pity we cannot, for very conscience, place it to learning, or even to gravity of characamong the legendary lore of Sussex. But ter.

there were other Sir Bevises to account for The sight of those embattled towers conthe name of Arundel tower; whilst, whether jures up before us many historic personages, with Sir W. Burrell we derive the town it- whom in fancy we can see emerging from self from the dell of the Arun, or with their venerable gateways, in all the pride others from the arundines on its banks, or of youth and ancestry, whose mouldered with others from 'hirondelle,' which forms ashes now repose under those grey walls. part of the municipal coat-of-arms, there is And there too now lies, alas! added to the no connection between it and the war-horse. number, the late kind-hearted and amiable No place in England deserves more no Duke, snatched away, like so many of his tice than the Castle of Arundel - a grand forefathers, in the very prime of manhood. pile of building, modern for the most part The chapel of the College of the Holy and not capable of supporting criticism; but Trinity,' forming the choir and east end of the ivy-grown keep, at least as old as the the parish church, but separated from it by days of Henry I., may challenge comparison a wall, and strangely belonging to the Duke with any of the same date in this country. of Norfolk, a Roman Catholic peer, conThe castle has not withstood sieges as others tains a fine series of Fitzalan monuments, have; it is but too well known for its sur- which recal passages of no small importrender to Sir William Waller, who took ance in the history of our country. from it seventeen colours of foot, two of The banks and brooks of Arun have not horse, and a thousand prisoners: nor is it been unsung by poet. Nor are there want associated with any decisive battles or ing among them spots of romantic scenery. events; but no residence presents us with Such for instance, is a watermill called such a picture of feudal times; no other Swanbourne, of remarkable antiquity. The baronial home has sent forth thirteen dukes traveller by the main road will miss it, but and thirty-five earls. What house has been if he will take the lower one which leads so connected with our political and religious from Arundel to the little hamlet of Off ham, annals as that of Howard? The premiers following the right bank of the river, he in the roll call of our nobility have been will come suddenly upon it, and be amply also among the most persecuted and ill repaid for his trouble. Mr. Tierney has fated. Not to dwell on the high-spirited well described it.† Isabelle Countess Dowager of Arundel, and Quitting this peaceful scene, and still keepwidow of Hugh, last Earl of the Albini fam- ing the right bank of the river (whose eels ily, who upbraided Henry III. to his face and bream, which once fell to our rod, we with 'vexing the Church, oppressing the see again in twice their natural dimensions barons, and denying all his true-born sub- through the magnifying glass of years) till jects their rights; or Richard Earl of we cross it at Houghton Bridge, we are Arundel, who was executed for conspiring brought to a hardly less interesting relic of to seize Richard II. we must think with the olden time in Amberley Castle, built by indignation of the sufferings inflicted by Bishop Rede in the time of Richard II., and Elizabeth on Philip Earl of Arundel, son once the residence of the Bishops of Chiof the 'great' Duke of Norfolk, beheaded chester, to whom it still belongs. A more by Elizabeth in 1572 for his dealings with picturesque ruin does not exist, with its Mary Queen of Scots. In the biography of massive round towers, and dangling ivy, Earl Philip, which, with that of Ann Dacres and smooth_lawns within. A mile farther his wife, has been well edited by the late east stands Parham. This is a fine specimen lamented Duke, we find that he was caress- of Elizabethan domestic architecture, and ed by Elizabeth in early life, and steeped its grey gables, hall hung with armour, and in the pleasures and vices of her court by long upper gallery, carry us back at once to her encouragement, to the neglect of his the days of the Virgin Queen. Parham constant young wife, whose virtues, as soon was the home of the Bishopps, who are now as they reclaimed him to his duty to her, represented by its owner the Baroness de rendered him hated and suspected by the la Zouch. This lady's son, the author of Queen, so that she made him the subject of the original and charming volume on the vindictive and incessant persecution, till Monasteries in the Levant,' has enriched death released him at the age of 38. To the mansion with a museum of Eastern art. another Howard, Thomas, son of Earl Phil- Parham indeed is a perfect mine of artip, the country is indebted for those trea- treasures. Early MSS. and printed books, sures of the East, the Arundel Marbles; *Hist. Reb.,' vol. i., p. 99. though Lord Clarendon describes him somewhat illnaturedly, denying him all claims

6

Tierney's Hist. of the Castle and Town of Arundel,' p. 725.

