Hill are reached.
+
+Before 1820 their sites were fields and common land, wild and
+gorse-covered, free and open. Few houses were then in sight; the "Anchor"
+inn, by Burgess Hill, the reputed haunt of smugglers, who stored their
+contraband in the woods and heaths close by; and the "King's Head," at St.
+John's Common, with two or three cottages--these were all.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SUSSEX FIREBACK, RIDDENS FARM.]
+
+[Sidenote: BURGESS HILL]
+
+St. John's Common, partly in Keymer and partly in Clayton parishes, was
+enclosed piecemeal, between 1828 and 1855, by an arrangement between the
+lords of the manors and the copyholders, who divided the plunder between
+them, when this large tract of land resently became the site of these
+towns of St. John's Common and Burgess Hill, which sprang up, if not with
+quite the rapidity of a Californian mining-town, at least with a celerity
+previously unknown in England. Their rapid rise was of course due to the
+Brighton Railway and its station. There are, however, nowadays not
+wanting signs, quite apart from the condition of the brick and tile and
+drainpipe-making industry, on which the two mushroom towns have come into
+being, that the unlovely places are in a bad way. Shops closed and vainly
+offered "to let" tell a story of artificial expansion and consequent
+depression: the inevitable Nemesis of discounting the future.
+
+[Illustration: JACOB'S POST.]
+
+I will show you what the site of these uninviting modern places was like,
+a hundred years ago. It is not far, geographically, from the sorry streets
+of Burgess Hill to the wild, wide commons of Wivelsfield and Ditchling;
+but such a change is wrought in two miles and a half as would be
+considered impossible by any who have not made the excursion into those
+beautiful regions. They show us, in survival, what the now hackneyed main
+roads were like three generations ago.
+
+[Sidenote: JACOB'S POST]
+
+In every circumstance Ditchling Common recalls the "Crackskull Commons" of
+the eighteenth-century comedies, for it has a little horror of its own in
+the shape of an authentic fragment of a gibbet. This is the silent
+reminder of a crime committed near at hand, at the "Royal Oak" inn,
+Wivelsfield, in 1734. In that year Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar, came to the
+inn and, stabling his horse, attacked Miles, the landlord, while he was
+grooming the animal down, and cut his throat. The servant-maid, hearing a
+disturbance in the stable, and coming downstairs to see the cause of it,
+was murdered in the same way, and then the Jew calmly walked upstairs and
+slaughtered the landlord's wife, who was lying ill in bed. None of these
+unfortunate people died at once. The two women expired the same night, but
+Miles lived long enough to identify the assassin, who was hanged at
+Horsham, his body being hung in chains from this gibbet, ever since known
+as Jacob's Post.
+
+Pieces of wood from this gallows-tree were long and highly esteemed by
+country-folk as charms, and were often carried about with them as
+preventatives of all manner of accidents and diseases; indeed, its present
+meagre proportions are due to this practice and belief.
+
+The post is fenced with a wooden rail, and is surmounted by the quaint
+iron effigy of a rooster, pierced with the date, 1734, in old-fashioned
+figures.
+
+It is a lonely spot, with but one cottage near at hand: the common
+undulating away for miles until it reaches close to the grey barrier of
+the noble South Downs, rising magnificently in the distance.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Returning to the exploited main road. Friar's Oak is soon reached. It was
+selected by Sir Conan Doyle as one of the scenes of his Regency story,
+"Rodney Stone"; but since the year 1900, when the old inn was rebuilt, the
+spot has become an eyesore to those who knew it of old.
+
+No one knows why Friar's Oak is so called, and "Nothing is ever known
+about anything on the roads," is the intemperate exclamation that rises to
+the lips of the disappointed explorer. But wild legends, as usual, supply
+the place of facts, and the old oak that stands opposite the inn is said
+to have been the spot where a friar, or friars, distributed alms. To any
+one who knows even the least about friars, this story would at once carry
+its own condemnation; but a friar, or a hermit, may have solicited alms
+here. At any rate, the old inn used to exhibit a very forbidding "friar of
+orders grey" as its sign, dancing beneath the oak. Stolen many years ago,
+it was subsequently discovered in London by the merest accident, was
+purchased for a trifling sum, and restored to its bereft signpost. The
+innkeeper, however, thinking that what befell once might happen again,
+hung the cherished panel within the house, where it remains to this day.
+
+From Friar's Oak it is but a step to that newest creation among Brighton's
+suburbs, Clayton Park, its clustering red-brick villas, building estates,
+and half-formed roads adjoining the station of Hassocks Gate, which, by
+the way, the railway authorities have long since reduced to "Hassocks."
+The name recalls certain dusty contrivances of straw and carpeting
+artfully contrived for the devout to stumble over in church. But, not to
+incur the suspicion of tripping over the name as here applied, it may be
+mentioned that "hassock" is the Anglo-Saxon name for a coppice or small
+wood; and there are really many of these at and around Hassocks Gate to
+this day.
+
+[Sidenote: TURNPIKE GATES]
+
+At Stonepound a road leads on the right to Hurstpierpoint, which is too
+big a mouthful for general use, and so is locally "Hurst." The Pierpoints,
+whose name is embedded in that of the place, like an ammonite in a
+geological stratum, were long since as extinct as those other Normans, the
+Monceaux of Hurstmonceaux, and are what Americans would term a "back
+number."
+
+  ............................
+  .    Stone Pound Gate      .
+  .   Clears Patcham Gate    .
+  .St. John's and Ansty Gates.
+  .            Y             .
+  ............................
+
+  ............................
+  .      Patcham Gate        .
+  . Clears Stone Pound Gate, .
+  .St. John's and Ansty Gates.
+  .          126             .
+  ............................
+
+Stonepound Gate was one of the nine that at one time barred the Brighton
+Road, and the last but one on the way. It will be seen, by the specimens
+of turnpike-tickets reprinted here, that at one time, at least, the burden
+of the tolls was not quite so heavy as the mere number of the gates would
+lead a casual observer to suppose, a ticket taken at Ansty "clearing" the
+remaining distance, through three other gates, to Brighton. But it was
+necessary for the traveller to know his way about, and, if he were going
+through, to ask for a ticket to clear to Brighton; else the pikeman would
+issue a ticket, which cost just as much, to the next gate only, when
+another payment would be demanded. These were "tricks upon travellers"
+familiar to every road, and they earned the pikemen, as a class, a very
+unenviable reputation.
+
+It was here, in the great Christmas Eve snowstorm of 1836, that the London
+mail was snowed up. Its adventures illustrate the uncertainty of
+travelling the roads.
+
+In those days you took your seat on your particular fancy in coaches, and
+paid your sixteen-shilling fare from London to Brighton, or _vice versa_,
+trusting (yet with heaviness of heart) in Providence to bring you to a
+happy issue from all the many dangers and discomforts of travelling.
