Sussex, Kent and Surrey 1939 E-Book

Richard Wyndham

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 250

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A remarkable and eccentric insight into the south east of England in the pre-war period. Richard Wyndham's 'last look round' was a tour taken immediately before the Second World War in 1939 and was originally published in the following year as South-Eastern Survey. Wyndham is a very agreeable companion as he travels in his self-confessed 'haphazard' way around the counties of Sussex, Kent and Surrey. Often eccentric but always good fun, he drives 'for the most part on side roads only, and through villages and lesser towns.' A selection of Wyndham's own black and white photographs taken on his expedition are included. Sussex, Kent and Surrey 1939 is a wonderful insight into south east of England before the outbreak of the Second World War, which brought so much change to the country. Wyndham is a superb travel companion who completed the writing as he was called up for active service.

Leseprobe

TO

THE ARM-CHAIR TRAVELLERSOF THE SECOND GREAT WAR

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

THIS book was almost completed on the outbreak of the war, when the author was called up on active service. Under the circumstances it was impossible for him to complete certain districts, particularly Surrey, as comprehensively as he would have liked, or to make a final check-up on certain references and anecdotes. It was also thought best not to attempt to revise the book in view of recent events, but rather to leave it as it is—a nostalgic memory of England in the last months of peace.

November 1939

PREFACE

THIS is a travel-book rather than a guide-book. I have travelled at haphazard through South-Eastern England; but, for the most part, on side roads only, and through villages and lesser towns. In so short a book it seemed impossible to deal fully with “tourists’ Meccas” such as Canterbury, Maidstone, Brighton or Chichester. And the London suburbs would have required a psychological treatise of length. Even with these omissions, my task appeared absurd until I discovered that, while my notes about certain places occupied several pages, about others they remained mere notes. The latter I discarded, and in consequence there must appear an inequality, which is the inequality of my own mind.

In search of my facts, I have picked too many brains to thank the owners individually—except Murray; and in acknowledging a special debt to his Handbooks I am surely voicing the gratitude of most English guide-book authors for nearly a century.

Private houses which are open to the public presented a problem that could only be solved by their omission. To have dealt with them all was impossible; to have selected or criticised would have been an abuse of hospitality.

R. W.

TICKERAGE MILL

August 23, 1939

INTRODUCTION

ONE cold Easter I was writing about the Romney Marsh in Kent, imagining I was out on the windswept pastures and in particular sitting in the white-painted box pews of the tiny church of Fairfield, which sits completely alone two miles south of Appledore. Surrounded by the Marsh sheep and reed-bordered dykes, this is a favourite location with film-makers for its remoteness and atmosphere. I wanted to see how other writers had described this church that served no village but still acted as a focal point for the surrounding farms and cottages. John Newman called it a ‘diminutive, dumpy church set down pat on the marshes’, Richard Ingrams thought it looked like ‘a Noah’s Ark that has come to rest’ and Simon Jenkins had it ‘deposited by the tide’. It was then that I reached for a book long collected but never read, perhaps subconsciously thinking the title suggested a county council draft plan. It appeared in the Batsford series The Face of Britain: South-Eastern Survey by Richard Wyndham. His Fairfield ‘looks like a toy dropped by a child’. I quickly turned to the front of the book and as a result of this playfully apt description, read it cover to cover over what remained of Easter. When I finished I sat and marvelled that this eccentric, eclectic, wry and wonderful tour through the south eastern counties of England, just before the Second World War, had appeared to have been lost in the mists of the eighty years since 1939. It appeared as South East England in 1951 but was needlessly edited. What we see here is the original.

Guy Richard Charles Wyndham was born into the aristocracy in 1896, a descendant of George Wyndham, the third Earl of Egremont who lived at Petworth House in West Sussex. Dick Wyndham, as he was known, was brought up in a Philip Webb designed house, Clouds, in East Knoyle, Wiltshire, later left to him by a cousin. He was educated at Wellington College and at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and subsequently won the Military Cross in the First World War. In 1927, despite having considerable wealth, he continued his habit of selling a family painting once a year ‘to keep buoyant’ and sold the 1899 painting of his three aunts (dubbed The Three Graces by the then Prince of Wales) by John Singer Sargent, for £20,000, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Around this time he discovered on a walk, and subsequently bought, Tickerage Mill near Uckfield in East Sussex, a property later owned by actress Vivien Leigh. From here he wrote books, painted and made prints, and as Britain prepared for war was asked in 1939 by Batsford to write about his corner of England, a ‘last look round’ as he described it of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey. In the publisher’s note you will see that it was almost completed when he was ‘called up on active service’. (His daughter Joan, born in East Knoyle in 1927, came to prominence much later with her lively and romantic wartime diaries.) Wyndham was invalided out and became a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, but in a skirmish in Jerusalem between Israeli troops and the Arab League he was killed in 1948 by Israeli gunfire as he was taking a photograph of an Arab advance.