ancient plate, enamels, and carvings, histori- in solitary state upon his box, on his way cal portraits, and swords and breastplates to mildly bracing' Bognor. Now scarce a which are hardly less historical - among vestige remains of the magnificent Gothie them some armour of the Christian knights mansion on which so many thousands were who defended Constantinople against the expended, and in which Judge Shelley enter Sultan Mahomet II., in the year 1452-are tained Henry the Eighth: and the place but a few of the attractions of the place. thereof knows it no more. And the park affords studies of beautiful Taking the rail to Worthing, and bestowforest scenery. But we must not linger ing a thought upon that pleasant hill to our here, even to visit the heronry, nor wander left, just where the engine begins to let off farther from the Downs. Mount we the steam, if not upon eccentric Miller Oliver, steep hill at the back of the Castle, it will whose funeral was attended there, some repay us though it tests the soundness of seventy years ago, by all the country round, our lungs, and we shall tread for five miles and whose tombstone surmounts it, we find over Kithurst Down to Highden Beeches a ourselves in the electoral parallelogram, exvery race-course of turf for velvety smooth- tending through the breadth of the county ness; then turn we right, to enter a still with a width of some ten or twelve miles, wilder country, between Black Patch and a known as the Rape of Bramber-another lone sugar-loaf hill, Mount Harry, rank with portion of De Braose's lion's share of the luxuriant pasturage, which no foot of man Conquest. The etymology of 'Rape' still or horse ever crosses, save the shepherd-boy vexes the learned; it appears to be used noor the racers from yonder Michelgrove in where else, as a territorial term, but in their morning canter. And so onward to Iceland, and it is remarkable that each of the another quaint old hill called Peppering, five districts of that name into which this covered with loose weather-worn flints and county is divided has its own port and castle. wrinkled with dykes and tumuli, and Ang Somner thinks the word may be derived mering will lie before us, famed for its her- from the Anglo-Saxon word rape, 'a rope ’— ons, which, as we are told in Mr. Knox's as if these portions of land were measured pleasant volume, coming originally from and divided by ropes.* Coity Castle in Wales in the time of James On leaving Worthing, Broadwater first I., first took wing to Penshurst in Kent, meets us, with its square semi-Norman thence found refuge here, and, when these tower and rich interior arches, and its tall trees were felled, migrated to Parham. 'Green,' that loved 'practice ground,' for A sigh for the coursings on 'Black Patch!' the County eleven,' in the days when it We remember, with a yearning for by-gone could beat the Country; and Offington, with days, those huge undisturbed vollers' (fal- its gray shingle gables, formerly the resilows) under the lee of that juniper-studded dence of the Lords Delawarr; and, just behill, from which, no unusual thing, the expe- yond where the four roads meet, the Mill of rienced eye of keeper or of shepherd could Salvington-Salvington, the birthplace of count in a morning in their forms a score of John Selden; and Tarring, with its luscious strong Down hares. Then sprang the wellmatched grey-hounds from the leash, and all was lost to sight awhile, for puss had beat them up the steep hill-sides, but not for long; now, now they turn her, and she makes again for home, and they kill on the tableland at Muntham Well House. Oh! there never was such a coursing-ground as that! that amount of local knowledge which we Alas! too, for the glories of Michelgrove, when the old house was standing, once the home of the Shelleys, and, in older times still, part of the enormous holdings of that great Sussex pluralist De Braose; where we danced the old year out and the new year in, what time, in the palmy coaching days, our host, great in handling the 'ribbons,' horsed and drove his own favourite drag over the bleak Downs to the White Horse' at Fetter Lane, and took without compunction the 'Something, Sir, for the coachman?' Full many a drizzling autumn day you might meet him, with hay band for hatband, seated

เ

fig-garden (whose parent trees tradition holds were brought by Thomas à Becket from Italy), and its worthy vicar, Southey's sonin-law, who has found in his 'Seaboard and the Down' so much vent for his pastoral musings and exuberant aptitude for quotation, but who has not given us, we think,

had a right to expect from the topographical title of his book. Soon the woods of Clapham open on the left, and we pass over Findon Church Hill, and by the kennel from which for so many years rang out the music of its favourite 'subscription pack,' and Muntham, with its formal groves and rookeries, noted for good truffles, and buried, like so many Sussex seats, just on the wrong side of the Downs-the residence of the mechanician Frankland, and now of the Dowager Marchioness of Bath.

*Diction. Saxon. Lat Angl.,' title Rape.