+Occasionally it was brought home, by storm and flood, to those learned
+enough to know it, that "travelling" derived originally from "travail,"
+and the discomforts of leaving one's own fireside in the winter are
+emphasized and underscored in the particulars of what befell at Stonepound
+in the great snowstorm of December 24th, 1836--a storm that paralysed
+communications throughout the kingdom.
+
+"The Brighton up-mail of Sunday had travelled about eight miles from that
+town, when it fell into a drift of snow, from which it was impossible to
+extricate it without assistance. The guard immediately set off to obtain
+all necessary aid, but when he returned no trace whatever could be found,
+either of the coach, coachman or passengers, three in number. After much
+difficulty the coach was found, but could not be extricated from the
+hollow into which it had got. The guard did not reach London until seven
+o'clock on Tuesday night, having been obliged to travel with the bags on
+horseback, and in many instances to leave the main road and proceed
+across fields in order to avoid the deep drifts of snow.
+
+"The passengers, coachman, and guard slept at Clayton, seven miles from
+Brighton. The road from Hand Cross was quite impassable. The non-arrival
+of the mail at Crawley induced the postmaster there to send a man in a gig
+to ascertain the cause on Monday afternoon, and no tidings being heard of
+man, gig, or horse for several hours, another man was despatched on
+horseback. After a long search he found horse and gig completely built up
+in the snow. The man was in an exhausted state. After considerable
+difficulty the horse and gig were extricated, and the party returned to
+Crawley. The man had learned no tidings of the mail, and refused to go out
+again on any such exploring mission."
+
+The Brighton mail from London, too, reached Crawley, but was compelled to
+return.
+
+[Sidenote: CLAYTON TUNNEL ACCIDENT]
+
+Such were the incidents upon which the Christmas stories, of the type
+brought into favour by Dickens, were built, but the stories are better to
+read than the incidents to experience. I am retrospectively sorry for
+those passengers who thus lost their Christmas dinners; but after all, it
+was better to miss the turkey and the Christmas pudding than to be "mashed
+into a pummy" in railway accidents, such as the awful heart-shaking series
+of collisions which took place on Sunday, August 25th, 1861, in the
+railway tunnel through Clayton Hill. On that day, in that gloomy place,
+twenty-four persons lost their lives, and one hundred and seventy-five
+were injured.
+
+Three trains were timed to leave Brighton station on that fatal morning,
+two of them filled to crowding with excursionists; the other, an ordinary
+train, well filled and bound for London. Their times for starting were 8,
+8.5, and 8.30 respectively, but owing to delays occasioned by press of
+traffic, they did not set out until considerably later, at 8.28, 8.31, and
+8.35. At such terribly short intervals were they started, in times when
+no block system existed to render such close following comparatively safe.
+
+Clayton Tunnel was already considered a dangerous place, and there was
+situated at either end (north and south entrances) a signal-cabin
+furnished with telegraphic instruments and signal apparatus, by which the
+signalman at one end of the tunnel could communicate with his fellow at
+the other, and could notify "train in" or "train out" as might happen.
+This practically formed a primitive sort of "block system," especially
+devised for use in this mile and a quarter's dark burrow.
+
+A "self-acting" signal placed in the cutting some distance from the
+southern entrance was supposed, upon the passage of every train, to set
+itself at "danger" for any following, until placed at "line clear" from
+the nearest cabin, but on this occasion the first train passed in, and the
+self-acting signal failed to act.
+
+The second train, following upon the heels of the first, passed all
+unsuspecting, and dashed from daylight into the tunnel's mouth, the
+signalman, who had not received a message from the other end of the tunnel
+being clear, frantically waving his red flag to stop it. This signal
+apparently unnoticed by the driver, the train passed in.
+
+At this moment the third train came into view, and at the same time the
+signalman was advised of the tunnel being clear of the first. Meanwhile,
+the driver of the second train, who _had_ noticed the red flag, was,
+unknown to the signalman, backing his train out again. A message was sent
+to the north cabin for it, "train in"; but the man there, thinking this to
+be a mere repetition of the first, replied, "train out," referring, of
+course, to the first train.
+
+The tunnel being to the southern signalman apparently clear, the third
+train was allowed to proceed, and met, midway, away from daylight, the
+retreating second train. The collision was terrible; the two rearward
+carriages of the second train were smashed to pieces, and the engine of
+the third, reared upon their wreck, poured fire and steam and scalding
+water upon the poor wretches who, wounded but not killed by the impact,
+were struggling to free themselves from the splintered and twisted remains
+of the two carriages.
+
+The heap of wreckage was piled up to the roof of the tunnel, whose
+interior presented a dreadful scene, the engine fire throwing a wild glare
+around, but partly obscured by the blinding, scalding clouds of steam;
+while this suddenly created Inferno resounded with the prayers, shrieks,
+shouts, and curses of injured and scatheless alike, all fearful of the
+coming of another train to add to the already sufficiently hideous ruin.
+
+Fortunately no further catastrophe occurred; but nothing of horror was
+wanting, neither in the magnitude nor in the circumstances of the
+disaster, which long remained in the memories of those who read and was
+impossible ever to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SOUTH DOWNS]
+
+From these levels at Stonepound the South Downs come full upon the view,
+crowned at Clayton Hill with windmills. Ditchling Beacon to the left, and
+the more commanding height of Wolstonbury to the extreme right, flank this
+great wall of earth, chalk, and grass--Wolstonbury semicircular in outline
+and bare, save only for some few clumps of yellow gorse and other small
+bushes.
+
+Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb
+Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms
+with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history,
+continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell's mouth.
+
+Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick
+ventilating-shafts going in a long perspective above the chalky cutting
+in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton,
+humbly crouching under the lee of the downs.
+
+"Clayton Hill!" It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year
+1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient
+spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill
+drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road
+takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of
+the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain
+their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick
+wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured; and seven
+have met their death here. Even in these days of good brakes a fatality
+has occurred, a cyclist being killed in November, 1902, in a collision
+with a trap.
+
+From the summit of the downs the Weald is seen, spread out like a
+pictorial map, the little houses, the little trees, the ribbon-like roads
+looking like dainty models; the tiny trains moving out of Noah's Ark
+stations and vehicles crawling the highways like objects in a minature
+land of make-believe. Looking southward, Brighton is seen--a pillar of
+smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so
+near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the
+downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe
+crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of
+the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district.
+Next year the sheep will be shorn, just as they were when the Saxon churls
+worked for their Norman masters, and, unless a cataclysm of nature
+happens, they will continue so to be shorn centuries hence.
+
+[Illustration: CLAYTON TUNNEL.]
