The story is still told at Robertsbridge, and with appropriate awe, how a ploughman on Taylor’s Farm, Mountfield, ploughed up £1,100 worth of gold, and sold it for five shillings, as old brass. That happened so long ago as 1862 and the tale has lost nothing, since then, in the re-telling. Mountfield was long a place of pilgrimage after that event, and the ploughmen on its fields drove the share deeper than ever they had done before; but if they made any more discoveries they were wise enough to keep the fact to themselves. Although it all happened so long ago, almost the first thing the stranger hears of in Robertsbridge to this day is that mystic gold. Reduced to plain facts, it seems that during his work in Barn Field, on Taylor’s Farm, January 12th, 1862, a ploughman suddenly drove his plough into an entangled mass of metal that brought him up with a jerk. He threw the pieces on the baulk, and when his day’s work was done showed them to his master, who thought they were brass, and gave them to him. They were really, from the description afterwards given of them, gold torques and other Early British ornaments, and had lain there two thousand years. The metal weighed no less than thirteen pounds. After vainly endeavouring to sell the “old brass” to one dealer after another, a Hastings man more wideawake than the rest, suspecting it to be the more precious metal, gave the ploughman 6_d._ a pound for it—liberal man! He lost no time in travelling to London, where he sold it to a refiner, who melted it down and paid him £529 12_s._ 7_d._ for the resultant 153 oz. 12 gr. of fine gold. A piece had already been sold to a Hastings jeweller for £18. Rumours of this extraordinary find soon spread, and in the end the ploughman and the sharp dealer were arraigned at the Winter Sessions at Lewes, December 1862, on the charge of illegally disposing of treasure-trove, the property of Her Majesty the Queen. They were each fined £265, half-value of the metal disposed of, or ordered to be imprisoned until the money was paid. Fairy gold has ever brought trouble upon those who find it. It is useless to speculate upon the possible antiquarian value of the ancient ornaments thus destroyed; but it must have been many times that of the mere metal. The other main staples of talk are cattle, hops, and wool. If you cannot talk wool, hops, or cattle at Robertsbridge without some knowledge of those subjects, you are self-condemned. There is a fortnightly cattle-market; “ship” browse in many flocks on the surrounding pastures, but everywhere are the hop-gardens and their inseparable oast-houses. XXXVIII Out of Robertsbridge and the Rother valley the road ascends steeply to John’s Cross, where the old coach-road bears to the left in a circuitous route to Battle, by Vine Hall and Whatlington, three-quarters of a mile longer than the absolutely straight modern highway.