The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"
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Title: The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"
Author: Charles G. Harper
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THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY
[Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY, FROM THE GREEN COURT.
"_A long narrow vaulted passage, paved with flagstones,
vulgarly known by the name of the 'Dark Entry.'_"
_The Legend of "Nell Cook."_
_Frontispiece._]
THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY
Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"
by
CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of "The Brighton Road," "The Portsmouth Road,"
"The Dover Road," "The Bath Road," "The Exeter Road,"
"The Great North Road," "The Norwich Road," "The
Holyhead Road," "The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn
Road," and "Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore"
[Illustration: Woman on broomstick]
Illustrated by the Author
London
Adam & Charles Black
1904
PREFACE [Illustration: Man on broomstick]
_"INGOLDSBY" has always been of that comparatively small number of
authors who command a personal interest and affection. Reading the
"LEGENDS" you cannot choose but see that when he sat down, often
at the midnight hour, to dash off the fun and frolic that came so
readily to his mind, it was a part of himself that appeared upon the
page. He did not and could not, when he wrote for publication under a
pseudonym, be other than himself, and did not self-consciously draw a
veil of style around him and speak, a cloaked figure lacking ordinary
human attributes, or as other than a man of the world. He claimed no
sacerdotal privileges, and we know, from the published "_Life and
Letters_" by his son, that he was in his life and intimacies, as the
Reverend R. H. Barham, the same genial wit and humorist he appeared
as "Tom Ingoldsby." He must, therefore, have been a likeable man,
and those who knew him were fortunate persons. The next best thing to
knowing him is to know something of the Ingoldsby Country, that corner
of Kent where he was born and whose legends he has put to such splendid
literary uses. The "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" have so long since become a
classic that it is indeed somewhat surprising that no literary pilgrim,
for love of their author and interest in his career, has before this
traced the landmarks of his storied district._
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM, SURREY.
_January, 1904._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. BARHAM: THE AUTHOR OF THE _INGOLDSBY LEGENDS_ 7
III. CANTERBURY 28
IV. THE CATHEDRAL: THE MURDER OF BECKET 41
V. TAPPINGTON HALL 63
VI. ROMNEY MARSH 77
VII. ROMNEY MARSH (_continued_) 98
VIII. OLD AND NEW ROMNEY, AND DYMCHURCH 110
IX. HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 124
X. FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 143
XI. FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD (_continued_) 159
XII. THE BACK OF BEYOND 165
XIII. THE BACK OF BEYOND (_continued_) 181
XIV. THE COASTWISE ROAD: FOLKESTONE TO
DOVER AND SANDWICH 192
XV. SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 208
XVI. SARRE AND RECULVER TO CANTERBURY 222
XVII. THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 233
XVIII. SOME OUTLYING INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 257
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The "Dark Entry," Canterbury, From the Green Court _Frontispiece_
Sketch Map: The Ingoldsby Country 5
"Tom Ingoldsby:" the Rev. Richard Harris Barham 13
No. 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury _Facing_ 14
St. Mary Magdalene, Burgate Street, Canterbury 15
Westwell 16
The Hall, No. 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury _Facing_ 16
The Barham Coat-of-Arms 18
No. 4, St. Paul's Churchyard 22
Amen Corner, where Barham died.... 24
Ruins of St. Mary Magdalene, after the Fire of
December 1886 26
Canterbury Castle 32
The Dane John, Canterbury 34
The Dark Entry 37
" " " 38
"The Martyrdom," Canterbury Cathedral 52
The Vale of Barham 65
The "Eagle Gates," Broome Park 67
Broome Park, the Real Original of Tappington
Hall _Facing_ 68
Tappington, from the Folkestone Road 69
Denton _Facing_ 70
Denton Church and Court 71
Tappington Hall 73
The "Merchant's-Mark" of Thomas Marsh of Marston 74
Tappington Hall: Night _Facing_ 74
Warehorne 79
A Sundial, Warehorne Church 81
Warehorne 82
The Royal Military Canal at Warehorne 84
Snargate 100
Brookland 102
Ivychurch 104
Newchurch, on Romney Marsh: "This recondite
region; this fifth quarter of the globe" 105
Old Romney 111
New Romney 116
A Martello Tower 119
Dymchurch Wall 121
" " 122
The "Smugglers' Nest," Hythe 127
Hythe, from the Road to Sandgate 128
Folkestone 132
The Stade, Folkestone 135
Folkestone Harbour 137
Folkestone in 1830. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._
_Facing_ 140
Romney Marsh, from Lympne " 144
Lympne Castle 146
A Cottage Tablet, Lympne 147
A Kentish Farm 148
The Ruined Chapel, Court-at-Street 149
An Old Sundial, Aldington 151
Aldington 154
Cobb's Hall 159
Aldington Knoll 160
Bilsington Woods 161
Bilsington Priory 162
Bilsington Church 163
Orlestone Hill 164
Saltwood Castle 169
Westenhanger House 175
Lyminge 182
Lyminge Church 183
Old Houses at Elham 185
Acryse 187
The Preceptory, Swingfield Minnis 190
The "Lone Tree" 197
East Langdon 199
"Marston Hall" 200
The "Three Horseshoes," Great Mongeham 201
St. Peter's, Sandwich 205
The Barbican, Sandwich 209
Sandwich, from Great Stonar 210
Richborough, and the Kentish Coast-line towards Ramsgate 213
The Smuggler's Leap 215
Monkton 217
" 218
The "Ville of Sarre" 220
Chislett 223
Reculver 225
Fordwich 228
Fordwich Town Hall 230
Sturry 232
The Devil's Footprint 234
Minster-in-Sheppey 243
Tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland 245
The Horse-vane, Minster-in-Sheppey 246
The Soul, from a Monument in Minster-in-Sheppey Church 249
The Estuary of the Medway, from the Road near
Minster-in-Sheppey 251
Shurland Castle 253
Netley Abbey 261
Salisbury Plain: where the Lavington Road branches off
to the left from the one to Devizes 266
[Illustration: The Ingoldsby Country]
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The present writer foregathered a little while since with a man who had
been to the uttermost parts of the earth. He had just returned from
Australia, and was casually met on what the vulgar call the "Tuppenny
Tube," travelling from the Bank to Shepherd's Bush. It was a humorous
anti-climax to all those other journeys, but that is not the point here
to be made. He was full, as might have been expected, of tales strange
and curious of those outposts of civilisation he had visited, and of
legends of places--whose names generally ended with two gulps and a
click--where civilisation was an unknown quantity. But to this man, who
had been everywhere and elsewhere, who had crossed the Dark Continent
when it was still dark, England, his native land, was largely a sealed
book. Even as one spoke with him it could be perceived how perfect an
exemplar he was of many globe-trotting Britons who roam the world and
can talk to you at first hand of Bulawayo or the Australian bush, but
are instantly nonplussed if the subject of rural England be broached.
When he was done talking of places with savage and
infinitely-repetitive names, composed of fantastically-arranged
vowels, with never a consonant to consort with them, he was asked if
he knew Kent. "Kent?" he repeated, in Jingle-like fashion, "why, yes.
Canterbury Cathedral, hop-gardens, Charles Dickens, Rochester, Dover,
and--and all that," he concluded, with a vague sweep of his arm. "Run
through it on y'r way to Paris," he added, in an explanatory way. And
that was all he knew of Kent: a place you run through, on the way to
somewhere else! a country observed from fleeting and not very attentive
glances obtained from a railway-carriage window! Such glances furnished
him fully forth in all he had cared to know of the Garden of England!
Not that one fully subscribes to that familiar epithet of praise, which
must have originally been given by a Cockney who knew no better. Who
that ever has sojourned in the west, and has known lovely Devon, would
for a moment give Kent that pride of place? Now, if it were called the
"Market Garden of England----!" What?
But this is not to say that Kent is not very beautiful; only it is not
Devon. I do not pillory Kent because it is not something else, and
would by no means contemn its chalky soil because of any affection for
the good red earth of that other shire. Kent has its lovable qualities,
and when you have eliminated the thronging tramps, the paper and other
factories, the objectionable hop-pickers, the beanfeasters, and the
multitudinous yahoos who people its nearer Cockneyfied districts, there
is a very considerable residuum of exquisite country. The elimination
of all those items would be what the slangy term a "big order"; but
the tourist who knows, and even the tourist who does not actually
_know_, but can infer and deduce, need never lose himself in the Kent
of commerce and blackguardism. He seeks out, and by instinct finds,
the best; and, having found the best that Kent affords, is ready to
declare that it is hard to beat. It is, for example, impossible to
match, even in Devon, the beauty of that fertile fruit and hop-bearing
belt of country which begins at Newington, a few miles below Chatham,
and continues beside the Dover Road, past Teynham and Faversham, and
on to Canterbury. It is a beauty that appeals alike and at once to the
artist and the man with carnal appetites and fleshly longings; for,
once off the dusty high-road, it is a constant succession of orchards
and hop-gardens, wherein it is pleasant to lie on sunny afternoons
in the dappled shade of the apple, pear, or cherry-trees, with the
swede-eating sheep for sole companions, and the noise of the toilsome
world coming restfully over the hedgerows.
It _is_ a noisy and a toilsome world. There goes the roar of the big
guns down at the Medway forts; the clear note of the bugles sings
up faintly--like an anthem from amid a naughty nest of vipers--out
of Chatham and New Brompton (we are being duly taken care of!); the
whistling and rushing of the railway trains are never still, and you
can hear that holiday world which takes its vacation strenuously,
"pip-pipping" on cycles, "poop-pooping" on motor-cars, and playing the
yearnful concertina on the passing break like anything, t'other side
of the merciful hedge. Even if you could not hear them, the signs of
their passing would be evident in the cloud of chalk-dust which, like
the pillar of cloud by day that guided the Children of Israel, marks
their route. But the Land of Promise sought by those pilgrims, at such
speed, is not ours. How should it be? Theirs is ever the Next Place;
ours is Here. Theirs is the Promise without fruition; ours is granted
to the full, and Now, wherever we be. That is if we be indeed wise in
our generation, and content with the happy moment. One understands that
same happy moment, here and now, to be passed in the consumption of
ripe cherries out of a cool cabbage-leaf, in the shade of the boughs
that bore them. This is one way in which beauteous Kent appeals, as we
have said, to the carnal man, who perceives that if indeed Devonshire
cream be good, equally good are the kindly fruits of Kent.
If Kent be essentially the Market Garden of England, rather than
pre-eminently the Garden in the picturesque sense, certainly this
country yields to none other in historic or literary interest.
That coast where Cæsar and Augustine, easily first among the great
personages of history, landed; this fertile county which contains the
Metropolitan Cathedral of the Church of England; the neighbourhood of
Rochester and Maidstone, linked with the literary activities of Charles
Dickens, must needs hold the affections of Englishmen, irrespective of
the physical and æsthetic attractions of scenery. But there is another
great literary figure connected with Kent, both by birth and by reason
of his having exploited many of its rural legends in his merry verse.
Richard Harris Barham was born at Canterbury, and in his _Ingoldsby
Legends_ created an Ingoldsby Country, which he had already peopled
with many notable characters before death cut him off in his prime.
The capital of the Ingoldsby Country is Canterbury; its very heart and
core is comprised within the district to the east of a line drawn
due south from Whitstable to Canterbury, Denton, and Hythe; and its
frontiers make an indeterminate line to the west, beyond Romney Marsh
and Ashford. The whole north coast of Kent, including Sheppey, the
Swale, and the littoral of the Thames and Medway, is part and parcel
of Ingoldsby Land, whose isolated and far-off dependencies are found
at Shrewsbury, the scene of "Bloudie Jack"; or Salisbury Plain, where
the "Dead Drummer" is located; at Wayland Wood, near Wymondham, in
Norfolk, where the legend of the "Babes in the Wood" belongs; and at
Netley Abbey, the scene of a fine poem. London, too, has its Ingoldsby
associations, duly set forth in these pages.
[Illustration: Sketch Map: The Ingoldsby Country]
CHAPTER II
BARHAM: THE AUTHOR OF THE _INGOLDSBY LEGENDS_
There are _coteries_, circles inner and outer, in the world of letters,
and there have always been. There are some in this time of ours whose
members think they are of the giants whose memory the world will not
willingly let die. There were other _coterie_ when the nineteenth
century was but newly come into its second quarter, when the period
that is now known as Early Victorian was in the making, and when the
Queen was young. The members of those literary brotherhoods are gone,
each one to his place, and the memories of the most of them, of the
books they wrote, the jokes they cracked, of their friendships and
quarrels, are dim and dusty to-day. The taste in humour and pathos
is not the taste of this time, which laughs at the pathos, and finds
the humour, when not dull, merely spiteful and vindictive. When you
rise from a perusal of Douglas Jerrold's wounding wit, you think him
ungenerous and a cad, De Quincey's frolics merely elephantine, Hood's
facilities dull, and Leigh Hunt's performances but journalism.
All this is but the foil to show the brilliant humour, the fun, and
the truly pathetic note of Richard Harris Barham's writings to better
effect. Time has breathed upon the glass through which we see the
lives and performances of Barham's contemporaries, and has obscured our
view of them; but the author of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ remains, almost
alone among that Early Victorian band, as acceptable to-day (nay,
perhaps even more acceptable) than he was fifty years ago.
The _Ingoldsby Legend_ will never be allowed to die. Indeed, we live
in times when their admirable sanity might well be invoked as a
counterblast to modern neurotic conditions, and a healthy revulsion
from superstitious revivals. Written at that now historic time when
the Ritualistic innovations and tendency towards Roman Catholicism of
the new school of theology at Oxford were agitating English thought,
they express the common-sense scorn of the healthy mind against the
mystification and deceit of the religion that the Reformation pitched,
neck and crop, out of England, close upon three hundred and seventy
years ago, and for which the large-minded tolerance of to-day is not
enough. Domination is its aim, but no mind that can enjoy the mirth and
marvels of the Legends has any room for such ghostly pretensions, and
their continued popularity is thus, by parity of reasoning, something
of an assurance. The _Ingoldsby Legends_ are included in the _Index
Expurgatorium_ of Rome.
Superfine critics have in recent years declared that Barham's fun has
grown out of date, and that they cannot read him as of old. But your
critic commonly speaks only for himself; and moreover, the superfine,
who cannot read Dickens, for example, have been sadly flouted of late
by the still increasing popular favour of that novelist.
It was in the fertile county of Kent that Barham was born, in the
midst of a district that has ever been the cradle of Barhams. Eight
miles to the south of the old Cathedral of Canterbury, and near
by the Folkestone Road, there lies, secluded in a deep valley, an
old-fashioned farmhouse, unpretending enough to the outward glance, but
quaint and curious within. This is the old manor house of Tappington
Everard, mentioned so often and so familiarly in the _Ingoldsby
Legend_, and for many centuries the home of Richard Harris Barham's
ancestors. "Tom Ingoldsby" himself was, indeed, born at Canterbury,
near the Cathedral precincts, and first saw the world beneath the
shadow of that great Church, of whose glories he was in after years
to tell in his own peculiar and inimitable way. His father, made rich
by hops, was a man of consideration at Canterbury, and filled an
Aldermanic chair with all the dignity that comes of adipose tissue
largely developed. He was, in fact and few words, a fat man, and it was
probably in reference to him that Tom Ingoldsby, in later years, wrote
of the "aldermanic nose" trumpeting in the Cathedral during service.
The Rev. Richard Harris Barham, the self-styled "Thomas Ingoldsby",
claimed descent from the De Bearhams, anciently the FitzUrses, whose
possessions extended round about Tappington for many miles of this fair
county of Kent. He delighted to think that he was descended from one
of those four knights who, on that dark December day of 1170, broke in
upon the religious quiet of the Cathedral and slaughtered Becket in
the north transept. When their crime was wrought the murderers fled,
FitzUrse escaping to Ireland, where he is said to have taken the name
of MacMahon, the Irish equivalent of his original patronymic, which was
just the Norman-Latin for "Bear's Son".
He died an exile, leaving his Manor of Barham to his brother, who,
so odious had the name of FitzUrse now become, changed it for an
Anglicised variant, and called himself "De Bearham." Eventually the
aristocratic prefix "De" fell out of use, and in course of time even
Bearham became "Barham."
The Barhams held place and power here for centuries, giving their name
to the village of Barham, which nestles, embowered in foliage, beneath
the bleak and bare expanse of Barham Downs; their estates dropping from
them little by little until, in the time of James I., the remaining
property was alienated by a Thomas Barham, a nerveless, unworthy
descendant of the fierce FitzUrses, who sold it to the Reverend Charles
Fotherby, Archdeacon of Canterbury. Thus were the Barhams torn from
their native soil and rendered landless.
The adjoining manor of Tappington, next Barham, had been held in
1272 by one Gerrard de Tappington, as one knight's fee. In the reign
of Henry VIII. it was purchased by a certain John Boys, who died in
1544, when his son, William Boys, alienated a small portion of the
demesne to a person named Verrier, and the manor, with the remainder
of the demesne, to one Marsh, to whose descendants it passed until at
length sold by Colonel Thomas Marsh to Mr. Thomas Harris, hopfactor of
Canterbury, who died in 1729, and whose daughter and sole heiress had,
by a singular freak of fate, married a John Barham, bringing him not
only the old manor of Tappington, or Tapton Wood, as it has sometimes
been styled, as her dower, but also some portions of the long-lost
lands of those whom he claimed for ancestors, including the manors of
Parmstead (called in olden times Barhamstead).
It will be noted that it was a John Barham--not necessarily one of
the Barhams of Tappington--who thus secured the Harris heiress. Kent
contains more than one family of the name, but let us hope, for the
sake of sentiment, that all Barhams, of whatever district, descend from
the original assassin. It would certainly have been a grievous thing
to Tom Ingoldsby if he had been compelled to cherish a doubt of the
blood-boltered genuineness of his own ancestry. We have, indeed, some
slightly different versions of what became of the FitzUrse family. One
tells us that a branch lingered long in the neighbourhood of Williton,
in Somerset, under their proper name, which became successively
corrupted into Fitzour, and Fishour, and at last assumed the common
form of Fisher. This is good news for Fishers anxious to assume long
descent, even if they have to date from a murderer. Time throws an
historic condonation over such things, and many an ambitious person who
would not willingly kill a fly, and who would very naturally shrink
from owning any connection with a homicidal criminal now on his trial,
would glow with pride at an attested family tree springing from that
blood-thirsty knight.
Another tales gives the Italian name of Orsini as a variant of
FitzUrse. If there be anything in it, then assuredly the notorious
Orsini of the infernal machine, who attempted the life of Napoleon
III., was a reversion to twelfth century type.
Other Barhams there are known to fame: Henry, surgeon and natural
history writer, who died in 1726, and was one of the family of Barhams
of Barham Court; and Nicholas Barham, lawyer, of Wadhurst, Sussex,
who died in 1577, and was descended from the Barhams of Teston,
near Maidstone. Nicholas was ever a favourite Christian name with
all branches of the family, and Tom Ingoldsby so named his youngest
son--the "Little Boy Ned" of the Legends.
The witty and mirth-provoking Reverend Richard Harris Barham, destined
to bear the most distinguished name of all his race, was fourth in
descent from the peculiarly fortunate John Barham who wedded the Harris
hopfields and the Harris daughter. His father, himself a "Richard
Harris" Barham--was that alderman of capacious paunch of whom mention
has already been made. He resided at 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury, a
large, substantial house of pallid grey brick, plain almost to ugliness
outside, but remarkably comfortable and beautifully appointed within,
standing at the corner of Canterbury Lane. A brick of the garden wall
facing the lane may be observed, scratched lightly with "M. B. 1733."
To this house he had succeeded on the death of his father, Richard
Barham, in 1784. He did not very long enjoy the inheritance.
[Illustration: "TOM INGOLDSBY": THE REV. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM.
_From a drawing by his son, the Rev. Richard Harris Dalton Barham._]
The alderman was of truly aldermanic proportions, for he weighed
nineteen stone. Existing portraits of him introduce us to a personage
of a more than Falstaffian appearance, and the tale is still told how
it was found necessary to widen the doorway at the time of his funeral.
For eleven years he lived here; and here it was, December 6th, 1788,
that the only child of himself and his housekeeper, Elizabeth Fox, was
born.
