Hastings and Neighbourhood

by Walter Higgins

If for this alone, the territory, no matter how ill-favoured and unattractive, would be worth visiting and revisiting. But there is yet another call—that of the intrinsic beauty of the country-side. And the call here is insistent. Hills and the sea; great folding downs and little valleys dropping fatness; immense stretches of lonely marsh and the nestling charms of copse-hidden villages; gentlest of streams slipping lazily through peacefullest of domains; wildest of breakers spending themselves at the base of steep tawny cliffs. Thus is the land compact. One is always reminded of a passage from Mark Twain: "That beauty which is England is alone; it has no duplicate. It is made up of very simple details, just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin, and over all a mellow dreamland of history. But its beauty is incomparable and all its own." And search where you will—north, south, east, west—nowhere can you come upon a spot to which these words might with greater fitness be applied; for this sequestered little area is the microcosm of England.

Despite its wilderness of bricks and mortar, Hastings itself is, under certain conditions, a place by no means unbeautiful. Possibly it is from the sea that it appears in happiest mood. One can take a boat on a high summer's morning, when the sun is shining gaily on its steep grass-capped cliffs, its fragment of castle ruin, its red and blue-grey roofs, when the sea is mazing away into every tint of emerald and sapphire. Then it is a place fair to behold and pleasing to remember. Or one can clamber to the top of the castle hill, and, Janus-like, comprehend the town in its entirety—eastwards the old town and the Past; westwards the modern watering-place and the Future. Then it is a place for soliloquy and moralizing.

Of the very early history of Hastings we know practically nothing, save that it seems to have been for many years a place apart. Shut off from the west by the invious flats of Pevensey, then one vast network of lagoons: from the east by the greater marsh of Romney; secluded on the north by the grey mystery of Andredesweald, which in those days came as far south as the top of Fairlight Hill, the people experienced a certain splendid isolation. So much so, in fact, that in the early records it was quite customary to refer to them as a race apart, as distinct as either of their nearest neighbours, the Jutes of Kent or the Saxons of Sussex. "And all Kent and Sussex and Hastings" was a phrase running easily from the pens of ancient chroniclers.

No one knows their origin. There was a tribe of Hastengi dwelling on the seaboard between the Elbe and what is now Denmark, having as a chieftain one Haesten, a piratical Dane, with whose name that of the town is often linked (erroneously, say some). In all probability, following on some raid rather more extensive and successful than usual, a party of these Hastengi came by this district as an allotment, and chose to settle here, bringing over their families and herds. Maybe thus the town was originated.

One of their earliest tasks, doubtless, was the construction of a stronghold, either the strengthening of an existing British earthwork or the formation of an entirely new one. The conditions of life demanded that they should possess such a fortification, a place which should be at once the residence of the chief and a refuge for the people in time of danger. And thus it happened that ere long there came into existence the Hastinga-ceastre, mention of which is made in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1050: "A little before that [the murder of Beorn by Sweyn] the men of Hastinga-ceastre and thereabouts won two of his ships with two of their ships and slew all the men and brought the ships to Sandwich to the King". But prior to 1050 the town must have attained to a considerable maritime strength and commercial eminence, for in 924 Athelstan founded a mint here. The site of this successful Saxon town and harbour is a matter of conjecture; only the hurrying sea knows where it lies.

History proper begins with the coming of the Norman adventurer, although, singularly enough, that worthy paid little attention to the town. Landing at Pevensey on 28th September, 1066, William made his way to Hastinga-ceastre, which he occupied without much show of resistance (despite the picture of burning houses in the Bayeux Tapestry), for the ships had gone north with Harold, and the folks around had neither the means nor the mind to fight. He stayed in the district a fortnight, scouring round for provisions and terrorizing the natives. During that time he set to work to build some sort of a castle, probably on or near the spot where the ancient camp had stood, and where later the Castle proper eventually rose. This we gather from the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the digging and timbering of a makeshift stronghold. On 14th October William marched northwards to meet Harold, and the famous Battle of Hastings, or Senlac, was fought.

Thence onward the town seems to have had a very chequered career. Previous to the coming of the Normans the encroachments of the sea and the gradual silting up of the old harbour (wherever it was) had rendered necessary the laying down of a new town in a securer place, and in all probability the building of the town between the east and west cliffs was in that way begun—at a spot far to the south of the present Old Town, of course. The township thus commenced was the New Burgh afterwards mentioned in Domesday Book, and placed by William under the jurisdiction of his kinsman, Robert, Count of Eu, and of the Abbot of Fécamp.

The Norman occupation heralded a period of prosperity, for everything was done by William to foster good relationship between the kingdom and the duchy. The continual passage of the monks between France and England, the importation of Caen stone for the building of the abbey (done until similar stone was discovered near at hand), made for commercial growth and stimulated that shipbuilding industry which the proximity of Andredesweald rendered possible. Robert of Eu at once replaced the hastily-formed wooden fortress by a small stone castle, and this was added to from time to time. And so the gradual progress went on till the days of the completion of the Abbey in the reign of the Red King: when Hastings reached its heyday.

Not long, however, did it remain thus in the full flush of existence, for from the time of Stephen onwards it began steadily to decay. Why Hastings ever was the premier port of the Cinque Ports Confederacy it is difficult to say. There were, as the name suggests, five towns—Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, Romney, and Hythe; and in addition there were Winchelsea and Rye, which differed merely in name, being called the Antient Towns. If Hastings were ever the most successful of these, it soon yielded pride of place to its neighbour and rival, Winchelsea. The sovereigns, especially the Angevins, gradually transferred their attentions to the more easterly rivals, proffering no royal aid even when Hastings suffered badly. Slowly, therefore, but certainly, the town sank to an insignificant position, with just here and there a tiny patch of more glorious life; and it revived again only as a result of one of the vagaries of fashion.

It was about 1750 that it took on its second lease of life, soon after the time when Brighton emerged from the obscurity of a small fishing-village to form the fashionable watering-place. Society doctors about that time discovered and began to recommend the advantages of sea-bathing; and, the vogue spreading, Hastings began rapidly to extend. When the Duke of Wellington brought his wife hither in 1806 there were less than four thousand inhabitants; but little by little the cosy valley, where the old town had so long nestled, ceased to be big enough, so that the town overflowed its confines; and eventually the modern resort commenced to flourish, west of the Castle hill—like a garish fungoid growth at the end of some fallen monarch of the forest. It was this modern development that excited the bitterness of Charles Lamb when he wrote his well-known tirade: "I love town or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither.... There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive state, and what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something—with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meshech, to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers.... But it is the visitants from town, that come here to say that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond-perch or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion.... What can they want here? What mean these scanty book-rooms—marine libraries as they entitle them—if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book to read strange matter in? What are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretension. They come because it is the fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place."