LIII
On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you swiftly and without toil to that height, the elderly and the unduly fleshy, Hamlet-like persons among them, “fat and scant of breath,” take advantage of it, and archæologise easefully by the aid of modern mechanism. But little remains to arouse enthusiasm or to employ the pencil of the artist, and that which might have been, from its situation, as imposing as the Castle of Dover itself, is but the matter of a few speculative arches and grizzled masonry.
Ever since the historic period, and doubtless long before the era of recorded things began, there existed a castle, or a fortified post, on this lofty cliff-top, where the shattered ruins of Hastings Castle still stand, few and almost formless—the long superannuated warden of the town that has grown so great and has now absolutely no defences against the foreign foe.
When the Normans came, they found defences of some nature here, and hastened from their landing-place at Pevensey to seize and to more strongly fortify them, as scenes in that graphic record, the Bayeux Tapestry, show. The wooden walls, palisades, and outworks thus hastily constructed by the Conqueror’s men were speedily discarded for a permanent building of stone, and the grim hold thus erected was given into the custody of the Norman Counts d’Eu; who, jointly with the Abbots of Fécamp, were responsible for keeping open the sea-passage between England and Normandy. This duty was laid upon those secular and ecclesiastical personages in consideration of the rights granted to the Count d’Eu in the Castle and the Old Town, and the lordship over the “New Burgh” bestowed upon the Abbot of Fécamp.
Time has worked odd changes with Hastings and very thoroughly obscured the ancient names, so that what was then the “old town” has been so long and so utterly swept away and built over that its very existence at any former time is unknown to all save Dryasdust and his brethren. The old original “old town” stood, in fact, where the new town of Hastings stands to-day, and the Old Town of the present time is the “New Burgh” referred to in Domesday Book as the property of the Abbot of Fécamp. Dryasdust, who is a very estimable person and a learned, will tell you all you want to know about it—and much more; but he is always so fully informed, and diverges so abundantly and promiscuously into notes, parentheses, sub-heads, and innumerable asides of that kind that he presently lands you in topographical swamps and mazes, and, feeding you overfull of knowledge, gives you a severe literary and antiquarian indigestion.
In short, to make a plain story of it, where modern Hastings stands, practically level with the water, there spread, at the time when the Battle of Hastings was fought, a quiet inlet of the sea. This was the haven, the natural harbour of refuge against winds and waves, that originally caused the site of Hastings to be selected for a port. It would never have been chosen and settled had it been without shelter, as it is now; and Hastings of to-day is merely an artificial growth, like Brighton, Eastbourne, and many another seaside town, sprung up to serve a century or more of holiday-making by the sea. The town, as we see it to-day, would have been impossible had the place depended merely upon fishing and shipping; for on this stark-naked foreshore, swept by gales and raging seas, there is no shelter for vessels.
It was, in fact, the early silting up of this haven that led to the utter obliteration of the original old town dependent upon it. When the tide no longer flowed up to its ancient quays and wharves, their use, of course, vanished, and they eventually disappeared. In those long-departed days the Castle cliffs and a long reef of rocks extended a considerable distance out to sea, and formed the natural protection for this inlet; but in the course of centuries the sea made such inroads that the protection at last disappeared, and the shingle, in its easterly march, instead of being kept out in the Channel and on its course, found entrance, and steadily, and by no means slowly, cut off the haven from the outer waters.
Thus was the chief port of the famous Cinque Ports finally ruined by the then irresistible forces of nature. Already, in 1205, it had suffered political ruin; for, as the chief port in the intercourse between England and Normandy, its trade became extinct on the severance of the Dukedom of Normandy and the Kingdom of England, in the reign of King John. Five years before even that event the port was far gone to decay, for it could furnish but six of the twenty-one ships that in its prime formed its contribution to the nation’s defence.
Apparently the inhabitants of the Hastings that bordered this haven early realised its inevitable doom; and those of the neighbouring New Burgh—the Old Town of our time—did not shift for themselves, to form a harbour, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And even then they were reduced to “sending round the hat” for contributions and donations from more prosperous places. Pity the sorrows of a poor old port!
They were led to this course by the destruction of their old wooden pier; but it was not until seventeen years had passed that sufficient funds had been accumulated and a beginning was made in the spring of 1595. Even so, fate dealt hardly with the place; for although the new pier was built “all of huge rocks, artificially pyled, edge-long, one close by another,” so that it was considered highly permanent, it needed only the first storm of the following winter to overthrow it.
Something daunted by this mischance, but not beaten, the Hastings people built the pier anew, and of a different construction, with “tymbor braces and barres, crosse dogges, and suchlike up to the top: bowtyfull to behold,” and much else in that quaint way. Woe, woe! This much-admired work had not stood a year when, like the earlier, it was washed completely away. It happened on “All saints’ daie, 1597,” when “appeared the mighty force of God, who, with the finger of his hand, at one greate and exceeding high spring tyde, with a south-east wynd, overthrew this huge worke in lesse than an hower, to the greate terrour and abashment of all beholders.”
The inhabitants this time acknowledged defeat, and, recognising the futility of further endeavour, folded their hands and did—that easiest of things to accomplish—nothing. So, finally, ended the active existence of Hastings as a Cinque Port.
It is true that projects were from time to time raised, but they were never translated from words to deeds. At the beginning of the reign of Charles the First a very promising scheme was reported, by which a Dutch engineer, one Cranhalls, proposed to excavate and reopen the ancient haven at a cost of £220,000; but the beginning of that reign was also the beginning of trouble, and, as the condition of the country at the time was unfavourable for the prosecution of public works, nothing, again, was done.
Had it been possible to undertake those proposed works, Hastings at this time would be a vastly different place from what it is. You are to picture the scene—the bygone haven restored, and all that space now occupied by the very centre of the modern town—the Queen’s Hotel, the Albert Memorial, and Queen’s Road—a basin, with quays, wharves, and warehouses. The thing could be accomplished to-day, were it thinkable that the valuable house-property covering the site could be removed; but what might have been done with vacant land has long become impossible in a crowded town.
Yet, as the merest glance will show the casual visitor, the port and harbour idea is not dead. In these days of questing after the seemingly impossible—of eating your cake and having it too, of having things all ways and every way to your own advantage, an aim which worries individuals and corporations alike—it is not to be supposed that Hastings should be content with its present condition. If it were, it would be exceptional. But it is not. In the eyes of many who know Hastings well and love it much, it is well enough; but the town will never be content until it has acquired a harbour. It calls aloud for a harbour, just as the proverbial baby cries for the moon, but with this very important difference, that if it calls loud enough and long enough it will eventually get that harbour.
Time was, as we have seen, when it had such a haven, duly provided by Nature, and it now has, or had, a prospect of a newer, provided by private enterprise; not on or near the old site, but to be formed by building concrete piers out to sea from the East Hill and the fishermen’s quarters. One such arm has for some years been completed, but the works now appear to be finally abandoned, and all there is to show for the expenditure of the matter of a hundred thousand pounds is that long, unrelieved wall where the melancholy surges still sweep toward an unprotected shore.