Elizabeth Fox came from Minster-in-Thanet. A miniature portrait of her
shows a fair-haired, bright-eyed woman, with abundant indications of
a sunny nature, rich in wit and humour. It is quite clear that it was
from his mother Ingoldsby derived his mirthful genius, just as in a
companion miniature of himself, painted at the age of six, representing
him as a pretty, vivacious little boy with large brown roguish eyes, he
bore a striking likeness to her.
It is singular to note that the future rector of St. Mary Magdalene in
the City of London was as an infant baptised at a church of precisely
the same dedication--that of St. Mary Magdalene in Burgate Street, a
few doors only removed from his birthplace. The tower only of that
church is now standing, the rest having been pulled down in 1871. It is
still possible to decipher some of the tablets fixed against the wall
of the tower, but exposed to the weather and slowly decaying. There is
one to Ingoldsby's grandfather, Richard, who died December 11th, 1784,
aged 82, and to his grandmother, Elizabeth Barham, who died October
2nd, 1781, aged 81; and other tablets commemorate his aunts Eliza and
Sarah, who died September 26th, 1782, and December 16th, 1784, aged
respectively forty-six and forty-four years.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE, 61, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY, WHERE
THE AUTHOR OF THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" WAS BORN.]
[Illustration: ST. MARY MAGDALENE, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY.]
Ingoldsby was only in his seventh year when a very serious thing
befell, for his father, the alderman, died in 1795. Those who love
their Ingoldsby and everything that was his, as the present writer
does, will be interested to know that he was buried at Upper Hardres
("Hards," in the Kentish speech), a small and lonely village, four
miles from Canterbury, on the old Stone Street, as you go towards
Lympne and Hythe. There, in the village church, high up on the south
wall of the nave, the tablet to his memory may be found. What became
of Elizabeth Fox is beyond our ken. We are told, in the _Life and
Letters of Richard Harris Barham_, by his son the Reverend Richard
Dalton Barham, that she was at the time a confirmed invalid.
[Illustration: WESTWELL.]
[Illustration: THE HALL, 61, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY, WHERE THE
AUTHOR OF THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" WAS BORN.]
To three guardians had been given the administration of the
comfortable patrimony of the boy, and by them he was sent to St.
Paul's School, then in the City of London. Thence he went to
Brasenose, Oxford, leaving the university with a modest B.A., degree
in 1811. Meanwhile the villain of the piece had been at work, in
the person of a dishonest attorney, one of his guardians, by whose
practices his fortune was very seriously reduced. Returning to
Canterbury, he seems to have contemplated studying for the law, but
quickly relinquished the idea, and prepared himself for the Church.
He was admitted to holy orders, and in 1813, in his twenty-fifth year
obtained a curacy at Ashford. This was exchanged in the following year
for the curacy of the neighbouring village of Westwell. Thus he was
fairly launched on his professional career, becoming successively
Rector of Snargate and Curate of Warehorne, Minor Canon of St. Paul's
and Rector of the united parishes of St. Mary Magdalene with St.
Gregory-by-St.-Paul's, and finally, by exchange in 1842, Rector of
St. Faith-by-St.-Paul's--a fine mid-nineteenth century specimen of
the "squarson." A competent genealogist, an accomplished antiquary,
a man of letters, he, by force of his sprightly wit, welded the
fragmentary legends of the country--but largely those of his native
county of Kent--into those astonishing amalgams of fact and fiction
which, published first, from time to time, in _Bentley's Miscellany_,
were collected and issued as the _Ingoldsby Legends_. It is not the
least among the charms of those verses that fact and fiction are so
inextricably mixed in them that it needs the learning of the skilled
antiquary to sift the one from the other; and so plausible are many of
his ostensible citations from old Latin documents, and his fictitious
genealogies so interwoven with the names, the marriages and descents
of persons, real and imaginary, that an innocent who wrote some years
ago to _Notes and Queries_, desiring further particulars of what
he thought to be genuine records, is surely to be excused for his
too-ready faith.
The assumed name of "Ingoldsby" is stated by his son to be found in
a branch of the family genealogy, but inquiry fails to trace the
name in that connection, and it may be said at once that the Kentish
Ingoldsbys are entirely figments of Barham's lively imagination.
Yorkshire knows a family of that name, of whom Barham probably had
never heard anything save their name. He was a man of property, and
modestly proud of the descent he claimed, and though by no means
rich, his place was among--
The _élite_ of the old county families round,
Such as Honeywood, Oxenden, Knatchbull and Norton,
Matthew Robinson, too, with his beard, from Monk's Horton,
The Faggs, and Finch-Hattons, Tokes, Derings, and Deedses,
And Fairfax (who then called the castle of Leeds his).
He was, in fact, "armigerous", as heralds would say, and the arms of
his family were--not those lioncels of the Shurlands impaled with the
saltire of the Ingoldsbys, of which we may read in the Legends--but as
pictured here. It may be noted that another Barham family--the Barhams
of Teston, near Maidstone--bore the three bears for arms, without the
distinguishing fesse; and that they are shown thus on an old brass
plate in Ashford church, which Ingoldsby must often have seen during
his early curacy there.
[Illustration: THE BARHAM COAT-OF-ARMS.]
When, however, he talks of the escutcheons displayed in the great hall
of Tappington, charged with the armorial bearings of the family and
its connections, he does more than to picturesquely embroider facts.
He invents them, and the "old coat" "in which a _chevron between
three eagles' cuisses sable_ is blazoned quarterly with the _engrailed
saltire_ of the Ingoldsbys"--which Mr. Simpkinson found to be that
of "Sir Ingoldsby Bray, _temp._ Richard I."--is one not known to the
Heralds' College.
Behind that farcical "Mr. Simpkinson, from Bath," lurks a real person,
and one not unknown to those who have read Britton and Brayley books
on Cathedral antiquities. John Britton, the original of Simpkinson,
was, equally with his contemporary Barham, an antiquary and genealogist
of accomplishment, and a herald of repute. Barham would not have
allowed as much, for there was, it would seem, a certain amount of
ill-feeling between the two, which resulted in the satirical passages
relating to "Mr. Simpkinson" to be met with in the pages of the
_Ingoldsby Legends_. They tell us that he was, among other things,
"an influential member of the Antiquarian Society, to whose 'Beauties
of Bagnigge Wells' he had been a liberal subscriber"; and that "his
inaugural essay on the President's cocked-hat was considered a miracle
of erudition; and his account of the earliest application of gilding
to gingerbread a masterpiece of antiquarian research." In all this one
finds something of that rapier-thrust of satire, that mordant wit which
comes of personal rivalry; and the heartfelt scorn of a man who loved
architecture, and was, indeed, a member of the first Archæological
Institute, but who whole-heartedly resented the introduction of picnic
parties into archæological excursions, and revolted at popularising
architecture and antiquarian research by brake parties, in which
the popping of champagne corks punctuated the remarks of speakers
holding forth on the architectural features of buildings in a style
sufficiently picturesque and simple to hold the attention of the
ladies. Those who have found how unconquerable is the indifference of
the public to these things will appreciate to the fullest extent the
feelings of Tom Ingoldsby, while yet reserving some meed of admiration
for John Britton's labours, which did much to advance the slow-growing
knowledge of Gothic architecture in the first half of the century.
His work may halt somewhat, his architectural knowledge be something
piecemeal and uninformed with inner light; but by his labours many
others were led to pursue the study of ecclesiastical art.
But the humour with which Barham surrounded "Mr. Simpkinson's" doings
took no count of his accomplishments, as may be seen in the excursion
to "Bolsover Priory", narrated in "The Spectre of Tappington".
"Bolsover Priory", said Mr. Simpkinson, "was founded in the reign of
Henry VI. about the beginning of the eleventh century. Hugh de Bolsover
had accompanied that monarch to the Holy Land, in the expedition
undertaken by way of penance for the murder of his young nephews in
the Tower. Upon the dissolution of the monasteries, the veteran was
enfeoffed in the lands and manor, to which he gave his own name of
Bolsover, or Bee-Owls-Over (by corruption Bolsover)--a Bee in chief
over Three Owls, all proper, being the armorial ensigns borne by this
distinguished crusader at the siege of Acre."
Thus far Simpkinson. Now Barham turns, with good effect, on the
ignorant sightseers to whom ruins are just a curiosity and nothing
more.
"'Ah! that was Sir Sidney Smith,' said Mr. Peters; 'I've heard tell of
him, and all about Mrs. Partington, and--'
"'P., be quiet, and don't expose yourself!' sharply interrupted his
lady. P. was silenced, and betook himself to the bottled stout.
"'These lands,' continued the antiquary, 'were held in grand sergeantry
by the presentation of three white owls and a pot of honey----'
"'Lassy me! how nice!' said Miss Julia. Mr. Peters licked his lips.
"'Pray give me leave, my dear--owls and honey, whenever the king should
come a-rat-catching in this part of the country.'
"'Rat-catching!' ejaculated the Squire, pausing abruptly in the
mastication of a drum-stick.
"'To be sure, my dear sir; don't you remember that rats once came under
the forest laws--a minor species of venison? "Rats and mice, and such
small deer," eh?--Shakespeare, you know. Our ancestors ate rats; and
owls, you know, are capital mousers----'
"'I seen a howl,' said Mr. Peters."
"Bolsover Priory" is one of those few places mentioned by Ingoldsby
that have not been identified with any real place in Kent. It might
have been taken to mean the ruins of the Preceptory at Swingfield
Minnis, some two miles from Tappington, had not Barham expressly said,
in his prefatory notes to the "Witches' Frolic," that they were not the
same.
[Illustration: NO. 4, ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD, DEMOLISHED 1901.]
The literary landmarks associated with Barham's residence in London
are readily traced. On leaving Kent in 1821 to take up his residence
in London, he, for a time, rented the upper part of the house, still
standing, No. 51, Great Queen Street, Holborn. There his eldest
surviving daughter, Caroline Frances Barham, afterwards Lady Bond,
was born, July 22nd, 1823. In 1824, following his appointment to
the rectorship of St. Mary Magdalene, the family removed to a house
numbered "4" on the south side of St. Paul's churchyard, and there
remained until 1839, when an exchange was made to a house in Amen
Corner, Paternoster Row--the first house through the gateway--by
arrangement with Sydney Smith, who was leaving it to reside in Green
Street, Mayfair.
He describes the garden at the back of this house as "containing three
polyanthus roots, a real tree, a brown box border, a snuff-coloured
jessamine, a shrub which is either a dwarf acacia or an overgrown
gooseberry bush, eight broken bottles, and a tortoise-shell tom-cat
asleep in the sunniest corner, with a wide and extensive prospect of
the back of the 'Oxford Arms,' and a fine _hanging_ wood (the 'new
drop' at Newgate) in the distance."
[Illustration: AMEN CORNER, WHERE BARHAM DIED.]
But the sprightly wit, the sound common-sense, the good-natured satire,
were doomed to early extinction. It was in the prime of life, and
when he might well have looked forward to further consolidating and
extending the fame his genius had already brought, that the blow fell
which laid him low. He had already, some twenty years earlier, suffered
some slight temporary trouble with a sensitive throat, and although
in general a robust man, was in that respect peculiarly liable to the
weather. It happened, unfortunately, that he was present as a spectator
at the opening by the Queen of the new Royal Exchange, October 28th,
1844. It was a bleak day, and, sitting at an open window in Cheapside
placed at his disposal by a friend, he caught a chill from whose
effects he never recovered. The evil was a stubborn inflammation of
the throat, which clung to him throughout the winter, and by degrees
reduced the strong man to an alarmingly weak condition. In the February
of 1845 he was induced to visit Bath, in the hope of recovery in that
mild atmosphere, but an imprudent return to London in the treacherous
month of March, in order to attend a meeting of the Archæological
Association, aggravated the malady. Still, that strong physique
struggled against illness, and he once more partly recovered, only to
be again laid low by a cold caught at an April vestry meeting in St.
Paul's. It was, however, not merely an exaggerated susceptibility to
cold that by this time dogged his every excursion into the open air,
but the grossly mistaken treatment of his medical man, who had inflamed
the malady by applying caustic to the uvula. At the beginning of May,
although reduced almost to the condition of a helpless child by his
sufferings, he was taken again to the west; this time to Clifton, near
Bristol. Unhappily, the local practitioner who was called in to attend
him was by no means a properly qualified man, and on hearing of the
mistaken treatment already followed, could think of nothing better than
to continue it. It is not remarkable, under the circumstances, that he
experienced no relief from the climate of Clifton, but grew steadily
weaker. It was a sad time, for his wife was simultaneously laid low
with illness. Everything devolved upon his daughter, Frances, then only
in her twentieth year, for his son Dick was away in Cambridgeshire,
doing duty as a clergyman.
The dying man--for the truth could be no longer disguised--kept a
spirit of the supremest cheerfulness and Christian courage. His
humorous verses on the incidents of his distressing illness--originally
composed as replies to the inquiries of anxious friends and afterwards
published in the collection of _Ingoldsby Lyrics_ as "The Bulletin,"
are no whit inferior to the productions of his careless health.
[Illustration: RUINS OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE, OLD FISH STREET HILL, CITY
OF LONDON, AFTER THE FIRE OF DECEMBER 1886.]
When recovery at Clifton seemed hopeless, he was removed again to
London, to the house he had occupied for the last six years, and made a
grim joke as they assisted him into the house, on the appropriateness
of his being brought at that juncture to Amen Corner. A few days he lay
there, life ebbing away from sheer weakness; his mind still clear, and
divided between making the most careful disposition of his property and
fond memories of that "little boy Ned" who had died, untimely, some
years before. It was then he wrote that last poem, the beautiful "As I
Laye a-thynkynge," printed at the end of all editions of the _Ingoldsby
Legends_ as "The Last Lines of Thomas Ingoldsby." There is not, to my
mind, anything more exquisitely beautiful and pathetic in the gorgeous
roll of English literature than the seven stanzas of the swan-song of
this master of humour and pathos. It is wholly for themselves, and not
by reason of reading into them the special circumstances under which
they were written, that so sweeping a judgment is made. That they have
never been properly recognised is due to the Wardour Street antiquity
of their spelling, and still more to that strange insistence which
ordains that the accepted wit and humourist must always be "funny" or
go unacknowledged. It is a strange penalty; one that would seek to
deprive the humourist of all human emotions save that of laughter, and
so make him that reproach of honest men--a cynic.
It was on June 17th, 1845, that Barham died, untimely, before the
completion of his fifty-seventh year. He was buried in the vaults of
his former church, St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street Hill, one of
those half-deserted city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after
the Great Fire of London. There he might have lain until now, but for
the fire of December 2nd, 1886, which destroyed the building. For at
least four years the blackened and roofless ruins stood, fronting
Knightrider Street, and then they were removed, to make way for
warehouses. The contents of the vaults were at the same time dispersed,
the remains of Tom Ingoldsby being removed to Kensal Green Cemetery,
while the tablet to his memory was appropriately transferred to St.
Paul's, where, in the crypt, it may still be seen.
CHAPTER III
CANTERBURY
There stands a city, neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty.
It matters very little, if at all,
Whether its denizens are dull or witty;
Whether the ladies there are short or tall,
Brunettes or blondes; only, there stands a city!
Perhaps 'tis also requisite to minute,
That there's a Castle and a Cobbler in it.
Thus wrote Ingoldsby of his native city of Canterbury, in "The Ghost,"
and "sweet and pretty" its air and situation remain, sixty years
since those lines were penned. For the changes that have altered so
many other cities and towns have brought little disturbance here. No
manufactures have come to abolish the prettiness of the situation; the
air--the atmospheric air--is sweet and fragrant as of yore, and that
other air--the demeanour and deportment--of Canterbury is still, as
ever, gravely cheerful, as surely befits the capital city of a Primate
whose Church is still a going concern.
Ingoldsby was exactly right in his epithetical summing-up, for
prettiness and not grandeur is the characteristic of the gentle valley
of the Stour, wherein Canterbury is set. Approach it from whatever
quarter you will, and you will find prettiness only in the situation.
Even when viewed from the commanding heights of Harbledown and St.
Thomas's Hill, the only grandeur is that of the Cathedral, and that
is extrinsic, a something imported into the picture. Nay, even the
uprising bulk of that cathedral church gains in effect from being thus
set down in midst of a valley that is almost with equal justness called
a plain, and whose features may, without offence, or the suspicion of
any thought derogatory from their beauty, be termed so featureless.
Unquestionably the best direction whence to enter this ancient capital
of the Kentish folk--this Kaintware-bury of the Saxons, the Durovernum
of the Romans--is from Harbledown, whence the pilgrims from London,
or from the north and west of England, entered. Only thus does the
stranger receive a really accurate impression. With emotions doubtless
less violent than those of the mediæval pilgrims to the shrine of the
blessed martyr, St. Thomas, but still strongly aroused, he sees the
west front of the Cathedral, its two western "towers," and the great
central "Bell-Harry" tower displayed boldly before him, in the level,
and may even identify the more prominent of the public buildings.
Descending from this hill, he passes through the ancient suburb of
Saint Dunstan, and enters the city beneath the frowning portals of the
West Gate.
If, on the other hand, the modern pilgrim arrives per Chatham and
Dover Railway, he will be dumped down in quite a different direction,
on the south side of the city, near Wincheap Street, in which
thoroughfare he will be able, without any delay, to discover his
first Ingoldsby landmark in Canterbury, in the shape of the "Harris's
Almshouses," founded in 1729 by that ancestral Harris whose daughter
his great-grandfather had married. They are five quite humble little
red-brick houses, with a garden at the back, endowed for the support of
two poor parishioners of St. Mary Magdalene, two of Thanington, and one
of St. Mildred's. The value is the modest one of about £9 a year. An
unassuming tablet on the central house of the row tells this story:
Mr. Thomas Harris
of this City
Founder of these Five
Alms-Houses
hath endowed them with
Marly Farm in Kent
for the Maintenance of five
Poor Familys for ever.
Ingoldsby--the Reverend Richard Harris Barham--became a governor of
this charity on his attaining his majority, as already alluded to in
the sketch of his birth and career.
The district of Wincheap only becomes tolerable after leaving the
railway behind. This outlying part, without the city walls, was of old
that place of degradation where the scourgings and stripes, the whips
and scorpions of mediæval punishments, were inflicted; where offending
books--ay, and the horror of it, the Protestant martyrs--were burnt of
yore. In this "Potter's Field" that is not now more than a struggling
little suburb where all the littlenesses of life are prominent, and few
of its beauties are to be seen, there has of late been erected a great
granite memorial pillar, surmounted by the "Canterbury Cross," on the
site of the stake at which forty-one victims of the Marian persecution
perished. Shackle and stake, faggot and gyve, rivet and torch, how busy
they were! It is a beautiful sentiment that rears this monument on the
spot where they suffered who testified for Jesus; but it should stand,
plain for all men to see, in the Cathedral Close itself.
Our course from this point into the city leads up to the Castle,
mentioned in the Legends, and especially in that early one, "The
Ghost," in whose stanzas are found many exquisitely apposite local
Canterbury touches. That Castle is, in its secular way, as interesting
as the Cathedral in its ecclesiastical:
The Castle was a huge and antique mound,
Proof against all the artillery of the quiver,
Ere those abominable guns were found,
To send cold lead through gallant warrior's liver.
It stands upon a gently-rising ground,
Sloping down gradually to the river,
Resembling (to compare great things with smaller)
A well-scoop'd, mouldy Stilton cheese--but taller.
The Keep, I find, 's been sadly alter'd lately,
And, 'stead of mail-clad knights, of honour jealous,
In martial panoply so grand and stately,
Its walls are fill'd with money-making fellows,
And stuff'd, unless I'm misinformed greatly,
With leaden pipes, and coke, and coals, and bellows,
In short, so great a change has come to pass,
'Tis now a manufactory of Gas.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY CASTLE.]
It is immediately fronting the street that this keep of old romantic
Norman times is found, with the smoke and noxious fumes, the chimneys
and retorts, of the City of Canterbury Gas-light and Coke Company,
very insistent to eyes and nose, in the rear; and, if you look down
a by-street--"Gas Street" is the vulgar name of it--and peer into the
empty roofless shell of that keep, you will discover it to be still a
coal-bunker, and that those who, in the rhyme of Ingoldsby, manufacture
"garss," are not more gentle with historic ruins than they were in
1825, when it was first put to this use. These shattered walls that,
quarried by time and the hands of spoilers, do indeed, as Ingoldsby
suggests, resemble one of those great, well-scooped cheeses found
in the coffee-rooms of old-fashioned hotels, were built by two very
great castle-builders; by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and William de
Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury. What Gundulf began for his master
and over-lord William the Conqueror, William de Corbeil completed
for Henry I. Among all the great castle keeps of England it ranked
third in size, and in that respect was inferior only to those of
Colchester and Norwich. It looks a very poor third indeed nowadays, and
so battered and reduced that a hundred keeps are more upstanding and
impressive. Alas! for that poor castle, its career was never an heroic
one. It surrendered tamely to Louis, the Dauphin of France, in 1216,
and for long years afterwards was a prison for Jews on occasions when
persecutions of the Chosen People broke out. From that use it declined
to the lower level of a debtor's prison.
