University of Virginia Library

[Lewes.]

These birds were, in times that the writer can remember, caught in great numbers by the shepherds on the South Downs. The trap was cut in the form of a T, with a noose of wool or horse-hair. The wheat-ear was popularly supposed to run under the raised turf for shelter when a cloud passed over the sun. It is now a rare bird in this district.

The great Forest of Anderida, named by the Saxons Andred's Wald, which spread over what is still called the ‘Weald’ of Sussex. The downs in the neighbourhood are covered with tumuli.

Ethnologists and optimists endeavour to represent barbarous Man as little superior to the beast, in order to conclude that the human race has reached the half-way house on the road to Utopia. (See, for instance, Sir J. Lubbock's Prehistoric Times.) This is surely as unwarrantable as Rousseau's extravagant exaltation of savage life. Sir H. Maine has recently shown very conclusively how superficial are the differences between Men in the primitive and in the refined stages of national growth. (See Popular Government, p. 143.)

A writer in the Quarterly Review for January (p. 197) shows from Caesar (De Bell. Gall. vi. 19) that the law of the Celtic races was founded on Patria potestas.

These designs, perfectly preserved, were found under the South Downs in 1811. They still remain on the spot; but it is much to be desired that some steps be taken for securing them against the inevitable destruction that awaits them from natural causes.

The fascination exercised by Roman Culture on the British imagination is vividly described by Tacitus:

‘Iam vero Principum filios liberalibus artibus erudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Gallorum anteferre, ut qui modo linguam Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga: paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balnea et conviviorum elegantiam; idque apud imperitos humanitas voca. batur, cum pars servitutis esset.’— Agricola, 21.

A very admirable and ingenious paper by the Rev. Thomas Debary, in the Sussex Archaelogical Collections (vol. xxx), gives us some grounds for supposing that the Villa was the work of Petronius Turpilianus, who was certainly one of the earliest Governors of Britain, being sent by Nero to succeed Suetonius Paulinus, ‘tamquam exorabilior’ (Agricola, 16). From the glimpses Tacitus gives of his character and public position as one of the favourites of Nero, it seems most probable that he is the same as Caius Petronius of whose death the historian draws so graphic a picture. Everything, again, seems to identify the latter with Petronius Arbiter. We may, therefore, at least please our imaginations with supposing that the writer who so admirably described Trimalchio's Dinner was the inventor of these designs, the graceful simplicity of which is quite characteristic of his taste. About the time of Petronius' governorship, we are told, ‘Didicere iam barbari quoque ignoscere vitiis blandientibus’ (Agricola, 16).

Tacitus says of him (Annals, xvi. 18): ‘His own vices, or his imitation of the vices of others, procured for him, as a judge of taste, the closest intimacy with Nero, who, satiated as he was, thought nothing agreeable or refined till it had received the approval of Petronius.’

‘Illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam protulerat.’— Annals, xvi. 18.

‘To linger’ is used transitively by Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act i, sc. I, v. 4; Richard II, Act ii, sc. 2, v. 72.

For the account of Petronius' suicide see Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 19: ‘Far from dispatching himself instantaneously, he made an incision in his veins, binding them up and opening them at pleasure while he conversed with his friends, though in no serious mood, nor with any attempt to gain a reputation for fortitude. He listened in turn while they discoursed, not on the immortality of the soul or the reasonings of philosophers, but in light song and flowing verse. . . . He feasted and indulged in sleep; so that the death which he was forced to undergo might seem to come upon him unawares.

Petronius was himself granted a Triumph by the Senate at the instigation of Nero.—Tacitus, Annals, xv. 72.

He laughs at the ‘mellitos verborum globulos’ so much in favour with the writers of his age, as they are with those of our own. The sound critical judgement shown in Petronius Arbiter is what we should expect after reading the account Tacitus gives of his character.

William, first Earl of Warren, married Gundrada, daughter of William the Conqueror.

The great Cluniac Monastery, founded by William de Warren in 1072, and dedicated to St. Pancras. It was most richly endowed by the Earl and his descendants, and with its walls and enclosures covered over thirty acres, on the outskirts of the town here described.

Gundrada's epitaph says:

‘Stirps Gundrada ducum, decus aevi, nobile germen, intulit ecclesiis Anglorum balsama morum.’

She died in childbirth, the 27th of May 1085, and was buried within the walls of the Priory.

The Monastery of St. Pancras was surrendered by the Prior to Henry VIII in 1538, and was granted by the King to Cromwell. A few ruined arches are now all that remains of what must once have been one of the grandest monasteries in England. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway runs over the site.

St. Benedict, of whose monastic order the Cluniac was a development.

