It is a popular error to suppose that Brighton owes its existence entirely to a caprice of George IV., or even to believe with Macaulay that it remained only an unfrequented fishing-village down to a very recent period. Though the history of the largest English watering-place is certainly not so eventful as that of many smaller and now less famous towns, it yet throws back its roots into a remote and respectable past, for the borough still bears in its very name the best evidence of its antiquity. The Brighthelmstone of the last century is lineally descended from the Brihthelmes Stán of the early South Saxon settlers; and that primitive form of the word again enshrines for us the half-obliterated memory of an ancient and universal custom. The open space between the Pavilion and the Aquarium is now known as the Steyne. Most people who have been familiar with its name from childhood upward have probably associated it only with local traditions of the Prince Regent or recollections of Thackeray’s wicked marquis in “Vanity Fair.” As a matter of historical fact, however, the Steyne carries on its face far more remarkable implications than that. It is indeed the site of the original Stán, the holy stone or monumental monolith round which the later town has slowly gathered. Such holy stones have often formed the nucleus for an English or British settlement, and in many cases the word still survives as part of the modern town name. Brixton in the Isle of Wight was once Ecgbrihtes Stán, the stone of Egbert; and another Ecgbrihtes Stán, the judgment-seat of its shire or hundred, which formed the rendezvous of Alfred’s army during the Danish invasion, is now identified as Brixton Deverill, near Warminster. Folkstone, too, is Folces Stán, the Folk Stone of the Kentish men, the Lapis Tituli of the conquered Romano-Britains. All over England such prehistoric stones still survive in numbers, in many places as sites of the local courts; and the court of the Hundred of Stone is always opened, to the present day, by pouring a bottle of port as a libation over the sacred relic from which the district takes its name. The Brihthelm after whom this particular stone on the site of the Steyne was originally called, ranks as an early Bishop of Selsey [?]; though in all probability he was not himself buried there, but merely gave a Christian character to some old local heathen monument, perhaps of pre-Roman or pre-Celtic date. So St. Patrick, finding three pillar stones connected with Irish paganism, instead of destroying them, inscribed them with holy names; while one, which he used as a place of baptism, was ever afterwards known as Patrick’s Stone. Indeed, many mediæval crosses are firmly mortised into bases composed of such hallowed megalithic structures belonging originally to the older creed. The obviously pagan clan-name of the Staningas, or sons of the stone, at Steyning, close by, may possibly have reference to this primæval monument.
No English clan seems to have settled beside the Stone of Brihthelm itself; but the site lay right on the line of the old British coast-road from Anderida or Pevensey to Regnum or Chichester; and the prehistoric fort of Whitehawk Hill overhung the little combe from behind; so that it must always have stood in the very thick of the local civilisation for the time being. Indeed, English clan villages cluster closely all around it; and we may be sure that a few fishermen settled in the seaward combe from the very earliest date when the South Saxons took to sea-fishing, which could hardly have been as late as the days of Wilfrith, in spite of the miraculous story retailed for us by Bede. The look of the hollow by the Steyne must then have been something like that of Rottingdean, without the houses: a mere gap or gate in the chalk downs, opening to the sea in front by a small fringe of lowland, where the Madeira Walk now runs beneath the buttressed cliffs. Until the Norman conquest we hear nothing definitely about the condition of Brihthelmes Stán. After that event the manor was granted to the Earls de Warrenne, castellans of Lewes, and a large number of Flemish fishermen from the opposite coast were induced to fix their homes on the ledge below the cliff. Another small village of landsmen crowned the white chalk heights above. The old church, dedicated to St. Nicholas, was placed quite apart from either hamlet, on high open ground between the Steyne and the modern railway station, where it served at the same time for a landmark to the fishermen out at sea. Of the primitive Norman or South Saxon building no relic now remains, except the font; but all visitors to Brighton before the last twenty-five years can remember the old long low decorated parish church of the fourteenth century, built, like so many antiquated Brighton houses, of that curious flint patchwork, the use of which was forced upon the inhabitants by the want of good building-stone. The base of the broken churchyard cross stands even now on the little plot without, upon the desecrated hill-side. In spite of French descents and occasional internal feuds, Brighthelmstone must have presented much the same picture all through the mediæval period: a green valley in the downs, along the hollow of the London road; a small fishing-village under the cliff; a little agricultural and trading hamlet above it; a solitary church among fields and pastures on the hill-side; and a few white windmills crowning the conical bosses of the chalk heights that bounded the view to northward behind the town.
Shortly after the Reformation, however, the days of old Brighthelmstone began to be numbered. The sea encroached gradually upon the lowland beneath the cliff, and at last the fishing-village was entirely swept away. For more than a hundred years the name was only remembered as that of a country rectory, on the coast near Shoreham, which had once been a flourishing fisher town, but was now reduced to a small group of agricultural cottages. Three old lanes, East Street, West Street, and North Street, forming with the sea-front a little square district near the market-hall, still preserve for us the boundaries of all that then remained of Brighthelmstone. Charles II. hid here for a while on his way to France by Shoreham. About the middle of the eighteenth century the doctors had just begun to discover the seaside; and when that discovery was once made, the little valley in the Sussex downs was one of the most natural places in the world to which the invalids of London could be sent for change and fresh air. It was a certain Dr. Russell in the bustling and busy county town of Lewes, hard by, who has the credit of first casting an appreciative eye upon the quiet and unvisited nook by the sea at Brighthelmstone. At that time the Steyne was an open common, and sojourners put up at the old King’s Head in West Street. Lodgings soon began to be in demand. The houses of this transitional period can still be easily recognised in the district just ringing round the old square village, as well as in many of the streets lying within that ancient boundary. Towards the close of the eighteenth century the Prince of Wales took a fancy to Brighton, as the name had now for some time been abbreviated, and began to build the mongrel domes and minarets of the Pavilion. Under such patronage the new town grew rapidly. The chain-pier was thrown out into the sea at the point where the cliff subsides, and houses spread quickly up the hill towards St. Nicholas Church, as well as in the other direction towards the New Steyne and the Marine Parade on the cliff-top. The Old Steyne was also enclosed and cut up by roads; though what became of the stone from which it takes its name, and on which tradition asserts that the old fishermen used to dry their nets, cannot now be discovered. Shortly after, the big pseudo-Gothic church of St. Peter, at the end of the Steyne, was built by Barry — a singular monument of the first attempts in the direction of mediæval revival in England. Even during the coaching days Brighton grew with astonishing rapidity: it had as many as 7000 inhabitants in 1801, and by 1830 it was already a large town, with more than thirty coaches running daily to London. The square and crescent at Kemp Town had been built before that period; while the names of the streets and districts elsewhere generally give one a shrewd idea in passing of their probable date. The Reform Act made Brighton into a parliamentary borough with two members; and the railway of course turned it practically into a seaside suburb of London. Since then almost all that was old in the town has disappeared: the great line of marine terraces has covered the whole sea-front, from Kemp Town to Hove and Cliftonville; the ugly West Pier has been put into unhappy competition with its graceful but neglected eastern neighbour; the Aquarium has been stuck down on a reclaimed corner near the Pavilion; the old church has been rebuilt and modernised out of recognition; and the houses have spread inland over all the hills, or along the original valley far beyond the once beautiful viaduct on the London road, now choked and obscured by endless rows of modern brick-built cottages. Nothing remains to-day of the primitive Brighton except a forgotten philological fossil in the name of the Steyne and the queer old legal form of Brighthelmstone still employed in public documents for certain official purposes.