Not far distant from it are the Dane John gardens, a public park of
by no means recent origin. It has been for more than a hundred years
what it is now, and is perhaps one of the very best wooded and most
picturesque urban parks in existence. Antiquaries have long since
ceased to trouble about the odd name, which appears to have originally
come from an estate here, belonging to the Castle, and variously named
the "Castle" or "Donjon" Manor. The huge prehistoric mound within its
area was remodelled, heaped seventeen feet higher, crowned with a
monument that halts between Gothic and Classic, and ringed round with
a spiral walk about 1790. The very long and very complacent statement
on that monument, telling how, when, and by whom all these things were
done, is itself a monument of self-satisfaction.
The city walls, with their towers at regular intervals, even yet in
very good preservation, bound the Dane John grounds in one direction.
Still goes a broad walk on the summit of those walls, and the pilgrim
might imagine himself a sentry guarding the mediæval city, were it not
that dense and sordid suburbs spread beyond, on whose blank walls soap
and cheap tea advertisements alternate with others crying the virtues
of infants' foods and the latest quack nostrums.
[Illustration: THE DANE JOHN, CANTERBURY.]
Canterbury is Canterbury yet, and Becket is still its prophet, but
some things be changed. Electric lighting--of a marvellously poor
illuminating quality it is true, and vastly inferior to the gas they
brew at the Castle, but yet electric lighting of sorts--somewhat
remodernises its streets; but it is still true, as at any time since
Popery came down crash, that you cannot obtain lodging without money,
or miracles, whether or no. Becket, however, still pervades the place.
His arms--the three black Cornish choughs, red-beaked and clawed, on
a blue field--have been adopted by the city, and every shop patronised
by visitors sells china or trinkets painted or engraved with them.
Pictures of the transept where he fell on that day of long ago; yea,
even photographs of the skull and bones discovered some years since,
and thought to be his, are at every turn. Becket is not forgot, and
a certain portly Tudor shade--the wraith of one who ordained all
worship and reverence of him to cease and every vestige of his shrine
and relics to be destroyed--must surely be furiously and impotently
angered. Little need, however, for that kingly shade to be thus
perturbed; this modern and local cult of Saint Thomas is only business
at Canterbury--and very good business, too.
Still goes the tourist-pilgrim along the way to the Cathedral trod by
the sinners of mediæval times, to purge them of their sins and start
afresh. Where they turned off to the left from the main street, down
Mercery Lane, the present-day visitors still turn, and the Christchurch
Gate, at the end of the narrow lane, opens as of old into the Cathedral
precincts. It is a wonderful gatehouse, this of Christchurch, built
by Prior Goldstone nigh upon four hundred years ago, and elaborately
carved with Tudor roses, portcullises, and things now so blunted by
time that it is difficult to distinguish them. Time has dissolved much
of the worthy Prior's noble structure, like so much sugar.
It was here, in this open space in front of the Gate, that the quaint
Butter Market stood until quite recently. Tardily eager to honour
one of her sons, Canterbury was so ill-advised as to sweep away the
curious Butter Market to make room for the new memorial to Christopher
Marlowe, the great dramatist of Shakespearean times, whose birthplace
still stands in St. George's Street. It is a cynical freak of time that
honour should be done to Marlowe at such a spot, for the Church in his
lifetime held him to be "a wretch," a "filthy play-maker," an "atheist
and a sottish swine," and it was thought that the unknown person who
slew him in his thirtieth year was someone who thus revenged his
insults to religion.
The Marlowe Memorial deserves attention. It is in the form of a
nude bronze figure representing the Muse of Poetry, placed on a
stone pedestal, and in the act of playing upon a lyre; but it is an
exceedingly plump and eminently erotic, rather than intellectual,
figure thus made to stand for the Muse--a Doll Tearsheet, with a
coarse, sensual face, most inappropriately shaded by a wreath of poetic
bays. The last touch of vulgarity is that especially municipal idea
of giving the whole thing a smart finish by surrounding it with four
ornate street-lamps.
[Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY.]
Burgate Street, branching off from this point to the right, is the
street where Barham was born; but our present business is to the Close,
and round the south side of the Cathedral to the east end, where the
Norman infirmary ruins stand. Turning here to the left, a narrow,
stone-paved passage, in between high, ancient walls, leads crookedly
through the romantic remains of the domestic buildings of the old
monastery to the cloisters and the north side of the Cathedral. It
is a twilight place, even now, in the brightest days of summer, and
was once, before portions of it were unroofed, much darker. That was
the time when it obtained its existing name of the "Dark Entry." If
the pages of the _Ingoldsby Legends_ are opened, and the legend of
"Nell Cook" is read, much will be found on the subject of this gloomy
passage. That legend is the "King's Scholar's Story": the terror of
a schoolboy of King Henry VIII.'s school, on the north side of the
precincts, at the prospect of being sent back by the haunted entry
after dark, on a Friday, when the ghost of Nell Cook was supposed to
have its weekly outing. Well might anyone believing in ghosts and omens
especially desire not to meet that spirit, for such an encounter was
supposed to presage the death of the person within the year:
[Illustration: THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY.]
"Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray,
Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest way;
I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour,
It fears me quite--it's Friday night!--and then Nell Cook hath pow'r."
"And who, silly child, is Nell Cook?" asks Uncle Ingoldsby; and the
King's Scholar answers:
"It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to shrift,
And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope adrift;
There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk;
He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark.
"The Canon was a portly man--of Latin and of Greek,
And learned lore, he had good store,--yet health was on his cheek.
The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made of rye,
The beer was weak, yet he was sleek--he had a merry eye.
"For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin,
The Canon's house it stood without;--he kept good cheer within;
Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look,
And Ellen Bean ruled his _cuisine_.--He called her 'Nelly Cook.'"
It is not a very proper story that the King's Scholar unfolds; of how a
"niece" of the Canon comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy
of the good-looking cook, whose affections that "merry eye" of the
Canon had captured. Nell Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon
and the strange lady with "some nasty doctor's stuff," with which she
flavours a pie destined for the Canonical table, and the two are found
as the Scholar tells:
"The Canon's head lies on the bed,--his niece lies on the floor!
They are as dead as any nail that is in any door!"
Nell Cook, for her crime, says Tom Ingoldsby, adapting to his literary
uses the legend long current in Canterbury, was buried alive beneath
one of the great paving-stones of the "Dark Entry"; when, local history
does not inform us:
But one thing's clear--that's all the year, on every Friday night,
Throughout that Entry dark doth roam Nell Cook's unquiet sprite.
And whoever meets Nell Cook is bound to die some untimeous death within
the year! Certainly, the Dark Entry is not a place greatly frequented
after nightfall, even nowadays--but that is perhaps less by reason of
superstitious fears than because it leads to nowhere in particular.
CHAPTER IV
THE CATHEDRAL: THE MURDER OF BECKET
It is by the south porch that the Cathedral is entered. Let none
suppose this to be the veritable Cathedral that Becket knew; that
was replaced, piece by piece, in the succeeding centuries, all save
the Norman transept where he met his fate. The nave, by whose lofty,
aspiring perspective we advance, was built in 1380 upon the site of
that of the twelfth century. According to the testimony of the time, it
was in a ruinous condition. Conceive, if you can, the likelihood of one
of those particularly massive Norman naves like those of Tewkesbury and
Gloucester, which this resembled, becoming ruinous! The more probable
truth of the matter is that the feeling of the time had grown inimical
to those cavernous interiors of the older architects, and sought
any excuse for tearing them down and building in their stead in the
lightsome character of the Perpendicular period.
This nave, then, much later than Becket's era, leads somewhat
unsympathetically to that most interesting spot in the whole Cathedral,
the north transept. Here is the "Martyrdom," as that massive Norman
cross-limb where Becket fell beneath the swords and axes of his
murderers is still called. You look down into it from the steps leading
into the choir and choir-aisles, as into a pit. Little changed, in the
midst of all else that has been altered, this north transept alone
remains very much as it was when he was slain, more than seven hundred
years ago, and the sight of its stern, massive walls does much to
bring back to those who behold them that fierce scene which, in the
passage of all those years and the heaping of dull verbiage piled up
by industrious Dryasdusts and beaters of the air, has been dulled and
blunted.
Barham--our witty and mirthful Tom Ingoldsby--felt a keen personal
interest in this scene, for was not his ancestor--as he conceived him
to be--Reginald FitzUrse, the chief actor in that bloody scene of
Becket's death? He is flippant, it must be allowed, in the reference he
makes to the occurrence in the _Ingoldsby Legends_:
A fair Cathedral, too, the story goes,
And kings and heroes lie entombed within her;
There pious Saints in marble pomp repose,
Whose shrines are worn by knees of many a sinner;
There, too, full many an aldermanic nose
Roll'd its loud diapason after dinner;
And there stood high the holy sconce of Becket,
--Till four assassins came from France to crack it.
Historians have not yet agreed upon the character of Becket, and
no final conclusion is ever likely to be arrived at upon the vexed
question of who was right and who wrong in the long-drawn contention
between King and Archbishop. It is easy to shirk the point and to
decide that neither was right; but another and a more just resort is
to declare, after due consideration, that in the attempted secular
encroachments of the Crown, and in the resistance of the Archbishop to
any interference with the prerogatives and jurisdiction of the Church
and the clergy, both sides were impelled by the irresistible force
of circumstances. Becket was of English origin, and the first of the
downtrodden Saxon race who had won to such preferment since the Norman
rule began. Thus, besides being bound to defend the Church, of which he
had become the head, he was regarded by the people, who idolised him,
as their champion against those ruling classes whose mailed tyranny
crushed them to earth.
A prime difficulty in judging the character of Becket is the
extraordinary change in his conduct after he had been induced to accept
the Primacy, that goal and crown of the clerical career ardently
desired by all, and attained by Becket in his forty-third year. Long
the favourite of the King, and already, as Chancellor, at the height of
power and magnificence, there was little advantage in this elevation
to the throne of Saint Augustine, and he seemed singularly unfitted to
fill it, for until that juncture he had been among the most worldly of
men. As Chancellor, his magnificence had outshone that of the King,
he himself was gay and debonnair, clothed in purple and fine linen,
feasting royally, and with hundreds of knights in his train. Nothing
that the world could give had he denied himself. He was not only
impressed personally with his unfitness, but the monks of Canterbury
themselves, in conclave, desired to elect one of their own choice. It
was, therefore, against the desire of the Church and against his own
better judgment, foreseeing as he did much of the trouble that was to
come, that he was given the headship.
But once enthroned, his conduct changed. He dismissed his magnificent
household, feasted no more, expended his substance in charity and
himself in good works; became, indeed, and in very truth, that
Right Reverend Father in God which the simulacra, the windbags, the
ravening wolves, the emptinesses that for hundreds of years have
occupied his place, are styled. The sinner saved must be prepared for
misunderstandings--it is part of the cross and burden he has taken up.
The scarlet sins of the unregenerate are remembered against the saint,
and his saintliness becomes to his old boon companions a hypocritical
farce. That is why Becket's contemporaries did not understand him;
that, too, is why so many, dimly fumbling by the rush-light glimmer of
their little sputtering intelligences, presently choked and dowsed in
the dusty, cobwebby garrets of incredible accretions of lies, mistakes,
perversions and general rag-bag of pitiful futilities, have been left
wandering in infinite darkness, and content so to wander in estimating
him.
It was the sinners whose poisonous tongues did, by dint of much
persistence, estrange the King's affections from Becket within a year,
and their innuendoes were remembered when a growing struggle over
disputed privileges found the Archbishop immovably set upon what he
regarded as his duty, and not at all prepared to favour the King. If
Henry had supposed the Archbishop whom he had created would be in every
sense his creature, he must have been furious at his gross mistake.
The fury of the Norman kings was like the unrestrained paroxysms of a
raving maniac, and opposition threw them into transports of rage, felt
severely by animate and inanimate objects alike. This second Henry,
whose eyes were said to have in repose been gentle and dove-like, is
no exception. Ill fares the messenger who brings him bad news--as
ill sometimes as though he had brought about the untoward things of
which he tells. Slight displeasure means a thump, a resounding smack
on the face from the Royal hands, or a right Royal kick on that part
where honour is so easily hurt. May not enquiring minds, diligently
bent on running to earth the origin of the still existing etiquette of
retreating backwards from the presence of the sovereign, find it in a
natural desire of courtiers at all hazards to protect that honour?
Conceive, then, the really Royal rage of this King, bearded by someone
not to be dissuaded, persuaded, admonished, or let or hindered in any
particular. He became like a wild beast, tearing whatever came in
his way, flinging off his clothes, throwing himself on the floor and
gnawing the straw and rushes, and not merely kicking the posteriors of
messengers, but flying at them with intent to tear out their eyes.
What was that which wrought such enmity between such old-time friends?
Not merely one, but many things, but first and last among them the
determination of the King that the clergy, instead of being amenable
for offences only to the ecclesiastical courts, should be answerable
to the civil tribunals. This, the earliest of the at last happily
successful series of blows at clerical privilege, seemed to Becket
almost sacrilegious, and he determined to protect the Church against
what was, he honestly thought, according to his lights and his
sacerdotal sympathies, an unwarranted attack.
By all accounts this saint was not, in his new character, the most
tactful of men. With the old courtier days gone by, he had discarded
the courtier-like speech, and austerely held his own. Jealous of him,
several great dignitaries of the Church supported the King: among
them the Archbishop of York, and the Bishops of London and Salisbury.
Becket, as their spiritual chief, hurled excommunication at them, and
it was even feared that he would do the same by the King. Then, in fear
of his life, he went into six years' exile, ended by a pretence of
reconciliation that was patently a pretence, even before he sailed for
England. He was weary of exile, and ready to lay down his life for the
Church.
It was early in December 1170 that he returned to Canterbury, "to die,"
as he prophetically had said, before embarking. Quarrels, insults, and
petty persecutions met him, and thus sped December to its close. On
Christmas Day he preached in the Cathedral on the text, as he read it
(an all-important reservation), "On earth, peace to men of good will."
"There is no peace," he declared, "but to men of good will," and with
solemn meaning, readily understood by the great congregation that
heard him, spoke of the martyrs who had fallen in olden days. It was
possible, he added, that they would soon have another.
"Father," wailed that assembled multitude, "why do you desert us so
soon? To whom will you leave us?" But, heedless of the interruption, he
passed from a plaintive strain to one of fiery indignation, ending, in
a voice of thunder, by a full and particular excommunication of many of
his enemies and persecutors. "May they be cursed," his voice resounded
through the building, "by Jesus Christ, and may their memory be blotted
out of the assembly of the saints, whoever shall sow discord between me
and my lord the King." So saying, he, with mediæval symbolism, dashed
down a lighted candle upon the stones, to typify the extinction of
those accurst, and, with religious exaltation on his face, left the
pulpit, saying to his crossbearer, "One martyr, St. Alphege, you have
already; another, if God will, you will have soon."
Already, while he spoke, his furrow was drawing to its end. Over in
Normandy, where the King was keeping Christmas, the Archbishop of York
and the Bishops of London and Salisbury were suggesting that it would
be a good thing if there were no Becket. "So long as Thomas lives,"
said one, "you will have neither good days, nor peaceful kingdom, nor
quiet life."
The thought thus instilled into the King's mind threw him into a
frenzy. "A fellow," he shouted--"a fellow that has eaten my bread has
lifted up his heel against me; a fellow that I loaded with benefits has
dared to insult the King and the whole Royal family, and tramples on
the whole kingdom; a fellow that came to Court on a lame sumpter-mule
sits without hindrance on the throne itself. What sluggard wretches,
what cowards, have I brought up in my Court, who care nothing for their
allegiance to their master! Not one will deliver me from this low-born,
turbulent priest!" So saying, he rushed from the room, doubtless to
roll in one of those ungovernable Plantagenet rages upon the floor of
some secluded chamber.
The four knights who from among that Court sprang forth to prove
themselves, even to the awful extremities of sacrilege and murder,
true King's men, were Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Moreville, William de
Tracy, and Richard le Bret. In the light of later events, the monkish
chroniclers, eager to discover the marvellous in every circumstance of
the tragedy, found a dark significance in their very names. FitzUrse,
they said, was of truly bear-like character; De Moreville's name
proclaimed him to be of "the city of death"; Le Bret was "the brute."
With so much ingenuity available, it is quite surprising they could
not twist Tracy's name into something allusive to murder; but they
had to be content with the weak suggestion that he was of "parricidal
wickedness." All save Le Bret had been knights owning fealty to Becket
while he was Chancellor.
It is detailed in these pages, in the description of Saltwood Castle,
how they landed in England and made for Canterbury. A dreadful
circumstance is that they knew perfectly well on whom to call when
they reached the city, and waited upon a sympathiser with the King,
Clarembald, the Abbot of St. Augustine's, who is thus sufficiently
implicated.
From the Abbot's lodging they sent a command, ordering the Mayor to
issue a proclamation in the King's name forbidding any help being
given to the Archbishop. Then they took horse again and rode to the
Palace, accompanied by their men-at-arms, whom they posted in a house
hard by the gateway. The short day of December 29th was nearly at
its close when they drew rein in the courtyard beneath the great hall
of the Palace, where the Archbishop and his household had but just
retired from supper. They had left their swords outside, and came as
travellers, their mailed armour concealed under long cloaks. Entering
the hall they met the seneschal, who ushered them into the private room
where the Archbishop sat, among his intimates. "My lord," he said,
"here are four knights from King Henry wishing to speak with you"; and
they were bidden enter.
FitzUrse began the furious discussion. The knights had seated
themselves on the floor at the Archbishop's feet, and waited until he
should finish the conversation he was holding with a monk. When Becket
turned and looked calmly at each in turn, ending with saluting Tracy by
name, FitzUrse it was who broke in with a contemptuous "God help you!"
The Archbishop's face flushed crimson. He was a man of vehement nature,
and it is wonderful that he restrained himself from striking that
insolent intruder. "We have a message from the King over the water,"
continued FitzUrse; "tell us whether you will hear it in private, or in
the hearing of all."
Within the hearing of all that message, such as it was, was given.
It was but a reiteration of old demands and old grievances, made to
goad the Archbishop into fury, and to afford an excuse for an attack
upon him. The discussion aroused both sides to anger, and the knights,
calling upon all to prevent the Archbishop from escaping, dashed off,
with the cry of "To arms!" for their swords.
But Becket harboured no thoughts of escape. Although he perceived
that death was near, he made no retreat, being indeed, by this time,
fanatically bent upon the martyr's crown. Outside, the signal had been
already given to the men-at-arms, who now came pouring in, with shouts
of "Réaux!" or "King's men." The knights now returned, their swords
girt about them. Already, however, the Archbishop's attendants had
closed and barred the doors, and were endeavouring to save him from
that death he seemed to welcome. With kindly violence they pushed and
pulled him by obscure passages from the Palace and along the cloisters,
while the blows of axes and the splintering of wood told how in
their rear the murderers were hewing their way onward. Thus at last,
strenuously resisting, he was impelled towards the door that opened
from the cloisters into the north transept.
Once within the Cathedral the monks bolted the door behind them, and in
their haste excluded some of their brethren, thus left, unprotected,
to face the onrush of armed men. Hearing these unfortunate ones vainly
knocking for admittance, Becket, exerting all his authority, commanded
the door to be opened; and when he found his words disregarded, broke
away from those who held him and drew back the bolts with his own hands.
Seeing the way thus made clear for those pursuing men of wrath, the
crowd of anxious monks surrounding the Archbishop immediately turned
and fled to those hiding-places they knew of. Only three remained,
dauntless, by their chief. These were Robert of Merton, William
FitzStephen, and Edward Grim, who stood by him, vainly imploring him to
flee. Only one concession he made to their entreaties. He would go to
the choir, and there, before the high altar, the holiest place in the
Cathedral, with all dignity make an end.
