THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE, REIGATE HILL.
The suspension bridge, carried overhead, spanning the cutting made through the crest of the hill, is known to the rustics—who will always invent simple English words of one syllable, whenever possible, to take the place of difficult three-syllabled words of Latin extraction—as the “Chain Pier.” It does not, as almost invariably is the case with these bridges, connect two portions of an estate severed by the cutting, but forms part of a public path which was cut through. It is very well worth the traveller’s attention, for it joins the severed ends of no less a road than the ancient Pilgrims’ Way, and is a very curious instance of modernity helping to preserve antiquity. The Way is clearly seen above, coming from Box Hill as a hollow road, crossing the bridge and going in the direction of Gatton Park, through a wood of beech trees.
The roadway of Reigate Hill is made to wind circuitously, in an attempt to mitigate the severity of the gradient; but for all the care taken, it remains one of the steepest hills in England, and is one of the very few provided with granite kerbs intended to ease the pull-up for horses. None but a very special fool among cyclists in the old days attempted to ride down the hill; and many, even in these times of more efficient brakes, prefer to walk down. Only motor-cars, like the Gadarene swine of the Scriptures, “rushing violently down a steep place,” attempt it; and those who are best acquainted with the hill live in daily expectation of a recklessly driven car spilling over the rim.
XIX
Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story. It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of “Cherchefelle,” and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until nearly two hundred years later.
Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a clearing of the Holmesdale woods; but it had not long passed into the hands of William de Varennes, who had married Gundrada the Conqueror’s daughter and was one of his most intimate henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became the site of the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. The manors granted to William de Varennes comprehended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included others in Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were the splendours that fell to the son-in-law and the companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He became somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl of Warenne, and the ancestor of a line of seven Earls, of whom the last died in 1347, when the family became firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the Mowbrays, and finally in that of the alternately absorbent and fissiparous Howards.
Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the warlike sort. It frowned terribly upon its sandstone ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216 when the foreign allies of the discontented subjects of King John approached: and when the seventh Earl, who had murdered Baron de la Zouche at Westminster, was attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks (equal to £24,000) demanded. In 1550, when Lambarde wrote, only “the ruyns and rubbishe of an old castle which some call Homesdale” were left, and even those were cleared away by order of the Parliament in 1648. Now, after many centuries of change in ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road through the town.
REIGATE HILL
In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate through Sutton in 1823, is highly entertaining. The tunnel was then being made, and it did not please him. “They are,” he vociferates, “in order to save a few hundred yards’ length of road, cutting through a hill. They have lowered a little hill on the London side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country actually thrown away: the produce of labour is taken from the industrious and given to the idlers. Mark the process; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty miles from the Wen, is on the seaside, and is thought by the stockjobbers to afford a salubrious air. It is so situated that a coach which leaves it not very early in the morning reaches London by noon; and, starting to go back in two hours and a half afterwards, reaches Brighton not very late at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches, and actually carry on stock-jobbing in Change Alley, though they reside at Brighton. The place is, besides, a great resort with the whiskered gentry. There are not less than about twenty coaches that leave the Wen every day for this place; and, there being three or four different roads, there is a great rivalship for the custom. This sets the people to work to shorten and to level the roads; and here you see hundreds of men and horses constantly at work to make pleasant and quick travelling for the Jews and jobbers. The Jews and jobbers pay the turnpikes, to be sure; but they get the money from the land and labourers. They drain these, from John o’ Groat’s House to the Land’s End, and they lay out some of the money on the Brighton roads.”