I’ve been rewalking Hilaire Belloc’s journey across Sussex, as told in The Four Men: A Farrago. I decided to do this for three reasons. The first was to discover what has changed, and what hasn’t, in the century or more since the book’s setting. The second reason was to bring a female perspective to some of the many questions he raises along the way: about home, belonging, friendship and our relationship with the landscape. The third, and perhaps the most important, was to put right a wrong. Belloc fills his journey with stories, local history and legends, yet women’s lives are conspicuously missing from the picture. I felt sure that somewhere along those same lanes, footpaths and village streets there would be clues to women whose stories deserved to be told.
I wasn’t sure how many I would find. Women’s history can take some unearthing: names disappear, achievements go unrecorded, and whole lives are reduced to somebody’s wife or daughter. But in the end, I found so many interesting women that they outgrew the account of the walk and needed an article of their own.
I have divided the whole walk across Sussex into seven sections, and here, then, are some of the women who stepped forward from the past as I walked from Robertsbridge to Old Heathfield. Some left substantial records; others offered only a tantalising glimpse. All gave me a reason to stop and look a little harder.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
The first woman I met, figuratively speaking, was none other than Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, whose home at Scalands Gate, now known as Scalands Folly, lay along my route just as you leave Robertsbridge. An artist, traveller and campaigner for women’s rights, Barbara helped found Girton College and challenged the laws that denied married women control over their own property and earnings. She also supported education closer to home through a local night school. But the connection that particularly caught my attention was her close friendship with Bessie Rayner Parkes, Belloc’s mother. The two women travelled through Europe without a chaperone, questioned the restrictions imposed on their sex and helped establish the English Woman’s Journal. Here, along the lanes I was following in Belloc’s footsteps, was a woman whose friendship with his mother opened up a whole other Sussex story. Feisty, different and determined, I couldn’t help but like her.
A sharman and a witch
As I walked from Robertsbridge to Brightling, I spotted a sign that said “Coffee and pastries” and knowing that the next food stop was a long, long way off, I swerved in as the first customer of the day of the Roots to the Moon café. When I read Bob Copper’s account (he rewalked Belloc’s walk in the 1990s and recorded it in Across Sussex With Belloc), I was struck by the fact that he had stumbled upon some traditional wheelwrights in the first section of his walk. In all honesty, I considered it unlikely that I was going to find any ancient trades or traditions on my walks. How wrong I was.
Roots to the Moon and Dr Joanna Gore
At Roots to the Moon, I met Dr Joanna Gore, whose approach to farming and wellbeing draws on biodynamic principles (Steiner farming principles known as biodynamic agriculture were introduced by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in 1924), shamanic practices and older traditions of working with the land. I was struck by Joanna’s determination to go back to basics, working with nature’s cycles, wasting nothing and revisiting traditional ways of farming, some with roots reaching back long before Belloc’s day. Her approach has attracted visitors from overseas interested in replicating what she is doing. She’s also not the first woman on this land to look back to the old ways, and as long ago as the 1980s, she told me a lady was selling organic vegetable boxes here at a time when neither organic nor vegetable boxes were a thing. So, here are two woman looking to the old ways to help shape something new. I like to think Belloc would approve of that.
Joanna also told me that Roots to the Moon is on land that used to form part of Green Oak Farm (formerly Scraggs Farm), and that she believed its history included an oak from which women accused of witchcraft had been hanged. This was her understanding of the place, but it sent me looking for other women whose stories lingered in the landscape. That search led to an unnamed woman accused of witchcraft in Brightling. According to an account retold by West Sussex Record Office, the woman was blamed for bringing spirits upon Joseph Cruttenden and his wife, whose house subsequently burned. Taken to Maidstone for trial, she was acquitted, and the disturbances were attributed to mischief by a disgruntled servant girl. Here was another of my missing women: her name absent from the account, but the accusation against her surviving long after she had been cleared.
Susanna Arabella Thrale
Brightling and its surrounding countryside are nearly always associated with Mad Jack Fuller, but I had begun to wonder about the women in his life. He never married, and my curiosity has an added family interest: one of my ancestors may have been related to him. Then Susanna Arabella Thrale stepped forward from the mists of time, with a story that deserved to be told. Daughter of the diarist Hester Thrale and her husband Henry, in 1790, when she was about twenty, Susanna declined Fuller’s proposal of marriage.
We do not know why but a contemporary letter from a Henrietta Henckell Hare to her sister relays a distinctly unpleasant story about his response. According to what she had heard, Fuller was so angry about being turned down that he brought a “woman of the town” to Tunbridge Wells to follow Susanna around and distress her. The letter writer herself questioned whether the report was true but if it happened, what a bizarre, controlling and thoroughly disagreeable response to a woman exercising her right to say no. Fuller is generally celebrated for his follies, patronage and philanthropy, although his opposition to the abolition of slavery belongs in that picture too. Susanna remained unmarried, but she deserves more than a place in the story of his rejection: she was reported to be brilliantly clever and as a child she read French comedy and memorised poetry for pleasure. Later she helped establish almshouses for poor single women in Streatham.