It was as he was thus ascending the steps from the transept that the
knights burst into the sacred building. Bewildered at first by the
almost complete darkness, they could only shout at random, "Where is
Thomas Becket, traitor to the King?" No answer. Then, falling over a
monk, came an oath, from FitzUrse, and the question, "Where is the
Archbishop?" Becket himself answered, and descending again into the
transept, confronted them. He stood in front of what was then the the
Chapel of St. Benedict, and calmly asked, "Reginald, why do you come
into my church armed?" For answer FitzUrse thrust a carpenter's axe he
had found against his breast, and with a savage oath declared, "You
shall die: I will tear out your heart!" "Fly!" exclaimed another, not
so eager to commit the sin of sacrilege, before which the mediæval
world recoiled; "Fly! or you are a dead man!" striking him with the
flat of his sword, to emphasise the warning.
[Illustration: THE "MARTYRDOM," CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]
Then the four united their efforts to drag him from the Cathedral,
but without success. Himself a powerful man, he seized Tracy and
flung him heavily upon the pavement. FitzUrse, advancing upon him
with a drawn sword, he called by a vile name, adding, "You profligate
wretch, you are my man; you have done me fealty; you ought not to touch
me." No fear, it will be seen, in all this, but a not unreasonable
fury, somewhat obscuring the martyr spirit. Fury on both sides, for
FitzUrse, losing the last atom of restraint, and yelling "Strike!"
aimed a blow with his great, two-handed sword that, had it been better
directed, must have smote off the Archbishop's head. As it was, it
merely skimmed off his cap. Becket, who must have been momentarily
surprised to find himself still alive, then covered his eyes with his
hands, and bending his head, was heard to commend his cause and the
cause of the Church to God, to St. Denis of France, to St. Alphege
and all the saints of the Church. Tracy then dealt a blow, partly
intercepted by Grim, whose arm, protecting the Archbishop, was broken
by it. By this time blood was trickling down the Archbishop's face.
He wiped it away and murmured, "Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my
spirit;" and then, falling at a further blow from Tracy, "For the name
of Jesus, and for the defence of the Church, I am willing to die."
There he lay, and so lying, received a tremendous stroke from Richard
le Bret, who accompanied it with the exclamation, "Take this, for love
of my lord William, brother of the King!" That stroke not only clove
away the upper part of the skull, but the sword itself was broken in
two. Vengeance was accomplished.
When the assassins fled from that scene of blood, it was quite dark.
They went as they had come, by the cloisters, shouting that they were
"King's men," and cursing and stumbling over unfamiliar steps. A
servant of the Archdeacon of Sens was sufficiently unfortunate to be
wailing for the cruel death of the Archbishop when they passed, and
foolish enough to be in their way. They fell over him, and, still heady
with that struggle and the lust of blood, gave him in passing a mailed
kick, and so tremendous a sword-thrust that for long afterwards he had
sufficient occasion to lament for himself.
It was something of an anti-climax to their murderous passions that
they should, as they now did, repair to the Archbishop's Palace and
make a burglarious raid upon the gold and silver vessels of the church,
and loot from Becket's stables the magnificent horses he kept. With
this personal plunder, and with a mass of the Archbishop's documents
and papers seized on behalf of the King, they were preparing to
depart when the very unusual circumstance in December of a violent
thunderstorm set a final scene of horror upon that closing day.
The news fell heavily upon the people of Canterbury, who reverenced
Becket far more than did those within the Church who had immediately
surrounded him; and the citizens came rushing like an irresistible
torrent into the Cathedral as soon as they heard of the sacrilegious
deed.
Like the greater number of our cathedrals, this of Canterbury has been
greatly altered since that time. It was into a Norman nave that the
excited populace thronged--a building that must have closely resembled
the still-existing nave of that period at Gloucester, gloomy and dark
at the best of times, but on this December evening a well of infinite
blackness, faintly illuminated by the distant lights twinkling in
the choir and on the high altar. This horror-stricken crowd was only
with great difficulty forced back and at last shut out, and it was
long before the monks returned to the transept where the Archbishop
had fallen before the blows of the four. There his body lay in the
dark, as it had been left, his blood still wet on those cold stones,
as Osbert, the chamberlain, entering with a single light, held out at
arm's length in that cavern of blackness and unimaginable gloom, steps
in it, and, if he be not quite different from other men, shudders and
almost drops his glimmering candle when he finds what awful moisture
that is in which he has been walking. Osbert alone has ventured to seek
his master. Where, then, are the others of his household? In hiding,
like those monks who, now that all is still, venture, like rats, to
come from their hiding-holes in chapel and triforium, or from secret
places contrived for such emergencies in the roof.
The Archbishop lay upon his face, the upper part of his scalp sliced
off by that whirling blow of Tracy's, and the contents of his head
spilled over the pavement, just as a bowl of liquid might be overset.
Osbert, with rare fortitude, replaces that scalp as one might replace a
lid, and binding the head, he and the monks between them place the body
upon a bier and carry it to the high altar in the choir.
There were those among the monks who felt small sympathy for Becket. To
them he was but a proud worldling whose remarkable preferment to the
Primacy had been scandalous, and whose quarrels with the King had been,
they thought, dictated more for the advancement of his own personal
authority than for sake of a purely impersonal desire to preserve and
cherish the rights of the Church. He had been elected Archbishop by
desire of the King and against the feeling of the Priory, and they
thought he should, in consequence, have been more complaisant to Royal
demands. They were not a little jealous of the man set to rule over
them, and moreover, could not at once perceive the martyr and the saint
in the dignitary thus at last struck down in that long struggle. They
were horror-stricken at the sacrilege of it, but did not burst into
grief and lamentations for the individual until that happened which
put a very different complexion upon the dead Archbishop's character.
Far into the night, as the monks sat in the choir around that silent
figure, his aged friend and instructor, Robert of Merton, told them of
the secret austerities of his later life, and made a revelation that
wholly changed their mental attitude. To prove his words, he exposed
the many layers of the clothing to those who gathered round, and showed
how, beneath all, and next the skin, the "luxurious" Archbishop had
worn the habit of a monk, and had endured the disciplinary discomfort
of a hair-shirt. There, too, on the skin, were visible the weals of the
daily scourgings by which the Archbishop mortified the flesh. Nor was
this the sum of his virtues, for when, a little later, his garments
were removed, previous to interment, they were found to be swarming
with vermin; that hair-cloth, itself so penitential, densely populated
with a crawling mass whose presence must have made it more penitential
still. According to the accounts of those who beheld these transcendent
proofs of sanctity, the hair-cloth was bubbling over with these
inhabitants, like water in a simmering cauldron.
At sight of such unmistakable evidences of holiness the brethren went
into hysterics. "See, see," they said to one another, "what a true
monk he was, and we knew it not!"--an oblique and unpleasing reflection
upon the personal habits of the monastic orders. They kissed him, as
he lay dead there, and called him "St. Thomas," and at last, unwilling
that any tittle of his sanctity should be impugned, buried him in his
verminous condition.
Meanwhile, newly alive to the saintly character of him whom they now
clearly perceived to be a martyr, orders were given to rail off the
spot where he had fallen, and for every trace of his blood to be
jealously preserved. But unhappily for the Church, the common people,
who had from the moment of his death regarded their Archbishop as a
martyred saint, had already soaked up the greater part of that precious
blood in strips hastily torn from their clothes, and had been given
his stained and splashed outer garments. These were losses that could
never be made good, but they did not greatly matter to those who could
so dilute the little remaining blood that it sufficed to supply the
uncounted thousands of pilgrims who made pilgrimage to the shrine of
St. Thomas for the space of three hundred and fifty years, and took
away with them little phials containing, as they fondly believed, so
intimate a relic of England's most powerful saint.
In spite of the dark legends that tell how vengeance overtook the
assassins, it does not seem to be the fact that they were adequately
punished for their fearful crime, and certainly no Royal displeasure
lighted upon them. "The wicked," we are told, "flee when no man
pursueth," and the knights, fearful of the revenge that might be taken
upon them by the people of Canterbury, rode off, unhindered, with their
small escort of men-at-arms, to Saltwood. Within that stronghold they
felt safe. That they would have been equally safe at Canterbury we may
suppose, for Robert de Broc, shut up within the strong walls of the
Archbishop's Palace, felt strong enough to threaten the monks with what
he would do if they dared so honour the dead Prelate as to bury him
among the tombs of the Archbishops. He would, he declared, tear out the
body, hang it from a gibbet, hew it in pieces, and throw the fragments
by the highway, to be devoured by swine or birds of prey. It is quite
evident that Robert de Broc was a good hater and a very thorough
partisan of the King. The monks did well to be afraid of him, and
meekly forbearing from giving offence, laid their martyr in the crypt.
The four lay only one night at Saltwood. The next day they rode to
the old manor-house of South Malling, near Lewes, itself a property
belonging to the Archbishops, and throwing down their arms and
accoutrements upon a dining-table in the hall, gathered comfortably
round the cheerful hearth, when--says the legend--the table, unwilling
to bear that sacrilegious burden, started back and threw the repugnant
load on the ground. The arms were replaced by the startled servants,
who came rushing in with torches; but again they were flung away, this
time with even greater force. It was one of the knights who, with
blanched face, declared the supernatural nature of this happening.
The following morning they were off again, bound for Hugh de
Moreville's far distant Yorkshire castle of Knaresborough, where they
remained for one year. It would have been too scandalous a thing for
the King to receive his bravos at once, for he had a part of his own
to play that would have been quite spoiled by such indecent haste--a
dramatic part, but one that fails to carry any conviction of its
sincerity. It was at Argenton that he heard of the successful issue
of his commission, and on receipt of the news isolated himself for
three days, refused all food but milk of almonds, rolled himself in
penitential sackcloth and ashes, and grievously called upon God to
witness that he was not responsible for the Archbishop's death. "Alas!"
exclaimed that trembling hypocrite, "alas! that it ever happened."
But it is not in empty lamentations, real or feigned, that penitence
is found. The assassins went unpunished, and, together with others
of Becket's bitterest enemies within and without the Church, were
even promoted. Before two years had passed the four knights were
found constantly at the King's Court, on familiar terms with him
and his companions in hunting. It is a cynical commentary upon the
kingly penitence that one of the murderers, William de Tracy, became
Justiciary of Normandy. But something had to be done to expiate a
deed whose echoes rumbled horrifically throughout Europe. The Pope,
Alexander III., indicated a course of fighting against the infidel
in the Holy Land, and it seems probable that they did so work off
their sins; all except Tracy, who, having made over his Devonshire
manor of Daccombe to the Church, for the maintenance of a monk for
ever, to celebrate masses for the repose of the souls of the living
and the dead, set out for Palestine, but was for so long driven back
by contrary winds that he almost despaired of setting foot abroad.
This especial retribution meted out to him was for the particular
heinousness of having dealt the first effective blow at the martyr.
When at last he was carried to the coast of Calabria, he was seized
with a mysterious disease at Cosenza, a disease whose agonies made him
tear the flesh from his bones with his own hands. Thus entreating,
"Mercy, St. Thomas!" he perished miserably.
The mysticism of the time told many dreadful legends. Dogs refused to
eat from the tables of the murderers; grass would not grow where their
feet went; those they loved were doomed to misery and death.
From the King a certain humiliation was demanded, but it amounted to
little beyond an oath, taken on the gospels before the Papal legates,
that he had not ordered or desired the murder, and an expressed
readiness to restore property belonging to the See of Canterbury. This
easy satisfaction was given at Avranches, in May 1172, but if it was
sufficient for the Pope it did by no means calm the English people,
who saw in the cumulative domestic troubles and foreign disasters
of the time the wrath of Heaven. The greater penance of 1174 was
accordingly decided upon. Arriving from Normandy on July 8th, he
journeyed to Canterbury, to the shrine of the already sainted martyr,
by the Pilgrims' Road, living the while upon bread and water. Coming to
Harbledown, he resigned horseback for a barefooted walk into the city.
Thus, with a mere woollen shirt and a cloak, he came to the Cathedral,
kneeling in the porch, and then proceeding directly to the scene of
the martyrdom, where he again knelt and kissed the stone where the
Archbishop had died. From that spot, he was conducted to the crypt,
where the tomb still remained, and, placing his head and shoulders in
the tomb itself, received on his shoulders five strokes of a rod from
each bishop and abbot present, and three each from the by-standing
eighty monks. This discipline must have killed him had those monks laid
on with the hearty goodwill customary with prison warders; but their
stripes were mere formalities, and the King departed the next morning,
after passing a solitary fasting vigil in the crypt, where, during the
solemn hours of the night, he had had ample opportunity of repentance.
From Canterbury he rode to London, absolved and with a whole skin.
The nation saw much virtue in this public reparation. How could they
fail so to do when the affairs of the realm took an immediate and
decided turn for the better, when the King of Scots, long a terror
in the north, was captured at Alnwick, and when the invading fleet
of Henry's own rebellious son was repulsed? The forgiveness and the
miraculous intercession of the beatified Thomas were prompt and
efficacious.
The cult of this peculiarly sainted person was extraordinary, and
far transcended that of any other martyr. To his shrine, erected in
a place of especial honour, and encrusted with gold and gems, the
pilgrims of many nations and many centuries flocked, greatly to the
enrichment of the Church. The miraculous cures wrought at his tomb,
and the marvellous legends that clustered around the story of his life
and death, were the theme of ages. But the gross superstitions, and
the grosser scandals, tricks, and miscellaneous knaveries that were
encouraged by that martyr-worship had discredited him by the time of
Henry VIII., that less superstitious age when it was possible for the
King and his advisers to declare "Thomas Becket" a traitor, to submit
his relics to every indignity, to destroy them and his shrine, and to
seize all the endowments and valuables connected with his worship.
The great destruction wrought at the Reformation accounts for the
scantiness of Becket's memorials. Here, in the "Martyrdom," only the
Norman walls that looked down upon the scene, and some portions of the
pavement, are left. A square piece of stone, inserted in the middle of
a large slab, marks the exact spot where he fell, and tells how the
original stone, regarded as of a peculiar sanctity, had been at some
time or another removed.
CHAPTER V
TAPPINGTON HALL
The central point of the Ingoldsby Country is, of course, the
Ingoldsby manor house of Tappington Hall. To discover this we must
leave Canterbury by the Dover Road, and, climbing up to the rise
of Gutteridge Gate, where a gibbet stood in ancient times and a
turnpike-gate until recent years, drop down into the village of Bridge,
whose name derives from an arch thrown at an early period across the
River Stour. At the summit of the corresponding rise out of Bridge,
the road, running exactly on the site of the Roman Watling Street,
comes to that bleak and elevated table-land known as Barham Downs, the
scene of Cæsar's great battle with the Britons on July 23rd, A.D. 56.
Twenty-seven thousand Roman soldiers, horse and foot, met the wild
rush of the Britons, who, with the usual undisciplined and untaught
courage of uncivilised races, flung themselves upon the invaders and
were thrown back by the impenetrable wall of the serried phalanxes.
Recoiling dismayed from this reception, they were instantly pursued
by the Roman cavalry and cut up into isolated bands, who fought
courageously all that fatal day in the dense woodlands. Protected
by mounds and trenches defended with palisades of stakes cunningly
interwoven with brushwood, they prolonged the hopeless contest until
nightfall, and then fell back. Cæsar, describing these woodland forts
as _oppida_, gives especial attention to one particularly troublesome
stronghold. "Being repulsed," he writes, "they withdrew themselves
into the woods and reached a place which they had prepared before,
having closed all approaches to it by felled timber." This retreat
was captured by the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, who, throwing up
a mound against it, advanced, holding their shields over their heads
in the military formation known as "the tortoise," and drove out the
defenders at the sword's point.
This, the last place to hold out, is, despite the eighteen and a half
centuries that have passed, still to be seen in Bourne Park, on the
summit of Bridge Hill, and is familiarly known in the neighbourhood
as "Old England's Hole." "Never forget," the old countryfolk have
been wont to impress their children--"never forget that this is Old
England's Hole, and that on this spot a last stand for freedom was made
by your British forefathers."
Everyone in the neighbourhood knows Old England's Hole. It is seen
beside the road, on the right hand, just where the cutting through
the crest of the hill, made in 1829, to ease the pull-up for the
coach-horses, begins. At that same time the course of the road was
very slightly diverted, and, instead of actually impinging upon this
ancient historic landmark, as before, was made to run a few feet away.
Now the spot is seen across the fence of the park, the old course of
the road still traceable beside it, as a slightly depressed grassy
track, plentifully dotted with thistles. The stronghold consists of a
crater-like hollow, encircled by earthen banks, still high and steep.
A great number of ash-trees and thorns, some very old, gnarled, and
decayed, grow on these banks, and cast a dense shade upon the interior.
[Illustration: THE VALE OF BARHAM.]
Barham Downs, stretching for three miles, windswept and bare, above
the valley of the Lesser Stour, form a tract of country that must
needs appeal strongly to the imaginative man. Only the bunkers and
other recent impudent interferences of some local golf club have ever
disturbed the ancient lines of Roman entrenchments.
Barham Downs are, of course, the "Tappington Moor," of that terrible
legend, the "Hand of Glory," which opens the collection of the
_Ingoldsby Legends_ in many editions:
On the lone bleak moor, At the midnight hour,
Beneath the Gallows Tree,
Hand in hand The Murderers stand,
By one, by two, by three!
And the Moon that night With a grey, cold light,
Each baleful object tips;
One half of her form Is seen through the storm,
The other half's hid in Eclipse!
And the cold Wind howls, And the Thunder growls,
And the Lightning is broad and bright;
And altogether It's very bad weather,
And an unpleasant sort of a night!
Barham village, a very different place, lies below, snugly embosomed
amid the rich trees of the Stour valley, sheltered and warm. From
this point its tall, tapering, shingled spire peeps out from among
the massed trees, and a branch road leads directly down to it and
to that park and mansion of Barham Court which, had his ancestors of
remote times done their duty by posterity, the author of the _Ingoldsby
Legends_ firmly believed would have been his.
[Illustration: THE "EAGLE GATES," BROOME PARK.]
But here we are come, on the high road, to a striking entrance to a
park. The place seems strangely familiar, yet the "Eagle Gates," as
the countryfolk call them, of this domain of Broome Park are certainly
unknown to us. The mystery is only explained by referring to the
woodcut which prefaces most editions of the _Ingoldsby Legends_, and
purports to be a view of "Tappington, taken from the Folkestone Road."
Then it is seen that the illustration rather closely resembles this
spot, with the trifling exceptions that eagles, and not lions, surmount
the pillars, and that the mansion of Broome is really not to be seen
through the gateway, although clearly visible a few yards away, when
it is seen to be not unlike the house pictured. Many have been the
perplexed pilgrims who have vainly sought the ancestral Ingoldsby gates
and chimneys between Canterbury and Folkestone, lured to the quest
by the original Preface to the _Legends_. Broome Park, whose lovely
demesne is criss-crossed by turfy paths and tracks freely open to the
explorer, is beautifully undulating and thickly wooded. In its midst
stands the mansion, built in the last years of the seventeenth century
by one of the extinct Dixwell family, and gabled, chimneyed, and
generally as picturesque as Barham "most pseudonymously" described it,
under the title of "Tappington Hall."
[Illustration: BROOME PARK: THE REAL ORIGINAL OF TAPPINGTON HALL.]
The Oxenden family have long owned the beautiful old place, which
still contains a "powdering closet," as used in the bygone days of
huge headdresses and powdered hair. My lady would sit in her boudoir
with her head thrust through a hatch in the wall into the "powdering
closet"--a contrivance necessary to prevent the powder being scattered
over everything.
[Illustration: TAPPINGTON, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD.]
Here, by the "Eagle Gates," the road branches, the left-hand route
continuing to Dover, the right-hand to Folkestone. This is the
"beautiful green lane" of the Preface to the _Legends_. "Here,"
says that Preface, addressed to the incredulous who did not believe
in the existence of Tappington Hall--"here a beautiful green lane,
diverging abruptly to the right, will carry them through the Oxenden
plantations and the unpretending village of Denton, to the foot of a
very respectable hill--as hills go in this part of Europe. On reaching
its summit, let them look straight before them--and if, among the
hanging woods which crown the opposite side of the valley, they cannot
distinguish an antiquated manor house of Elizabethan architecture, with
its gable ends, stone stanchions, and tortuous chimneys rising above
the surrounding trees, why, the sooner they procure a pair of Dollond's
patent spectacles the better. If, on the contrary, they can manage
to descry it, and, proceeding some five or six furlongs through the
avenue, will ring at the Lodgegate--they cannot mistake the stone lion
with the Ingoldsby escutcheon (Ermine, a saltire engrained Gules) in
his paws--they will be received with a hearty old English welcome."
