In every circumstance Ditchling Common recalls the “Crackskull Commons” of the eighteenth-century comedies, for it has a little horror of its own in the shape of an authentic fragment of a gibbet. This is the silent reminder of a crime committed near at hand, at the “Royal Oak” inn, Wivelsfield, in 1734. In that year Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar, came to the inn and, stabling his horse, attacked Miles, the landlord, while he was grooming the animal down, and cut his throat. The servant-maid, hearing a disturbance in the stable, and coming downstairs to see the cause of it, was murdered in the same way, and then the Jew calmly walked upstairs and slaughtered the landlord’s wife, who was lying ill in bed. None of these unfortunate people died at once. The two women expired the same night, but Miles lived long enough to identify the assassin, who was hanged at Horsham, his body being hung in chains from this gibbet, ever since known as Jacob’s Post.
Pieces of wood from this gallows-tree were long and highly esteemed by country-folk as charms, and were often carried about with them as preventatives of all manner of accidents and diseases; indeed, its present meagre proportions are due to this practice and belief.
The post is fenced with a wooden rail, and is surmounted by the quaint iron effigy of a rooster, pierced with the date, 1734, in old-fashioned figures.
It is a lonely spot, with but one cottage near at hand: the common undulating away for miles until it reaches close to the grey barrier of the noble South Downs, rising magnificently in the distance.
XXIX
Returning to the exploited main road. Friar’s Oak is soon reached. It was selected by Sir Conan Doyle as one of the scenes of his Regency story, “Rodney Stone”; but since the year 1900, when the old inn was rebuilt, the spot has become an eyesore to those who knew it of old.
No one knows why Friar’s Oak is so called, and “Nothing is ever known about anything on the roads,” is the intemperate exclamation that rises to the lips of the disappointed explorer. But wild legends, as usual, supply the place of facts, and the old oak that stands opposite the inn is said to have been the spot where a friar, or friars, distributed alms. To any one who knows even the least about friars, this story would at once carry its own condemnation; but a friar, or a hermit, may have solicited alms here. At any rate, the old inn used to exhibit a very forbidding “friar of orders grey” as its sign, dancing beneath the oak. Stolen many years ago, it was subsequently discovered in London by the merest accident, was purchased for a trifling sum, and restored to its bereft signpost. The innkeeper, however, thinking that what befell once might happen again, hung the cherished panel within the house, where it remains to this day.
From Friar’s Oak it is but a step to that newest creation among Brighton’s suburbs, Clayton Park, its clustering red-brick villas, building estates, and half-formed roads adjoining the station of Hassocks Gate, which, by the way, the railway authorities have long since reduced to “Hassocks.” The name recalls certain dusty contrivances of straw and carpeting artfully contrived for the devout to stumble over in church. But, not to incur the suspicion of tripping over the name as here applied, it may be mentioned that “hassock” is the Anglo-Saxon name for a coppice or small wood; and there are really many of these at and around Hassocks Gate to this day.