The site of the furnace is half a mile from Lamberhurst, on the way to Bayham Abbey. It is distinguished by a hammer-pond and a mouldy old house almost smothered in trees and creepers.
BAYHAM ABBEY: ACROSS THE WATER-MEADOWS.
Along the valley of the stream that feeds this pond lie the ruins of Bayham Abbey, a remote home of Premonstratensian Canons, whose simple life was to the last in great contrast with the dissolute conduct of the great majority of the religious houses rightly abolished in the time of Henry the Eighth. But they had to suffer for the sins of the many, and although a crowd of rustics and others of better estate assembled in disguise and reinstated the canons, after they had been expelled by the Commissioners, it was only a temporary victory. Abbey and estates fell to Sir Anthony Browne, of whom we shall hear more at Battle; but what became of the wonderful bed upon which the blessed St. Richard of Chichester had slept, history sayeth not. It should have been presented to the most deserving hospital, for it wrought cures upon all who slept in it, no matter what the disease. But the Age of Faith was past, and the Blessed Bed was doubtless chopped up for firewood and its bedding dispersed: an inestimable loss to an ailing world. Imagine a bed sovran for every ill! How compute the value of it?
If the curse upon sacrilege were not such a chancy and fortuitous thing, one might look confidently for terrible happenings to the owners of the Bayham Abbey lands, the Pratts, Marquises Camden, who bought the estates from Viscount Montagu in 1714. But their elephant’s-head crest remains on all the cottages for miles around, and they continue to “live long and brosber.”
The ruins are visible from the road, lying amid rich water-meadows, and they are to be seen more intimately at the end of a phenomenally muddy lane. But you may not view them from within the enclosure except on one day of the week and at a fee of sixpence.
XXXII
Restrictions upon sight-seeing in this neighbourhood are particularly severe. On the rising ground out of Lamberhurst, for example, lies Scotney Castle, a lovely, sequestered ruin partly surrounded by a great, lake-like moat, and only a little less romantic than Bodiam itself. To reach it you go past a very modern lodge and along a half-mile of wooded drive, chiefly of laurels and sweet chestnuts. But permission is granted on only one day of the week, doubtless in the hope that the precise day will not be remembered. On any summer’s day numerous vehicles and parties, some of them come from long distances, may be seen turned back by the lodge-keeper.
Scotney was ever the home of romance, for one of its earliest owners, Walter de Scotney, was executed at Winchester in 1259 for administering poison to the Earl of Gloucester and others. The humour of it is that Walter de Scotney was probably quite innocent. The Earl recovered, but his brother, William de Clare, died, as also did the Abbot of Westminster. The Earl himself seems to have had a narrow escape, for he lost hair, nails, teeth, and skin, and must have been one vast comprehensive ache, and in a more painful condition than that of a chicken plucked alive.
Scotney then passed to the Darrells, who led a finely dramatic life here until they ended, to an effective and tragical “curtain.”