[Illustration: DENTON.]
Let us, then, proceed along the Folkestone Road, with the Oxenden
plantations--now grown into dense woods of larch and pine--on the
right. Wayfarers are scarce, and the lovely scenery of Broome Park
and the road into Denton is quite solitary. A ladder-stile leaps the
rustic fence, birds chatter and quarrel in the trees, but as you come
into the hamlet of Denton, it is, in its quaint old-world appearance
and apparent emptiness, like some stage scene with the actors called
off. Denton is a triangular strip of village green, surrounded by
picturesque cottages, and with the old sign of the "Red Lion" inn
planted romantically in the centre. Beyond it comes Denton Court,
screened from the road by its timbered park, with Denton Chapel close
by. Of this you may read in the _Legends_; but those who, relying too
implicitly upon Barham's statements, seek the brass of the Lady
Rohesia, with the inscription--
"+Praie for ye sowle of ye Lady Royse,
And for alle Christen sowles+"
will be doomed to disappointment, for it is one of his picturesque
embellishments upon fact.
[Illustration: Denton Church]
Denton Chapel is a building of the smallest dimensions, belonging to
the Early English and later periods, but not distinguished by many
mouldings or other features by which the date of a building is most
readily to be fixed. It consists only of a nave and a plain tower; but
on the north wall, beside the pulpit, there is a sculptured stone which
may arouse the curiosity of the passing architect. It is probably a
dedication cross, but the incised letters upon it have hitherto baffled
elucidation.
More amusing, perhaps, is the colony of white owls which haunt the
chapel, and from their perch on the beams above the chancel deposit
upon the altar unmistakable evidence of their visits.
And now we come to Tappington. The valley opens wide, and on either
side of it climb gently-rising hills clothed with thin woods, the
Folkestone Road ascending the shoulder of the hills to the left. From
it we look down upon a beautiful flat expanse of meadow-land; but no
lodge-gate, no stone lions, no avenue, and certainly not the slightest
trace of a park nor of a grand manor house can be seen. Only an old
farmstead, half-smothered in ivy and creepers, is seen, in midst of the
open meadow. It is a dream of rustic beauty, but--it is not the manor
house of Barham's vivid fancy and picturesque pen. If, however, the
rich details with which he clothed the old farm buildings of Tappington
are lacking, it yet remains of absorbing interest, quite apart from
the literary memories it embodies. The old house, and the remains of
a former grandeur still visible in the half-obliterated foundations
of demolished buildings, attract attention. There it stands, a squat
building of mellowed red brick, crossed and recrossed with timbering.
Its rust-red roof is bowed and bent, and, in place of the clustered
chimneys of fiction, one short and stout chimney springs from the
centre of the roof-ridge, while another crowns the gable-end. In the
meadow are traces of an old well which, before the greater part of
Tappington Manor House was, at some unknown period, pulled down, stood
in a quadrangle formed by a great range of buildings. Creepers and ivy
clothe the front of the old house, and a garden, full of all manner
of old-fashioned flowers, extends on either side of the entrance.
[Illustration: TAPPINGTON HALL.]
The interior is of more interest than might be supposed from a glance
at the outside. A magnificent old carved-oak staircase conducts
upstairs from the lower rooms, and on the walls hang portraits--old
portraits indeed, but quite fictitiously said to be Ingoldsbys, and in
fact derived by some later owner of the property from Wardour Street,
or other such ready source, where not merely Ingoldsbys, but ancestors
of every kind, are procurable on demand. One, with an armorial shield
and the name of "Stephen Ingoldsby" painted on it, glowers sourly from
the topmost stair, where the blood-stained flooring still bears witness
to an extraordinary fratricide committed here two hundred and fifty
years ago.
[Illustration: THE "MERCHANT'S-MARK" OF THOMAS MARSH OF MARSTON.]
It is quite remarkable that, while Barham invented and transmuted
legends that had Tappington for their centre, he never alluded to
this genuine tragedy. It seems, then, that when all England was
divided between the partisans of King and Commons, and Charles and his
Parliament were turning families one against the other, Tappington
Manor House was inhabited by two brothers, descendants of that "Thomas
Marsh of Marston" who is the hero of that prose legend, "The Leech
of Folkestone," and whose merchant's-mark is still to be seen here,
carved on the newel of the great staircase. These two brothers had
taken different sides in the struggle then going on, and quarrelled
so bitterly that they agreed never to speak to one another, living
actually in different parts of the then much larger house, and only
using this staircase in common as they retired to or descended from
their particular apartments.
[Illustration: TAPPINGTON HALL: NIGHT.]
One night, by evil chance, they met upon the stairs. None knew what
passed between them, or whether black looks or bitter words were
exchanged; but as the Cavalier passed, his Puritan brother drew a
dagger and stabbed him in the back. He fell, and died on the spot, and
the stains of his blood are there to this day--visible, indubitably, to
one's own physical eyes.
The good people--farming folks from Westmoreland--who lately occupied
the house, showed the stranger these stains, outside what is known
as the bedroom of "Bad Sir Giles," who, to quote "The Spectre of
Tappington," "had been a former proprietor in the days of Elizabeth.
Many a dark and dismal tradition is yet extant of the licentiousness of
his life and the enormity of his offences. The Glen, which the keeper's
daughter was seen to enter, but never known to quit, still frowns
darkly as of yore; while an ineradicable blood-stain on the oaken stair
yet bids defiance to the united energies of soap and sand. But it is
with one particular apartment that a deed of more especial atrocity is
said to be connected. A stranger guest--so runs the legend--arrived
unexpectedly at the mansion of the 'Bad Sir Giles.' They met in
apparent friendship; but the ill-concealed scowl on their master's
brow told the domestics that the visit was not a welcome one." Next
morning, the stranger was found dead in his bed, with marks of violence
on his body. He was buried in Denton churchyard, on the other side
of the highway to Folkestone. For the rest of the tale, and how the
spectre was supposed to have purloined Lieutenant Seaforth's breeches,
the _Ingoldsby Legends_ themselves must be consulted.
Tappington has again passed away from the Barhams. Ingoldsby's
son, the Reverend Richard Harris Dalton Barham, Vicar of Lolworth,
Cambridgeshire, resigned that living in 1876, and retired to Dawlish,
South Devon, where he died in 1886; but considerably earlier than that
date he had agreed, having no children, to sell the property and divide
the proceeds with his two sisters. This was accordingly done.
Although the scenery is so sweetly beautiful, the soil is said to be
very poor--mostly unfertile red earth, mixed with great quantities of
flints, the rest chalk. A great extent of the property is still coppice
and scrubwood. An advertisement of 1890, offering the place to be let,
is interesting:
FARM.--KENT.--Tappington Everard, Denton, near Canterbury, comprising
Homestead, with Picturesque Residence (formerly occupied by the Rev.
R. H. Barham, author of the _Ingoldsby Legends_) and about 245 Acres
of Land, of which 144 Acres are Pasture, and 101 Acres Arable. Rent
£220. Early possession may be had.--For terms and further particulars
apply to Messrs. Worsfold & Hayward, Land Agents, Dover, and 80,
Cannon Street, London, E.C.
CHAPTER VI
ROMNEY MARSH
The scene now changes to Romney Marsh. It was in 1817, in his
twenty-ninth year, that Barham came to this recondite region,
the Archbishop of Canterbury having collated him to the rectory
of Snargate, with which went at that time, by some mysterious
ecclesiastical jugglery that does not concern us, the curacy of the
parish of Warehorne. He lived by preference there, rather than in the
malarious marsh itself, at Snargate, and thus the vicarage house that
stands, amid a recent melancholy plantation of larches, to the left
of the road on entering the village, has its interest, for we may
suppose that in it he lived, although, to be sure, it has undergone
alterations, and its stuccoed abominations and feeble attempts at
Gothic design must be later than his day. It is a disappointing house
to the literary pilgrim who loves his Barham--gaunt and dismal-looking
as you pass it; but the site is interesting, for we must by no means
forget that it was here, driven to it by the weariness of being
confined to the house after breaking his leg in a gig accident, in
1819, that he turned to literary composition. A novel called _Baldwin_
was the result. It was published anonymously, and was not--nor, as a
perusal of it satisfies one, did it deserve to be--a success. He was
only serving his apprenticeship to letters, and had not yet discovered
himself. That he speedily improved upon this first effort becomes
evident in his succeeding work, begun immediately after the completion
of the first. This, partly written here, was the novel of _My Cousin
Nicholas_, a work of splendid and rollicking humour now undeservedly
forgotten. Before he had finished the manuscript a change came over his
professional prospects, for in 1821 he was induced to apply for a minor
canonry of St. Paul's Cathedral, and when, to his surprise, he was
elected, removed to London, and neither Warehorne nor Snargate knew him
any more. Those who make this pilgrimage will think his unbounded joy
at leaving his country cure perhaps a little indecent:
Oh, I'll be off! I will, by Jove!
No more by purling streams I'll ramble,
Through dirty lanes no longer rove,
Bemired, and scratched by briar and bramble.
He was eager for London, and preferment.
[Illustration: WAREHORNE.]
As for Warehorne itself, it is one of those smallest of villages with
the biggest of churches which give the stranger the alternatives of
supposing either that it has decayed from some former prosperity or
that the piety of whoever built the big church outran his discretion.
Perhaps he who originally built it was a sinner of more than usual
calibre, the magnitude of whose misdeeds is thus feebly reflected to
after ages in this architectural expiation. It is a thought of one's
very own, but essentially Barhamesque--so imbued with the spirit of
the master does the pilgrim become. But at any rate, if the original
portions of the church be Norman and Early English, the great heavy
tower of dull red brick is commonplace eighteenth century, and owes
nothing to ideas of vicarious atonement, which were not prevalent
at the time of its building. "Commonplace" I have called it, and so
indeed it is, and unimaginative to boot, but that is not to deny the
impressiveness it gives the view. It has quite the right tone for
the grim place, overhanging the mist-laden, sad-faced marsh, and the
trees that have grown up around it have in some freakish sympathetic
mood grown in quite the proper dramatic way. There they slant across
the sky, the sweeping poplars; there between them you can glimpse the
churchyard yews; and there, I doubt not, the least imaginative can
picture the smugglers of Romney Marsh topping the rise, each one with
a couple of brandy-tubs across his shoulders. Nay, to go further--a
mental excursion for which we have due warranty in the authentic
published records of Barham's own residence here--we may perceive
the rector of Snargate coming home o' nights to wife and children
at Warehorne rectory, and meeting on the way, in the dark, those
self-same free-traders. "Stand!" they cry; and then, with relief, "It's
only parson! Good-night t'ye, sir!" Had it been someone else, say a
preventive man, they would have knocked him senseless to the ground, as
the mildest measure they could afford.
Here, down a curving and suddenly descending road, we came unexpectedly
to a railway and its closed level-crossing gates, a surprising
encounter in these wilds. It is the Ashford to Rye branch of the
South-Eastern--or more grandiloquently, since its alliance with the
London, Chatham and Dover, the "Great Southern" Railway: great, they
say, in nothing but its charges and delays.
Warehorne, to the backward view from the foot of this descent, looks
another place--its church, seen to be really on a height--surrounded by
apple orchards.
[Illustration: A SUNDIAL, WAREHORNE CHURCH.]
No sooner is the level crossing passed than we are come to a bridge
spanning a broad waterway running right and left. This marks our advent
upon Romney Marsh, for here is the famous Royal Military Canal, a
national defence that has never been called on to prove its usefulness,
and has ever been, since its projection and execution in 1805, the
subject of much satire at the expense of the military engineers who
designed and constructed, and the Government that authorised it.
The origin of the canal is found in the naturally open condition of
this coast, and in the old fears of invasion, not so long since dead;
for there are still those who vividly recollect such alarms even in the
reign of Napoleon III.
[Illustration: WAREHORNE.]
The long range of the south coast between Eastbourne and Folkestone--a
stretch of, roughly, fifty miles--is remarkable for the low sandy
or shingly shores that offer easy landing for boats. The smugglers,
during many centuries, found the beaches of Dymchurch, the marshes
of Winchelsea, Rye, and Romney, places exactly fitted to the needs
of their shy midnight business, and it has always been seen that the
landing of a foreign foe could most readily be effected by an invading
force on these low sand spits and shingly promontories--assuming the
simultaneous absence of our fleet and the presence of a dead calm.
Lying directly opposite France, whose coast can, under favourable
conditions, be seen, now like a grey cloud, and again, when sunshine
strikes the distant cliffs, gleaming white, the unprotected state of
the Kent and Sussex littoral has always occasioned much uneasiness in
times of war or rumours of war. It has never been forgotten that Cæsar
landed at Deal, or that William the Norman came ashore at Pevensey, and
those hoary historical lessons have served to afflict many statesmen
with nightmares, away from the time when Henry VIII., in 1539, built
his squat castles and potbellied bastions at Sandown, Deal, Sandgate,
and Walmer, in fear of a Continental combination against him, and
personally saw that they were well and truly built; down to the years
of Napoleon's threatened descent, when the Military Canal was dug and
the long line of Martello towers built. What says Ingoldsby of the
canal? Why, this:
"When the late Mr. Pitt was determined to keep out Buonaparte and
prevent his gaining a settlement in the county of Kent, among other
ingenious devices adopted for that purpose he caused to be constructed
what was then, and has ever since been conventionally termed, a
'Military Canal.' This is a not very practicable ditch, some thirty
feet wide and nearly nine feet deep in the middle, extending from the
town and port of Hythe to within a mile of the town and port of Rye,
a distance of about twenty miles, and forming, as it were, the end of
a bow, the arc of which constitutes that remote fifth quarter of the
globe, Romney Marsh, spoken of by travellers. Trivial objections to
the plan were made at the time by cavillers; an old gentleman of the
neighbourhood, who proposed, as a cheap substitute, to put down his own
cocked-hat upon a pole, was deservedly pooh-pooh'd down; in fact, the
job, though rather an expensive one, was found to answer remarkably
well. The French managed, indeed, to scramble over the Rhine and the
Rhone, and other insignificant currents; but they never did, or could,
pass Mr. Pitt's 'Military Canal.'"
[Illustration: THE ROYAL MILITARY CANAL, AT WAREHORNE.]
Satire is writ large, in a fine bold Roman hand, over that description
of the Military Canal, is it not? and really, the difficulty of
outflanking, or even of overpassing, this insignificant waterway would
have been small had Napoleon ever set forth from Boulogne. But he never
did, and so its defensible properties remain only x. One thing it does
do most thoroughly: being dug at the foot of the ground falling to
the levels, it sets visible limits and bounds to the marshland, and
in a striking manner makes you understand that here you are come into
another and strange region. From Hythe, under those earthy clifflets
it goes by way of Lympne, Hurst, Bonnington, Bilsington, Ruckinge,
Warehorne, and Appledore, and thence to within hail of Rye, and is
nowadays a most picturesque object. The word "canal" does by no means
accord it justice. You picture a straight-cut stretch of water, yellow
and malodorous, with barges slowly voyaging along, the bargees smoking
rank shag and indulging in ranker language; but that is quite unlike
this defence of Old England. It is not straight, its waters are clean,
there are not any barges; but there are overhanging trees, clusters of
bulrushes, strange water-plants, and an abundance of wild life along
its solitary way. Before railways were, and when even the few roads
of the marsh were almost impassable, the canal was very useful to the
inhabitants of the district, when goods came and went along it by
packet-boats; but they have long since ceased to ply. So long since
as 1867 it was proposed to sell this obsolete defence to a projected
railway company, but it escaped that fate.
They are chiefly beech-trees that line the banks, generally on the
inner side, where the heavy raised earthworks and the corresponding
ditch for defenders are still very prominent.
We are introduced to the Marshland at the beginning of the prose
legend, "The Leech of Folkestone." "The world," we are told, "according
to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
and Romney Marsh. In this last named, and fifth, quarter of the
globe, a Witch may still be occasionally discovered in favourable,
_i.e._ stormy, seasons, weathering Dungeness Point in an eggshell,
or careering on her broomstick over Dymchurch Wall. A cow may yet be
sometimes seen galloping like mad, with tail erect, and an old pair of
breeches on her horns, an unerring guide to the door of the crone whose
magic arts have drained her udder."
This "recondite region," as he very happily calls it, is still, sixty
years after the description was written, a peculiar and eerie tract.
Among the most readily defined of districts, Romney Marsh proper
extends from Hythe on the east, along the coast to New Romney, in a
south-westerly direction, and is bounded by the high-road between that
town and Snargate on the north-west; the circuit being completed by the
line of the Royal Military Canal. Other marshes, indistinguishable by
the eye from that of Romney, extend westward and up to and beyond Rye
and the river Rother, across the border from Kent into Sussex. These
are, severally, Dunge Marsh, Walling Marsh, and Guildford Level.
Romney Marsh obtains its name from the Anglo-Saxon _Ruimn-ea_, the
marshy water--the same root-word which gave Ramsgate its original
name of _Ruim's-geat_. We do not know by what name the Romans knew
the district; but it is quite certain that when they came to Britain,
and for two centuries later, the area now covered with pastures and
scattered hamlets was a great lagoon, fed by the rivers Rother and
Limen and the many landsprings that even in these comparatively arid
times gush from the ragged edge of the high ground between Hythe and
Warehorne. With every flood tide, the sea mixed its salt waters with
the fresh brought down by the rivers, which at the ebb flowed out
into the sea at a point where, now nearly four miles inland, the tiny
village of Old Romney is seen, standing on its almost imperceptible
hillock. The Rother, now a very insignificant stream, was diverted from
its old course by the terrible storm of 1280, and now seeks the sea
at Rye, and the Limen has long been a mere brook; but when the Romans
established themselves here, those river-channels were broad enough
and deep enough to afford safe passage for the vessels of that time,
and the anchorage within the great shingle-bank that then protected
the lagoon from where Hythe now stands to New Romney was by far the
best and safest on this coast. It is difficult at first to fully grasp
these great changes that have so altered the appearance of this great
tract of country within the historic period; but, once understood, they
make a fascinating study and give the marsh a deeper interest. Then
only is it possible to reconstruct the forgotten scene: the calm waters
of the magnificent harbour stretching away for miles, to the densely
wooded slopes of Ruckinge, Bonnington, and Hurst, where the oaks and
the brushwood were mirrored in the shallow reaches, and the clustered
vessels could be seen anchored in the fairway.
At the remotest end of this lake, where Lympne and Studfall Castle are
now, were the harbour and fortress of Portus Lemanis, taking their name
from the river Limen, and forming perhaps the chief commercial port of
that time, just as Rutupium and Regulbium were the military and naval
stations. From that point ran a road, straight as though measured by a
ruler, fourteen miles inland, across country, to the Roman station and
town of Durovernum: the lonely road now marked on the map as "Stone
Street"; the station that city we now know as Canterbury.
At some late period in the Roman domination this magnificent harbour
was found to be silting up. Many things have changed since those remote
days, but the prevailing winds and the general set of the sea-currents
in the Channel remain unaltered. Even then the westerly gales and the
march of the shingle from west to east were altering the geography of
this coast, just as they are active in doing now, adding as they do
in every year great deposits of shingle to that projecting beak of
Dungeness which was not in existence in the Roman era.
The consternation of the merchants and the shipping interest of Portus
Lemanis at this gradual silting up of the harbour must have been great,
but we know nothing of it, nor of the measures that must needs have
been taken to prevent it. Probably it was the clearing of the wooded
inland country that caused these changes, quite as much as the set of
the shingle; for it was the dense woods that gave the Rother and the
Limen their once robust existence, and when they were cut down and the
moisture they generated was lost, those rivers would lose that strength
of current necessary to scour away the shingly bars that began to
accumulate in the estuaries. The mischief was, of course, long in the
doing, and probably two hundred years passed before it was seen that
the harbour and the port were doomed.
