Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  As British Caer Badon looks down from its hill-perch on Roman Aquæ and English Bath, so the British Mai-Dun looks down from its terraced steep on Roman Durnovaria and English Dorchester. But there is little reason to suppose in either case that the town properly so-called ever occupied the summit of the isolated neighbouring hill. Both were probably mere high-places of refuge for the women and the other cattle in time of war. The people of the Frome valley were emphatically the Durotriges, the dwellers by the water-side; and their native capital was Durnovaria, the water of Var, an alternative title of the river which still survives in the later West-Saxon town of Wareham. That the main body of the folk lived in time of peace on the site of Dorchester is clear enough, both from the existence of a smaller local camp at Poundbury, hard by the town, and from the survival of their rude agora at Maumbury, near the railway station, now commonly called the Roman Amphitheatre, but too suspiciously like a Cornish “round” in its constructive features to bear out its reputed Italian pedigree. The southern invaders, in all probability, only adopted the native British village by the water-side, and replaced its irregular stockade by the square vallum and fosse, which, now planted with trees like the boulevards of so many French cities, form such a conspicuous and un-English feature in the view from the castle. They also ran through its centre two intersecting roads at right angles, which still make up the main streets of modern Dorchester, though their point of junction has been sadly narrowed by the building of the old English church on the site of St. Peter’s. From that time forth, no doubt, the Mai-Dun of the Celt, the Dunium of Ptolemy, has lain waste as a pasture for cattle; though, perhaps, it may again have been occupied for a while by the provincials when the heathen West Saxons swarmed up the Frome from Poole Harbour to the conquest of eastern and central Dorset. On the lips of the new-comers the dun became Maiden, as again at Maiden Newton; and later on it took the Norman termination Castle, like most other prehistoric earthworks in the semi-Celtic west country. At the same time the Durotriges became Dornsæte, or Dorset folk; while Durnovaria became Dornwaraceaster, or, more shortly, Dornceaster, a word which has slowly worn down on local lips into Dorchester. Such fossilised names as Durngate Lane, within the city, still faintly preserve the memory of the older tongue. The fate of the great earthwork contrasts strangely with those of its various compeers elsewhere. Thus Sorviodunum, or Old Sarum, another similar dun, was actually occupied and altered by the Romans: it became the site of a mediæval cathedral town, and it was only slowly abandoned in favour of modern Salisbury, which stands to its deserted platform much as Dorchester now stands to Maiden Castle. On the other hand, the dun by the Exe has continued its life to the present day, and has largely got rid of its entrenchments on either side, so as to coalesce with the surrounding heights in the modern city of Exeter. But Maiden Castle, like its numerous neighbours to the west, the boundary group [of hill-forts] which secured the Durotriges from the Dumnonians of Devon, has remained utterly unoccupied ever since the defeat of its Celtic founders. It is this accident of fate that has preserved it for us to our own time in such singular perfection. Had it been held in a military sense by the Romans, it might have been altered to a Roman shape, like Lincoln and Sarum: had it passed through both the Roman and the mediæval stages it might have been as hopelessly distorted as the Castle mounds at York and Exeter, or as that ancient dun which gives its name to London, and which we now call Tower Hill. But its fortunate desertion in favour of the site by the river-side has kept unaltered for us to this day the features of what was probably from the very beginning the finest Celtic hill-fortress in all Britain. Its very vastness made it impossible to defend from the point of view of scientific engineering; and the Romans left it alone as a witness to modern times of what the unaided Britain could do in the simplest arts of warfare.

