HAND CROSS 199 



Why " Squire Powlett " should haunt these nocturnal 

 glades is not so easily to be guessed. He was not, so 

 far as can be learned, an evildoer, and he certainly was 

 not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a 

 captain in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the 

 Forest of St. Leonards, who seems to have led an 

 exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under 

 an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church. 



XXV 



Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, 

 situated where several roads meet, in this delightful 

 land of forests. Its name derives, of course, from 

 some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost 

 and wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation 

 times, on the lonely cross-roads. No houses stood 

 here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest habitation 

 of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, 

 where, very little changed or not at all, it may still 

 be sought. Slaugham parish is very extensive, 

 stretching as far as Crawley ; and the hamlet of Hand 

 Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent 

 village itself, is only a mere mushroom excrescence 

 called into existence by the road travel of the last 

 two centuries. 



It is the being on the main road, and on the junction 

 of several routes, that has made Hand Cross what 

 it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham itself; just as 

 in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare 

 will make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps 

 ruin those of some other route. 



Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing 

 to the eye ; for, after all, it is a parvenu of a place, 

 and lacks the Domesday descent of, for instance, 

 Cuckfield. Now, the parvenu, the man of his hands, 

 may be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity 

 grates upon the nerves. So it is with Hand Cross, for 



