Highways and Byways in Sussex

by E. V. Lucas

SUPERSTITIONS

In Richard Jefferies' essay, "The Country-side: Sussex" (in Field and Hedgerow), describing this district of the country, is an amusing passage touching superstitions of these parts, picked up during hopping:

"In and about the kiln I learned that if you smash a frog with a stone, no matter how hard you hit him, he cannot die till sunset. You must be careful not to put on any new article of clothing for the first time on a Saturday, or some severe punishment will ensue. One person put on his new boots on a Saturday, and on Monday broke his arm. Some still believe in herbs, and gather wood-betony for herb tea, or eat dandelion leaves between slices of dry toast. There is an old man living in one of the villages who has reached the age of a hundred and sixty years, and still goes hop-picking. Ever so many people had seen him, and knew all about him; an undoubted fact, a public fact; but I could not trace him to his lair. His exact whereabouts could not be fixed. I live in hopes of finding him in some obscure 'Hole' yet (many little hamlets are 'Holes,' as Froghole, Foxhole). What an exhibit for London! Did he realise his own value, he would soon come forth. I joke, but the existence of this antique person is firmly believed in."

Burwash is one of the few Sussex villages that has been made the subject of a book. The Rev. John Coker Egerton's Sussex Folk and Sussex Ways (from which I have already occasionally quoted) was written here, around materials collected during the author's period as rector of Burwash. Mr. Egerton was curate of Burwash from 1857 to 1862, and from 1865 to 1867, when he became rector and remained in the living until his death in 1888. His book is a kindly collection of the shrewd and humorous sayings of his Sussex parishioners, anecdotes of characteristic incidents, records of old customs now passing or passed away—the whole fused by the rector's genial personality.

PARTY POLITICS

It is to Burwash and Mr. Egerton that we owe some characteristic scraps of Sussex philosophy. Thus, Mr. Egerton tells of an old conservative whose advice to young men was this: "Mind you don't never have nothing in no way to do with none of their new-fangled schemes." Another Sussex cynic defined party government with grim impartiality: "Politics are about like this: I've got a sow in my yard with twelve little uns, and they little uns can't all feed at once, because there isn't room enough; so I shut six on 'em out of the yard while tother six be sucking, and the six as be shut out, they just do make a hem of a noise till they be let in; and then they be just as quiet as the rest."

The capacity of the Sussex man to put his foot down and keep it there, is shown in the refusal of Burwash to ring the bells when George IV., then Prince of Wales, passed through the village on his return to Brighton from a visit to Sir John Lade at Etchingham; the reason given being that the First Gentleman in Europe when rung in on his way to Sir John's had said nothing about beer. This must have been during one of the Prince's peculiarly needy periods, for the withholding of strong drink from his friends was never one of his failings. Another Burwash radical used to send up to the rectory with a message that he was about to gather fruit and the rector must send down for the tithe. The rector's man would go down—and receive one gooseberry from a basket of ten: all that was to be gathered that day.

Another Burwash man posed his vicar more agreeably and humorously in another manner. Finding him a little in liquor the pastor would have warned him against the habit, but the man was too quick. How was it, he asked the vicar with well affected or real concern, that whenever he had had too much to drink he felt more religious than at any other time?

The Burwash records indeed go far to redeem Sussex men from the epithet "silly," which is traditionally theirs. Concerning this old taunt, I like the rector's remarks in Idlehurst. The phrase, he says, "is better after all than 'canny owd Cummerlan'' or calling ourselves 'free and enlightened citizens' or 'heirs to all the ages.' But suppose Sussex as silly as you like, the country wants a large preserve of fallow brains; you can't manure the intellect for close cropping. Isn't it Renan who attributes so much to solid Breton stupidity in his ancestors?" I notice that Mr. H. G. Wells, in his very interesting book, Mankind in the Making, is in support of this suggestion. The Idlehurst rector, in contrasting Londoners with Sussex folk, continues: "The Londoner has all his strength in the front line: one can never tell what reserves the countryman may not deploy in his slow way." (Some old satirist of the county had it that the crest of the true Sussex peasant is a pig couchant, with the motto "I wunt be druv." I give this for what it is worth.)

SUSSEX RESERVES