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114 THE SUSSEX COAST |
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place, an agreeable young lady with a genteel fortune, and every other qualification to make the Marriage State happy."* In the eighteenth century some of the neighbouring landowners had town houses in Arundel, to which they moved for festivities of a social kind during part of the winter months. When London was nearly as far off as New York is now, these little towns had a life of their own which has been hopelessly destroyed by the forces that work to-day.
The sloping streets of Arundel contain a few old houses and an extraordinary Town Hall in a modern Norman style. One great charm of our Sussex towns is their individuality; we know little of the comparative sameness of, for instance, East Anglian towns with their market-places and magnificent Perpendicular churches, all of the same general type. Each Sussex town appears to have a soul of its own, and this is particularly so at Arundel. The spirit of an elder day seems pleasantly to brood over the place; here feudalism is still triumphant; the general view of the town proclaims to the world not the idiosyncrasies of the townspeople, but the ideals of their overlord. His new castle entirely overpowers the keep of Roger and Albini; he has built on high ground a short way west a vast, but rather soulless, apsidal transepted church in the French style of the fourteenth century, dedicating it to the rites of Rome under the patronage of St. Philip Neri. The modern church crushes the old and with the new castle completely transforms the town, and notifies to the traveller that even in these democratic days the head of the house of Howard can in the vast-ness of his conceptions and the impressive pro-
* K. M. Underhill, articles in the Guardian, 1910-1911. |
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