All that suggested by the mere name “Hastings” and the charlatanry of “Senlac”; but really such a name might suggest whole cartloads of books.
Go to Battle and see the place where Harold fell. You can mark it to a yard. Look at the little tomb in which they say Odo lay; see the Malfosse still clearly there just westward of the tennis courts in the gardens of the Abbey; a trap for cavalry. Note how the Normans, Bretons, and all the rest of the foreigners could not deploy until they were at the very foot of the hill, and how they were handicapped by its steepness without the momentum of a gallop down hill to begin with; it was that which nearly lost them the battle. Mark the length of the ridge, and ask yourself how it could have been held against heavily armed horse with less than thirty or forty thousand men packed in a dense formation, for it is nearly a mile from flank to flank, and would need two thousand locked shields to cover it.
There never was, I suppose, one day spent in this island with greater consequence to Christendom.
It was but a drift past the Martello Towers during that morning, and I slept through it, having been at the helm all through the long night, till my companion relieved me. When I woke we were opposite that entry to Pevensey which is an entry no more, but which still holds, strongly challenging the sea, the Roman walls of the Andred Fort.
The place was a narrows, like those which give entry to the wide expanse of Portsmouth Harbour; and, as in that gulley between Portsmouth and Gosport today, there must then have raced through the gulley of Pevensey the gallop of the flood and of the ebb tides. Within was a vast expanse of level water that could hold as many score or hundred of ships as any captain might lead. Today you can follow clearly enough the old level of the salt—but that great haven is now all dry land.
It is full of memories. The ditches in the marsh still bear the name of such poor branches and inlets of the once spacious harbour as struggled to live on into a later time. But no man will sail into Pevensey again. Thither the Mora sailed with William of Normandy aboard, ahead of his forest of a fleet, and at its bow a little cupid all in gold, and on its decks a great cask of wine broached for glory. He had made his landfall by the white gleam of Beachy near at hand. He had outrun all his transports, and he lay there off this coast awaiting them, until a man sent up the mast cried that he saw the fleet approaching “like a wood.” It was Saint Michael’s Day.
The place is full of memories. The people who wrote down the legends of England under Alfred preserved after four hundred years a dreadful memory of some pirate raid, in which all the garrison of Pevensey perished, on some day between the end of the Imperial rule and the landing of Saint Augustine.
Strangely enough, we have no record of the process whereby that vast and secure harbour lifted above the level of the sea and lost its usage. Hastings has lived on, but Pevensey died in some darkness, and has disappeared. There still stands the wall of the Roman fort, with its courses of small Roman tile-brick remaining to stamp its origin. The great town that must have stood outside has dwindled to a hamlet, and the vast stretch of flat, beyond which was once what Portsmouth is, lies utterly alone with the sea birds complaining over it.
Beyond Pevensey walls the wind rose somewhat and gave us a fair course round Beachy, coming further round, so that we could carry on without handling the headsail sheets. We ran on a wind all the miles into the Sussex bay. I stood in close to the lighthouse (for the shore is fairly steep there), not a quarter of a mile off shore. It was unwise, for I had experience, as you know, of the way the wind will spill over that height. But I wished to save mileage; I had sailed the seas enough, and was for home.
The wind from that quarter brings usually a clear air, but in the calm weather of those last few days it had blown from anywhere, for the summer’s end had upon it an anticyclone, which is a Mumbo-Jumbo for fine weather. In such weather winds behave unnaturally, the southwest brings no gale or rain, nor is the easterly wind dry, nor the northerly cold, nor the southerly warm; and this, I suppose, is because the winds of an anticyclone are but youngling winds; not great steady ancestored winds from far away with a weight behind them.
I did wish as I was rounding Beachy that day that I could see a sea serpent, which, many years ago (I had read it in print in an old magazine book which lay about in the parlour of a harbour inn), showed itself, for the conversion of the unbelieving, in these very seas.
It reared a great neck and shot at a prodigious pace through the salt with the movements of its long body, and, having been seen by a whole crew thereto adjacent, sneered contemptuously at the puny race of men, and disappeared.
I thought to myself: “How should I behave if I were to see some such Horrendum, and had to bear witness to it before my fellow men?” I concluded that I would mix the truth with falsehood, like my good ancestor the wise Ulysses, and so shoehorn a