Brian Cook, later politician Brian Cook Batsford, illustrated many Batsford dust jackets. When the publisher came to initiating the series The Face of Britain, he hoped that the books would be planned around counties. But Harry Batsford insisted on geographical areas, such as the subsequent Chiltern Country and Cotswold Country. The new series was published alongside the very successful British Heritage books with their brilliantly-coloured jackets by Cook, but instead of the time-consuming Jean Berté printing process his illustrations for The Face of Britain were taken directly from his original paintings by photolithography. And so it was, as Richard Wyndham was finishing his writing and taking up arms, the cover for South-Eastern Survey was being painted. A farm labourer with his cap turned round stands on his empty wagon, giving the horse a rest as he looks over the landscape falling away from him. He sees a patchwork of fields, red-tiled roofs and the distant line of the Downs, whilst his workfellows are finishing loading a cart with hay.

Richard Wyndham wrote his book when already his beloved countryside was threatened by the increase of traffic on arterial roads and over development. The advent of affordable cars meant that Britain was now visited in places that hitherto could only have been reached by the railway, and the new guidebooks like those of Shell and indeed Batsford brought enticing views of British counties. The south east coast could be reached in a couple of hours from London, and Brighton was always an hour from Victoria. The topographical Batsford books of the 1930s almost always used photographs gained from outside sources, but South Eastern Survey exclusively used Wyndham’s own images.

When one first opens the book and skims through the pictures, at first glance they may seem just like those in other Batsford books, but on closer inspection many of Wyndham’s photographs are very different from anything else in a book of this type at this time. Although the scene probably courted his displeasure, he nevertheless found interest in Whitehawk Camp near Brighton with fences made from discarded iron bedsteads. The ruined farmhouse, sunrise gates and a single decker bus turned into a home in Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey were unexpected images to see in a Batsford book. These are things some of us clamour to find now, and I wonder whether Richard Wyndham was the first to acknowledge them. He takes the trouble to take his photograph of oast houses in Kent by moonlight, and the backs, not fronts, of Bluecoat boys in Horsham. I suppose it’s the painter’s eye, seeing things the casual observer does not. He makes no comment on his photograph of a street in old Folkestone because the indecent plethora of signs says it all, or about the litter left by ‘trippers’ on Box Hill. I don’t know what the make of car is whose bonnet stretches out in his shot of Saltdean, I don’t know what camera he used, or what film, but he drove, walked and sat on trains to give us a unique account of the villages, towns and people that were soon to be on the home front line in the Second World War.

It’s the writing though that really sets this book apart. All Batsford books were well-written by people who knew their subjects, but Richard Wyndham’s personality seeps through onto the page to such an extent it make us glad that we are in his company. It is all too easy to see ourselves sitting next to him in a country inn as he talked with the locals, his fat sheepdog asleep under the table. Or to wish we were in the carriage with him on the Kent & East Sussex Railway as the trackside willow hedges brushed across the windows. If one incident serves not only to represent the uniqueness of this book, and shows us both just how much life has changed forever since 1939 and what we’ve irrevocably lost, then his account of the running of a country railway at Northiam station will serve us well.

For Wyndham this really was ‘a last look round’; the chances are he never made these same journeys again, certainly not in the same spirit. So much has changed in Kent, Sussex and Surrey over eighty years that it might seem impossible to find the places as he did in 1939. Motorways slice up North Kent and Surrey, scarring the North Downs; the towns of Sussex expand under the roar of airliners climbing out over the Weald from Gatwick, the coastline becomes even more of a crowded playground. But what is remarkably still true is Wyndham’s thought that he firmly plants in our minds in the first paragraph of his first chapter: ‘But turn off these concrete highways down a side lane or an old main road now by-passed; as in the vortex of a hurricane, you can find complete calm.’