It shall be September 12th, and here over wheel-barrow; but the cord, which he had the hills, as far as the eye can reach, come looped over his shoulders to support it, on in serried bands, compact as Macedonian snapped as he was crossing a hayfield, and phalanxes, and musical as marriage-bells, the haymakers jeered him; so in revenge he each with their sage and shaggy orderly, ever after sent annual showers about hay hundreds of flocks of Southdowns, all for the harvest to spoil their crop. He soon mangreat annual sheep-fair of Findon - pictures aged, however, to prop up his barrow again of health and beauty, so clean and creamy with elder-twigs; though they too, in their white, for— turn, gave way. This time, interpreting his ed finally, and founded on the spot what interruption as a Divine revelation, he haltwas afterwards matured into the parish church.

The sheep-shearings are over, and harvest draws

nigh.'

centuries-the sole surviving representative of the stronghold and head-quarters of De Braose; and from this quiet resting-place there is a very striking finish to this bowl of Downs, if we will reascend them (still on the Chanctonbury range), and, leaving Cissbury on the right, with the Adur winding past the little villages of Coombes, Botolphs, and Applesham on the left, and passing over Steep Hill, one of the boldest and loneliest of the entire range, descend Lancing Down by the Mill and Mr. Woodard's College.

Strolling through the pleasant villages of Lancing and Sompting, and paying especial attention to the church of the latter-to portions of which a Saxon origin is assigned

It is a sight worth lingering for. But we must not stay; for right opposite, athwart Let us go a mile further, and ruminate in the narrow valley, stands the monarch of that quaint old morsel of tower at Bramber, our Sussex hills, with its many lights and which still stands the sieges of the southshadows, and outlines of rounded beauty-westers, beat they never so tempestuously; vedeλnyepéτng Chanctonbury. Here we see and round which the daws and rooks are but the back of him; his front, like a king, clustering now, as they have clustered for he presents to the fair plains below, for forty miles and more: there he flings his steep sides down, all sheer and bluff: on this side we shall easily ascend him. How stiff and formal is the great Weald mapped out in perspective from his beech-wood coronet! What a calm broods over that vast panorama, though we know the busy world to be as wicked and unquiet there as elsewhere! How level all! and yet we know 'tis not so -so completely does a lofty eminence, in nature as in mind, dwindle all minor inequalities graciously overlooking them. And then there is its twin unwieldy neighbour Cissbury, but two miles off; like Chichester, a monument of Cissa's prowess, bulging with its deep and perfect fosse, and like nothing so much as a huge sponge cake as if it had tumbled by accident among those quiet grazing grounds, treeless and shrub less; and there is peaceful Findon once more (for we have made the circuit of the bowl, and look on it from the other rim). Immediately below Chanctonbury lies Wiston Park, with a hall inferior to none in the county, the seat of the Shirleys and Faggs, and through the Faggs of the Gorings; and then we must descend the hill to Steyning, if not (as we are much inclined) to tarry for the night at its comfortable hostelry, at least to linger in the fine old Norman church which contains the remains of Ethelwulf and St. Cuthman. Here, however, the imagina tion of our readers must be again invoked, for we are treading on the borders of romance; nor can we tell exactly when the saint lived. As he was the patron of Steyning, so ought he to be also of Sussex shepherds; for he drew a mystic circle with his crook upon the Down, and bade his sheep keep within it till he returned from dinner, and they marvellously obeyed him. Next we find him conveying an aged mother in a

we may retrace our steps to Worthing, and thence set out for the bolder outlines of the eastern division of the county. Not that it is so favourite a district as the western one; less thriving homesteads cover it, for bluff headlands take the place of the rich alluvial plains of the seaboard; fewer mansions ornament its sunny southern slopes; fewer hill-sides are brought under the plough, or girdled with plantations; everything is poorer, but in proportion grander, and dearer therefore to the tourist. Yet here the white cliff's first appear; and here the hops come in, vying with those of Kent. Here, when summer suns are plentiful, and September has browned those hanging gardens, the traveller will pass enraptured through their pleasant vistas and natural arbours, blithe with the merry hum of a peasant people storing the easy harvest.

At Shoreham the Adur discharges itself into the sea under the suspension-bridge – disproportionately handsome to the town erected by a late Duke of Norfolk. We will eschew those six miles of uninviting, road, over which William IV. took his daily airing through all the Brighton coal-carts,

and strike once more for the northern escarp- after lying concealed at a farm at Ovingment of the Downs. It is a bold range that, dean, Charles II. took ship and fled for Nor above Fulking and Edburton and Castle mandy; and a fulsome inscription is placed Hill and Perching, and so to the Devil's in the old church to the commander on that Dyke, where, alas! there is now a perma- occasion of the 'Royal Escape,' who at the nent inn, and a two-horse coach to Brighton, Restoration obtained promotion as Constaand a gipsy or two all day from Poynings-ble of Brighton, but figures no more in histhe vicar should know this- to whisper non- tory. sense to Brighton belles.