When that fact became at last impressed upon the Romans, they altered
their policy. Ceasing any attempt they had made to keep the waterway
open, they allied their efforts to the forces of nature, and, building
walls to keep the sea out and the rivers within their courses, began
that sustained work which has at last, after some sixteen hundred
years, made Romney Marsh what we now see it. It was they who first
built upon the shingle where Dymchurch Wall now keeps the sea at
bay, and their work was the "Rhee Wall"--the _rivi vallum_ of their
language--that, running from Appledore to Romney, kept the fresh water
out of the land it was now their earnest endeavour to reclaim. Portus
Lemanis, of course, was ruined, but, equally of course, not at once.
How rarely does one actually picture the real length of the Roman stay
in Britain, which actually comprised over four hundred years; or, to
put it in a picturesque comparison, a period of time equal to that
between our own day and the reign of Henry VIII. For half of their
colonial period--say from a time corresponding to that between the
reign of Queen Anne and that of Edward VII.--they were engaged in
enclosing and draining the marsh, and there must have been ample time
for the inhabitants of Portus Lemanis to realise the position. Did the
Roman scheme, we wonder, allow them compensation?
By the time that their empire fell to pieces, and their troops and
colonists were withdrawn from Britain, they had succeeded by degrees
in altering this scene into a bog, and then into fenced-off enclosures
intersected with drains and having a great reedy expanse of lake in
the centre, where the wild fowl nested in myriads. Something very like
this scene, although on a smaller scale, may now be observed at Slapton
Sands, between Dartmouth and Torcross in South Devon, where a shingle
bank divides the scene from a long length of a freshwater lake, choked
with aquatic plants and teeming with wild life.
This scene of reclamation must have reverted to a very wild condition
in the savage centuries after the Romans had left, and we hear nothing
of any further works until the eighth century, when the monks of Christ
Church, Canterbury, were granted the western portion of the marsh, and
reclaimed much of it around New Romney.
It was somewhere about this period, when it was difficult to convict
a writer of untruth, that Nennius, Abbot of Bangor, in his _History
of the Britons_, told his pleasant fable about Romney Marsh. His
imagination was not limited by his ever having visited Kent, and so,
sitting in the scriptorium at Bangor, he could give his lively fancy
full play. He describes it as "the first marvel of Britain, for in it
are sixty islands, with men living in them. It is girt by sixty rocks,
and in every rock is an eagle's (not a mare's) nest. And sixty rivers
flow into it, and yet there goes into the sea but one river, which
is called the Limen." For a series of picturesque lies that would be
difficult to beat, outside the _Arabian Nights_, whose tales do not
pretend to be other than fiction.
It was by the efforts of the monastery of Christ Church that the
harbour of New Romney, two miles farther down than the ancient Rother
mouth, was begun, and, in spite of Danish incursions and frequent
lapses into barbarism, the work went surely forward, so that in the
Norman period, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the marsh was
grazing ground for sheep, settled and prosperous, with numerous
villages and churches, whose Norman architecture bears witness to the
truth of history, as written in dryasdust deeds and charters.
The Church derived a splendid profit from the enterprise with which
it had thus developed its property. Fat fields yielded toll of rent
and wool; the important harbour of New Romney collected rich shipping
dues. And then!--then befell a series of the greatest tempests ever
known on these shores--the storms of 1236, 1250, 1286, and 1334. The
first two wrought much havoc, but the great February storm of 1286
was the worst, when the wind and the sea choked up the harbour with
shingle and diverted the course of the Rother, and, tearing down the
sea-defences, lay the hardly-won lands once more under salt water. This
crowning disaster paralysed all effort. Only by degrees, and unaided,
did the waters subside. The unfortunate inhabitants had lost all; many
lost their lives; the port of Romney was crippled. Tradition even
goes so far as to tell how fifty-two thousand persons were drowned
in a tidal wave. Worst of all, the great monastery of Christ Church,
ruled at that time by men more grasping than enterprising, expended
nothing to make those misfortunes lighter. The port and harbour of
New Romney, in especial, brought into flourishing existence by the
statesmanlike policy of the early churchmen, was ruined by the later,
who at this hour of need treated it merely as a source of revenue,
and refused to undertake those works which, embarked upon in time,
might have preserved its importance. Great shingle-banks filled the
harbour entrance, and only the smallest vessels could enter. So affairs
remained, the townsfolk feebly delving and clearing the obstructions,
unaided, for close upon half a century, when the furious storm of 1334
undid all their work and finally crushed their spirit of resistance. At
this time, also, the district was exposed to foreign attack.
Thus it was that, in the reign of Edward IV., the marsh was, for its
better government and to induce settlement and reclamation of the
drowned lands, placed under the control of the bailiff and jurats
appointed by the charter of February 23rd, 1461. In the introduction
to this measure, the marsh was declared to be "much deserted, owing to
the danger resulting from foreign invasion and to the unwholesomeness
of the soil and situation." To support that statement, and to show that
this scheme was not altogether successful, comes the very interesting
description by Lambarde, who, a hundred years later, says, "The
place hath in it sundry villages, although not thick set, nor much
inhabited, because it is _Hyeme malus_, _Aestate molestus_, _Nunquam
bonus_--Evill in winter, grievous in summer, and never good"; or, in
the once familiar Kentish phrase, the marsh provided "wealth without
health," good grass but unwholesome air.
Freed from the paralysing ownership of the Church, on the Reformation
an effort was made to encourage settlers in this almost deserted
region by granting those who held land within its limits freedom from
many of those imposts with incomprehensible names that must have made
the lot of mediæval taxpayers unhappy. "Toll and tare," "scot and
lot," "fifteen and subsidy," were the particular extortions excused
to these adventurous persons, and to quote Lambarde again, "so many
other charges as I suppose no one place within the Realm hath. All
which was done (as it appeareth in the Charter itself) to allure men
to inhabit the Marsh which they had before abandoned, partly for the
unwholesomeness of the soil, and partly for fear of the enemie, which
had often brent and spoyled them."
These inducements did not have much effect, for although many taxes
were remitted, there was still that special local tax levied to provide
funds for keeping the sea defences in repair, and that alone was, and
still remains, a heavy burden on the land. Thus many of the deserted
villages of the marsh were never re-populated, as we may still see in
the ruined churches and waste sites in its midst.
But the marsh was not wholly devoid of population. As the waters
subsided and grass grew again, so the flocks increased; and the ancient
trade of smuggling, which began in the time of Edward I. in the
illegal exportation of wool, flourished all the more from this being a
lonely district in which it was difficult for strangers to find their
way. This, the first phase in the long and varied history of smuggling,
was then known as "owling," and the dangerous trade at once enlisted
men fully as courageous and desperate as those who, in later ages, when
lace, tea, tobacco, and brandy were the chief items in the contraband
industry, terrorised the countryside and warred with the preventive
service in many a midnight skirmish. "Owling" took its name from the
signal-calls of the smugglers to one another on black and moonless
nights. They imitated the weird shrieks of those nocturnal birds, and
never was such a place for owls as Romney Marsh in the brave times of
contraband.
The exportation of wool was at first only taxed, but later was entirely
prohibited. The object aimed at in depriving the Continent of wool was
the extinction of the foreign weaving industries, and the establishment
of the clothing trade in this country. To insure the fleeces not being
shipped abroad by men eager for personal gain and indifferent to
patriotism or national policy, the taxes on bales varied from twenty to
forty shillings in the reign of Edward I., but exportation was wholly
forbidden by Edward III., whose Queen ardently desired to introduce
colonies of Flemish weavers to use our home-grown wool within these
shores. Punishments ranging from death down to mutilation of ears or
hands were provided for those who infringed this severe law, but these
penalties had few terrors for the marshfolk, secure in their boggy
fastnesses. The marsh produced some wool, and the inland districts a
great deal more, and every shearing season, impudently flaunting all
laws and prohibitions, long lines of pack-horses, laden with woolpacks,
found their way to New Romney and quiet places along this coast, on
their way to France. For every new restrictive amendment of the laws
the smuggling exporters of wool had an ingenious evasion, and so the
contest went on for centuries. The law was the more successfully
outwitted and defied because the landowners and every rural class were
financially interested in the illegal trade. Although, as a special
effort against wool leaving the country, shearers were at last required
to shear only at certain specified times, and to register the number
of fleeces, this provision was openly broken. In 1698 it was enacted
that no man living within fifteen miles of the sea in Kent or Sussex
should buy any wool, unless he entered into sureties that none of
what he bought should be sold to any person within fifteen miles of
the coast; and wool-growers were required to account for the number
of fleeces they owned, and state the places where they were stored.
But legislators might have saved themselves the trouble, for it was
calculated that forty thousand packs of wool continued to be illegally
conveyed annually to Calais. The Devil might as reasonably be expected
to reprove sin as the local magistrates and persons in authority to
suppress the lucrative trade in which they waxed rich.
Under such circumstances, the officials who were entrusted with the
administration of these laws led a very hard life. They were the
Ishmaels against whom every man's hand was raised, and the more
strictly they performed their duty, by so much more were they hated.
One striking incident has survived out of many such that must have
happened. The mounted excise officers who in 1694 patrolled the
district made a capture of ten men escorting a large pack-horse train
of wool-bales to some pushing-off place for France, and haled them
before his worship the Mayor of New Romney. Sworn information and due
process of law were followed, and Mr. Mayor was desired to commit the
captives to prison. Instead of doing so, he strained his discretionary
powers to the utmost, and admitted them to bail. Possibly he had an
interest in that very consignment thus put under embargo, or at the
very least of it claimed friendship with, or was under neighbourly or
business obligations to those to whom it did belong--so thoroughly
bound up with smuggling was every detail of trade and intercourse
in the marsh. This admission of the whole gang to bail was but the
second act of the comedy, of which the seizure was the first, and it
was followed by another, and a more stirring one. During the night
the furious populace of Romney burst in upon the Revenue men, and so
threatened them with violence that the Mayor's son advised them, in
God's name, begone, lest worse befell.
Most excellent advice, and they take it. Half-dressed, and flinging
themselves upon their horses in haste, they ride out of Romney with
the whole town after them, and the town's pots and kettles hurtling in
the air after pursued and pursuers alike. Jacob Rawlings, as good a
freetrader as anyone, and hating an Exciseman as he ought to hate the
Devil, is downed by a saucepan intended for a King's officer; Nehemiah
Crutwell, who thinks good wool ought never to be taxed, has got a cut
in the cheek from a brass skillet, flung with uncertain aim; the sconce
of another is cracked by a broomstick intended for the crupper of one
of the horses. Off they go into the night, pursued by fifty armed men,
vowing death and destruction, and not until they have floundered across
Guildford Level, and are come to Camber Point and Sussex, do their
enemies draw off.
CHAPTER VII
ROMNEY MARSH (_continued_)
There is no fault to be found with the present condition of the road
that leads from Warehorne to Snargate. It winds amazingly, but the
surface is good and the width sufficient to keep the most inexpert
drivers of traps or riders of cycles from steering into the black
dykes that line it. Far otherwise, however, is it with the tracks that
branch off boldly here and there and lure the unwary into extraordinary
remotenesses where the guide-book measurements and acreage of the
marsh seem a mockery, and its limits recede with every step. Lonely
cottages, where the "lookers," or shepherds, or the dykers live, are
passed at infrequent intervals, each one a forbidding box of dull
brick, with its generally unkempt garden and numerous chickens, and
its great pile of faggots or brushwood for winter's firing. In this
wilderness may be found many of those deserted sites already mentioned;
the shapeless walls of ruined churches alone telling silently of the
great flood and the drowned villages. Eastbridge Chapel, Orgarswick,
Blackmanstone, and Hope Chapel are the chief of these. Newchurch and
Ivychurch are striking exceptions to this old tale of destruction. They
belong to the same Early English period, with later additions, and are
large, handsome structures. Standing on ground rising ever so slightly
higher than the sites of their unfortunate neighbours, they escaped
destruction, to tell us how well, and on how grand a scale they builded
who first brought the marsh under cultivation.
Romney Marsh is still so greatly in a state of nature that the
black-headed gull breeds freely in its reedy dykes, although, to be
sure, the demand for plovers' eggs causes much havoc to be wrought
among its nests by denizens of the neighbourhood, who earn a very
excellent livelihood by supplying London poulterers. The simple native
and the honest poulterer both do very well, and so long as the London
consumer of expensive "plover's" eggs knows no better, why, no harm is
done.
Snargate stands on that fine, straight, broad, and level road from
Appledore to New Romney which bears the strongest evidence of having
once been a raised causeway across the morasses, and is in fact
identical with the Rhee Wall, already mentioned as having been built
by the Romans to keep out the river Rother. "Snargate" was originally
the name given to a sluice from the marsh into the river at this
point. An inn, the church, a few old cottages, the vicarage--that is
now the sum-total of Snargate, whose flint and stone battlemented
church-tower peeps over the surrounding trees, and forms a pretty
picture for a great distance down the long perspective of the road.
A near approach shows it to be not only surrounded with trees, but
hemmed in by them, and so closely that they obscure the light from the
plain, leaded casement windows, and cast a green, mildewy, fungoid
shade over all. Great gloomy churchyard yews, planted, perhaps, by the
first church-builders, grow at close quarters and carpet the ground
with thick and vivid moss, and two giant trees that look like pollard
beeches, but on closer inspection are seen to be ashes, stand sentinel
by the south porch, and lift eerie phalanginous branches dramatically
upright.
It is a fine old church, built in the graceful Early English style,
and on quite a large scale; but now uncared for and horribly damp.
When, having obtained the keys, you swing back the groaning door, the
reek of the dampness smites you coldly in the face, and the odour of
it produces a sneeze that goes hollowly reverberating up and down the
mildewed interior. Emptiness and damp are the interior characteristics
of Snargate church--its pavements slimy with moisture, the walls
alternately livid and green with it. It is not surprising that Barham
preferred to live at Warehorne.
[Illustration: SNARGATE.]
Brenzett village is larger and livelier than Snargate. From it
Brookland, Ivychurch, and Newchurch are most easily reached--the first,
on the right-hand side of this causeway road to New Romney, in Walling
Marsh; the others to the left, in the Marsh of Romney. Brookland is
distant one mile from the main road, on a by-way that, if you follow it
long enough, brings you dustily into Rye; dustily, because the traffic
that resorts to Brookland station cuts up the surface to an astonishing
extent; astonishing, because that traffic is necessarily of small
dimensions, seeing that this is merely a branch railway leading to
the very verge and outer rim of the world at Dungeness. An infallible
sign of this scarcity of road traffic is the action of the keeper
of the level crossing by the station, whom one suspects to be also
station-master, ticket-collector, porter, and signalman combined. He
touches his hat to the passing tourist, and, glad to hear the voice of
a stranger, exchanges remarks on the weather.
[Illustration: BROOKLAND.]
From afar off, along the flat road, the whimsical bell-tower of
Brookland church rises, like some strange portent. If the stranger
has not heard of it before, he speculates, perplexed, as to what
it can possibly be, for, seen in silhouette against the sky, it
presents the weirdest kind of outline. Imagine three old-fashioned
candle-extinguishers, placed one upon the other, and you have that odd
campanile very closely imitated. It stands apart from the church, is
of massive oak framing, weatherboarded, and thickly and most liberally
tarred. The wildest local legends exist, purporting to account for this
freak, the most specious of all telling how the builder of the church
finding he had lost by the contract, set this up in place of the stone
tower originally contemplated. The real reason for this detached wooden
belfry is found in the old-time nature of the site, too waterlogged
to be capable of giving support to so heavy a structure as a stone
tower. A wicked old satirical allusion to this unusual feature, still
current in the village--or perhaps rather, considering its nature, in
the surrounding villages--declares that when a bachelor and a maid
are married in Brookland church, the belfry will leap up and occupy a
place on the roof. As marriages here are not uncommon, and the belfry
keeps its place, this, it will be allowed, is a grievous saying. An old
writer, with a naive assumption of innocence, noting this example of
local humour, pretends not to understand the libellous gibe. "What it
doth portend," he remarks, "I know not." He should have inquired, say,
at Brenzett--or, indeed, anywhere save at Brookland, whose inhabitants
are still touchy on the subject; as well they may be, since every
passing stranger, posted in local lore, lets off a joke or makes
jocular inquiry.
Returning to the main road, a signpost directs into the heart of Romney
Marsh, by way of Ivychurch and Newchurch. Ivychurch, whose tower is
dimly visible from the road in the soft atmosphere of the marsh, is
a mile and a half distant, and stands as isolated from the world as
a place well may be and yet remain a "going concern." What is there
of Ivychurch? A few farmsteads, a few more cottages, an oast-house
or so, a village inn, and an amazingly large church. Apart from New
Romney church, which is that of a town and therefore not comparable
with that of this rural parish, the great church of Ivychurch is by
far the largest in the whole district, and fully deserves to be called
the Marshland Cathedral. It could accommodate, fifty times over, the
present population of the parish, and the irresistible inference is
that this must, six hundred years ago, when the great church was built,
have been the most densely peopled region of the marsh. Nowadays, like
all its fellow churches, it is damp and mouldy and a world too large.
Nay, more: its vast empty interior is falling into decay, and the north
aisle is made to serve the purpose of a coal-cellar; while, because
the windows are broken, the wildfowl of this "recondite region" have
made it a favourite roosting-place. It is an eerie experience, having
procured the keys and unlocked the door, to be met with a tremendous
whirring of wings, and to be almost knocked down with the surprise of a
moorhen flying in one's face. Funds are accumulating for a restoration
of this church; but, unless the people come back to the land, why
expend so much good money? Better were it that this should go the way
of the other ruined churches of the marsh if there be none to worship.
The wheel of fortune, however, still turns. God grant the time be at
hand when the yellowing corn becomes again that predominant feature in
the landscape it never has been in the eyes of the present generation;
that the farmer may again find his industry pay, and we be no longer
dependent upon the foreigner for our food supplies.
[Illustration: IVYCHURCH.]
[Illustration: NEWCHURCH, ON ROMNEY MARSH: "THIS RECONDITE REGION;
THIS FIFTH QUARTER OF THE GLOBE."]
Newchurch, nearly three miles farther into the marsh, was new seven
hundred years ago, when the church was built. It is second only in
size to Ivychurch, with the same lichenous damp, but better cared
for, and the centre of a quite considerable village, as villages go
in these parts. There must actually be sufficient inhabitants in the
parish to quarter fill the building! Newchurch makes a pretty picture,
thoroughly characteristic of the marsh. From it the eye ranges to
the wooded cliffs at Bilsington, to Aldington Knoll, and to Lympne,
with its castle and church, looking fairy-like and ethereal in the
shimmering light of a summer afternoon; or in the other direction
to where the marsh is bounded by the sea. The picture of Newchurch
itself is seen here, and is more eloquent than mere words can be. In
it you perceive how this is an epitome of the marsh, with windmill and
rushy dyke in the foreground, and farmsteads, rickyards and church,
companionable together, and in appearance mutually dependent, in middle
distance: the infinite levels of this interesting district appearing
in the background. It is not by mere chance or by any figment of
literary imagination that farms and church here look so dependent
upon one another. They actually were so in the marsh, much more than
is indicated by that tithing of the unhappy farmer customary all over
the country. It was the Church, in the form of the monastery of Christ
Church, Canterbury, that originally reclaimed the marsh and brought
it under cultivation, and the Church was, by consequence, landlord.
Long years of patient labour had resulted in winning these lands for
agriculture, and the monastery fully earned the profits it eventually
secured from its long-continued enterprise. Its piety was of two
kinds,--of that practical sort which makes two blades of grass grow
where but one grew before, and thus improves our temporal condition
in this vale of tears; and of that spiritual and intellectual variety
which, having founded settlements for the husbandmen, saw to it that
his immortal as well as his earthly part should have due sustenance.
This is no place to tell how in the course of centuries that Church
fell away from its high ideals: here still survive neighbourly farm and
parish place of worship, to prove that they once existed.
It is here, in the middle of the marsh, that you perceive how little
given to change are the local methods. Sheep are still to be found
here in thousands, and still tended, as from time immemorial, by that
variety of shepherd known in these parts as a "looker." Ingoldsby names
the manservant of Thomas Marsh of Marston, "Ralph Looker," and derived
the name, doubtless, from this local title for shepherd.
The terms of a "looker's" employment are curious, and look wretchedly
poor, but as they have survived, and show no signs of being revised
in these times when labour is scarce on the farms and farmers eagerly
compete for help, they cannot be worse than methods of paying shepherds
in other parts of the country. A "looker" does everything connected
with sheep-tending at an inclusive payment of one shilling and sixpence
an acre per annum. For this he looks after the flocks, sees them
through the horrors of the lambing season, shears them in summer,
succours them in winter, and cures their ailments throughout the year.