  IV. SOUTH-EAST

  HASTINGS AND ST. LEONARDS

  Whoever wishes to reconstruct the original Hastings in his mind’s eye must climb the gorse-covered slopes of the East Cliff on some clear sunny morning, and sit down upon the little broken scarp of crumbling sandstone that overhangs the square old tower of All Saints’ Church. He must mentally abolish the pier, the Parade, and the long line of houses that form the modern suburb of Halton, and must restrict his attention entirely to the deep little glen, thickly crowded with red-roofed houses, that lies directly beneath his feet. That one narrow hollow combe, worn out of the soft sandy strata by the tiny stream known as the Bourne, represents the site of the primitive clan-village of the Hæstingas. Behind his back, on the summit of the cliffs, stands an earthwork of yet earlier date — probably Roman, but perhaps the relic of some aboriginal Celtic or pre-Celtic race. In the days when that earthwork was thrown up, however, the valley of the Bourne was doubtless still in much the same wild condition as Ecclesbourne Glen, just beyond the flagstaff on the hill, at the present day. It was not till the period of the South Saxon invasion, in all probability, that any rude fishing village first occupied the site of Hastings old town. When the invaders came, they came apparently in separate clan bands, each clan having its own little fleet of keels, and conquering a small isolated district on its own account. The existing Rape of Hastings, consisting of the high sandstone belt that here runs northward to meet the Forest Ridge, seems to have formed for a while just such a separate principality for the petty tribe of the Hæstingas. It was ringed round by a very distinct mark of swamp and woodland, which naturally fitted it to become the seat of a single chieftainship among the jealous little Teutonic communities. On the east, the estuary of the Rother, debouching into the great tidal expanse of Romney Marsh, as yet undrained and unreclaimed, altogether cut it off from the Jutish conquerors of Kent. On the west, the smaller fen-land of Pevensey Level, now carefully guarded by drains and sluices, but then a vast stretch of boggy quagmire, divided it equally from the main South Saxon kingdom in the chalk-down country. In the rear, the pathless forest of the Weald, long an absolute barrier to roads and settlements, completed the girdling line of natural defences. The practical peninsula thus formed, all of whose boundaries may still be marked from the wooden watch-tower in the new cemetery, lay open in fact to the sea alone. By sea, then, the Hæstingas probably attacked it; and having overrun it, they held out for ages in their all but island territory as a separate community, only slowly amalgamated with the general dominions of the West Saxon kings. Before the Norman Conquest, indeed, the tract now included in Hastings Rape is never described as a part of Sussex; and as late as the days of Cnut the Dane, the English Chronicle speaks of the Kentings, and the South Saxon, and the Hæstingas, and the Surreys, as though each division were equally important and equally recognised for an independent folk.

  During all these early times, the name of Hæstingas belonged not to the place but to the people, and was hardly perhaps more distinctive of the one narrow combe where Hastings arose later on than of any other clustering hamlet in the peninsular district. Even then, however, a small fishing village had evidently gathered in the valley of the Bourne; and as it possessed the only harbour in the whole territory of the tribe — for elsewhere the shore was either cliff or swamp — it came to be known as Hæstinga-port, or the haven of the Hæstingas. Up to the period of the Conquest, we may picture this little group of rough wooden houses as filling the very lower end of the Bourne glen, for the land then ran farther out to sea than at present; while on either hand the Castle Hill and the East Cliff rose sheer above their roofs as open downs, the White Rock (now demolished) closing the view to westward with its weather-beaten mass. The great impetus to the port of the tribesmen, as to all the other towns of Sussex, arrived with the advent of William the Conqueror. “In this year,” says the English Chronicle, under the date of the Conquest, “came Wyllelm earl out of Normandy into Pevensey, on St. Michael’s Mass even, and wrought a castle at Hæstinga-port.” This castle was a mere rough and hasty stockade [as we are told], for temporary defence; but it probably occupied the crest of the present Castle Hill, to the wes
t of the fishing village, on the spot where the stone fortress afterwards arose. From that point William marched, as everybody knows, to the heights of Telham, near Battle, and there fought with Harold the decisive engagement which settled the fate of England. In the history of Hastings town, however, the battle which takes its name from the tribal district is a mere alien episode: and, indeed, it is the common error of local historians to concentrate themselves too closely upon those events in the general annals of England which have happened to occur in their neighbourhood, and to neglect overmuch the organic development and individual continuity of their own town or country. Still, the results of the battle were full of immediate importance to the fishing village itself. Of all parts of England, Sussex, the first conquered, suffered most from the conquest. Its nearness to Normandy made its obedience of the first moment, for it formed the open gate for reinforcements from the Continent. William divided it out into six rapes or divisions, each of which was handed over to a Norman castellan, and each guarded by a great fortress. The country of the Hæstingas fell to the share of the Counts of Eu, who built the first Norman Castle on the West Hill. Hastings, as the town now began to be familiarly called, rose rapidly into importance under the new régime. Its port was one of the chief outlets to Normandy; and while the Norman connection lasted, Sussex, previously one of the most isolated districts in South Britain, formed the king’s main highway from England to his continental provinces. The old church of the fisher town was given to the monks of Fécamp; and ships from St. Valery-sur-Somme, whose houses are visible from the East Cliff in clear weather, resorted with merchandise to the little harbour. The castle, the neighbourhood of so wealthy a monastery as Battle Abbey, and the ship-building trade induced by the nearness to the timber of the Weald, must all have contributed to make Hastings a comparatively large and notable place under the first line of our foreign kings.

