For over one hundred and fifty years Robertsbridge Abbey was an iron and steel foundry, where cannon and shot were cast. In the garden of the farmstead a heap of cannon-balls, found about the premises, reminds the visitor of this closed chapter.
When Horace Walpole and his companion, descending Silver Hill in the dark, came to “the wretched village called Rotherbridge,” they would have stayed the night, if they could have found any decent accommodation. “But alas! there, was only one bed to be had. All the rest were inhabited by smugglers, whom the people of the house called ‘mountebanks,’ and with one of whom the lady of the den told Mr. Chute he might lie.” That was rather too much for Mr. Chute, who was a very great person indeed when he was at home at his stately seat, “The Vyne,” near Basingstoke, and he declined the fellowship.
So, with links and lanthorns, they continued their journey, and arrived at Battle, hardly six miles away, at two o’clock in the morning, to a “still worse” inn, “and that crammed with excise officers, one of whom had just shot a smuggler. However, as we were neutral powers, we have passed safely through both armies hitherto.”
One would like to identify that “den.” The term would scarcely apply to the “George,” then, as now, the principal house, and a good specimen of the old English inn, whose proprietor, according to an advertisement in The General Evening Post of 1784, when the house was to let, had a “part-share” in the post-coach on the road to Hastings, described as a “favourite place for sea-bathing.” Was it the “Seven Stars”? Or was it not the “Stag’s Head” of other days, a shy-looking cottage lying low down on the right of the “George,” and well remembered locally to have been the haunt of the smugglers of Darvell Wood?
Robertsbridge is pure Sussex, and pronounces local place-names in a manner peculiar to itself. In the result those names do not appear any the more poetic—Udiham becoming “Udjem,” Bodiam “Bodjem,” Northiam “Norjem,” and Horsmonden “Ors’nd’n.” The story is even told of a stranger asking an inhabitant of Heathfield the way to that place, and of that unlettered person for long declaring he had “niver ’eared of sech a name in these parts.” At last a light broke in upon him. “You means Efful,” he said.
Robertsbridge has now two railway-stations—that of the South Eastern, opened in 1851, and a newer, on the Kent and East Sussex Light Railway, recently made; but it is as old-fashioned as ever, and the subject-matter of the inns at night is apt to be of such recollections as that of how, seventy years ago, there were only three pairs of top-boots in the parish, and how farmers going up to London to cut an occasional dash would borrow them for the jaunt.
XXXVI
It would be unthinkable to leave Robertsbridge without visiting its mother church of Salehurst; or, when there, to return without having seen Bodiam Castle, two miles onward.
Salehurst Church stands picturesquely above the Rother, on the opposite bank from the Abbey. On the north side of it there stands an aged stone recording the incredible age of one “Peter Sparkes, who died October 8th, 1683, aged 126 years.” He is referred to in the registers of Wadhurst as “being above 126 years old by his own computation.” Within the church there are several seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cast-iron slabs to Peckhams and Stevens: relics of the forgotten iron-founding industry of the district.