The Kent & East Sussex Railway still steams gently from Tenterden to Bodiam, at Faversham boats still navigate the ‘sluggish creek’ and moonlight still shines on the dew pond next to the Chanctonbury Ring. Of course if you find yourself out on the Romney Marsh, two miles south of Appledore, you will also see that no one has picked-up the child’s toy.

PETER ASHLEY

Slawston 2018

CONTENTS

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION BY PETER ASHLEY

I. THE VANISHED FOREST

II. NORTH OF THE DOWNS TO TENTERDEN

III. ACROSS THE WEALD INTO KENT

IV. PILGRIM CITY

V. NORTH OF THE DOWNS TO CHICHESTER

VI. ACROSS THE WEALD INTO SURREY

VII. BEAUTY SPOTS

VIII. THE ROAD TO THE COAST

IX. THE COAST ROAD TO THE WEST

X. THE COAST ROAD EAST

XI. HOMEWARD JOURNEY

INDEX

2 Baroque Monument, Cuckfield Church, Sussex

3 Ash, Kent: the Church and Ship Inn

CHAPTER

I

THE VANISHED FOREST

I

IN 1749 Horace Walpole wrote to Montagu, “If you love good roads, conveniences, good inns . . . be so kind as never to go into Sussex . . . Sussex is a great damper of curiosity.” In 1935 Hilaire Belloc complained: “But no man can answer for what evil modern machinery may not do in the near future. It may even kill the integrity of the downs.” Two points of view. There is a third. With cheap motor transport, trippers on a great scale became inevitable, and mechanised trippers meant concrete roads, petrol pumps, dainty teas and mushroom growths. But—as always in this well-balanced world—an unexpected compensatory factor has now appeared: thirty years ago wheeled traffic used alike the high roads and by-roads; excursionists and school treats boiled their tea among ruins no matter how inaccessible; new cottages were built in this small village or that. To-day the motorist, whether in a “Family Ten,” a motor coach, or a Rolls, cannot be persuaded to leave his fine concrete road; surprisingly, bicyclists risk death to accompany him; yet more surprising, a large number of people doomed to dwell in Tudoresque villas prefer the stink or petrol fumes to the brackish thyme-scent of the downs. In fact, mechanised trippers and mechanised houses are becoming like our main roads—arterialised. But turn off these concrete highways down a side lane or an old main road now by-passed; as in the vortex of a hurricane, you can find complete calm.

There are exceptions. In spite of the displeasure of bathing in the English Channel and North Sea, bungalows have ousted agriculture from the coasts of Sussex and Kent; and there is the retired business man who has a true love of the country, but no objection to living in an eyesore. (Here he is logical; for his own home cannot interfere with his own view. I have always held that, should one live in an eighteenth-century square with one Edwardian horror—then one should live in the horror.) Finally, there is the hiker, and here we have an analogy: we hikers (I include myself) are on a walking tour; it is only all other walking tourists who deserve the vile name of hiker.

When writing a book of this description the author’s first difficulty is to decide where to start, but in this case my decision was simple. I was forced to start from a village in the very centre of these three counties—Surrey, Sussex and Kent. For that is where I live. Twelve years ago I happened to turn down a steep lane of great troughs of Sussex clay. In a wooded valley lay a mill pool—silver among silver reeds, and bulrushes just bursting in white cotton cascades. Mallard and wild duck rose vertically from the marsh; a heron flopped from the great oak to perch ridiculously on top of the purple wood. The mill house was empty, and almost lost among unpruned apple trees, and gooseberry bushes run wild; a simple tile-hung cottage that for four hundred years had refused to fall down.

Above a bridge and a weir, the tranquil mill stream lay among the bulrushes in fat coils, growing narrower and narrower until lost in a thistle-grown marsh. Below the weir it took an amber leap into a frothy pool, then bored across the fields, cutting so deep into the clay that only a line of alders marked its course—in their branches hung debris from last winter’s floods. The slopes of the valley were wooded with chestnut and some huge oaks.

