He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died, in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads, on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
PATCHAM.
Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays, and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain; for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand years.
XXXIII
From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the “deans.” North and South of the Downs are two different countries—so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter. But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
THE DEANS