The sum seems pitiful, but when calculated on farms of six hundred
acres or so, works out fairly well.
One comes to love the marsh, to delight in its byways, and to welcome
opportunities for extended exploration. From Newchurch it is easily
possible to find a way back to the main road without retracing one's
footsteps. That way lies near the spot marked on ordnance maps as
"Blackmanstone Chapel," a ruin so thoroughly ruinated that it is
difficult to find--and not worth seeing when found. Blackmanstone
Chapel was apparently founded by one Blacheman, who held the manor
in the time of Edward the Confessor, but, in common with many such
chapels, it seems to have been founded more for the repose of a
single erring soul than to satisfy any crying spiritual need of the
neighbourhood. The adjoining parish of St. Mary the Virgin is more
fortunate. It keeps its ancient church in excellent condition. On its
pavement the curious may note an epitaph to one Daniel Langdon, "Common
Expenditor" of Romney Marsh, 1750.
The cautious explorer of the marsh is careful to carry his nosebag
with him, in the shape of some pocketable light refreshment, for the
inns are infrequent, and the farm-folk, although hospitable enough,
cannot always supply even the most modest demands of the stranger.
Milk even--that unfailing product of a farm--is not always to be had,
for the morning's supply may already have been sent off to the nearest
railway station, and the five o'clock afternoon milking hour be not yet
come. Moreover, farmers generally entering into a contract to supply a
certain quantity cannot always afford to sell even a single glass. As
for farmhouse bread and cheese, dismiss from your mind all thoughts of
home-baked bread or local cheese in these times. The bread will often
be a tin loaf from the baker's of Ashford, Hythe, or Littlestone; and
the cheese--well, here is the apology of a farmer's wife: "I'm sorry
we've no Dutch cheese, but here is some American; we think it very
good." Can such things be? you ask. _Can_ they be, indeed? Are they
not the commonplace experiences of all those few who really explore
the innermost recesses of the country and feel the pulse and count
the heart-beats of rural life? Is there not something radically wrong
with England when a farmer's wife can make such a speech as that, and
not think it strange? In the dying words of the late Lord Winchilsea,
a true friend of farming, "God save Agriculture!" when in an English
dairying district the farmers buy Dutch and American cheese.
But that is not the only alien article in the farmhouses. Tawdry German
glassware and "ornamental" china "decorate" the "best parlour," and
the doleful wailings of American organs on Sundays give evidence of
the religious instincts of the farmer's family and agonise the unhappy
wayfarer. Old England is certainly being cosmopolitanised (good word!)
in every direction; here is another instance, for what do we see on
the barn-walls and posting-stations but the announcement, addressed
to the rustics, of a "Fête Champêtre" to be held in aid of a church
restoration fund. In the days before Hodge left off saying "beant" and
took to using the more cultivated phrase "is not," like the Squire and
the Parson, he would--supposing him able to read at all--have asked,
wonderingly, "What be this 'ere Feet Shampeter?"--and that would have
been a very learned Squire or Parson who could have correctly explained
the meaning.
CHAPTER VIII
OLD AND NEW ROMNEY AND DYMCHURCH
Returning from this excursion into the intimate things of the marsh,
and making for New Romney, attention is arrested by the view of a
group of a church and two houses at a little distance from the road.
This the map proclaims to be Old Romney, that sometime seaport, busy
and prosperous in Saxon times, before ever the Normans came to follow
the retreating sea and to found New Romney, a mile and more away. Old
Romney is so very old that it has forgotten its past, and antiquaries
can tell little or nothing of it; but with our vision illumined by
legitimate imagination, we can picture that old port in no uncertain
way, perched upon its slight eminence and overlooking the mingling of
salt water and fresh at this long-vanished mouth of the Rother; the
Saxon ships beached on the shingle-falls, or stuck fast in the alluvial
mud of still bayous. Where those keels came to anchor, the ploughman
drives his furrow, and where the wooden houses of that old town
stood, the broad fields of oats, beans, and turnips ripen in the sun.
The population of the whole parish of Old Romney, with its outlying
hamlets and cottages, numbers not more than a hundred and fifty, and
of village there is but this lonely group of church, vicarage, and
two farmhouses. The church itself, Norman and Early English though
it be, is of the rural type, and thus tells us that already, when it
was built, the place had sunk into insignificance. There it stands,
on its scarcely perceptible knoll, its broad-based tower, constructed
of flint and shingle grouting, eloquent of the Has Been, and still
indifferent, as for seven hundred years past, to the To Be. Dynasties,
social conditions, the whole polity of a nation, have changed, time and
again, since that old tower first arose beside this Rhee Wall road.
All the little injustices, oppressions, and disasters, all the joys
and sorrows of seven centuries, all those flouts of cynic Circumstance
that in their time seem so great and poignant, have passed it by, and
still, with its immemorial attendant yew-tree, it looks upon this
ancient road, calmly contemptuous of the wayfarers that come and go.
There is that in this merely rural church which impresses one much
more deeply than--or in an altogether different way from--the sight
of a cathedral. The great minster means intellectual and religious
exaltation; here a sense of the futility of men and things--of the
evanescent nature of those who build and of the astounding permanency
and indifference of the things they rear--clutches the heart with
the grip of ice. Not here the _sursum corda_ of the pilgrim, but
the gloom of the pessimist and the tears of those who sorrow for
the littleness of our little span are called forth by the solitude,
the isolation and minatory prominence of this marshland church. For
though it be neighboured by farmsteads, the brooding spirit of the
place is communicated to them, rather than their domestic cheerfulness
irradiating its aloofness. In fine, only the stolid and the
unimaginative should live at Old Romney, whose minor key deepens into a
sadder intensity when day draws to its close, as the shadows lengthen
and the cattle come, lowing, home to byre.
[Illustration: OLD ROMNEY.]
I would do much to avoid Old Romney at such time o' day, coming to it
by preference in early morning, when the summer sun is hot upon the
earth, but not so hot nor so long risen that it has had time to dry the
dew upon the fragrant wild thyme of the grass. Then there is hope in
the atmosphere, and the Past does not lie with so dead a weight upon
the Present and the Future.
But to continue to New Romney. There, on the way, across the level,
seen dimly through the heat-haze, and scarce distinguishable from a
ragged clump of trees, rises the shattered wall that is the sole relic
of Hope Chapel, one of the ruined endeavours of the marsh. Hope All
Saints is traditionally said to have been the first settlement in
the district, and named "Hope"--it is a simple, artless belief--as
expressive at once of the anxieties and the trustfulness of those
original settlers, who selected that comprehensive dedication of "All
Saints" with the businesslike idea of enjoying as extended a patronage
as possible among the bright and shining ones of the New Jerusalem.
Alas! for the protection thus sought. Hope has been deserted time out
of mind, and the walls of its chapel are a shapeless and solitary mass.
Such also is the condition of Mydley Chapel, in Dunge Marsh, on the
right-hand side of the road, whose ruined gable-end is seen standing
out prominently, like an inverted Y.
Within sight, surrounded by that almost invariable circlet of trees
which seems to lovingly enfold the churches, the villages, and the
townlets of the marsh, and to shelter them from the cold blasts of
change, as also from those of the weather, is New Romney, the four
angle-tourelles or dwarf pinnacles of its church tower--not one quite
the counterpart of any of its fellows--prominent above all else.
Rounding an acute bend in the road, and passing a few scattered
nondescript sheds and outbuildings, we come with surprising suddenness
into the old Cinque Port that is so surprisingly called "new." A
dog dozing in the middle of the broad, empty street, a piano being
somewhere injuriously practised upon, the sound of a laugh in the
parlour of an old inn--these sights and sounds comprise the life and
movement of New Romney on a mid-day of this midsummer in the early
twentieth century.
The newness of New Romney is now only a battered and outworn figure of
speech, to be taken relatively and with reference to that Old Romney we
have just left. What the streets of New Romney were like when it really
was new--about the time of the Norman Conquest--we cannot conceive;
how they looked when it had already grown to a respectable age, when
the Late Norman church of St. Nicholas was built, we can form no idea.
But it is certain that this was once a town of goodly size and great
prosperity. At the time when the Cinque Ports were constituted, Romney
was thought worthy to be of the company, and to be equal fellow with
Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, and Hythe; but so early as 1351 it was so
decayed by reason of its misfortunes at the hands of tempests and the
contrary sea-currents that shoaled and silted-up its harbour, that
the unfortunate port could not send out its quota of ships for the
national defence, and was penalised accordingly, losing for a time
many of its Cinque Port privileges. When Queen Elizabeth visited the
town, and granted it the empty honour of a Mayor and Corporation, it
was very much in the condition it occupies now. Of its five churches,
only one--the one still standing--was left, the sea was two miles
distant, and her "poor town of Romney" would have been sore put to it
to do her honour, except for the liberality of certain substantial men
whose purses were equal to the heavy calls such Royal visits made.
But, it may be asked, if the town were in such sore case, whence came
the wealth of those substantial burgesses? Ay, whence? Why, from that
unchartered industry of smuggling of whose history we have already
heard so much. The port and town might decay, but for centuries
before Elizabeth's time and until the first half of the nineteenth
century had almost gone, the "owling" trade in the exportation of
wool, and the import smuggling of exciseable articles, enriched many a
highly-respectable family and kept a whole army of longshore loafers in
comfortable circumstances. Strangers with astonishment saw substantial
mansions in these wilds, eloquent in their every appointment of a high
degree of prosperity, and Ireland, writing on Kent at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, could not comprehend the existence here,
where there was no distinguishable commerce, of the "numbers of stout,
hale-looking men" who were always loafing about, without any visible
occupation. If Mr. Ireland had walked abroad o' nights, he would have
discovered that those aimless persons were then very busily employed,
and he would probably have received a crack over the head from one or
other of them, if thought too curious. The smuggling fraternity did not
welcome curious strangers.
But Ireland can scarce have been so ignorant as not to comprehend so
very obvious a thing. Either he was not sufficiently frank in his
writings, or else assumed a clumsy and not easily-detected archness.
For the thing was notorious and patent to everyone. Long before and
after his day, Hasted, the historian of Kent, described New Romney as
a town of one hundred and eighty houses and one thousand inhabitants,
"chiefly such as follow a contraband trade between this kingdom and
France." But gone are those times, and the town is now too listless
either to grow, or to die and so make an end.
The country is in the middle of the town at Romney. The stranger
who glances down the quiet street can see the cows grazing round the
corner; "baa" comes from flocks and herds, in successful competition
with the rare ting-a-ling of alarum-bells on shop-doors, infrequently
opened; and the crows and jackdaws hold a noisy witenagemot among
the embowering trees of the churchyard--the "God's Acre" of this one
remaining church of St. Nicholas, that patron saint who impartially
looked after the interests of sailors and thieves. Thieves were,
indeed, in the Middle Ages known by the polite title of "St. Nicholas'
clerks"--hence perhaps the vulgar term of "nicking" for stealing.
[Illustration: NEW ROMNEY.]
It is a fine old Norman building, this church of St. Nicholas, with a
tower arcaded and panelled in the well-known Norman style, and a grand,
black-browed, ponderous interior, infinitely eloquent of old-time
importance. The old altar tomb to Richard Stuppeneye, Jurat of the
Marsh in 1509, in times before Mayors of Romney, stands at the east
end of the south aisle, and was the spot where the business of the
town was transacted in days before a town hall was erected; times when
men thought it no ill to employ the house of God in between whiles
for certain secular purposes. Stuppeneye's tomb, as an inscription
states, was erected by his great-grandson in 1622, "for the use of the
ancient meeting and election of Maior and Jurats of this port towne."
And surely, if there be anything in associations and surroundings the
town's business was like to be hallowed by the place where it was
conducted, just as the annual election of a mayor beside the worthy
Stuppeneye's resting-place should have secured a fitting magistrate.
Let no one cite the mayor who sympathised with and aided the "owlers"
as an instance of an unfit representative being chosen, for no one
outside the Revenue ever thought any form of smuggling sinful. But old
customs were broken some nine years since, and no longer is the mayor
chosen beside the tomb of that worthy jurat.
Close beside this monument may be noticed, on the floor, a stone to
"Edward Elsted, many years Riding Officer of this Place," who died in
1757, aged 51, doubtless, if he was a true and faithful servant of the
Revenue, to the great joy of the smuggling interests of the town; for
by the term "Riding Officer," we are to understand a mounted official
of the Preventive Service to be indicated.
For the rest, New Romney may easily be dismissed. There is the "New
Inn," with a frontage perhaps not older than one century, but with an
interior that was only new five hundred years ago, where the smuggling
cult used to hold convivial and profit-sharing meetings; there is the
Town Hall next door, and there is the broad street with never a new
building in it, or anywhere at all in the town. Sandwich is commonly
held up as an example of a Cinque Port utterly decayed and dead as
Queen Anne, or as the Pharaohs, or anything or anyone of whose demise
there cannot possibly be any doubt, but there are new houses and other
unmistakable signs of a living existence there, while here the town,
reduced to the merest existence, simply continues mechanically, like
a clock not yet run down. It is not an unpleasing--nay, it is even
an interesting--place, but it gives an odd, weather-beaten, bleak
impression, not perhaps so much to the eye as to the mind. It is
possible to visit New Romney when the thermometer registers eighty in
the shade, and for the mind to convey that bleak impression so acutely
to the senses that the body shivers.
If, however, you want something really gaunt and shivery, why
then, Littlestone-on-Sea will give all you desire in that sort,
in full measure and brimming over. Littlestone-on-Sea might
with equal propriety and more exact descriptiveness be named
Littlestone-at-the-World's-End. It stands on the shingle-banks that
have been thrown up by the sea to ruin Romney, and it is a mere line of
sad grey stucco houses with their faces to the immensity of the sea,
their backs to the emptiness of the marsh, and their skylights looking
up into the vastness of the sky. The place is a resort of golfers in
summer, an emptiness in winter, and all the year round an eyesore to
those who fare the road between Romney and Dymchurch, and cannot fail
to observe those gaunt houses in the distance, notching the coast-line
in a hateful commonplace of detached-and semi-detachedness.
Here, along this coastwise road, between this point and Hythe, we
make close acquaintance with the Martello towers. A ready way of
describing the shape of one of these towers is to picture it as an
inverted flower-pot. The proportions of height and circumference are
very nearly the same, and what architects and builders would call
the "batter"--_i.e._, the narrowing slope of the sides--runs at very
closely the same angle.
[Illustration: A MARTELLO TOWER.]
They are just upon a century old. Built solidly, of honest brickwork
through and through, in the days of the Great Terror, no enemy's fire
has ever been directed against them, but several have been used as
targets for the heavy ordnance and high explosives of the modern
gunners of Lydd and Dungeness, and, with a great deal of labour and at
huge expense, at last destroyed. Some few, also, have been undermined
and ruined by the encroachments of the sea. There were originally
seventy-six of these towers, costing from _£_10,000 to _£_20,000
apiece, according to size. The usual size is thirty feet in height,
with a diameter of forty feet at the base, diminishing to thirty at
the top. They are in two storeys, with a bomb-proof roof formerly
surmounted by a cannon mounted on a swivel-carriage. The walls vary
from a thickness of nine feet on the seaward side to six on the
landward, which would not be so greatly exposed to assault. Their name
is said to derive from that circular fort at Martella, in Corsica,
captured only after a long and desperate resistance in the time of
Nelson. It has been left for modern times to thoroughly vindicate
the plan of the military engineers who designed this first line of
defence along an unprotected coast. Fortunately, there has never been
any occasion to put these to the test, and it was not until the same
blockhouse principle was introduced on the veldt in the second Boer
War, that the weary campaign was brought at last to a close.
This tower, standing at the entrance to Dymchurch, behind the famous
Wall, has been put to a whimsical use, for it is in occupation by a
poor family, whose rent of half-a-crown a week, due to the War Office,
is guaranteed by the vicar. A Martello tower makes a squalid home.
Very little light can struggle through the deep and narrow embrasures,
and the interior is grimly suggestive of a mausoleum. The ragged duds
drying from flaunting clothes-lines, the position of the tower planted
in a scrubby waste, with domestic refuse strewed about, and the stark
nakedness of the brick, combine to make an inglorious and repellent
picture.
[Illustration: DYMCHURCH WALL.]
Here begins that famous three miles length of bulwark against the sea,
Dymchurch Wall. Witches no longer skim across it on their broomsticks,
but when the wind comes booming out of the Channel from a lowering
sky, and the seagulls fly screaming low upon the water, you will,
quite possibly, not believe and tremble, but will understand--what you
will by no means comprehend only by reading the printed page--that it
is, to the imaginative, a "whisht" place. The modern marshmen are not
imaginative, fancy does not breed in their brains, and all they see
in a storm is the chance of a rich aftermath of driftwood; but their
forebears heard a voice in every wind, and handled every besom with
that respect due to a thing which, under cover of night, might have
been, and might be again, an unholy sort of Pegasus, bound for some
Satanic aerial _levée_.
Dymchurch village shelters very humbly behind this Wall, from whose
summit one looks down upon it, or, on the other side, down upon a long,
vanishing perspective of solitary sands and blackened, rotting timber
groynes. The Wall is about twelve feet high, with a curved, concave
"apron" of boulders toward the sea, and an abrupt turfy slope on the
inland face. The summit affords a fine continuous walk, and has been
an undisguised earthen and grassy path since a few years ago, when
_£_35,000 worth of paving-stones, provided to make it look neat and
town-like, were swept away to sea in a storm.
[Illustration: DYMCHURCH WALL.]
Bungalows have now begun to appear here and there inside the Wall
adjoining Dymchurch, for there are summer visitors to whom the
solitude and the unconstrained freedom of the empty sands are welcome;
but, situated as they are, close against the inner face of the Wall,
they have the blankest sort of outlook.
CHAPTER IX
HYTHE AND FOLKSTONE
From Dymchurch, five miles of excellent road bring one into Hythe, that
old Cinque Port whose early Saxon name means "harbour," and thus tells
those among us who are thinking men how important a place it was of
old. "_The_ Harbour," definitely and emphatically it was, of capital
importance in those far-away times when Sandwich, Romney, Dover,
Folkestone, and others were of less moment; but even by the time the
Cinque Ports came into existence it had declined to inferior rank among
its brethren, and when Dover was required to furnish twenty-one ships
for the defence of the nation, and Winchelsea and Hastings respectively
ten and six, Hythe, Sandwich, Rye, and Romney were assessed at only
five each. Where is that harbour of which some vestiges remained to
the time of Elizabeth? that haven which, according to Leland, was
"strayt for passage owt of Boloyn?" Where but choked up, embedded, and
deeply overlaid beneath a mile-long waste of shingle! The glory of
that storied port is buried "full fathom five." Everywhere is shingle.
A world of it expands before the vision as one comes out of the marsh
towards the town, and Martello towers and forlorn congeries of more
modern forts stand islanded in midst of it. From the sunlit glare of
this waste the road enters Hythe, through an exquisitely beautiful
woodland, open and unfenced from the highway, with the landward ridge
of hills and the Military Canal approaching on the left.
"Hythe hath bene," says Leland, "a very greate towne yn length, ande
conteyned IIII paroches, that now be clene destroied." The greatest
surviving evidence of that ancient estate is the one remaining church
of St. Leonard, which tops the hill behind the High Street and is
the crown and distinguishing mark of Hythe from afar off. It is
chiefly of Early English architecture, and an exquisite example of
its period, with a noble chancel like the choir of a cathedral, and a
remarkable crypt or undercroft, stacked with a neatly-disposed heap
of many hundreds of skulls and large quantities of human bones. No
one knows in any definite manner how, why, or when these gruesome
relics were brought here, but legendary lore tells how they are the
remains of those who were slain in some uncertain fight--so uncertain
that whether between Britons and Romans, Romano-British and Saxons,
or Saxons and Danes is not stated. Borrow, in his _Lavengro_, plumps
for Danes, more perhaps because he had a prejudice for that hypothesis
than from any evidence he could have produced, if asked. That many of
the owners of those skulls did actually meet a violent death is quite
evident in the terrific gashes they exhibit. One may see these poor
relics for threepence, and Hythe does a roaring trade with the morbid
in photographs of the shocking collection; but it were better they
were decently buried and given rest from the handling and the flippant
comments of the shallow-minded crowd.