Beyond the weir I found a mill wheel so entwined with brambles and bindweed that it could surely never turn again. Rusty Victorian wheel—but an innovation in this valley, replacing the huge hammer that had beaten out the first English-made swords. For this placid pool had been a noisy “hammer pond”; the silent marsh, the centre of industrial England where forges clapped and boomed and bellows creaked; while axes chopped in the forest and great oaks toppled on to cracking boughs.

The history of this valley—though no battle was fought—is the history of the Weald. From the pit behind my garage the iron ore was dug. At the farm over the hill—still known as “Huggett’s furnace”—the first English cannon was forged. In Elizabeth’s reign war-profiteering reached a peak and the profits were sunk in “Armada houses.” During brief moments of peace—when there was a home demand only for iron tombstones, fire-backs and courtiers’ swords—gun-running to pirates made good the deficit. Our fishermen no longer dared leave Rye Harbour, and the Government had to intervene.

4 The Author’s Home: Tickerage Mill, near Uckfield, Sussex

5 A Dew Pond on the Sussex Downs: Chanctonbury

6 A Hammer Pond on the Sussex Weald: Tickerage

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the wealden “black country” was so well established that the discovery of coal made little difference; the new fuel was shipped from the mines to Sussex ports. But at the end of the century, when the harbours had become silted and the forests had almost disappeared, emigration to the Midlands began; in 1820 only one hammer was left echoing in the valleys of the weald at Ashburnham—to our great-grandfathers a surviving curiosity, as hand-looms and hand printing-presses are to us to-day.

II

Previous to this industrialisation of Sussex, my stream dribbled undiscovered in a forest that lay unbroken between the north and south ridges of the downs, and spread from Hampshire eastward to the sea. Travel between mediæval villages was on foot or horseback—the shingled church spire a sole guide above the trees. Before that, the forest was traversed only by tracks connecting Saxon settlements at the foot of the downs (the -ings: Poynings, Beeding, Steyning, etc.) with their small forest clearings where swineherds lived in huts (the -lys, -dens, -hursts and -folds: Hellingly, Tenterden, Hawkhurst, Chiddingfold, etc.). So isolated were these men that they remained for twenty years in ignorance of the Norman Conquest, and were indignant when strange men appeared to assess their land for some foreign king.

Before the coming of the Saxons, who were skilled woodmen, the whole forest lay virgin but for some ribbon development bordering the Roman roads. The 15th Legion was stationed a few miles south of my valley, and created an oasis of civilisation that in many parts of Sussex has not since been surpassed. It lasted four hundred years, to be quite forgotten—in history, a mere flash as brilliant and momentary as a falling star. The Roman nose survives in Sussex to this day; and the Roman names, Avis, Virgo, Morphew; and I know an old hedger with a stage Sussex yokel’s fringe of beard whose surname is Venus.

Before this, with forests impenetrable and the seashore a marsh, mankind was left only one choice of habitation: the hilltops, where he could find a few treeless acres for his plough and herds; for in those days of primitive axes, trees were enough to drive people from the land. On these hilltops we can trace our ancestry back to near-apes. Iron Age, Bronze Age, and the Neolithic Stone Age—their history lies in the chalk of the downs and goes back anything up to 10,000 years; but in earlier times still, before even the dawn of civilisation, when man lived by hunting, these gameless ridges meant starvation. The few remaining traces of the Mesolithic and Palæolithic existence are to be found on those dry sandy heights that once rose above the sodden forests of the weald.1

On the downs, archæologists still trace the outline of fields ploughed by the Romans and Celts, and the footpaths that linked the string of wheat-growing villages; they still crawl along the galleries of the Cissbury flint mines, which were tunnelled when a pick was an antler and a shovel the shoulder-blade of an ox; and at Trundle and White-hawk camps they have discovered something of the squalor in which Britons lived more than four thousand years ago. It must have been a very similar life to that of the most primitive African tribes before the white man made them his burden: a semi-nomadic existence, sheltering in ditches and pits. These ancestors of ours cut beads from the chalk, brewed their own mead, and in hard times resorted to cannibalism. They worshipped the Phallus. That was the beginning of our civilisation.

