BATTLE ABBEY.
XLV
All these things are enclosed within the massive walls and the great Gateway that face the open market-place of Battle town as though the Abbey itself were still perfect behind them. Once a week great crowds of visitors come from Hastings, by rail, by waggonette, or a-foot, and pay their sixpences to be conducted over the place. They see the wooden beam projecting from the walls of the Gatehouse, and learn that it was a gallows; they are bidden look through the windows of the modern drawing-room that was the monastic “locutorium,” or parlour, for the reception of strangers; they stand on the terrace, and look down upon the valley of Senlac and the corresponding heights of Telham, the way the Conqueror’s army advanced to the attack. Then the guide conducts to the site of the High Altar, the spot where Harold fell, to the gardens, once the Cloisters; then to the great roofless Refectory. Beneath it are the three fine crypts. One of them the guide calls the Scriptorium, but the name has little meaning for him. If you ask him to point out the site of the Œsophagus, the Pericardium, or the Cerebellum, he will look puzzled for a moment; but, rallying, will declare them to have been destroyed so long ago that their sites are uncertain. At last, with evident relief, he conducts the crowd to the gate, and saying, “That’s all I can show you to-day, ladies and gentlemen,” dismisses them.
A relic of more savage times than these of ours still exists in the market-place, in the iron ring to which the bull was tethered when bull-baiting was a popular sport. It has recently been covered over with earth.
BATTLE CHURCH.
The parish church of Battle, standing beside the road on the way out of the town, was a “peculiar,” i.e. independent of ecclesiastical control. Its incumbent is not merely a vicar or a rector, but a dean, and is appointed by the owner of Battle Abbey, still the lay Abbot. In the chancel lie Sir Anthony Browne and his wife, with a magnificent tomb over them, and in the churchyard is the humble stone to Isaac Ingall, who died after ninety years’ service at the Abbey, in 1798, aged 120. Beginning as postilion, he ended as major-domo. At the age of 107, resentful of some indignity—perhaps some one had called him “old”—he went off in quest of another situation.
A BYE-ROAD AT BATTLE.