The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"

by Charles G. Harper

ETCHINGHAM CHURCH.

Although the call of nature may be attended to, and thirst and hunger handsomely appeased at Hurst Green, the æsthetic sense is unlikely to be full fed. Satisfaction of that kind—but none of the other—is amply obtained at Etchingham, one mile distant, down a bye-road.

Travellers to and from Hastings by South Eastern Railway are familiar with Etchingham, as a place with a station where no train appears ever to stop; and indeed to the ordinary mind there seems, not merely no reason for stopping, but none for a station at all. For Etchingham is just what you see from the passing train: a great, impressive church, and one or two ancient farmsteads. There was no village when the station was built, in 1847, and the place was, except for that beautiful church and those farms, a solitude. A solitude, too, it remained until 1904, when an entirely new village was begun. There it blooms to-day, in red brick, like a scarlet geranium, and the South Eastern Railway is at last, after close upon two generations, justified of its prescience.

There seems never to have been a village at Etchingham. Only a manor-house of the de Etchinghams; and that disappeared so long ago that little is known of it. Its last traces were erased when the railway came, and the station stands on the site. There is something so typical of the age in that circumstance that one cannot but stand and admire the dramatic completeness, the colossal audacity of it.

THE ANCIENT VANE,
ETCHINGHAM.

But a something greater than the manor-house of those ancient lords remains; in the great church they built. It stands so near the railway that one might pitch a stone from the train into the churchyard; and, as it is one of the finest churches in Sussex, it never fails to hold the glance of those who pass this way. It was built, on the site of an earlier, by Sir William de Etchingham, in 1365, and is a cruciform building, with massive central tower, in the Late Decorated style—that large and bold phase of Gothic which comes between Early English and Perpendicular, and looks lovingly back upon the grace of the earlier and forward to the lofty emptiness of the later, with a richness of detail peculiar to itself. A special note of this church is the fine tracery of its east window, in the easy flowing style, common in France but comparatively rare in this country, known as Flamboyant. The low pyramidical spire of the tower still supports the original copper weathervane, in the form of a banneret displaying the fretty coat of arms of the de Etchinghams, and on the floor of the chancel are the almost life-sized figures, in engraved brass, of the founder himself, and his son and grandson. Sir William, the builder of the church, died in 1387. He still darkly, in obscure Norman-French and black-letter, begs the prayers of all: “I was made and formed of Earth; and now have I returned to Earth. William de Etchingham was my name. God have pity on my soul; and all you who pass by, pray to Him for me.”

If salvation be found in church-building—and there are yet those who seek it that way—then, in those many mansions beyond, William de Etchingham is well-housed, for he built not only a large church, but a beautiful.

BRASS OF SIR WILLIAM DE ETCHINGHAM.