Sussex has neither the imaginative Celtic race of Cornwall nor that county’s fantastic scenery to inspire legends; but is it at all wonderful that old beliefs die hard in a county so inaccessible as this has hitherto been? We have read travellers’ tales of woful happenings on the road; hear now Defoe, who is writing in the year 1724, of another proof of heavy going on the highways: “I saw,” says he, “an ancient lady, and a lady of very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen; nor was it done in frolic or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it.” All which says much for the piety of this ancient lady. Only a few years later, in 1729, died Dame Judith, widow of Sir Henry Hatsell, who in her will, dated January 10th, 1728, directed that her body should be buried at Preston, should she happen to die at such a time of year when the roads were passable; otherwise, at any place her executors might think suitable. It so happened that she died in the month of June, so compliance with her wishes was possible.
XXXI
And now to trace the Hickstead and Bolney route from Hand Cross, that parting of the ways overlooking the most rural parts of Sussex. Hand Cross, it has already been said, is in the parish of Slaugham, which lies deep down in a very sequestered wood, where the head-springs issuing from the hillsides are never dry and the air is always heavy with moisture. “Slougham-cum-Crolé” is the title of the place in ancient records, “Crolé” being Crawley. It was from its ancient bogs and morasses that it obtained its name, pronounced by the natives “Slaffam,” and it was certainly due to them that the magnificent manor-house—almost a palace—of the Coverts, the old lords of the manor—was deserted and began to fall to pieces so soon as built.
THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.
The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, “came over with the Conqueror”; but they are not found settled here until towards the close of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat, over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater part to the level of the watery turf.
The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the mansion remain to confirm the thought.
That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed, and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues and chills innumerable.