One refuses further to discuss skulls in the holiday sunshine of Hythe,
whose long, narrow street is cheerful and pulsing with life. Hythe
street is one of those humanly interesting old thoroughfares which one
is inclined, in the mass, to call picturesque; but on reflection it
is seen to be really always about to become so, as you advance, and
never to actually arrive at any very remarkably picturesque climax. The
Georgian town hall, standing on pillars, is interesting, and so, too,
is that queer little building called the "Smugglers' Nest," claiming
to be a look-out place of some of the many "free-traders" who carried
on operations from the town. For the rest, Hythe is old-fashioned
and by no means overwhelmed, as many of its neighbours are, by
modernity. Here the four separate and distinct streams of seafaring,
military, agricultural, and shop-keeping life pool their interests and
mingle amicably enough, under the interested observation of a fifth
contingent, the summer visitors who find the unconventional attractions
of the shingle and the unspoiled place more to their taste than the
modish charms of Folkestone.
[Illustration: THE "SMUGGLERS' NEST," HYTHE.]
Just where Hythe ends and Seabrook begins, the Military Canal comes
to a dusty and somewhat stagnant conclusion on the flat foreshore.
Lest the dreaded invader should not play the game properly, and meanly
attempt to land his troops on the open and undefended beach beyond
the tract of country cut off by that "not very practicable ditch," a
Martello tower was set up on the little shoulder of a hill overlooking
this spot, and there it remains to this day. A grey, grim, giant hotel
stands isolated out upon the shingle-banks, and would offer a splendid
mark for any modern invader who should descend upon the coast and do
the neighbourhood the kindness to blow its hideous presence away.
[Illustration: HYTHE, FROM THE ROAD TO SANDGATE.]
That stranger who might pass from Hythe to Sandgate and know nothing
of the separate existence of Seabrook would have every excuse, for it
bears every outward appearance of belonging to one or other. It is
largely a recent development, and in so far a pleasing one, for its
pretty new gabled seaside red-brick cottages, giving immediately upon
the shore, are in the best of taste and have delightful gardens, where
the little bare-legged boys and girls of the visitors sit in the sun
or sprawl, book-reading, upon the steps. Opposite these, evidences of
an enlightened taste, some grey "compo" villas cast a gloom over those
who glance upon them and tell us how stupid were those times of some
thirty years ago, when such sad-faced houses arose everywhere at the
seaside in this grey climate that calls aloud for the cheerfulness of
colour in building.
Sandgate, into which Seabrook insensibly merges, sits so close upon the
shore that it is credibly reported the lodging-house landladies live
on the upper floors of their houses in those empty winter months when
the winds blow great guns and the seas come pouring into the basements,
bringing with them large deposits of that plentiful shingle, fragments
of sea-wall, and twisted remnants of promenade railings. Year in and
year out, the sea and the Local Board, or Urban District Council, or
whatever may be the name of the authority that rules Sandgate, play a
never-ending game. In the summer the authority builds up a sea-wall,
and, in effect, says to the sea, "You can't smash _that_!" And the sea
sparkles and drowses in the sun and laps lazily upon the shore, and
artfully agrees. But when the visitors have all gone home, and the
equinoctial gales go ravening up and down the Channel, then Londoners
open their morning papers and say to their wives, "You remember that
sea-wall at Sandgate, my dear, where we used to sit in the shade: it
was entirely washed away yesterday by the sea!" But by the time their
next holiday comes round there is a newer wall there, on an improved
pattern. That, too, is either utterly destroyed in the following winter
and flung in fragments into neighbouring gardens, or else, with the
roadway and the kerbs and lamp-posts, the pillar-boxes and the whole
bag of tricks, swept out to sea and lost.
And so the game goes on. It is a costly one, and a heartbreaking for
those folks who have semi-basement breakfast-rooms and ever and again
experience the necessity of excavating their furniture out of the
shingle-filled rooms, like so many Layards digging out the Assyrian
relics of Nimroud and Baalbec. When such things can be, the desire of
adjoining Folkestone for Sandgate and the determination of Sandgate not
to be included within the municipal boundaries of its great neighbour
are not readily to be understood.
Dramatic things happen at Sandgate. Vessels are cast away upon the
road, their bowsprits coming in at the front doors, while shipwrecked
mariners, instead of being flung upon an iron-bound coast, are
projected against the palisades of the front gardens. At such times the
variety of jettisoned cargo that comes ashore is remarkable. One day
it will be a consignment of Barcelona nuts; another, a ship-load of
boots; what not, indeed, from the jostling commerce that goes up and
down that crowded sea-highway, the Channel. When the _Benvenue_ was
wrecked inshore here, at the close of 1891, and lay a menace to passing
ships, that happened which sent Sandgate sliding and cracking in all
directions. The wreck was blown up with dynamite, and soon afterwards
the clayey clifflet that forms the foundation for the north side of
Sandgate's one street slipped suddenly down, wrecking some houses and
cracking many others from roof to foundation. Many, including the
London newspapers, thought it was an earthquake.
Since then, Sandgate has largely altered, and instead of being
rather an abject attempt at a seaside resort, has been brightened
by re-building and cheered by the overflow to it from Folkestone's
overbrimming cup of prosperity. Still stands Sandgate Castle on the
sea-shore, one of Henry VIII.'s obese, tun-bellied blockhouses, very
much in shape like that portly Henry himself, as we may safely declare
now that Tudors no longer rule the land; but the very thought would
have been treason, and its expression fatal, in that burly monarch's
own day.
There is a choice of ways into Folkestone--by steeply-rising Sandgate
Hill, or by the flat lower road, where a modern toll-gate stands to
exact its dues for the convenience. This way the cyclist saves the
climb, and pilgrims in general are spared the villa roads of the hill
approach to the town, coming to it instead through pleasant woods, with
the tangled abandon of the Leas undercliff rising up to the left.
Folkestone chiefly interests the Ingoldsby pilgrim because of that
eloquent and humorous description of the old town to be found in "The
Leech of Folkestone." There was then no new and fashionable town to
be described, and the place was "a collection of houses which its
maligners call a fishing-town, and its well-wishers a watering-place. A
limb of one of the Cinque Ports, it has (or lately had) a corporation
of its own, and has been thought considerable enough to give a second
title to a noble family. Rome stood on seven hills--Folkestone seems to
have been built upon seventy. Its streets, lanes, and alleys--fanciful
distinctions without much real difference--are agreeable enough to
persons who do not mind running up and down stairs; and the only
inconvenience at all felt by such of its inhabitants as are not
asthmatic is when some heedless urchin tumbles down a chimney or an
impertinent pedestrian peeps into a garret window.
"At the eastern extremity of the town, on the sea-beach, and scarcely
above high-water mark, stood, in the good old times, a row of houses,
then denominated 'Frog Hole.' Modern refinement subsequently euphemised
the name into 'East-street'; but 'what's in a name?'--the encroachments
of Ocean have long since levelled all in one common ruin."
[Illustration: FOLKESTONE.]
Nothing of the sort has happened. East Street is still there, and
"East Street" yet, but no one has ventured to identify any house with
that occupied by that compounder of medicines, "of somewhat doubtful
reputation, but comparative opulence," Master Erasmus Buckthorne, "the
effluvia of whose drugs from within, mingling agreeably with the
'ancient and fishlike smells' from without, wafted a delicious perfume
throughout the neighbourhood."
It was to this picturesquely-described place that the Master Thomas
Marsh of the legend and his man Ralph wended their way to consult that
learned disciple of Esculapius with the fly-blown reputation; coming to
it by "paths then, as now, most pseudonymously dignified with the name
of roads."
Folkestone, the fisher-village, the "Lapis Populi" of the Romans and
the "Fulchestane" of Domesday Book--stood in a pleasant country now
quite lost sight of, built over, and bedevilled by the interminable
brick and mortar of the great and fashionable seaside resort that
Folkestone is at this day. It lay, that fisher-haven, in a hollow at
the seaward end of a long valley bordered by the striking hills of the
chalk downs that are only now to be glimpsed by journeying a mile or
so away from the sea-shore, past the uttermost streets, but were then
visible at every point. Down this valley came, trickling and prattling
in summer, or raging in winter, a little stream that, as it approached
the sea, flowed in between the crazy tenements of the fisher-folk and
smugglers who then formed the sole population--who then were the only
folk--of Folkestone. This was the "Pent Stream," which found its way
into the sea obscurely enough, oozing insignificantly through the
pebbles where the Stade and the Fishmarket now stand, by the harbour.
Alas! for that forgotten rill; it is now made to mingle its waters with
a sewer, and to flow under Tontine Street in a contaminated flood.
It is true that the small natural harbour was improved so early as
1810, or thereabouts, by Telford, but it was not until after 1844, when
the South-Eastern Railway was opened, that Folkestone began to grow,
and the original village began to be enclosed within the girdle of a
"resort" quite alien from it in style, thought, and population.
There is no love felt for modern Folkestone by the inhabitants of the
old town, who resent the prices to which things have been forced up
by the neighbourhood of the over-wealthy, and resent still more the
occasional descent from the fashionable Leas of dainty parties bent on
exploring the queer nooks, and amusing themselves with a sight of the
quaint characters, that still abound by the fishing-harbour. To those
parties, every waterside lounger who sports a peaked cap and a blue
jersey, and, resting his arms upon the railings by the quay and gazing
inscrutably out to the horizon, presents a broad stern to the street,
is a fisherman, and the feelings of a pilot, taken for a mere hauler
upon nets and capturer of soles and mackerel, are often thus outraged.
[Illustration: THE STADE, FOLKESTONE.]
For the spiritual benefit of the fisher-folk and others of the old
town, there is planted, by the Stade, a "St. Peter's Mission,"
established there by well-meaning but stupid folk who look down,
actually and figuratively, from the modern town upon this spot,
and appear to think it a sink of iniquity. But iniquities are
not always, or solely, resident in sinks; they have been found,
shameless and flourishing, in high places. There are those among the
fisher population who take the creature comforts--the coals and the
blankets--of the mission, and pocket the implied affront; but there
are also those others who, with clearer vision or greater independence
of character, do not scruple to think and say that a mission for the
salvation of many in that new town that so proudly crowns the cliffs
would be more appropriate. "What," asked an indignant fisherman--"what
makes them 'ere hotels pay like they does?" and he answered his own
query in language that shall not be printed here. "If them as goes
there all had to show their marriage-lines first," he concluded, "it's
little business they'd do"; and his remarks recalled and illuminated
the story of a week-end frequenter of one of the great caravanserais
whose Saturday to Monday spouses were so frequently changed that even
the seared conscience of a German hotel-manager was revolted.
Folkestone's fishing-harbour is wonderfully picturesque. Beside
it stands the Stade, a collection of the quaintest, craziest old
sail-lofts and warehouses, timbered and tarred and leaning at all sorts
of angles. Down in the harbour itself the smacks cluster thickly. The
rise and fall of the tide here is so much as eighteen feet, and at the
ebb to descend upon the sand and to look up and along toward the Leas
is to obtain the most characteristic and striking view in the whole
place. There, perched up against the sky-line, is the ancient parish
church of St. Eanswythe, in modern times frescoed and bedizened and
given up to high church practices. There, too, the custom has recently
been introduced of going in procession, with cross and vestments, to
bless the fishing-nets. One wonders what scornful things Ingoldsby
would have said of these doings within the Church of England, and
indeed the fishery seems neither better nor worse for them.
[Illustration: FOLKESTONE HARBOUR.]
That sainted princess, Eanswythe, daughter of the Kentish King Eadbald,
is said to be buried within the church. She was one of the most
remarkable of the many wondrous saints of her period, and performed
the impossible and brought about the incredible with the best of them.
She brought water from Cheriton to Folkestone, making it run up hill,
and incompetent carpenters who had sawn beams too short had but to
invoke her for them (the beams, not the carpenters) to be instantly
lengthened to any extent desired. Monks, too, it was said, whose
cassocks had been washed, and shrunk in the process, could always get
them unshrunk in the same marvellous way; but this must be an error
of the most flagrant kind, for we know that those holy men washed
themselves little, and their clothes never. But whatever marvellous
things she could do, she was not capable of the comparatively simple
feat of preventing her original conventual church being washed away by
the sea.
Folkestone people were of old very largely the butt of the neighbouring
towns. They were said to be stupid beyond the ordinary. Twitted on some
occasion that has escaped the present historian with not being able to
celebrate a given event in poetry, the town produced a poet eager to
disprove the accusation. To show what he could do in that way, he took
as his theme a notable capture that Folkestone had just then made, and
wrote:
A whale came down the Channel;
The Dover men could not catch it,
But the Folkestoners did.
He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an approach to a poet as
that mayor who read an address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with,
"Most Gracious Queen,
Welcome to Folkesteen."
to which Her Majesty is said to have replied,
"You great fool,
Get off that stool!"
But doubtless these be all malicious inventions. Certainly, though,
"great Eliza" did visit Folkestone, and we can have no doubt that the
usual address was read--can even see and hear in imagination that
mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes "um-um-er-er," like some blundering
bumble-bee, the atmosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities,
platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal but vinegary
monarch cuts him rudely short. We can see--O! most clear-sighted
that we are!--that tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with
high, beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt hen--but a very game
hen--actually cutting short that turbid flow of mayoral eloquence! we
wonder she does not _peck_ him.
Still hazardously up and down go those old streets and lanes of the
old town--Beach Street, North Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street,
and East Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and the serried
tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching in the direction of Dover.
Still the Martello tower stands upon that point, as it stands in the
illustration of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming population of
to-day has blotted out much of that obvious romance that once burst
full upon the visitor. The romance is still there, but you have to
seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern changes before it
is found. Trivial things dot the i's, cross the t's, and generally
emphasise this triumph of convention. "Lanes" become "streets," and
that quaintly illiterate old rendering, "Rendavowe" Street, was
long since thought by no means worthy of more educated times, and
accordingly changed to the correct spelling of "Rendezvous" it now
bears.
Modern Folkestone is already, by effluxion of time, becoming sharply
divided into modern and more modern. The ancient Folkestone we have
seen to be the fishing village, the first development from whose
humble but natural existence, in days when seaside holidays began
to be an institution and the "resorts" set out upon their career of
artificiality, was the "Pavilionstone" of Dickens and Cubitt. The trail
of Cubitt, who built that South Kensington typified by the Cromwell
Road, and was followed by his imitators throughout the western suburbs
of London in the 'fifties and 'sixties, is all over the land, and is
very clearly defined on the Folkestone Leas, whose houses are in the
most approved grey stucco style. The Leas therefore are not Folkestone,
but, as Dickens dubbed them, "Pavilionstone," or, more justly,
Notting-Hill-on-Sea. They and their adjacent contemporary streets
are the seaside resort of yesterday; the red-brick and terra-cotta
houses and hotels, in adaptation of Elizabethan Gothic and Jacobean
Renaissance, that of to-day, a newer and grander place than Cubitt
conceived or Dickens knew.
All those magnificent streets, those barrack-like hotels, all those
bands and gay parterres, and all the fashion that makes Folkestone the
most expensive seaside resort on the south coast, are excrescences.
That only is Folkestone where you really do smell the salt water and
can seek refuge from the cigar-smoke and the Eau-de-Cologne, the
wealthy, the idle, and the vicious, to come to the folk who earn their
livelihood by the sea and its fish, and are individual and racy of the
water and the always interesting waterside life.
[Illustration: _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._ FOLKESTONE IN 1830.]
The inquirer fails to discover why that hotel, the "Pavilion," of
which Dickens was so enamoured, and from whose style and title he named
the newly-arising town "Pavilionstone," was given that sign. Napoleon
declared, in the course of his great naval works at Cherbourg, that
he was resolved to rival the marvels of Egypt; was Cubitt, in his
building and contracting way, eager to emulate the plasterous glories
of George IV.'s marine palace, the "Pavilion" at Brighton, or, at any
rate, to snatch a glamour from its name? The "Pavilion" has been once,
certainly--perhaps twice--rebuilt since Dickens wrote, and is now,
they say, palatial, and with every circumstance of comfort; but when
Pavilionstone was in the making, it seems to have been a sorry sort
of a hostelry, in which voyagers for Boulogne had sharp foretastes of
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which awaited those who
resigned themselves to the cross-Channel passage at that period. This,
says Dickens, is how you came here for that discomfortable enterprise:
"Dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station at
eleven o'clock on a dark winter's night, in a roaring wind; and in
the howling wilderness outside the station was a short omnibus which
brought you up by the forehead the instant you got in at the door; and
nobody cared about you, and you were alone in the world. You bumped
over infinite chalk until you were turned out at a strange building
which had just left off being a barn without having quite begun to be
a house, where nobody expected your coming, or knew what to do with
you when you were come, and where you were usually blown about until
you happened to be blown against the cold beef, and finally into
bed. At five in the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a
dreary breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion,
were hustled on board a steamboat, and lay wretched on deck until you
saw France lunging and surging at you with great vehemence over the
bowsprit."
The miseries of crossing between Folkestone and Boulogne are very
greatly assuaged in these times, but still the summer visitants who
have exhausted a round of pleasures find a perennial and cruel joy in
repairing to the pier, where they can gloat over the miserables who,
yellow and green-visaged, step uncertainly ashore after a bad passage.
CHAPTER X
FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD
From Hythe, where many roads meet, there goes a very picturesque way
along the high ground overlooking Romney Marsh--a route intimately
associated with "The Leech of Folkestone." It is uphill out of Hythe,
of course: indeed, among all the roads out of the town, only the coast
routes are flat.
Lympne is the first place on the way--that "Lymme Hill, or Lyme" which
Leland says "was sumtyme a famose haven, and good for shyppes that
myght cum to the foote of the hille. The place ys yet cawled Shypway
and Old Haven."
That it is not now "good for ships" is quite evident to anyone who
takes his stand on the cliff-top and views that fifth quarter of the
globe, Romney Marsh, from this most eloquent of all view-points. Full
three miles away, as the crow flies, the summer wavelets whisper on the
beach, and between the margin of the sea and this crumbling cliff-edge,
whose foot once dabbled in the waters of the haven, are pastures that
have been the anchorage of ships.
Grey buildings of high antiquity rise from the cliff-top and command
the mapped-out marshland. The stern tower of Lympne church, forming a
beacon for mariners, is next door neighbour to Lympne Castle, once a
residence of the Archdeacons of Canterbury. That "castelet embatayled,"
in the words of Leland is now a farmhouse. Like the church, it was
largely built from the stone of the Roman castle down below the cliff;
that ancient Portus Lemanis whose feet rested in the waters of the
haven and to whose walls the crowding vessels ranged in the grand
colonial days of Imperial Rome. Stutsfall Castle the countryfolk call
those shattered walls that tell of Roman dominion, rendered "Studfall"
on the map.
It is from these crumbling, earthy cliffs of Lympne that one obtains
the best and most comprehensive view of Romney Marsh, spread out
like an isometric drawing, below. From here the eye ranges over the
grey-green levels, until lost in the dim haze of Dungeness, ten miles
away. There curves the bay, like the arc of a bended bow, going in a
magnificent semicircular sweep into the distance, its margin dotted
at regular intervals with those pepper-boxes, the Martello towers,
which it was hoped would have made it so hot for Napoleon had he
ever descended upon these shores. Nearer at hand--almost, indeed, at
our feet--goes the Royal Military Canal, its waters hid from this
view-point, but its course defined by the double row of luxuriant trees
that clothe its banks. Between foreground and far distance, in a welter
of foreshortened fields and hedgerows, lie hid the many hamlets and
villages of the marsh. From here it can be seen and felt how open this
district is to every breeze that blows, but it needs for the traveller
to descend into those levels for him to discover how fiercely the winds
lurk behind the contorted hedges of the ridiculously-winding roads,
leaping forth at the corners and seizing one with the rude grip of a
strong man. Save for the direct road that leads from Hythe to Dymchurch
and New Romney, and that other from thence to Snargate and Appledore,
the marshland ways are mazy and deceptive, impassable ditches and
drains rendering likely-looking short cuts impracticable. To approach
a place coyly, and as though really going away from it, is the road
method of Romney Marsh, and to strike boldly in the direction of any
given spot is to make tolerably sure of never reaching it. Thus, when
the stranger with dismay perceives the distant village for which he has
been setting forth slipping by degrees behind him, he should know that
he is on the right road, but when he observes its church tower towering
straight ahead, then let him pause and anxiously inquire the way. When
these facts are borne in mind there will be little wonder that Romney
Marsh was among the last strongholds of supersti
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