the story of the rescued
poachers may still, perhaps, be heard from the mouth of the oldest
inhabitant, who was himself at one time a constable. As an expert in
suppressing crime, he never liked the plan on which the cage was built.
The floor is higher by two steps than the ground outside, and you had to
go upstairs to it. In fact, you had to throw your prisoner upstairs--a
most perilous business. It ought to have been built so that you could
take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs like a Christian.

Caged prisoners at Lingfield were not always treated with the utmost
rigour of the law. At one time the door was pierced by a grating, and
through the grating kindly souls passed packets of tobacco. Liquor could
not be passed in packets, but found its way in somehow. Afterwards in
severer days the grating was closed, and prisoners neither drank nor
smoked, as became their miserable condition. Nine years after the last
captive languished behind the blocked grating the prison was taken over
by the village for fresh purposes. Henceforward it was to be the museum,
and was duly vested in trustees. Its collection still grows slowly.
"Anything to do with village crime--we make that our special subject,"
the curator informs you with a pleasing urbaneness. The collection
includes a man-trap, a pair of handcuffs, a canvas bed which furnishes
the museum whenever it is wanted as a mortuary, a pair of farmer's
snowboots used a hundred years ago, and a pair of farmer's ordinary
boots used more recently.

Of tiny village streets there is no more fascinating byway than the
little road which leads up to the south door of Lingfield Church. On the
right is the Star inn, taking its sign from the arms of the great lords
of Sterborough who lie in the church; and built beside the inn a row of
quiet cottages, perhaps once part of the inn. On the left one building
stands out from the rest; an early sixteenth century timber house,
admirably preserved, and of peculiar interest because after three
hundred years it is still carrying on the business for which it was
intended. It was built as a shop, and it is a shop still. Modern
preference for plate glass and easily opened doors has changed the
original plan of the ground floor, but the first floor remains almost as
its builder left it, and its heavy girders with their rounded ends
jutting out over the pavement below are a happy testimony to the worth
of wealden builders and wealden wood. We