Part 20 (1/2)

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

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

CHAPTER XIX

Sh.o.r.eHAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: THE LIFE OF A HARBOUR]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: MR. SWINBURNE'S POEM]

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

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

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

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

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