  In the later Plantagenet period, our relations with France became reversed, though not apparently to the detriment of Hastings. As premier Cinque Port, it still maintained its own among the coastwise towns of England; but a wall now protected it on the sea half from marauding Frenchmen, running across the gap in the downs from the Castle Hill to the East Cliff, and still partly visible in the little alley called Bourne Street. The ship-building trade continued to flourish; the fishing-trade is always perennial; and the rise of the iron-smelting industry in the Weald probably made Hastings into a considerable port. Hither, too, the monks of Battle must have imported all their wine and merchandise from the Continent. The proofs of the increasing wealth in the place at this time are seen in the two large and picturesque churches of the old town — All Saints’ and St. Clement’s — both of the perpendicular period, though the oldest and largest of all was long ago swept away by encroachment of the sea. Until the days of Elizabeth, Hastings held its own manfully; but during that queen’s reign a great storm — the same that threw up the shingle-bank which turned aside the mouth of the Ouse from Seaford to Newhaven — destroyed the old wooden pier, washed away the lower part of the town, obliterated the harbour, and ruined the trade of Hastings. For two centuries the decaying port became a poor struggling fishing village once more, with a broken castle crowning a picturesque cliff on its western side. Even the fishing-vessels could only be beached with danger and difficulty. At last, about a hundred years ago, a fashionable London doctor began to send his consumptive patients for the winter months to Hastings. The pretty old-world quarter known as the Croft, under shelter of the Castle Hill, dates in part from this renaissance. From that time forward the town has steadily increased as a watering-place. Lying so near London, it flourished even in the coaching days; but railways soon achieved its fortune. It began to grow westward from the Croft, and first rounded the edge of the cliff in the West Hill by a barbarous excavation in the native sandstone rock, beneath the castle, hollowed out to receive Pelham Crescent, and the Arcade. Thence it spread, in the early years of the century, past Wellington Square, into the valley of a second bourne, which flows through St. Andrew’s Gardens, and now falls into the sea ingloriously by iron pipes near the Queen’s Hotel. A little later, the invalid district about Robertson Terrace was built, and by a horrid act of vandalism the White Rock was blown away, so as to let the rising Parade extend onward even beyond the limits of the western valley. Meanwhile, early in the second quarter of the century, the Burtons had begun their fashionable watering-place of St. Leonards, at first a totally distinct town, separated from Hastings by a wide open stretch of close-cropped down. It consisted of several terraces fronting the sea, all built upon a regular and similar plan, with the club, the baths, the hotel, and the Assembly Rooms in the centre. Gradually, however, the Hastings Parade spread westward, and the St. Leonards Marina spread eastward, till they met at last in the middle, at Warrior Square. Seen from a height, indeed, the place still naturally divides itself into three distinct portions, each occupying a valley of its own — Old Hastings, New Hastings, and St. Leonards; for the buildings zigzag in and out through the hollows, leaving the intervening hills for the most part quite unoccupied. The dates of the various churches accurately mark the general growth of the population at each period.

