Besides these two religious houses, Winchelsea possessed three hospitals, those of St John, St Bartholomew and Holy Cross.
The Hospital of St Bartholomew was near the New Gate on the south-west of the town, and dated from the refounding of Edward. Nothing remains of it, or of the Hospital of Holy Cross, which had existed in old Winchelsea and was set up in the new town also near the New Gate. But the oldest and the most important of the three hospitals was that of St John. A fragment of this remains where the road turns towards Hastings to the north of the churchyard. Close by is the thirteenth- century Court House.
It is always with regret I leave Winchelsea when I must, and even the beautiful road through Icklesham into Hastings will not reconcile one who has known how to love this place, to departure. And yet how fair that road is and how fair is the Norman church of St Nicholas at Icklesham upon the way! The road winds up over the low shore towards Fairlight, ever before one, and at last as one goes up Guestling Hill through a whole long afternoon and reaches the King's Head Inn at sunset, suddenly across the smoke of Hastings one sees Pevensey Level, and beyond, the hills where fell the great fight in which William Duke of Normandy disputed for England with Harold the King. At sunset, when all that country is half lost in the approaching darkness, one seems to feel again the tragedy of that day so fortunate after all, in which once more we were brought back into the full life of Europe and renewed with the energy Rome had stored in Gaul.
CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
It is not often on one's way, even in England of my heart, that one can come upon a place, a lonely hill-side or a city, and say: this is a spot upon which the history of the world was decided; yet I was able on that showery morning, as I went up out of Hastings towards Battle and saw all the level of Pevensey full of rain, to recall two such places in which I had stood already upon my pilgrimage. For I had lingered a whole morning upon the battlefield where the Romans first met and overthrew our forefathers and thus brought Britain within the Empire; while at Canterbury I had been in the very place where, after an incredible disaster, England was persuaded back again out of barbarism into the splendour of the Faith and of civilisation. These places are more than English, they are European sanctuaries, two of the greater sites of the history of Europe. Perhaps as much cannot rightly be said for the hill where the town of Battle stands, the landing-place at Pevensey and the port of Hastings.
And yet I don't know. What a different England it would have been if William of Normandy had failed or had never landed here at all. And if such an England could have endured how changed would have been the whole destiny of Europe. I am not sure after all that we ought not to be as uplifted by the memory of Hastings as we are or should be by the memory of Caesar's advent. At any rate since Hastings was fought and won in the eleventh century any national prejudices that belong wholly to the modern world are quite as much out of place with regard to it as they are with regard to Caesar or St Augustine. And if we must be indignant and remember old injuries that as often as not were sheer blessings, scarcely in disguise, let us reserve our hatred, scorn and contempt for those damned pagan and pirate hordes that first from Schleswig-Holstein and later from Denmark descended upon our Christian country, and for a time overwhelmed us with their brutish barbarism. As for me I am for the Duke of Normandy; without him England were not the England of my heart.
Now the great and beautiful road up out of Hastings, seven miles into Battle, is not only one of the loveliest in Britain, every yard of it is full of Duke William's army, and thence we may see how in its wonderful simplicity all that mighty business which was decided that October morning on the hill-top that for so long Battle Abbey guarded as a holy place, was accomplished. For looking southward over the often steep escarpment, always between three and five hundred feet over the sea plain, we may see Pevensey Castle, the landing, Hastings, the port, and at last come to Battle, the scene of the fight that gave England to the Norman for our enormous good and glory and honour.
I say that the struggle for the English crown between Duke William of Normandy and Harold, King of England, was in no sense of the word a national struggle; on the contrary, it was a personal question fought and decided by the Duke of Normandy and his men, and Harold and his men. Indeed the society of that time was altogether innocent of any impulse which could be called national. That society, all of one piece as it was, both in England and in Gaul, was wholly Feudal, though somewhat less precisely so here than in Normandy. Men's allegiance was not given to any such vague unity as England, but to a feudal lord, in whose quarrel they were bound to fight, in whose victory they shared, and in whose defeat they suffered. The quarrel between King Harold and Duke William was in no sense of the word a national quarrel but a personal dispute in which the feudal adherents of both parties were necessarily involved, the gage being the crown and spoil of England. This is at once obvious when we remember that the ground of William's claim to the throne was a promise received from King Edward personally, unconfirmed by council or witan, but endorsed for his own part by Harold when shipwreck had placed him in Duke William's power. Such were the true elements of the dispute.