THE MOATED CASTLE OF BODIAM.
The contemplative person, for whom antiquity is not everything, who finds interest in things of the present as well as those of the past, may discover some entertainment in noticing how exquisitely the accommodation in the House of God shades off in fine distinctions, from the cushioned seats and carpeted floors in front, to the strips of carpet and the fibre matting of the intermediate, and lastly to the bare seats and naked boards of those nearest the door—and the draughts. He notices how things religious and things secular are all ordered in these beautiful gradations: the three classes on railways, and the more than three orders of seats in theatres; and he wonders—that contemplative person—whether the “many mansions” prepared in the Father’s house partake of the like subtleties.
The road to Bodiam—spelled “Bodiham” on old maps—is hilly and circuitous; but it brings you at last to that tiny village overlooking the Rother marshes, and to that castle which, more than any other ancient fortress in England, figures the fairy home of the Sleeping Beauty. Bodiam Castle stands on the hillside, beautifully rural, and is surrounded by a very broad and very clear moat of running water, fed from the never-failing springs that flow from the higher ground and are dammed at this point. The grey and lichened walls of the castle rise sheer from the water, amid a wealth of the loveliest water-lilies.
It is mediævalism incarnated. The walls and the eight towers, alternately round and square, are almost perfect, and the wooden gate yet hangs on its hinges across the bridge, where the portcullis grins and the holes in the masonry remain above, to show how, by flinging molten lead, boiling water, hot pitch, and domestic abominations upon the heads of the enemy, the garrison were prepared to hold their own.
But history tells us nothing of sieges or conflicts here. Possibly Sir Edward Dalyngruge, warrior of Crecy and Poictiers, who in the fourteenth century built it, was too strong a castellan, and his moated fortalice more than a thought too formidable. At any rate, it is a castle without a story.
XXXVII
The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe, how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event, and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise enough to keep the fact to themselves.
Although it all happened so long ago, almost the first thing the stranger hears of in Robertsbridge to this day is that mystic gold. Reduced to plain facts, it seems that during his work in Barn Field, on Taylor’s Farm, January 12th, 1862, a ploughman suddenly drove his plough into an entangled mass of metal that brought him up with a jerk. He threw the pieces on the baulk, and when his day’s work was done showed them to his master, who thought they were brass, and gave them to him. They were really, from the description afterwards given of them, gold torques and other Early British ornaments, and had lain there two thousand years. The metal weighed no less than thirteen pounds.
After vainly endeavouring to sell the “old brass” to one dealer after another, a Hastings man more wideawake than the rest, suspecting it to be the more precious metal, gave the ploughman 6d. a pound for it—liberal man! He lost no time in travelling to London, where he sold it to a refiner, who melted it down and paid him £529 12s. 7d. for the resultant 153 oz. 12 gr. of fine gold. A piece had already been sold to a Hastings jeweller for £18.
Rumours of this extraordinary find soon spread, and in the end the ploughman and the sharp dealer were arraigned at the Winter Sessions at Lewes, December 1862, on the charge of illegally disposing of treasure-trove, the property of Her Majesty the Queen. They were each fined £265, half-value of the metal disposed of, or ordered to be imprisoned until the money was paid. Fairy gold has ever brought trouble upon those who find it.