COPLEY FIELDING

 

Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding, painter in water colours from 1831 till his death in 1855, and at one time President of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, lies buried in the church yard on the north side of the church, and a marble monument has been erected to his memory on the south wall of the nave. Copley Fielding, who was born in 1787, was a native of Halifax, Yorkshire, but spent much of his life on the South Coast.

 

He painted many sea pieces, but his chief work was as an interpreter of Down-land scenes. His industry was enormous; when he decided to send in to the Royal Academy he submitted some seventy or eighty sketches, all specially painted for the purpose. He lived for many years at Hove, and died at Worthing in 1855.

The tomb of Charlotte Elliott, who wrote the hymn " My God, my Father, while I stray," and many poems descriptive of Sussex scenery, is on the south side of the church, close against the chancel door.

 

It seems odd now to read of " the extensive fields at the back of Hove church,'' where the so-called Brighton camps were held between 1793 and 1795. That which assembled on August 13, 1793, numbered about 10,000 regulars and militia, and was formed on account of some apprehensions of an invasion by " the new Republic of France." It broke up on the 28th of October, but was reassembled in the following year, when 15,000 men were concentrated here.

 

In 1795 occurred the mutiny at East Blatchington, near Seaford, when a revolt against the bad food and tyranny prevailing in the army was led by a private soldier named Cooke, dubbed " Captain Cooke " by his comrades. With him was associated another private named Parrish, both belonging to the Oxford Light Infantry. They were, of course, overpowered at once, and, with several of their followers, were brought to Brighton for court-martial. The court found them guilty, and sentenced Cooke and Parrish to be shot; while three of their comrades were ordered to be flogged at the triangles with three hundred lashes each.

 

From the contemporary accounts one learns that the whole thing was carrierd out with that ghastliness and parade of inhumanity that characterised the military punishments of the period. The execution took place at Goldstone Bottom, and it so preyed upon the mind of the unfortunate chaplain who attended the condemned men in their last moments that he never recovered.

 

 

The Goldstone

Goldstone Bottom, which lies between Hove railway station and the foot of the Downs, is so named from the fact that the Goldstone, an enormous grey-wether, lay there in the land of Farmer Bigden. It was anciently supposed to be a Druidical altar or sacrificial stone, and it is said that it formerly lay in a stone circle. In the early years of the nineteenth century it attracted the interests of archeologists, and was frequently visited, to the great annoyance of the farmer.

So, in 1833, the farmer and his men dug a deep pit and buried it. County historians of the period had some hard things to say about this act. Nevertheless it remained buried, and its hiding place forgotten,until 1902. Then Mr. William Hollamby, one of the ex-Commissioners of Hove, set to work to find it, and, after much searching and inquiry, he discovered and exhumed it, for which public-spirited action he deserves the thanks of every antiquary.

 

Many authorities have pronounced an opinion on this interesting relic, which has been declared to be the Tolmen, or Holy Stone of the, Druids, the God-stone or Col-thor of the ancient Britons, and even the Gorsedd or Bardic chair of a Pre-Roman eisteddfod.

 

However, some doubt has been thrown upon the scientific probability of any of these statements, notably by Mr.H.S. Toms, of the Brighton public museum, who made a systematic survey of the grey-wethers both here and in Stanmer Park. The stone, which is now in Hove Park, measures about fourteen feet by ten by five at the thickest part, and weighs about twenty tons.

 

Aldrington

 

The sea has played such strange havoc with Aldrington in past ages that one is not surprised Aldrington. to find its history in a confused state, and its historians in wordy disagreement. At one period we find Aldrington referred to as a thriving seaport town, to which Brighton and Hove were mere pendant fishing villages.

 

In a later age the chroniclers are hard put to say anything about Aldrington at all, or if they do so it is merely to deplore the rapacity of the waves that have filched its acres, destroyed its houses, and driven out its population.

For whether Aldrington was Portus Adurni, or whether Bramber can rightly claim that honour, there is no doubt that a Roman town stood there, further seaward perhaps than the present coastline, but at least in the parish of Aldrington.

Of the part it played guesses have been hazarded, with some show of historical probability, but we may best begin with St. Leonard's Church, which in its original state must have been built some time during the latter part of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century.

 

It served its purpose while the town remained, but desolation seems to have come early upon it, Why else should the rector of Brighton have chosen it for his domus anchoritoe in 1402, and have petitioned the Bishop of Chichester to allow him to live a hermit's life in a cell there? Very little is known of this hermit who selected Aldrington as a place to encourage that mortification of the flesh which should make him blessed.

 

There was a chapel to the Virgin in Aldrington, and the hermit would have had the perpetual right of entering at all hours from his cell adjoining the building, as anchorites were wont to do. But we know next to nothing about him, and must piece our mental pictures of him from these slender materials.

 

The church saw the town washed gradually away. Great havoc was done by the storms of 1703 and 1705, and twenty years later the parsonage was the only house left. That too went, and in 1750 the number of actual inhabitants was one. Last of all the church itself fell to ruin. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the inroads of the sea had ceased somewhat, the tower, the height of which was given by an accurate diarist of the period as forty feet, was still to be seen from the sea, serving probably as a mark for fishing boats.

 

The roof had fallen in, the doorways had collapsed, and breaches had been made in the walls - but the living, worth £40 a year, still continued to be held. It is thus described by a contemporary historian :

The patronage of the living, which had become a complete sinecure, was vested in Magdalen College, Cambridge. Upon a vacancy taking place, and a fresh incumbent being appointed, he goes through the ceremony of "reading in," mounted on the heap of stones which, from the continued decay of the edifice, has greatly accumulated on its site, a ceremonial of not very frequent occurrence; and which, therefore, when it does take place, usually attracts a large congregation from the neighbouring parishes.

The church stood absolutely derelict for about a century and a half, when, in 1878, it was restored at the expense of the Ingram family. As in the case of St.Andrew's, Hove, the old lines of the foundation were followed; though the chancel, having mouldered completely away, was restored on new lines.

 

Where possible, however, the features of the old church were copied in the new one, and in the case of the two lancet windows in the chancel the actual old stones were used. Even in its materials the new fabric imitated its fore-runner, flint, faced with Caen stone, being chiefly employed. A peal of six bells hangs in the tower. St.Philip's Church, built as a chapel of ease to St.Leonard's, was erected from designs by Mr. Oldrid Scott.

 

The River Adur

 

In former times the river Adur, which rises in the Weald of Sussex, near Nuthurst, used to flow into the sea at Aldrington. Traces of its ancient course was to be seen in the sunken lawns given to tennis and promenades; still more definitely in the eastern harbour, which terminates in a basin at Wish Wharf, near the Adur Hotel.

 

The river in former years constantly shifted its opening, for the reason that at certain seasons every inflow of tide brought an accumulation of shingle to one bank, and every receding tide carried some away. At periods the process would not go on so easily; the mouth of the harbour became silted up, and the waters, following the line of least resistance, forced their way to the sea at some other point.

 

The present opening at Shoreham was made in 1817, and at a later period the old river bed was turned Into a floating canal and dock. It adds greatly to the picturesqueness of this end of the town, besides providing Hove with a convenient access shipping.

The lower Shoreham road skirts the harbour, and follows the line of the canal and river into Shoreham town. North of the Shoreham road, opposite to the termination of the harbour, is Aldrington Recreation Ground, twelve acres in extent.

 

 

 

 

 

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