+
+But the shepherds have ceased to be vocal with the sheep-shearing songs of
+yore; it seems that their modern accomplishment of being able to read has
+stricken them dumb. Neither the words nor the airs of the old
+shearing-songs will ever again awaken the echoes in the daytime, nor make
+the roomy interiors of barns ring o' nights, as they were wont to do
+lang-syne, when the convivial shearing supper was held, and the ale hummed
+in the cup, and, later in the evening, in the head also.
+
+But the Sussex peasant is by no means altogether bereft of his ancient
+ways. He is, in the more secluded districts, still a South Saxon; for the
+county, until comparatively recent times remote and difficult, plunged in
+its sloughs and isolated by reason of its forests, has no manufactures,
+and the rural parts do not attract immigrants from the shires, to leaven
+his peculiarities. The Sussex folk are still rooted firmly in what Drayton
+calls their "queachy ground." Words of Saxon origin are still the staple
+of the country talk; folk-tales, told in times when the South Saxon
+kingdom was yet a power of the Heptarchy, exist in remote corners,
+currently with the latest ribald song from the London halls; superstitions
+linger, as may be proved by he who pursues his inquiries judiciously, and
+thought moves slowly still in the bucolic mind.
+
+The Norman Conquest left few traces upon the population, and the peasant
+is still the Saxon he ever has been; his occupations, too, tend to
+slowness of speech and mind. The Sussex man is by the very rarest chance
+engaged in any manufacturing industries. He is by choice and by force of
+circumstances ploughman, woodman, shepherd, market-gardener, or carter,
+and is become heavy as his soil, and curiously old-world in habit. All
+which traits are delightful to the preternaturally sharp Londoner, whose
+nerves occupy the most important place in his being. These country folk
+are new and interesting creatures for study to him who is weary of that
+acute product of civilisation--the London arab.
+
+[Sidenote: OLD SUSSEX WAYS]
+
+Sussex ways are, many of them, still curiously patriarchal. But a few
+years ago, and ploughing was commonly performed in these fields by oxen.
+
+[Illustration: CLAYTON CHURCH AND THE SOUTH DOWNS.]
+
+Their cottages that, until a few years ago, were the same as ever, have
+recently been very largely rebuilt, much to the sorrow of those who love
+the picturesque. They were thatched, for the most part, or tiled, or
+roofed with stone slabs. A living-room with yawning fireplace and
+capacious settle was the chief feature of them. The floor was covered with
+red bricks. When the settle was drawn up to the cheerful blaze the
+interior was cosy. But many of the most picturesque cottages were damp and
+insanitary, and although they pleased the artist to look at, it by no
+means followed that they would have contented him to live in.
+
+Outside, in the garden, grew homely flowers and useful vegetables, and
+perhaps by the gnarled apple-tree there stood in the sun a row of
+bee-hives. Sussex superstition declared that they might, indeed, be
+purchased, but not for silver:
+
+  If you wish your bees to thrive,
+  Gold must be paid for ev'ry hive;
+  For when they're bought with other money,
+  There will be neither swarm nor honey.
+
+The year was one long round of superstitious customs and observances, and
+it is not without them, even now. But superstition is shy and not visible
+on the surface.
+
+In January began the round, for from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Day was the
+proper time for "worsling," that is "wassailing" the orchards, but more
+particularly the apple-trees. The country-folk would gather round the
+trees and chant in chorus, rapping the trunks the while with sticks:
+
+  Stand fast root, bear well top;
+  Pray, good God, send us a howling crop
+  Ev'ry twig, apples big;
+  Ev'ry bough, apples enow';
+  Hats full, caps full,
+  Full quarters, sacks full.
+
+These wassailing folk were generally known as "howlers"; "doubtless
+rightly," says a Sussex archaeologist, "for real old Sussex music is in a
+minor key, and can hardly be distinguished from howling." This knowledge
+enlightens our reading of the pages of the Rev. Giles Moore, of Horsted
+Keynes, when he records: "1670, 26th Dec., I gave the howling boys 6d.;" a
+statement which, if not illumined by acquaintance with these old customs,
+would be altogether incomprehensible.
+
+Then, if mud were brought into the house in the month of January, the
+cleanly housewife, at other times jealous of her spotless floors, would
+have nothing of reproof to say, for was this not "January butter." and the
+harbinger of luck to all beneath the roof-tree?
+
+Saints' days, too, had their observances; the habits of bird and beast
+were the almanacs and weather warnings of the villagers, all innocent of
+any other meteorological department, and they have been handed down in
+doggerel rhyme, like this of the Cuckoo, to the present day:
+
+  In April he shows his bill,
+  In May he sings o' night and day,
+  In June he'll change his tune,
+  By July prepare to fly,
+  By August away he must.
+  If he stay till September,
+  'Tis as much as the oldest man
+  Can ever remember.
+
+If he stayed till September, he might possibly see a sight which no mere
+human eye ever beheld: he might observe a practice to which old Sussex
+folk know the Evil One to be addicted. For on Old Michaelmas Day, October
+10th, the Devil goes round the country, and--dirty devil--spits on the
+blackberries. Should any persons eat one on October 11th, they, or some
+one of their kin, will surely die or fall into great trouble before the
+close of the year.
+
+Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that
+county's fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful
+that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto
+been? We have read travellers' tales of woful happenings on the road; hear
+now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy
+going on the highways: "I saw," says he, "an ancient lady, and a lady of
+very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen;
+nor was it done in frolic or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way
+being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it." All which says
+much for the piety of this ancient lady. Only a few years later, in 1729,
+died Dame Judith, widow of Sir Henry Hatsell, who in her will, dated
+January 10th, 1728, directed that her body should be buried at Preston,
+should she happen to die at such a time of year when the roads were
+passable; otherwise, at any place her executors might think suitable. It
+so happened that she died in the month of June, so compliance with her
+wishes was possible.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that
+parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand
+Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies
+deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from
+the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture.
+"Slougham-cum-Crole" is the title of the place in ancient records, "Crole"
+being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it obtained
+its name, pronounced by the natives "Slaffam," and it was certainly due to
+them that the magnificent manor-house--almost a palace--of the Coverts,
+the old lords of the manor--was deserted and began to fall to pieces so
+soon as built.
+
+[Illustration: THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
+
+The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most
+powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of
+Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, "came over with the
+Conqueror"; but they are not found settled here until towards the close
+of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the
+Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter
+Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of
+that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was
+due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their
+enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat,
+over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the
+apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar
+of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush
+grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble
+gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its
+massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort
+of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater
+part to the level of the watery turf.
+
+The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean
+build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences
+when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few
+mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the
+mansion remain to confirm the thought.
+
+That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls
+should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its
+completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed,
+and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other
+hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of
+their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and
+defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of
+land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so
+important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it
+is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues
+and chills innumerable.
+
+[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE: RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.]