1862.

Sussex.

37

queror had given his daughter Gundreda in | danger-flags. But if all is well, the insulmarriage. The noble patrons had set out ated position of this group of hills will enin a spirit of religious fervour on a pilgrim- able us to command the whole northern age to Rome, but were diverted from their ridge of the Downs, looking across the purpose by the wars then raging between Glynde and Falmer valleys to the east and the Emperor and the Pope. So they turned west, and down the Lewes Levels to Newaside to the famed monastery of Cluny, and haven to the South. We tread here, too, prevailed on the good abbot there to send among many vestiges of the past-haunts them over a bevy of monks to take charge dear to those staunch Sussex men, who have of their new institution. Straight the state- done so much for the cause of provincial ly structure arose, and for five centuries archæology-Mr. Blaauw, Mr. Blencoe, and received countless treasures into its coffers, Mr. Lower-as the many remains preserved so that it became the wealthiest foundation in the keep of Lewes Castle, the peaceful in the south. Then came the great reverse emporium now of relics of more troublous -the Dissolution; and all its greatness times, will testify. Here, too, we look down passed away and was forgotten, -all but a on a succession of pleasant villages- Offslab forming Gundreda's marble tombstone, ham, and Hamsey, and Ringmer-the latter richly sculptured in bas-relief, which was with the comfortable mansion of Mr. Brand found about a century ago in the chancel of and South Malling, an archiepiscopal a neighbouring church. The discovery of its manor of Canterbury, and as late as the most interesting monument was reserved, as fourteenth century invested with supernat in so many other cases, for humble instru ural terrors from the popular tradition conments. The land had passed through the nected with the murderers of Becket, so well compulsory clauses of a Railway Act into told by Dr. Stanley in his 'Memorials of the unromantic clutches of the London, Canterbury :'-'They rode to Saltwood the Brighton and South Coast Company, and night of the deed: the next day (forty miles the navvies scraped their pickaxes by chance by the coast) to South Malling. On enterone day against the veritable leaden coffins ing the house they threw off their arms and of the noble founders. Lewes, ever the trappings on the dining table, which stood head-quarters of Sussex archæology, was in the hall, and after supper gathered round in a ferment, and so was the county. A the blazing hearth. Suddenly the table fitting receptable was soon devised for the started back, and threw its burden to the bodies. They had been found in the parish ground. of Southover (and certainly may be said to have gained a legal settlement there, if anywhere),-in Southover they should remain. A small Norman chapel was accordingly built-'Gundreda's chapel'— adjoining the mother-church; and there lie the coffins side The by side, open to any one to inspect. beautiful black tombstone is reclaimed, and laid decently on fair encaustic tiles.

In a garden behind a chapel in the town is the burying-place of the eccentric William Huntington, with an epitaph on his tomb, dictated by himself, beginning-'Here lies the coalheaver, beloved of his God, but abhorred of men;' and signed W. H., S.S.' (Sinner Saved).*

We must not leave Lewes without exploring the singularly detached bowl of Downs, which rises immediately behind it, beginning with the 'Cliffe,' and ending with that abrupt and conical landmark Mount Caburn. But the Rifle Volunteers may be out. They are very fond of the deep ravines which abound there, and serve as natural butts for their practice - grounds. So we must keep an especial look out for red

*See an article on the works of the Rev. W. Huntington, 'Quarterly Review,' vol. xxiv., p. 462.

The attendants, roused by the crash, rushed in with lights, and replaced

the arms.

But soon a second and still louder crash was heard, and the various articles were thrown still further off. Soldiers and servants with torches scrambled in vain under the solid table to find the cause of its convulsions; till one of the conscience-stricken knights suggested that it was indignantly refusing to bear the sacrilegious burden of their arms-the earliest and most memorable instance,' adds Dr. Stanley, ' of a rapping, leaping, and turning table.'*

Here, too, are the Lewes Levels, which, according to Gideon Mantell, himself a native of Lewes, have seen so many sequences of physical changes, having been originally. salt-water estuaries, inhabited by marine shell-fish; then, as the inlet grew narrow, and the water only brackish, fresh-water shells were first mingled with them, and then predominated. Then a peaty swamp, formed by the drifted trees and plants from the forest of Andreadswald, and terrestrial. quadrupeds, became imbedded in the morass; lastly, the soil, inundated by land floods, became an oozy marsh, which has been since

*Mem. of Canterbury,' p. 88.