1 Corinthians xiii. 7.

2 Corinthians xi. 3; St. Matthew x. 16.

The Castle built by William de Warren, who, after the Conquest, became Lord of the Town.

Alluding to the great and stubbornly contested battle fought on the spot in 1264 between Henry III and his Barons under Simon de Montfort; one result of which was the direct representation of the people in Parliament. De Montfort made his soldiers mark their breasts with white crosses.

The Castle precincts are now converted to the peaceful purposes here described. The Bowling Green is in fact one of the old institutions of the Town.

A speech attributed to John de Warren, seventh Lord of the Town, when Edward I employed Commissioners to make inquiry through the kingdom by what title or warrant (‘quo warranto’) the landowners held their estates. Holinshed tells the story: ‘Many were thus called to answer, till at length the Lord John Warren, Earle of Surrey, a man greatly beloved of the people, perceyving the Kynge to have caste his net for a preye, and that there was not one whyche spake against those so bitter and cruell proceedings; and, therefore, being called afore the Justices about this matter, and being asked by what right he held his landes? he sodenly drawing forth an old rusty sword, “By this instrument”, sayde he, “doe I holde my landes, and by the same I entende to defende them.” ’ It was after this speech that the Warren family assumed their motto of ‘Tenebo’.

Two of the present Lords of the Town have rights over threefourths of the Castle, Town, and Lordship, by direct inheritance, through the marriage of their ancestors with Joanna and Margaret, heiresses in 1415 of Thomas Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, whose grandfather derived his right from Alice, sister of John, eighth and last Earl of Warren, who died without lawful issue in 1347. A title, dating from the Conquest, of nearly thirty generations! Sir Richard Sackville, ancestor of the third Lord in the present day, and father of Thomas Sackville, famous as a statesman and a poet, who was created Baron of Buckhurst in Sussex, obtained the remaining fourth of the lordship, either by grant or purchase, in the reign of Elizabeth. His descendants became Dukes of Dorset.

The arms of Warren, quartered on the Duke of Norfolk's shield.

The mottoes of the present Lords of the Town. It is almost needless to add that what follows is meant to apply to the historic English aristocracy generally.

‘In ordinary circumstances,’ said Prince Bismarck in the Prussian Diet on January 28th, [1886] ‘I should be no advocate of such a policy; but when the cause of the Fatherland is imperilled, I will not hesitate to give the Emperor [William I] becoming advice. That minister would be a miserable coward who did not risk his head to save his country in despite even of the will of a majority.’ In England politicians seem to have forgotten the existence of such an institution as the Crown. With us ‘all are for the Party, none are for the State’.

Old folk in Sussex still speak of the inhabitants of other counties as ‘foreigners’, and have a proper contempt for the ‘sheres’.

The two points of inferiority in the French nation generally insisted on by English writers in the early part of the eighteenth century were the want of political liberty and the wooden shoes of the peasantry.

Claudian, De Sene Veronensi. [see pp. 96-7].

A friend of mine tells me he has often heard one of his aunts speak of the profound emotion aroused in the neighbourhood of her home—she was a girl of fourteen at the time—when the Portsmouth coach passed on its way to London with the tidings that ‘Robert Spires’ was dead. Wordsworth, in the Prelude, also describes the tremendous effect produced by the news.

See De Quincey's fine description of the Mail Coach ‘going down with victory’.

A common transformation. The Town is full of fine old houses of pleasure, now converted into houses of business.

The last of the old Watchmen lingered on, an institution of his native Town, till quite recently. Besides crying the hour, he announced, for the benefit of those comfortably housed, the state of things out of doors: ‘Ten of the clock! 'Tis a fine starry night!’

Like many other ancient boroughs, the Town, not long since, exchanged a feudal Constitution, dating from the Conquest, and truly Venetian in its character, for a commonplace Mayor and Corporation.

Old customs on St. John Baptist's Day, and All Saints' Day, for divining luck in marriage.

The mixture of apple, nutmeg, and sugar in the wassail bowl.

A common countryside belief, curiously encouraged by the experience of the present year [1886], is preserved in the old rhyming hexameters:

Sixteen persons in all were burned in the Town in three years under Bloody Mary. Its inhabitants have never forgotten these tragedies, which they commemorate every year, on the Fifth of November, with a zest beyond any place in England, by burning the Pope, in the manner described, on the spot where the martyrs suffered. The ‘Bishop’ who officiates at the function is attired in full ecclesiastical costume, and, as the whole town is in masquerade, the scene is extraordinarily picturesque.

A great Sheep Fair for the South Down district is held on the heights above the Town on the last two Tuesdays of every September. The number of sheep collected is very large. I have myself seen over thirty thousand penned there, but formerly the number was much greater.