+
+A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on
+circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes
+to his wife: "The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I
+vow 'tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of
+dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen
+miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges
+of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient
+draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry
+summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time."
+
+Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so
+ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry
+apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking
+moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all
+those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the
+havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it
+is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park,
+where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its
+handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the
+"Star" Hotel at Lewes.
+
+The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an
+architectural frieze of greyhounds' and leopards' heads and skulls of oxen
+wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of
+their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within
+the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically
+versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but
+the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the
+most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land,
+who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the
+sea on their own manors.
+
+[Illustration: BOLNEY.]
+
+The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated
+architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In
+the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503;
+and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard
+Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company
+of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a
+curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by
+armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because
+executed all innocent of joke or irreverence.
+
+Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights,
+to bear me up.
+
+[Illustration: FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.]
+
+Another Richard, but twice married, who died in 1579, is commemorated in a
+large and elaborate monument in the Covert Chapel, whereon are sculptured,
+in an attitude of prayer, Richard himself, his two wives, six sons, and
+eight daughters.
+
+Last of the Coverts whose name is perpetuated here is Jane, who deceased
+in 1586.
+
+[Illustration: HICKSTEAD PLACE.]
+
+Beside these things, Slaugham claims some interest as containing the
+mansion of Ashfold, where once resided Mrs. Matcham, a sister of Nelson.
+Indeed, it was while staying here that the Admiral received the summons
+which sped him on his last and most glorious and fatal voyage. Slaugham,
+too, with St. Leonard's Forest, contributes a title to the peerage, Lord
+St. Leonards' creation being of "Slaugham, in the county of Sussex."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly
+beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets
+trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its
+course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the
+lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of
+the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is
+only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the
+topmost branches of distant trees. "Bowlney," as the countryfolk pronounce
+the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot
+that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought
+for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new,
+the church, and the "Eight Bells" inn, group for effect.
+
+Down the road, rather over a mile distant from Bolney, and looking so
+remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied
+with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small
+but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time
+of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of
+the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the
+large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and
+supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent
+that point; but, as the inquirer may discover for himself, it now
+fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church
+of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and
+built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family
+for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the
+way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and
+adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the
+continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are
+frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of
+field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is
+covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original.
+Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his
+rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of
+eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.
+
+[Illustration: NEWTIMBER PLACE.]
+
+Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies
+away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South
+Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow
+plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow
+of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a
+noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an
+Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by
+embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the
+chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.
+
+Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of
+love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale
+Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that
+Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his
+first fight.
+
+[Illustration: PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.]
+
+He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended
+from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known
+throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and
+Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on
+the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a
+bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes
+Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the
+town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died,
+in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
+
+At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads,
+on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty
+churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in
+appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished
+off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little
+Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly
+interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
+
+[Illustration: PATCHAM.]
+
+Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the
+time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a
+gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays,
+and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is
+quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain;
+for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had
+been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no
+further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle
+Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who
+lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the
+circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints
+of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the
+weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely
+gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could
+have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he
+has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar
+that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand
+years.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the
+South Downs into the country of the "deans." North and South of the Downs
+are two different countries--so different that if they were inhabited by
+two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge,
+it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely
+England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district
+of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter.
+But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs,
+looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe
+Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that
+very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
+
+[Sidenote: THE DEANS]
+
+The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows
+Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to
+be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and
+shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form
+places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These
+are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and
+all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you
+will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean,
+by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course "Dean-ton") near Newhaven,
+Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are
+strung along these last miles into Brighton--Pangdean and Withdean. Most
+of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a
+sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with
+stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little
+cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to
+conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first
+"dean" is one of these nonconformists.
+
+Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs
+are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of
+the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho
+and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond
+of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility,
+standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of
+their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and
+beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.
+
+Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other
+circumstance, a "dean" is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a
+dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the
+hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands,
+too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old
+toll-house.
+
+Not so _very_ old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston
+turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807,
+was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set
+afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for
+another term of years. It and its legend "NO TRUST," painted large for all
+the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit,
+were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one
+regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the
+early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying at Patcham Gate, and yielded
+their "tuppences" with what grace they might.
+
+On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still
+with difficulty be spelled the inscription:
+
+  Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,
+  who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,
+  November 7th, 1796.
+
+  Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,
+  Which pierced through the young man's head.
+  He instant fell, resigned his breath,
+  And closed his languid eyes in death.
+  All you who do this stone draw near,
+  Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.
+  From this sad instance may we all,
+  Prepare to meet Jehovah's call.
+
+It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to
+youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and
+"agin the Government"; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were
+wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even
+middle-aged blood.
+
+[Illustration: OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.]
+
+Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and
+Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he
+was "unfortunately shot," he, with many others of the gang, was coming
+from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell
+in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The
+smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves,
+careful only to make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales,
+who, met by a "riding officer," was called upon to surrender himself and
+his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in
+early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand
+plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that
+Daniel was "too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before," so
+he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery
+rhyme, was made of "lead, lead, lead," Daniel was killed. Alas! poor
+Daniel.
+
+An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham,
+sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully
+buttressed.
+
+[Sidenote: PRESTON]
+
+Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although
+patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of
+Thomas a Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the
+possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is
+weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in
+one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other "kick the beam."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that
+complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through
+Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall
+elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick
+arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.
+
+It is Brighton's ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter
+and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.
+
+Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good,
+and went through a middle period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet
+fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its
+newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George
+the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste,
+become almost archaeologically interesting, and the newer Brighton
+approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the
+Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an
+old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the
+twentieth century.
+
+[Illustration: PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.]
+
+The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from
+London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a
+curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of
+the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even
+if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York
+Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that,
+and Brunswick t'other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.
+
+The Old Steyne was in Florizel's time the rendezvous of fashion. The
+"front" and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction,
+but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful
+than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.
+
+[Sidenote: BRIGHTON]
+
+Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom
+Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in
+the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to
+be so desolate that "if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation
+at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on
+which to fasten a rope." At any rate it would have needed a particularly
+stout tree to serve Johnson's turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an
+ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.
+
+Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted
+fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with
+the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to
+Johnson's as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the
+elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being
+construed into praise by the townsfolk. "Of all the trees," says he, "I
+ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent
+beach at Brighton."
+
+But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the
+glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the
+tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the
+tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is
+reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive
+shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever have been
+admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost,
+one shrewdly suspects--it is supposed to have cost over L1,000,000--was
+what appealed to the imagination.
+
+That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one
+recognises as the "Marquis of Steyne" in "Vanity Fair," admired it, as
+assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, "A good idea of the
+building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon
+the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners."
+
+That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste.
+Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and
+rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the
+work of William the Fourth in 1832.
