XXXV
Returning to Hurst Green, and resisting the temptation to turn aside for the purpose of seeing the farmhouse called “Squibs,” we come presently to Silver Hill, an eminence described by Horace Walpole, who in 1752 travelled Kent and Sussex with Mr. Chaloner Chute on antiquarian pilgrimage:
“The roads grew bad beyond all badness, the night dark beyond all darkness, our guide frightened beyond all frightfulness. However, without being at all killed, we got up, or down—I forget which, it was so dark—a famous precipice called Silver Hill, and about ten at night arrived at a wretched village called Rotherbridge.”
He forgot which! That is—like the hill—rather steep. But he must have known by the time they returned, for he speaks of the view from the crest, on the homeward journey, as “the richest blue prospect you ever saw.” It is indeed very beautiful, and the fact has been recognised by some enthusiastic person who, in a field beside the road to the left, has erected a tall staging, known as “The Beacon,” for sightseers.
The hill is steep: not too steep for a determined cyclist to ride up it on the return, but still a very respectable gradient. It looks by no means so terrible as Walpole’s description would prepare the stranger for; but the roadway is, in fact, not that which gave these tourists and their guide such qualms, for it was reconstructed about 1830. Occasional lengths of deserted hollow road at the side are surviving portions of the old road, and are quite steep and rugged enough to acquit Walpole of unnecessary alarm.
Robertsbridge is a long, long village of old-fashioned houses huddled together on either side of a narrow street in the flats that form the valley of the Rother. Although Robertsbridge is so undeniably old it is not an independent village, being in the parish of the much smaller Salehurst, seen across the levels, a mile away.
It has never been determined whether Robertsbridge acquired its name from Robert de Saint Martin, who founded the Cistercian Abbey “de Ponte Roberti” here in 1176, or from a corrupted version of “Rotherbridge.” “Much,” as Sir Roger de Coverley says in The Spectator, “might be said on both sides.”
At any rate, it is unquestionably a place of bridges. There are seven in all, in a line along the road; but no one of them is at all considerable, and only three span any water, save in seasons of flood.
The beginning of the village, officially styled “Northbridge Street,” is generally styled “the Bridges”; but was in turnpike days, when a gate existed here, “the Clapper.”
The Abbey, long since demolished, lay one mile from the village, beside the Rother. Fragments of it are picturesquely built into the Abbey Farm, and serve as substantial walls for oast-houses. The most perfect relic is the crypt, inside the house, forming an ideally cool dairy.
To this has come the Abbey that gave hospitality to Edward the First and his successor; whose Abbot in 1193, in company with the Abbot of Boxley, was of sufficient importance to be entrusted with the mission of discovering the whereabouts on the Continent of the imprisoned Richard Cœur de Lion. All that is left of it, beside these fragments, is a manuscript volume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, inscribed: “This book belongs to St. Mary of Robertsbridge: whosoever shall steal it or sell it, or in any way alienate it from this house, let him be Anathema Maranatha.”
THE ABBEY FARM.
Notwithstanding this comprehensive curse, some one did steal it. A further inscription, written, it is thought, by John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, 1327-1369, declares: “I, John, Bishop of Exeter, know not where the aforesaid house is; nor did I steal this book, but acquired it in a lawful way.” It is quite surprising to find the old Churchmen believing in the efficacy of their curses, and thus seeking to turn them aside.
The site of the Abbey was granted by Henry the Eighth to Sir William Sidney, and there are those who like to think that his grandson, Sir Philip, would not have been killed at Zutphen, nor Algernon Sidney beheaded, had it not been for the curse upon sacrilege, sleeping in one generation to work woe in another.
For over one hundred and fifty years Robertsbridge Abbey was an iron and steel foundry, where cannon and shot were cast. In the garden of the farmstead a heap of cannon-balls, found about the premises, reminds the visitor of this closed chapter.
When Horace Walpole and his companion, descending Silver Hill in the dark, came to “the wretched village called Rotherbridge,” they would have stayed the night, if they could have found any decent accommodation. “But alas! there, was only one bed to be had. All the rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the house called ‘mountebanks,’ and with one of whom the lady of the den told Mr. Chute he might lie.” That was rather too much for Mr. Chute, who was a very great person indeed when he was at home at his stately seat, “The Vyne,” near Basingstoke, and he declined the fellowship.
So, with links and lanthorns, they continued their journey, and arrived at Battle, hardly six miles away, at two o’clock in the morning, to a “still worse” inn, “and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom had just shot a smuggler. However, as we were neutral powers, we have passed safely through both armies hitherto.”
One would like to identify that “den.” The term would scarcely apply to the “George,” then, as now, the principal house, and a good specimen of the old English inn, whose proprietor, according to an advertisement in The General Evening Post of 1784, when the house was to let, had a “part-share” in the post-coach on the road to Hastings, described as a “favourite place for sea-bathing.” Was it the “Seven Stars”? Or was it not the “Stag’s Head” of other days, a shy-looking cottage lying low down on the right of the “George,” and well remembered locally to have been the haunt of the smugglers of Darvell Wood?
Robertsbridge is pure Sussex, and pronounces local place-names in a manner peculiar to itself. In the result those names do not appear any the more poetic—Udiham becoming “Udjem,” Bodiam “Bodjem,” Northiam “Norjem,” and Horsmonden “Ors’nd’n.” The story is even told of a stranger asking an inhabitant of Heathfield the way to that place, and of that unlettered person for long declaring he had “niver ’eared of sech a name in these parts.” At last a light broke in upon him. “You means Efful,” he said.
Robertsbridge has now two railway-stations—that of the South Eastern, opened in 1851, and a newer, on the Kent and East Sussex Light Railway, recently made; but it is as old-fashioned as ever, and the subject-matter of the inns at night is apt to be of such recollections as that of how, seventy years ago, there were only three pairs of top-boots in the parish, and how farmers going up to London to cut an occasional dash would borrow them for the jaunt.