(The letter from Henrietta Henckell Hare is cited in the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s research on Fuller, referencing Sussex County Magazine).
Denise Bowyer
After leaving Brightling, our walk took us west to Dallington Forest, now silent, stunning and beautiful but once noisy and industrial with the work of iron making. As we reached Glazier’s Forge, in the very heart of the forest, I couldn’t help wondering about the women who had worked in Sussex ironmaking, and, reading around the subject, I came across the formidable Denise Bowyer. After her husband John’s death, Denise leased Parrock Forge at Hartfield, where a dispute with rival ironmaster William Saunders brought rather more action than our peaceful surroundings suggested.
In proceedings before the Star Chamber, Denise accused Saunders of breaking her ponds, draining the water essential to her forge and carrying away her bellows. She rallied eighteen men armed with staves, bows and arrows for a counterattack. Saunders, in turn, complained that they struck him on the head and threatened his life, while Denise struck his oxen across their muzzles with a staff, trying to turn them back, until he picked her up and carried her away. These are competing allegations, and the account gives no outcome, but what a glimpse of a woman defending her livelihood in the noisy, fiercely contested world of Sussex iron and men.
By a strange coincidence there was a William Saunders associated with Cox’s Mill in 1798 near Glazier’s Forge. Perhaps a distant descendent?
Mrs Jack Cade
From Dallington Forest, our walk took us on to Punnett’s Town and then Cade Street, famous for being the site of the apprehension of the famous rebel and rebel leader Jack Cade. Cade died shortly after he was caught in 1450 from injuries sustained. Accounts of his earlier life raise more questions than they answer, including a suggestion that he had been involved in the murder of a young pregnant woman. But what I also wanted to know was what happened to his wife. Some accounts suggest that he married the daughter of a squire, possibly from Tonbridge, hinting at connections to property and a more settled life before the rebellion. Whether they had children, I have yet to discover. But what became of Mrs Cade after her husband’s capture, death and public mutilation? It was hard to imagine that his notoriety left her life untouched. Yet while his name survives on a roadside monument, I am still searching for hers.
The women sent to America
This first walk in the series ended at The Star in Old Heathfield, a pub with a history dating back hundreds of years. And that history brought another group of missing women into view.
On 22 April 1830, parishioners met here to consider providing some of the parish’s poorest inhabitants with the means to emigrate to America. Fourteen families were named, with three more added at a meeting a few days later. I had yet to see the list, but wondered about the women among those families. In what circumstances were they leaving? Was this a welcome opportunity, a desperate necessity or a decision over which they had little say? And what became of them across the Atlantic? Laura and Louise, who now run The Star, told me they had an enormous book about its history and have offered me access. so, “I will be back”, as the former husband of Maria Shriver once famously said.
Mary Newbery
Just to the north west of the pub is Heathfield Park, always associated with a long list of illustrious men. But what of any women who may have lived there?
They are quite hard to tack down but one name that came up was Mary Newbery, born Mary Raikes, the sister of Robert Raikes, the promoter of Sunday schools. She was married to Francis Newbury who bought Heathfield Park in 1791 and commissioned the Gibraltar Tower. According to The Keep, she is thought to have been partly responsible for establishing Heathfield’s National School, which opened in November 1819, after her husband Francis’s death. She is mainly referred to as Francis’ widow and her precise contribution remains elusive, but here is another woman who appears to have been working quietly behind the scenes to do something significant and help others less well off than herself.
Let’s not forget
Of course, other women joined our conversation along the way, their stories deserving a mention now, even if we return to them later in this series. Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise as a barrister in England, particularly resonated with me. She retained her name after marriage and became the first married British woman to have a passport issued in her maiden name. Even in the early 1990s, keeping my own name a a practising barrister felt like something I had to fight for. And I remember at my wedding, despite speaking being my profession, I was not given the opportunity to say anything amongst speeches dominated by men.
Virginia Woolf walked with us for a while too, in conversation: the Bloomsbury writer whose home at Monk’s House in Rodmell anchors her firmly in Sussex, and her writing still feels so relevant and poignant. A woman ahead of her time. Finally, even Anne Boleyn put in an appearance at times, through her family’s ownership of Pashley Manor and her connection to Bolebrook Castle. Centuries later, she is still cast in competing roles: victim, survivor or conniver?
Perhaps these women belonged in our conversation partly because their stories prompt us to ask who gets heard, who is remembered, and who controls the telling. Of course, I’m sure there are many more women along this first section of the walk whose stories deserve to be told. What surprised me most was the number of lives full of courage, hardship, ambition and achievement that are so often overlooked in the histories of the places we pass. Some of these women I know a little better now; others have left me with questions I hope to return to. And there are still six sections of the walk to go.
If you’ve enjoyed this first exploration of Belloc’s missing women, you may also like:
In Conversation with Belloc & Sussex: Robertsbridge to Old Heathfield
Madge Turner: the Chichester Project Putting Women Back into History