+
+The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for
+Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and
+was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace
+at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than
+it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious
+scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style,
+would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to
+justify the Prince's taste.
+
+But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence
+upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose
+population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to
+5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more
+than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian
+Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of
+Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of
+161,000--the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that
+in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.
+
+[Illustration: THE PAVILION.]
+
+One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well
+in the "Four Georges":
+
+"And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence
+and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince
+Regent, all play parts.
+
+"The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the
+scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly associates, there
+figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in
+his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with
+the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had
+taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine
+and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of
+Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in
+Sussex.
+
+"The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable
+scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to
+drink wine with the Duke--a challenge which the old toper did not refuse.
+He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank
+glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first
+gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers
+filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink.
+'Now,' says he, 'I will have my carriage and go home.'
+
+"The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof
+where he had been so generously entertained. 'No,' he said; 'he had had
+enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave
+the place at once, and never enter its doors more.'
+
+"The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour's interval, the
+liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host's generous purpose
+was answered, and the Duke's old grey head lay stupefied on the table.
+Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered to it as
+well as he could, and, stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel.
+
+"They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the
+poor old man fancied he was going home.
+
+"When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince's hideous house
+at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers
+there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the
+Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still
+there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted."
+
+[Sidenote: CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK]
+
+Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray's
+"Four Georges" is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke,
+who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other
+since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was
+not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of
+drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish
+creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink,
+he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A
+contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described
+him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had
+eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a
+bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him
+off to bed. It was well written of him:
+
+  On Norfolk's tomb inscribe this placard:
+  He lived a beast and died a blackguard.
+
+This "very old," "poor old man" of Thackeray's misplaced sympathy did not,
+as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged
+sixty-nine.
+
+Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by
+the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told
+of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great yellow
+barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect
+the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. "It was a
+position," says my authority, "which gave His Royal Highness an
+opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke.
+Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he
+exclaimed, 'By Jove, Townsend, I've been robbed; I had with me some damson
+tarts, but they are now gone.' 'Gone!' said Townsend, rising;
+'impossible!' 'Yes,' rejoined the Prince, 'and you are the purloiner,' at
+the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting
+the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, 'This is a
+sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.' 'Rather say, your
+Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,' added Townsend, raising
+the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained
+seat of his nankeen inexpressibles."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton.
+It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would
+have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion--an inferior
+Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell--the name sometimes spelt with one
+"l"--who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs
+the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He
+died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the
+fishing-village; but even before the Prince of Wales first visited
+Brighthelmstone in 1782, it had attained a certain popularity, as the
+"Brighthelmstone Guide" of July, 1777, attests, in these halting verses:
+
+  This town or village of renown,
+  Like London Bridge, half broken down,
+  Few years ago was worse than Wapping,
+  Not fit for a human soul to stop in;
+  But now, like to a worn-out shoe,
+  By patching well, the place will do.
+  You'd wonder much, I'm sure, to see
+  How it's becramm'd with quality.
+
+And so on.
+
+[Illustration: THE CLIFFS, BRIGHTHELMSTONE, 1789. _From an aquatint after
+Rowlandson._]
+
+[Illustration: DR. RICHARD RUSSELL. _From the portrait by Zoffany._]
+
+[Sidenote: GUIDES TO BRIGHTON]
+
+Brighthelmstone, indeed, has had more Guides written upon it than even
+Bath has had, and very curious some of them are become in these days. They
+range from lively to severe, from grave to gay, from the serious screeds
+of Russell and Dr. Relhan, his successor, to the light and airy, and not
+too admirable puffs of to-day. But, however these guides may vary, they
+all agree in harking back to that shadowy Brighthelm who is supposed to
+have given his peculiar name to the ancient fisher-village here
+established time out of mind. In the days when "County Histories" were
+first let loose, in folio volumes, upon an unoffending land, historians,
+archaeologists, and other interested parties seemed at a loss for the
+derivation of the place-name, and, rather than confess themselves ignorant
+of its meaning, they conspired together to invent a Saxon archbishop, who,
+dying in the odour of sanctity and the ninth century, bequeathed his
+appellation to what is now known, in a contracted form, as Brighton.
+
+But the man is not known who has unassailable proofs to show of this
+Brighthelm's having so honoured the fisher-folk's hovels with his name.
+
+Thackeray, greatly daring, considering that the Fourth George is the real
+patron--saint, we can hardly say; let us make it king--of the town,
+elected to deliver his lectures upon the "Four Georges" at Brighton, among
+other places, and to that end made, with monumental assurance, a personal
+application at the Town Hall for the hire of the banqueting-room in the
+Royal Pavilion.
+
+But one of the Aldermen, who chanced to be present, suggested, with
+extra-aldermanic wit, that the Town Hall would be equally suitable,
+intimating at the same time that it was not considered as strictly
+etiquette to "abuse a man in his own house." The witty Alderman's
+suggestion, we are told, was acted upon, and the Town Hall engaged
+forthwith.
+
+It argued considerable courage on the lecturer's part to declaim against
+George the Fourth anywhere in that town which His Majesty had, by his
+example, conjured up from almost nothingness. It does not seem that
+Thackeray was, after all, ill received at Brighton; whence thoughts arise
+as to the ingratitude and fleeting memories of them that were either in
+the first or second generation, advantaged by the royal preference for
+this bleak stretch of shore beneath the bare South Downs, open to every
+wind that blows. Surely gratitude is well described as a "lively sense of
+favours to come," and they, no doubt, considered that the statue they had
+erected in the Steyne gardens to him was a full discharge of all
+obligations. Nor is the history of that effigy altogether creditable. It
+was erected in 1828, as the result of a movement among Brighton tradesfolk
+in 1820, to honour the memory of one who had incidentally made the
+fortunes of so many among them; but although the subscription list
+remained open for eight years and a half, it did not provide the L3.000
+agreed upon to be paid to Chantrey, the sculptor of it.
+
+The bronze statue presides to-day over a cab-rank, and the sea-salt
+breezes have strongly oxidised the face to an arsenical green; insulting,
+because greenness was not a distinguishing trait in the character of
+George the Fourth.
+
+[Sidenote: LAST OF THE REGENCY.]
+
+The surrounding space is saturated with memories of the Regency; but the
+roysterers are all gone and the recollection of them is dim. Prince and
+King, the Barrymores--Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate--brothers three;
+Mrs. Fitzherbert, "the only woman whom George the Fourth ever really
+loved," and whom he married; Sir John Lade, the reckless, the frolicsome,
+historic in so far that he was the first who publicly wore trousers:
+these, with others innumerable, are long since silent. No more are they
+heard who with unseemly revelry affronted the midnight moon, or upset the
+decrepit watchman in his box. Those days and nights are done, nor are they
+likely to be revived while the Brighton policemen remain so big and
+muscular.
