XXXI

Those who would find Lamberhurst church must diligently seek it, for it lies quite away from the village, on the hill-top, beside the manor-house, which you approach past a long line of pyramidical yew-trees, so like those of toy Noah’s Arks that you look instinctively for their wooden stands.

Like most manor-houses in Kent, this is styled the “Court Lodge.” The Court Lodge itself is a stone building of considerable age, with the desolating gaunt exterior of a workhouse; and the church, standing behind it, is in appearance—and in some sort in fact—an appanage of the lord of the manor, for it stands, with the residence, in the middle of his park.

It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy, with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise:

This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small Pox,” aged 28.

I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it in this larcenous way.

At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in a valley with beautiful hills round it.”

Old writers gave it as their opinion that the place-name came from “the Anglo-Saxon Lam, meaning ‘loam,’” and supported their contention by referring to the sticky clay of the neighbourhood; but Lamberhurst probably took the first part of its name from the Saxon genitive plural for lambs. The second part means, of course, a wood. Most surrounding places take their names, in this manner, from natural objects.

LAMBERHURST.

Kent and Sussex here march together, and the village was, until 1894, in both counties, the dividing-line being the little river Teise that flows under the picturesque and narrow bridge in the village street. In that year, however, Lamberhurst was transferred wholly to Kent. The old “Chequers” inn, type of an old English hostelry, has lately been neighboured by an upstart hotel, disturbing with its raw newness the ancient peace of this Sleepy Hollow.

It was once a busy enough place, and black and smoky, for close by were the famous furnaces, or “bloomeries,” where iron-ore was smelted and cannon cast, and where the famous iron railings that now partly, and once wholly, surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral, were made. Great outcry was made when the railings were removed from the west front of the cathedral in 1873, but we need not lack in admiration of them to realise that the open space thus created is a better sight than the strictly enclosed approach to London’s chief place of worship. The railings originally weighed 200 tons, cost £11,202, and were considered to be the finest, as they certainly were the heaviest, in the world.

The site of the furnace is half a mile from Lamberhurst, on the way to Bayham Abbey. It is distinguished by a hammer-pond and a mouldy old house almost smothered in trees and creepers.

BAYHAM ABBEY: ACROSS THE WATER-MEADOWS.

Along the valley of the stream that feeds this pond lie the ruins of Bayham Abbey, a remote home of Premonstratensian Canons, whose simple life was to the last in great contrast with the dissolute conduct of the great majority of the religious houses rightly abolished in the time of Henry the Eighth. But they had to suffer for the sins of the many, and although a crowd of rustics and others of better estate assembled in disguise and reinstated the canons, after they had been expelled by the Commissioners, it was only a temporary victory. Abbey and estates fell to Sir Anthony Browne, of whom we shall hear more at Battle; but what became of the wonderful bed upon which the blessed St. Richard of Chichester had slept, history sayeth not. It should have been presented to the most deserving hospital, for it wrought cures upon all who slept in it, no matter what the disease. But the Age of Faith was past, and the Blessed Bed was doubtless chopped up for firewood and its bedding dispersed: an inestimable loss to an ailing world. Imagine a bed sovran for every ill! How compute the value of it?

If the curse upon sacrilege were not such a chancy and fortuitous thing, one might look confidently for terrible happenings to the owners of the Bayham Abbey lands, the Pratts, Marquises Camden, who bought the estates from Viscount Montagu in 1714. But their elephant’s-head crest remains on all the cottages for miles around, and they continue to “live long and brosber.”

The ruins are visible from the road, lying amid rich water-meadows, and they are to be seen more intimately at the end of a phenomenally muddy lane. But you may not view them from within the enclosure except on one day of the week and at a fee of sixpence.