XLV
All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern drawing-room that was the monastic “locutorium,” or parlour, for the reception of strangers; they stand on the terrace, and look down upon the valley of Senlac and the corresponding heights of Telham, the way the Conqueror’s army advanced to the attack. Then the guide conducts to the site of the High Altar, the spot where Harold fell, to the gardens, once the Cloisters; then to the great roofless Refectory. Beneath it are the three fine crypts. One of them the guide calls the Scriptorium, but the name has little meaning for him. If you ask him to point out the site of the Œsophagus, the Pericardium, or the Cerebellum, he will look puzzled for a moment; but, rallying, will declare them to have been destroyed so long ago that their sites are uncertain. At last, with evident relief, he conducts the crowd to the gate, and saying, “That’s all I can show you to-day, ladies and gentlemen,” dismisses them.
A relic of more savage times than these of ours still exists in the market-place, in the iron ring to which the bull was tethered when bull-baiting was a popular sport. It has recently been covered over with earth.
BATTLE CHURCH.
The parish church of Battle, standing beside the road on the way out of the town, was a “peculiar,” i.e. independent of ecclesiastical control. Its incumbent is not merely a vicar or a rector, but a dean, and is appointed by the owner of Battle Abbey, still the lay Abbot. In the chancel lie Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, with a magnificent tomb over them, and in the churchyard is the humble stone to Isaac Ingall, who died after ninety years’ service at the Abbey, in 1798, aged 120. Beginning as postilion, he ended as major-domo. At the age of 107, resentful of some indignity—perhaps some one had called him “old”—he went off in quest of another situation.
A BYE-ROAD AT BATTLE.
Beneath the town and the church, the road crosses the railway. The allotment gardens, squalid with little sheds, after their kind, stand below Harold’s centre, on the spot where the fight raged fiercest. But the finest idea of the battlefield is to be obtained from the bye-road that here turns to the right, and, skirting the park, runs to the site of the old Powder Mills. It is far better than looking down, with the crowd, from the terrace of the Abbey, and hearing the parrot-talk of a guide. Here you are in the spirit-company of the invaders, and can appreciate better their task of charging up to that ridge where Harold and his warriors stood then, where the Abbey buildings stand now.
It is magnificent. The park-like landscape, dotted with clumps of trees in the uplands; a line of oaks and undergrowth following the course of the stream in the bottom; the town nested in woods, and Caldbeck windmill on the right, where, the rustics say, William “called ’em back.” Away down by Powder Mill House, in the coppices, one may still see the rocky ravine in whose depths the Norman cavalry fell in the fierce rally after their pretended flight. The ledges still drip red, as they needs must do, for the ground is rich in iron; but, although the explanation of the old legend that the soil weeps blood is prosaic enough, yet the sight is not without its impressiveness, and vividly recalls the magnificent opening lines of Maud:
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath;
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”