  BRIGHTON

  It is a popular error to suppose that Brighton owes its existence entirely to a caprice of George IV., or even to believe with Macaulay that it remained only an unfrequented fishing-village down to a very recent period. Though the history of the largest English watering-place is certainly not so eventful as that of many smaller and now less famous towns, it yet throws back its roots into a remote and respectable past, for the borough still bears in its very name the best evidence of its antiquity. The Brighthelmstone of the last century is lineally descended from the Brihthelmes Stán of the early South Saxon settlers; and that primitive form of the word again enshrines for us the half-obliterated memory of an ancient and universal custom. The open space between the Pavilion and the Aquarium is now known as the Steyne. Most people who have been familiar with its name from childhood upward have probably associated it only with local traditions of the Prince Regent or recollections of Thackeray’s wicked marquis in “Vanity Fair.” As a matter of historical fact, however, the Steyne carries on its face far more remarkable implications than that. It is indeed the site of the original Stán, the holy stone or monumental monolith round which the later town has slowly gathered. Such holy stones have often formed the nucleus for an English or British settlement, and in many cases the word still survives as part of the modern town name. Brixton in the Isle of Wight was once Ecgbrihtes Stán, the stone of Egbert; and another Ecgbrihtes Stán, the judgment-seat of its shire or hundred, which formed the rendezvous of Alfred’s army during the Danish invasion, is now identified as Brixton Deverill, near Warminster. Folkstone, too, is Folces Stán, the Folk Stone of the Kentish men, the Lapis Tituli of the conquered Romano-Britains. All over England such prehistoric stones still survive in numbers, in many places as sites of the local courts; and the court of the Hundred of Stone is always opened, to the present day, by pouring a bottle of port as a libation over the sacred relic from which the district takes its name. The Brihthelm after whom this particular stone on the site of the Steyne was originally called, ranks as an early Bishop of Selsey [?]; though in all probability he was not himself buried there, but merely gave a Christian character to some old local heathen monument, perhaps of pre-Roman or pre-Celtic date. So St. Patrick, finding three pillar stones connected with Irish paganism, instead of destroying them, inscribed them with holy names; while one, which he used as a place of baptism, was ever afterwards known as Patrick’s Stone. Indeed, many mediæval crosses are firmly mortised into bases composed of such hallowed megalithic structures belonging originally to the older creed. The obviously pagan clan-name of the Staningas, or sons of the stone, at Steyning, close by, may possibly have reference to this primæval monument.

  No English clan seems to have settled beside the Stone of Brihthelm itself; but the site lay right on the li
ne of the old British coast-road from Anderida or Pevensey to Regnum or Chichester; and the prehistoric fort of Whitehawk Hill overhung the little combe from behind; so that it must always have stood in the very thick of the local civilisation for the time being. Indeed, English clan villages cluster closely all around it; and we may be sure that a few fishermen settled in the seaward combe from the very earliest date when the South Saxons took to sea-fishing, which could hardly have been as late as the days of Wilfrith, in spite of the miraculous story retailed for us by Bede. The look of the hollow by the Steyne must then have been something like that of Rottingdean, without the houses: a mere gap or gate in the chalk downs, opening to the sea in front by a small fringe of lowland, where the Madeira Walk now runs beneath the buttressed cliffs. Until the Norman conquest we hear nothing definitely about the condition of Brihthelmes Stán. After that event the manor was granted to the Earls de Warrenne, castellans of Lewes, and a large number of Flemish fishermen from the opposite coast were induced to fix their homes on the ledge below the cliff. Another small village of landsmen crowned the white chalk heights above. The old church, dedicated to St. Nicholas, was placed quite apart from either hamlet, on high open ground between the Steyne and the modern railway station, where it served at the same time for a landmark to the fishermen out at sea. Of the primitive Norman or South Saxon building no relic now remains, except the font; but all visitors to Brighton before the last twenty-five years can remember the old long low decorated parish church of the fourteenth century, built, like so many antiquated Brighton houses, of that curious flint patchwork, the use of which was forced upon the inhabitants by the want of good building-stone. The base of the broken churchyard cross stands even now on the little plot without, upon the desecrated hill-side. In spite of French descents and occasional internal feuds, Brighthelmstone must have presented much the same picture all through the mediæval period: a green valley in the downs, along the hollow of the London road; a small fishing-village under the cliff; a little agricultural and trading hamlet above it; a solitary church among fields and pastures on the hill-side; and a few white windmills crowning the conical bosses of the chalk heights that bounded the view to northward behind the town.