+
+With the death of George the Fourth the play was played out. William the
+Fourth occasionally patronised Brighton, but decorum then obtained, and
+Queen Victoria and Prince Albert not only disliked the memory of the last
+of the Georges, but could not find at the Pavilion the privacy they
+desired. The Queen therefore sold it to the then Commissioners of
+Brighton in 1850, for the sum of L53,000, and never afterwards visited the
+town.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+The Pavilion and the adjoining Castle Square, where one of the old coach
+booking-offices still survives as a railway receiving-office, are to most
+people the ultimate expressions of antiquity at Brighton; but there
+remains one landmark of what was "Brighthelmstone" in the ancient parish
+church of St. Nicholas, standing upon the topmost eyrie of the town, and
+overlooking from its crowded and now disused graveyard more than a square
+mile of crowded roofs below. It is probably the place referred to by a
+vivacious Frenchman who, a hundred and twenty years ago, summed up
+"Brigtemstone" as "a miserable village, commanded by a cemetery and
+surrounded by barren mountains."
+
+From here you can, with some trouble, catch just a glimpse of the Watery
+horizon through the grey haze that rises from countless chimney-pots, and
+never a breeze but blows laden with the scent of soot and smoke. Yet, for
+all the changed fortune that changeful Time has brought this hoary and
+grimy place, it has not been deprived of interesting mementoes. You may,
+with patience, discover the tombstone of Phoebe Hassall, a centenarian
+of pith and valour, who, in her youthful days, in male attire, joined the
+army of His Majesty King George the Second and warred with her regiment in
+many lands; and all around are the resting-places of many celebrities,
+who, denied a wider fame, have yet their place in local annals; but
+prominent, in place and in fame, is the tomb of that Captain Tettersell
+who (it must be owned, for a consideration) sailed away one October morn
+of 1651 across the Channel, carrying with him the hope of the clouded
+Royalists aboard his grimy craft.
+
+[Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS, THE OLD PARISH CHURCH OF BRIGHTHELMSTONE.]
+
+His altar-tomb stands without the southern doorway of the church, and
+reads curiously to modern ears. That not one of all the many who have had
+occasion to print it has transcribed the quaintness of that epitaph aright
+seems a strange thing, but so it is:
+
+    P.M.S.
+
+    Captain NICHOLAS TETTERSELL, through whose Prudence ualour an Loyalty
+    Charles the second King of England & after he had escaped the sword of
+    his merciless rebells and his fforses received a fatall ouerthrowe at
+    Worcester Sept{r} 3{d} 1651, was ffaithfully preserued & conueyed into
+    ffrance. Departed this life the 26{th} day of Iuly 1674.
+
+              ---->      ---->      ---->
+
+        Within this monument doth lye,
+        Approued Ffaith, hono{r} and Loyalty.
+        In this Cold Clay he hath now tane up his statio{n},
+        At once preserued y{e} Church, the Crowne and nation.
+        When Charles y{e} Greate was nothing but a breat{h}
+        This ualiant soule stept betweene him & death.
+        Usurpers threats nor tyrant rebells frowne
+        Could not afrright his duty to the Crowne;
+        Which glorious act of his Church & state,
+        Eight princes in one day did Gratulate
+        Professing all to him in debt to bee
+        As all the world are to his memory
+        Since Earth Could not Reward his worth have give{n},
+        Hee now receiues it from the King of heauen.
+
+The escape of Charles the Second, after many perilous adventures, belongs
+to the larger sphere of English history. Driven, after the disastrous
+result of Worcester Fight, to wander, a fugitive, through the land, he
+sought the coast from the extreme west of Dorsetshire, and only when he
+reached Sussex did he find it possible to embark and sail across the
+Channel to France. Hunted by relentless Roundheads, and sheltered on his
+way only by a few faithful adherents, who in their loyalty risked
+everything for him, he at length, with his small party, reached the
+village of Brighthelmstone and lodged at the inn then called the "George."
+
+[Illustration: THE AQUARIUM, BEFORE DESTRUCTION OF THE CHAIN PIER.]
+
+That evening, after much negotiation, Colonel Gunter, the King's
+companion, arranged with Nicholas Tettersell, master of a small trading
+craft, to convey the King across to Fecamp, to sail in the early hours
+of the following morning, October 14th. How they sailed, and the account
+of their wanderings, are fully set forth in the "narrative" of Colonel
+Gunter.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+A new era for Brighton and the Brighton Road opened in November, 1896,
+with the coming of the motor-car. Already the old period of the coaching
+inns had waned, and that of gigantic and palatial hotels, much more
+luxurious than anything ever imagined by the builders of the Pavilion, had
+dawned; and then, as though to fitly emphasize the transition, the old
+Chain Pier made a dramatic end.
+
+The Chain Pier just missed belonging to the Georgian era, for it was not
+begun until October, 1822, but, opened the following year, it had so long
+been a feature of Brighton--and so peculiar a feature--that it had come,
+with many, to typify the town, quite as much as the Pavilion itself. It
+was, moreover, additionally remarkable as being the first pleasure-pier
+built in England. It had long been failing and, condemned as dangerous,
+would soon have been demolished; but the storm of December 4th, 1896,
+spared that trouble. It was standing when day closed in, but when the next
+morning dawned, its place was vacant.
+
+Since then, those who have long known Brighton have never visited it
+without a sense of loss; and the Palace Pier, opposite the Aquarium, does
+not fill the void. It is a vulgarity for one thing, and for another
+typifies the Hebraic week-end, when the sons and daughters of Judah
+descend upon the town. Moreover, it is absolutely uncharacteristic, and
+has its counterparts in many other places.
