Now there is little to stir the pulses or make the heart leap. Occasionally some great cycle “scorch” is in progress, when whirling enthusiasts speed through the village on winged wheels beneath the sign of the “George” spanning the street and swinging in the breeze; a sign on which the saintly knight wages eternal warfare with a blurred and very invertebrate dragon. Sometimes a driving match brings down sportsmen and bookmakers, and every now and again some one has a record to cut, be it in cycling, coaching, walking, or in wheelbarrow trundling; and then the roads are peopled again.
There yet remain a few ancient cottages in Crawley, and the grey, embattled church tower lends an assured antiquity to the view; but there is, in especial, one sixteenth-century cottage worthy notice. Its timbered frame stands as securely, though not so erect, as ever, and is eloquent of that spacious age when the Virgin Queen (Heaven help those who named her so!) rules the land. It is Sussex, realised at a glance.
They are conservative folks at Crawley. When that ancient elm of theirs that stood directly below this old cottage had become decayed with lapse of years and failure of sap, they did not, even though its vast trunk obtrudes upon the roadway, cut it down and scatter its remains abroad. Instead, they fenced it around with as decorative a rustic railing as might well be contrived out of cut boughs, all innocent of the carpenter and still retaining their bark, and they planted the enclosure with flowers and tender saplings, so that this venerable ruin became a very attractive ruin indeed.
Rowlandson has preserved for us a view of Crawley as it appeared in 1789, when he toured the road and sketched, while his companion, Henry Wigstead, took notes for his book, “An Excursion to Brighthelmstone.” It is a work of the dreadfullest ditch-water dulness, saved only by the artist’s illustrations. That they should have lived, you who see the reproduction will not wonder. The old sign spans the way, as of yore, but Crawley is otherwise greatly changed.
AN OLD COTTAGE AT CRAWLEY.
An odd fact, unknown to those who merely pass through the place, is that the greater part of “Crawley” is not in that parish at all, but in the adjoining parish of Ifield. Only the church and a few houses on the same side of the street belong to Crawley.
In these later years the church, once kept rigidly locked, is generally open, and the celebrated inscription carved on one of the tie-beams of the nave is to be seen. It is in old English characters, gilded, and runs in this admonitory fashion:
Man yn wele bewar, for warldly good makyth man blynde
He war be for whate comyth be hynde.
When the stranger stands puzzling it out, unconscious of not being alone, it is sufficiently startling to hear the unexpected voice of the sexton, “be hynde,” remarking that it is “arnshunt.”