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.