Of pre-civilised Sussex much less is known, but one of the first of the human species—a gibbering creature—chose to live on the sandy soil of my local golf course at Piltdown, not far from the fifth tee. When he lived can only be conjectured—it may have been several hundred thousand years ago, when Sussex was joined to Africa. Food was plentiful—but dangerous: immense elephants, rhinoceroses and bears. Mentally, this man was developed a shade more, perhaps, than the chimpanzees who drink tea in the Zoo. His bones were unearthed by Sussex labourers in 1912. From an account of this discovery, we can estimate to what degree the Sussex intellect had developed during these countless thousands of years. The archaeologist, Charles Dawson, happened to pass two men digging a gravel pit, and noticed a fragment of an exceptionally thick skull. He begged the labourers to put aside anything similar, and to dig with the greatest care. These labourers “found the greater part, if not the whole of the human skull . . . and taking it for a cocoanut, deliberately smashed it . . .” (E. Cecil Curwin, County Archœlogies: Sussex).

This Piltdown creature is the first appearance in history of a Sussex homo sapiens—how he came into existence is as mysterious as the arrival of the first wild trout in my stream—but the geological history of the land can be traced farther back by milliards of years: the slow process of nature that set the scene of his birth.

As in Genesis, first there was water; South-eastern England was a muddy lake, a few feet deep, peopled by huge reptiles. The climate was tropical. The sea broke in, and during eons deposited layer after layer of sand and clay. The great reptiles disappeared, but in the sea lived microscopic crustaceæ, whose calcium shells, falling on to the bed of the ocean, produced in time a layer of chalk. The best indication of the time factor in the story is that this layer finally reached a thickness of a thousand feet. Now the sea began to recede again; Surrey, Sussex and Kent appeared out of the water—a great hump of chalk with a core of sand and clay. Its peak, which was some ten miles south of my valley, reached three thousand feet.

To-day there is a peculiarity about the rivers of this part of England: instead or rising in the highest hills, they have their sources in comparatively low country and cut their way through the downs. This phenomenon was caused by the denudation of the weald. Originally, these rivers did rise from the higher points of the chalk hump, and formed great fissures in its side as they flowed down the northern and southern slopes. As time went on, they began to wash away the chalk of the hump until the peak was denuded down to a ridge of sand standing in a plain. Only the lower slopes were left as two high ridges of chalk, on one side abrupt escarpments, on the other falling away gradually to the shore or cliffs formed by inroads of the sea. One might compare these parallel ridges to a series of waves: the crests are the North and South Downs and the high Weald; the troughs, the north and south coastal plains and the flat pasture-land of clay. The Downs and Weald of Sussex, Kent and Surrey; that is the country we will now explore.

7 Twentieth-century Litter on the Site of a Neolithic Downland Village: Whitehawk Camp, near Brighton

8 Sussex Chalk: Clayton Down

9 Sussex Clay: the Weald near Buxted

1There are, of course, numerous exceptions to this general statement; a changing climate would at the same time change the character of the landscape. At one period trees grew on the top of the downs and man was driven to the southern slopes; at another the drying up of the downland springs forced him into the plains.

CHAPTER

II

NORTH OF THE DOWNS TO TENTERDEN

I

AT the top of my lane we turn left to Cross-in-Hand. Though one of the most beautiful of Sussex place-names, the village has nothing to show for it but a modern inn, a modern church, a windmill that works, and one of the most extensive views in Sussex, taking in forty churches, the Wealds of Sussex and Kent, Ashdown Forest, the coastline of Beachy Head, and the greater part of the Sussex Downs. This is the place to bring a telescope and an argumentative friend—a pleasant morning can be spent that way. But the view is much the same, and just as dull, as any other long-distance view; it is the view from an air liner. Perhaps the aeroplane will prove to a new generation that there can be nothing more dreary than Nature’s panoramas.

I know little about windmills, but this windmill at Cross-in-Hand seems to be the latest thing, with its small auxiliary sails which drive themselves round on a circular rail, thus keeping the main sails into wind. I have a grievance against this mill—a grievance which I cannot expect the reader to share. I dislike the fact that it works—it irritates me on my walks to keep catching sight of the revolving silhouette of the sails. For we have a windmill in my own village of Blackboys, a prettier mill though not so up-to-date. During ten years the old miller used to grind my wholemeal flour—I’d watch him at work while everything shuddered and creaked. During a storm the sails were carried away over two fields, and since then the mill at Blackboys has been still, and for sale. Perhaps someone will buy it as a romantic place to live in—there were rumours of an actress—why, I cannot imagine, for it is now just a dirty white pepper-pot, with no point at all.

