XXXVI
It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward.
Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his own computation.” Within the church there are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cast-iron slabs to Peckhams and Stevens: relics of the forgotten iron-founding industry of the district.
THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM.
The contemplative person, for whom antiquity is not everything, who finds interest in things of the present as well as those of the past, may discover some entertainment in noticing how exquisitely the accommodation in the House of God shades off in fine distinctions, from the cushioned seats and carpeted floors in front, to the strips of carpet and the fibre matting of the intermediate, and lastly to the bare seats and naked boards of those nearest the door—and the draughts. He notices how things religious and things secular are all ordered in these beautiful gradations: the three classes on railways, and the more than three orders of seats in theatres; and he wonders—that contemplative person—whether the “many mansions” prepared in the Father’s house partake of the like subtleties.
The road to Bodiam—spelled “Bodiham” on old maps—is hilly and circuitous; but it brings you at last to that tiny village overlooking the Rother marshes, and to that castle which, more than any other ancient fortress in England, figures the fairy home of the Sleeping Beauty. Bodiam Castle stands on the hillside, beautifully rural, and is surrounded by a very broad and very clear moat of running water, fed from the never-failing springs that flow from the higher ground and are dammed at this point. The grey and lichened walls of the castle rise sheer from the water, amid a wealth of the loveliest water-lilies.
It is mediævalism incarnated. The walls and the eight towers, alternately round and square, are almost perfect, and the wooden gate yet hangs on its hinges across the bridge, where the portcullis grins and the holes in the masonry remain above, to show how, by flinging molten lead, boiling water, hot pitch, and domestic abominations upon the heads of the enemy, the garrison were prepared to hold their own.
But history tells us nothing of sieges or conflicts here. Possibly Sir Edward Dalyngruge, warrior of Crecy and Poictiers, who in the fourteenth century built it, was too strong a castellan, and his moated fortalice more than a thought too formidable. At any rate, it is a castle without a story.