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.