+
+But Brighton itself is eternal. It suffers change, it grows continually;
+but while the sea remains and the air is clean and the sun shines, it, and
+the road to it, will be the most popular resorts in England.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 209-222
+
+  Albourne, 248
+
+  Ansty Cross, 93, 222
+
+  Aram, Eugene, 172
+
+  "Autopsy," Steam Carriage, 37, 63, 88
+
+
+  Banks, Sir Edward, 136
+
+  Banstead Downs, 159-161
+
+  Barrymore, The, 6, 192, 267
+
+  Belmont, 159
+
+  Benhilton, 156
+
+  Bicycles, 64-71, 74-79, 85-91
+
+  Bird, Lieutenant Edward, murderer, 169-172
+
+  Bolney, 200, 243, 246
+
+  "Boneshakers", 65
+
+  Brighton, 2, 12, 37, 255-272
+    Railway opened, 42
+    Road Records tabulated, 88-91
+    Routes to, 1-4
+
+  Brixton, 92, 97-100
+    Hill, 68, 93, 98, 105
+
+  Broad Green, 108, 129
+
+  Burgess Hill, 223
+
+  Burgh Heath, 159-161
+
+
+  Carriers, The, 11-14
+
+  Charles II., 270
+
+  Charlwood, 175
+
+  Chipstead, 135-138
+
+  Clayton, 93, 102, 231, 250
+    Hill, 25, 229, 231-232
+    Tunnel, 229-231
+
+  Coaches:--
+    Accommodation, 26
+    Age, 29, 30, 35
+      1852-1862, 42, 45, 47
+      1875-1880, 1882-3, 46
+    Alert, 33, 34
+    Coburg, 30
+    Comet, 33
+      1887-1899, 1900, 46, 49, 55
+    Coronet, 33
+    Criterion, 41, 64, 74, 88
+    Dart, 33
+    Defiance, 28, 46
+      1880, --
+    Duke of Beaufort, 31
+    "Flying Machine," coach, 18-22
+    Life-Preserver, 30
+    Magnet, 33
+    Mails, The, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34, 42
+    Old Times, 1866, 45
+      1888, 49-51
+    Quicksilver, 38
+    Red Rover, 41, 63, 88
+    Regent, 33
+    Sovereign, 33
+    Times, 33
+    Union, 33
+    Venture (A. G. Vanderbilt), 61
+    Victoria, 42
+    Vigilant, 1900-05, --
+    Wonder, 38
+
+  Coaching, 5, 11-14, 18-34, 37-49, 228
+
+  Coaching Notabilities:--
+    Angel, B. J., 45, 46
+    Armytage, Col., 45
+    Batchelor, Jas., 14
+    Beaufort, Duke of, 45, 46
+    Beckett, Capt. H. L., 46
+    Blyth, Capt., 46
+    Bradford, "Miller", 26
+    Clark, George, 45
+    Cotton, Sir St. Vincent, 29, 45
+    Fitzgerald, Mr., 45
+    Fownes, Edwin, 46
+    Freeman, Stewart, 46, 49
+    Gwynne, Sackville Frederick, 29
+    Harbour, Charles, 41, 64
+    Haworth, Capt., 45, 46
+    Jerningham, Hon. Fred., 29
+    Lawrie, Capt., 45
+    Londesborough, Earl of, 46
+    McCalmont, Hugh, 46
+    Meek, George, 46
+    Pole, E. S. Chandos, 45, 46
+    Pole-Gell, Mr., 46
+    Sandys, Hon. H., 49
+    Selby, Jas., 41, 49, 64, 73, 74, 75, 89
+    Stevenson, Henry, 29, 30
+    Stracey-Clitherow, Col., 46
+    Thynne, Lord H., 45
+    Tiffany, Mr., 46
+    Vanderbilt, Alfred Gwynne, 61
+    Wemyss, Randolph, 49
+    Wiltshire, Earl of, 46
+    Worcester, Marquis of, 29, 38
+
+  Coaching Records, 41, 64, 73, 74, 88, 89
+
+  Cold Blow, 159
+
+  Colliers' Water, 108
+
+  Colliers of Croydon, 108
+
+  Coulsdon, 131, 133
+
+  County Oak, 178
+
+  Covert, Family of, 238-244
+
+  Crawley, 93, 173, 182-195
+
+  Crawley Downs, 191-193
+
+  Croydon, 106-123
+
+  Cuckfield, 30, 202-209
+    Place, 209-222, 242
+
+  Cycling, 64-71, 74-79, 85-91
+
+  Cycling Notabilities:--
+    Edge, Selwyn Francis, 75, 76, 89
+    Holbein, M. A., 74
+    Mayall, John, Junior, 66-69, 70, 88
+    Shorland, F. W., 74, 89
+    Smith, C. A., 75, 76, 77, 89
+    Turner, Rowley B., 66, 67, 69
+
+  Cycling Records, 68-79, 85-91
+
+
+  Dale, 93, 248, 250
+
+  Dance, Sir Charles, 37, 39
+
+  Ditchling, 224
+
+  Driving Records, 63, 73, 194
+
+
+  Earlswood Common, 93, 146, 148
+
+
+  Fauntleroy, Henry, 196
+
+  Foxley Hatch, 93, 126
+
+  Frenches, 93, 145
+
+  Friar's Oak, 226
+
+
+  Gatton, 141-145, 164
+
+  Gatwick, 155
+
+  George IV., Prince Regent and King, 3, 6, 8-11, 24, 62, 88, 132,
+      191-194, 256-262, 266
+
+
+  Hancock, Walter, 34, 88
+
+  Hand Cross, 24, 93, 195, 198-201
+    Hill, 61
+
+  Hassall, Phoebe, 268
+
+  Hassocks, 226
+
+  Hayward's Heath, 205
+
+  Hickstead, 200, 245
+
+  "Hobby-horses", 65
+
+  Holmesdale, 172
+
+  Hooley, 136
+
+  Horley, 93, 149, 151-155, 173
+
+
+  Ifield, 175, 178-182, 188
+
+  "Infant," Steam Carriage, 37
+
+  Inns (mentioned at length):--
+    Black Swan, Pease Pottage, 195
+    Chequers, Horley, 152
+    Cock, Sutton, 159
+    Friar's Oak, 24, 226
+    George, Borough, 12-14
+      Crawley, 114, 187, 189
+    Golden Cross, Charing Cross, 20, 33
+    Green Cross, Ansty Cross, 222
+    Greyhound, Croydon, 114
+      Sutton, 159
+    Hatchett's (_see_ White Horse Cellar).
+    Old King's Head, Croydon, 115
+    Old Ship, Brighton, 12
+    Red Lion, Hand Cross, 200
+    Six Bells, Horley, 153
+    Surrey Oaks, Parkgate, 179
+    Tabard, Borough (_see_ Talbot).
+    Talbot, Borough, 12-14, 17
+    Talbot, Cuckfield, 206
+    Tangier, Banstead Downs, 160
+    White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, 34
+
+
+  Jacob's Post, 224
+
+  Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 102-105, 257
+
+
+  Kennersley, 173
+
+  Kennington, 92-96
+
+  Kimberham Bridge, 173
+
+  Kingswood, 162
+
+
+  Lade, Sir John, 267
+
+  Lemon, Mark, 190
+
+  Little Hell, 159
+
+  Lowfield Heath, 173-175, 182
+
+
+  Merstham, 93, 134, 138-141
+
+  Milestones, 126-130, 159, 163
+
+  Mitcham, 155
+
+  Mole, River, 149, 152, 173-175, 196
+
+  Motor-cars, 50, 53, 54, 57-61, 63
+
+  Motor-car Day, Nov. 14th, 1896, 53-60
+
+  Motor-omnibus, Accident to, 60
+
+
+  Newdigate, 176
+
+  Newtimber, 247, 248
+
+  Norbury, 195
+
+
+  Old-time Travellers:--
+    Burton, Dr. John, 16
+    Cobbett, William, 161, 165, 168, 178
+    George IV., Prince Regent and King (_see_ "George the Fourth.")
