never seen such sport before.
Passing the hamlet of Litlington we caught a glimpse, on the other side of the valley, of ancient Alfriston, a little village that calls itself "the capital of the downs," and its modest flint-built church "the cathedral of the downs." So, by title, the unimportant assumes the rôle of the important. A village becomes a capital, a country church a cathedral, and a stream a river. One might imagine this was the land of Lilliput!
Of Alfriston a halting couplet runs:
Poor parson, poor people,
Sold their bells to repair their steeple.
But that, I take it, was a long while ago—if it ever was, for I have heard similar couplets of many other places; a few may possibly have some foundation in fact, but I doubt the rest, and in some, alas, the word "drunken" is substituted for "poor"! After the Alfriston people had sold their bells, tradition, that unreliable jade, avers that the bell of a ship, wrecked on the coast, was purchased to take the place of the lost peal, and by the side of the ancient pilgrims' hostel in the same village stands a ship's figure-head in the shape of a boldly carved lion, fierce of countenance, said to have come from the same ship that provided the bell; this, as long as the oldest inhabitant can remember—and what memories these oldest inhabitants have—has rejoiced in a coat of brilliant vermilion, hence the local saying, apropos of what I know not, "As red as the Alfriston lion." Such, at least, were the tales told to me, and many were the tales I heard as I travelled on.
Leaving the valley and the lonely downs regretfully behind, we entered upon a level country, and crossing the main Lewes road we proceeded straight forward into a tame land of flat fields. The scenery was featureless and void of interest, but I was in search of a moated house, so the quality of the scenery was a detail. A friend had told me of this house just before I started on the journey, and had kindly given me a written introduction to its owner, who by happy chance I found at home. So, learning from my map that I was passing close to the place, I determined to see it, if possible. Even with the aid of my map I had some difficulty in discovering the object of my search. Claverham, to give the moated home its title, stands within a few hundred yards of the road, yet so hidden by trees that no casual passer-by would dream of its existence. Thus many good things, though close to his way, may be missed by even the keenest observer, unless he has some hint of them and their whereabouts. I had gone this stretch of road once before and with open eyes, and yet had not discovered Claverham.
A moated house is a graphic reminder of old times when every Englishman's house was in reality, not in words, his castle. Early in the seventeenth century Sir Edward Coke laid down the dictum that "the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress," a dictum that passed into a law proverb, "Jura publica privata domus." In those benighted days there were no land taxers, or sanitary or other inspectors to demand entry into an Englishman's home. What, I wonder, in olden times would the master of his house have said to a sanitary inspector who demanded admission thereto? Perhaps it would not so much have mattered what he would have said as what he would have done to him—with a deep moat so handy.
The very sound of the words "moated" or "haunted house" was as romance to my ears when I was a youth, and the sound has lost little of its glamour and suggestion of mystery since that long ago, for over such ancient homes there always seems to brood an abiding air of mystery. In my search after moated and haunted houses, many a ballad in building, many a romance in stone, seeming more like an artist's or a poet's dream than a happy reality, and many a legended home in remote places have I discovered—for a romantic spot is the mother of legends. In the troublesome days gone by the dwellers in a moated house must have felt a delightful sense of security with the drawbridge up and the outer windows iron-barred. Even to-day, when staying in a moated house, have I felt the sense of security that a moat affords. So much for sentiment.
Claverham disappointed me, though the fault was mine in expecting too much. To cherish an ideal and trusting to find it is to court disillusion, and a seasoned traveller like myself should not have fallen into this error. The unexpected always charms, when it has the power to charm, more than the expected. "Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises," says Shakespeare, whom it is the privilege of all Englishmen to quote. The chief delight of travel lies in the surprise of the unforeseen, and the discoveries we make for ourselves of interesting places and beauty-spots: being unprepared beforehand for such revelations, no ideals have been formed. So the unknown attracts and becomes oftentimes memorable.
HAUNTED!
I always picture a moated house as a building grey with years, perhaps in parts a little ruinous and creeper overgrown, with ivied casements, a bent and mossy or lichen-laden roof, and with oftentimes a ghost thrown in. Such a house without its ghost seems incomplete to me. Now Claverham, excepting for one possibly original chimney and a lichen-laden roof, conformed in no way to my picture, for the house has been so altered and rebuilt that the greater part of it, though not of to-day, is comparatively of yesterday and not of centuries ago. The wide and weedy moat, enclosing nearly an acre of ground, is there as of yore, but the chief interest of the place is in its history. Still Claverham is picturesque: a pleasant, retired, and wholly delightful abode in the summer-time; in the winter—well, it was not winter-time then. Portions of the interior are quaint, especially the black oak-beamed and plastered hall that with its ingle-nook gives one a genuine old-world greeting. The beams of the hall are of the original building, and so, we were told, was the wide ingle-nook of the dining-room; the crane, fire-back, and andirons of this fireplace, though ancient, are doubtless of more recent date.
This is the history of Claverham in brief as told me by its present possessor. The house was originally built in 1307; according to Volume XIV. of the Sussex Archaeological Society, the manor of Claverham "in 12 Edward II. was in the possession of Nicholas de la Beche. This personage appears to be identical with the Sir Nicholas de Beche who, according to a wardrobe account dated 27th March, 1311, participated with Sir Humphery de Littlebury and Sir Thomas le Latimer in the reward of twenty pounds for the singular service of dragging the King out of bed on Easter Monday." So at any rate my visit there unearthed a curious bit of ancient history. The manor shortly afterwards came into the possession of a member of the then famous Fiennes family, a descendant of one of the Norman warriors who had come over with the Conqueror. A successor of his afterwards built Hurstmonceux Castle and went to live there in 1422, but Claverham was retained by the Fiennes until about 1600. My host told me that his father remembered when there was still a drawbridge over the moat; now where the bridge was is an embanked approach to the house, doubtless more convenient, but infinitely less romantic. So, here and there, these picturesque relics of the past disappear. A portion of the building was so old that it tumbled down some few years back. My host considered that the house was never really fortified in the sense of being able to resist a regular siege, but was rather intended to withstand a raid, or a sudden attack by the robber bands which infested the country; the moat, too, served the further useful purpose as a protection against wolves and other wild animals which at the time had free range over the unenclosed and wooded country around. To-day it serves as a fence to keep out straying sheep and cattle from the fields, so that the tree-shaded and pleasant garden it encloses can be enjoyed in as much peace and privacy as though it were walled about; at the same time the moat does not interrupt what view there is.
Leaving Claverham we drove along a narrow lane that ended in a fair main road, and this took us for a space alongside of the wide Laughton Level, over which sea of waving grasses, once mere marshland, is to be had perhaps the best and most comprehensive panorama of the South Downs, ranging as it does almost from Beachy Head to close upon Lewes. There before us they stretched, bare and rounded to the sky, in their long and lordly array of golden greenery fading into grey: miles and miles of glorious greenery as beheld under the summer sunshine, only broken here and there below by the pale-blue shadows of their shallow recesses. From that distance and point of view, the downs