I have another grievance to do with this part of the world—but this grievance I hope the reader will share: it is over that appalling street of Victorian hot brick and cold slate which, even in spite of the Ordnance map, insists on calling itself Heathfield. How could this have been the site of “Hefful Fair” where for centuries an old woman freed the first cuckoo of summer from a cage ? Or the home of that observant seventeenth-century parson who noted down Halley’s comet in his church register: “A blazing star appeared in this kingdom. It did stream from the south west and the middle of heaven, broader than a rainbow by far”?

Yet the Post Office, and two A.A. signs, insist that this outcrop of a railway built on the cheap by an American contractor is the village of Heathfield. Drive on (only too willingly) for a mile or so along the Hastings road, and you will be puzzled by a sign-post still directing you to “Heathfield i Mile.” It is worth while turning down this lane to find one of the prettiest and smallest of Sussex villages: two rows of cottages—weather-boarded on one side of the street, and on the other grey-aged bricks; a church with a thirteenth-century tower and shingled spire; and an inn where—though it is admitted that to-day there is no old woman to free the cuckoo at Hefful Fair—they still insist that this first note of summer is heard on 14th April and on no other date.

In the church a couplet in memory of Thomas Courthope and his wife proclaims that

“A happier couple Sure than ne’er was wed

But much more So

Now they are dead.”

II

We rejoin the Eastbourne road at Cade Street, a village through which traffic speeds. During the last twelve years I had passed through this village without knowing its name until one hot Saturday afternoon. The road was up, with one-way traffic; for many minutes I sat in the August dust waiting for “Stop” to turn to “Go.” Pneumatic drills were in full orchestra; now and again an impatient driver gave an earstartling hoot. Aimlessly my eyes wandered to a square stone monument on the side of the road. I read—for nothing better to do—the following inscription:

10 Tickerage Wood

11 Tickerage Barn Around the Author’s Home, near Uckfield, Sussex

12 Fun Fair at Uckfield, Sussex

13 The Windmill at Cross-in-Hand, Sussex

“Near this spot was slain the notorious rebelJACK CADEby Alexander Iden esq. Sherif of Kent, A.D. 1460___________His body was carried to London, his head fixed onLondon Bridge.This is the sweet of all rebels and the fortune chancethever to traitors.”

Cade was an enlightened revolutionary and brilliant general. As leader of “The Men of Kent” he defeated the King’s forces in one lightning battle and captured London. Having gained the reforms he demanded, and pardons for all, he disbanded his army. Cade himself was tricked; a name error was discovered in his pardon, he was hunted down, and shot while playing a game or bowls.

How changed the scene: I tried to imagine the simple garden, the bees, the silent arrow. How peaceful this rebel’s death compared with this gibbering afternoon!1

A mile to the south lived another rebel, in the hamlet of Warbleton. It is a pretty village built on a steep lane; on one side slopes a row or three or four cottages and the “War-Bill-in-Tun” Inn. Opposite stands the church, and, by the churchyard wall, a small farm on the site of the home of Richard Woodman—worthy, well-to-do iron-master and employer of many men. In 1557 he rebelled against his Queen, “Bloody Mary,” and led nine other martyrs to the stake.

So little has this hamlet changed that it is not difficult to imagine this man and his surroundings, and all that took place. One can see Richard Woodman with his trim pointed beard and clothes of the best-lasting material bought in Lewes. In the little inn this rich employer would be listened to with respect; his word would be accepted and—should trouble of any sort arise—these peasants would turn to Mr. Woodman: he’d soon put things right. We find the same type to-day in most villages the size of Warbleton: the well-to-do, righteous local deity. Things did go wrong—very wrong—with the arrival of the new rector, the Rev. Mr. Fairbanks. Nowadays such trouble makes third-page news—parishioners send anonymous letters, or hide the key of the vestry door. In Warbleton it was left to Woodman to put matters right, and it is easy to imagine the scene in the inn: the lifted tankards, the boasting, “Leave it to Mr. Woodman, he’s got the forehorse by the head, he’ll tell parson what’s right. And we’ll stand by him.”