+    Walpole, Horace, 16-18
+
+
+  Pangdean, 253
+
+  Patcham, 25, 93, 250, 251-255
+
+  Pavilion, The, 256-261, 268
+
+  Pease Pottage, 195, 197
+
+  Pedestrian Records, 64, 69, 72, 75, 79-91
+
+  Pilgrims' Way, The, 164
+
+  Povey Cross, 155, 173, 175
+
+  Preston, 93, 250, 255
+
+  Prize-fighting, 5, 191, 248-250
+
+  Pugilistic Notabilities:--
+    Cribb, Tom, 190
+    Fewterel, 132
+    Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man", 192
+    Jackson, "Gentleman", 132, 159
+    Martin, "Master of the Rolls", 5, 192
+    Randall, Jack, "the Nonpareil", 5, 192
+    Sayers, Tom, 248
+
+  Purley, 93, 121-125, 130, 176
+
+  Pyecombe, 200, 249, 250
+
+
+  Railway to Brighton opened, 42, 131
+
+  "Records", 61-91
+    (_See_ severally, Coaching, Cycling, Driving, Pedestrian, and Riding).
+    Tabulated, 88-91
+
+  Redhill, 93, 145
+
+  Reigate, 27, 93, 164-172
+    Hill, 162-164
+
+  Riding Records, 62, 88
+
+  Roman Roads, 102
+
+  "Rookwood", 209-222
+
+  Routes to Brighton, 1-4
+
+  Rowlandson, Thomas, 157, 185, 187, 203, 263
+
+  Ruskin, John, 106, 115
+
+  Russell of Killowen, Baron, 161
+
+  Russell (_or_ Russel), Dr. Richard, 262
+
+
+  St. John's Common, 103, 223
+
+  St. Leonard's Forest, 196, 199
+
+  Salfords, 93, 149, 173
+
+  Sayers Common, 248
+
+  Sidlow Bridge, 173
+
+  Slaugham, 238-246
+    Place, 240-242
+
+  Slough Green, 93
+
+  Smitham Bottom, 68, 129, 131-133, 136
+
+  Southwark, 12-14
+
+  Staplefield Common, 200
+
+  Steam Carriages, 34, 37, 50, 63
+
+  Stoat's Nest, 132
+
+  Stock Exchange Walk, 80-82
+
+  Stonepound, 93, 227, 231
+
+  Streatham, 100, 103-105, 107
+
+  Surrey Iron Railway, The, 122, 136
+
+  Sussex Roads, 15, 178, 237, 242, 237, 242
+
+  Sutton, 93, 156-159, 161
+
+
+  Tadworth Court, 161
+
+  Tettersell, Captain, 268, 270
+
+  Thackeray, W. M., 9, 10, 266
+
+  Thornton Heath, 103, 105-108
+
+  Thrale Place, 103-105
+
+  Thrales, The, 103-105
+
+  Thunderfield Castle, 149-152
+
+  Tilgate Forest Row, 173, 196
+
+  Tooke, John Horne, 124
+
+  Turnpike Gates, 92, 126, 145, 195, 226-228, 253
+
+
+  Velocipedes, 65-69
+
+
+  Walking Records (_see_ Pedestrian Records).
+
+  Westminster Bridge, 1, 3, 14, 129
+
+  Whiteman's Green, 202
+
+  Whitgift, Archbishop, 109-114
+
+  Wilderness Bottom, 161
+
+  Withdean, 253, 255
+
+  Wivelsfield, 224
+
+  Woodhatch, 93
+
+  Wray Park, 93
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] He was a baker; hence the nickname.
+
+[2] Henry Barry, Earl of Barrymore, in the peerage of Ireland.
+
+[3] _Hiatus_ in the Journals, arranged by the editor for benefit of the
+Young Person!
+
+[4] Kirkpatrick Macmillan, in 1839-40, invented a dwarf, rear-driving
+machine of the "safety" type, and was fined at Glasgow for "furiously
+riding." He made and sold several, but they attained nothing more than
+local and temporary success.
+
+[5]
+
+  "There's nothing brings you round
+  Like the trumpet's martial sound."--W. S. GILBERT.
+                                    "The Pirates of Penzance."
+
+[6] In 1829 there were three additional gates: one at Crawley, another at
+Hand Cross, before you came to the "Red Lion," and one more at Slough
+Green. Meanwhile the Horley gate on this route had disappeared. At a later
+period another gate was added, at Merstham, just past the "Feathers." On
+the other routes there were, of course, yet more gates--e.g., those of
+Sutton, Reigate, Wray Park, Woodhatch, Dale, and many more.
+
+Salfords gate was the last on the main Brighton Road. It remained until
+midnight, October 31st. 1881, when the Reigate Turnpike Trust expired,
+after an existence of 126 years. Not until then did this most famous
+highway become free and open throughout its whole distance.
+
+[7] Preface to "Praeterita," dated May 10th, 1885.
+
+[8] The name derives from a farm so called, marked on a map of 1716
+"Stotes Ness."
+
+[9] "Sir Edward Banks, Knight, of Sheerness, Isle of Sheppey, and Adelphi
+Terrace, Strand, Middlesex, whose remains are deposited in the family
+vault in this churchyard. Blessed by Divine Providence with an honest
+heart, a clear head, and an extraordinary degree of perseverance, he rose
+superior to all difficulties, and was the founder of his own fortune; and
+although of self-cultivated talent, he in early life became contractor for
+public works, and was actively and successfully engaged during forty years
+in the execution of some of the most useful, extensive, and splendid works
+of his time; amongst which may be mentioned the Waterloo, Southwark,
+London, and Staines Bridges over the Thames, the Naval Works at Sheerness
+Dockyard, and the new channels for the rivers Ouse, Nene, and Witham in
+Norfolk and Lincolnshire. He was eminently distinguished for the
+simplicity of his manners and the benevolence of his heart; respected for
+his inflexible integrity and his pure and unaffected piety; in all the
+relations of his life he was candid, diligent, and humane; just in
+purpose, firm in execution; his liberality and indulgence to his numerous
+coadjutors were alone equalled by his generosity and charity displayed in
+the disposal of his honourably-acquired wealth. He departed this life at
+Tilgate, Sussex ... on the 5th day of July, 1835, in the sixty-sixth year
+of his age."
+
+[10] Matthew Buckle, Admiral of the Blue; born 1716, died 1784.
+
+[11] He really drove the other way; from Carlton House to Brighton.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+Letters printed in reverse are indicated by =X=.
+
+Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.
+
+The original text contains a few letters with diacritical marks that are
+not represented in this text version.
+
+The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
+letters have been replaced with transliterations.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brighton Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #38611 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38611)