SARRE AND RECULVER TO CANTERBURY
The rows of feathery poplars lining the causeway road out of Sarre
towards Canterbury give it, for a little distance, the look of a
French road. But they presently cease, and it becomes for some miles a
singularly dreary way. All the more excuse, therefore, for adventuring
away from it across country to Reculver, celebrated by Ingoldsby in the
"Brothers of Birchington."
Chislett village, through which the route lies, shows prominently
from its ridge--or, rather, its church does. A church it is of
singular outline, viewed from a distance, and calculated to entice the
inquisitive away from the direct road, only to find that the bizarre
appearance is caused by the spire having been almost wholly shorn off
at some time not specified, and the stump suffered to remain. For the
rest, Chislett is sufficiently interesting in the wheat and swede and
mangold way, but not otherwise attractive, unless the stocks, still
preserved in the churchyard, may be mentioned.
The route from here to Reculver is a five miles long stretch of
scrubwoods, through the hamlet of Marsh Row. These rabbity solitudes
lead at last to the low, broken, earthy coast presenting a weak and
dissolving barrier to an encroaching sea between Herne Bay and
Birchington. Midway between those two watering-places stands the gaunt
ruin of that ancient church built within the Roman castle of Regulbium,
to which its name in mutilated form has descended. Its skeleton towers
rise over the hillside, minatory, as we descend toward the sea.
[Illustration: CHISLETT.]
Reculver is popularly--and mistakenly--spoken and written of in the
plural, "Reculvers." There is no real warranty, in the derivation of
the name, for what our grandfathers would have called a "vulgar error."
We can clearly trace the place-name from the Roman times, when it was
"Regulbium," to the days of the Saxon King, Ethelbert, when it had been
changed into "Raculf Ceastre," and thence, by way of half a hundred
grotesque spellings in ancient historical documents, to the form it now
bears. Never, save by modern writers of guide-books, has it been spoken
of in the plural, and the only possible reason for their doing so must
be a real ignorance of its history and a belief that the twin towers of
the ruined church are themselves the "Reculvers." This is no attempt
to right the wrong: that would be a hopeless task, and a thankless. A
mistake set afoot so long ago and so popular is not to be discredited,
and "Reculvers" this will remain, certainly so long as there are _two_
towers.
In Roman times the fortress of Regulbium stood at some little distance
from the sea, on the only available firm ground, a gentle rounded hill
rising from the surrounding marshes. Now that the sea has for centuries
been advancing upon the spot, this hill has been half washed away, and
its remaining section shows as a low cliff, with the gaunt towers of
the mediæval church rising from it. This church is the successor of
that built within the walls of the Roman castle in Saxon times, as a
monument of the downfall of Paganism and the triumph of Christianity.
So long ago as 1780 the sea had begun to threaten it, and the great
north wall of the castle fell one night into the advancing tide,
leaving the monument to Christianity in a very exposed condition,
while the bones of the forgotten inhabitants were washed away out of
the churchyard, just as those of Warden, in Sheppey, are at this day.
Instead of making any attempt to save the church, the authorities began
in 1809 to demolish it, only halting when they reached the twin towers.
The surrounding farmers found the building-stones very useful for
pig-sties and cow-sheds, and cared not a rap whether they were Norman
or Early English. There were, indeed, some Roman columns in the church.
They had come from the pagan basilica within the castle, but that did
not hinder their being cast aside with the rest. In 1860 one was
discovered, one of its stones doing duty as a garden-roller. It was,
with another column, rescued from further desecration, and the two have
been set up in the Cathedral Close at Canterbury.
[Illustration: RECULVER.]
The vicarage was also abandoned in 1809, but not pulled down. It was
converted into a public-house, which long stood here under the sign of
the "Hoy." The existing inn is the "King Ethelbert."
The twin towers of Reculver church form a portion of the former west
front. They are of Norman and Early English date, and, constructed
as they were largely of the materials of the ruined Roman buildings,
are rich in fragments of tile. The towers were erected to serve as a
sea-mark, to warn vessels beating up for the Swale and the Medway of
the dangerous Columbine Sand, and their origin has from time immemorial
been the subject of the legend of the "Twin Sisters," which tells how
the Abbess of the Benedictine Priory of Davington and her sister,
voyaging to fulfil a vow made to Our Lady of Broadstairs, were wrecked
here for lack of a sea-mark. The Abbess was saved, but her sister was
drowned, and, as a combined thank-offering for her own escape and by
way of memorial to her sister, that holy woman erected the twin towers,
to serve all mariners sailing by. Barham perverted the legend in his
"Brothers of Birchington." Perhaps the temptation to alliteration was
too strong to be resisted, and then the idea came to him of rejecting
the familiar story and using in its stead an old monastic tale of how
there were two brothers, the one pious and the other given up to all
manner of evil courses, and how the Devil came for the wrong one by
mistake and was obliged to restore him. In the Ingoldsby legend the
brothers become Robert and Richard de Birchington, and their vow it
was, he tells us, which produced the famous sea-mark:
Well--there the "Twins" stand
On the verge of the land,
To warn mariners off from the Columbine Sand,
And many a poor man have Robert and Dick
By their vow caused to 'scape, like themselves, from Old Nick.
The mariners of old never failed as they passed to bare their heads and
pray to Our Lady or Reculver. It is said that a good omen was argued by
them if the towers were clearly seen in passing, and evil if they were
hidden by fog; but, when we consider the dangers of the sea in fogs,
there seems less superstition in those ideas than sheer common-sense.
The towers have for many years been maintained by the Trinity House,
according to the tablet over the doorway: "These towers, the remains
of the once venerable Church of Reculver, were purchased of the Parish
by the Corporation of the Trinity House of Deptford Strond in the year
1810, and groynes laid down at their expense to protect the cliff on
which the church had stood. When the ancient spires were afterwards
blown down, the present substitutes were erected, to render the towers
still sufficiently conspicuous to be useful to navigation.--Captain
Joseph Cotton, Deputy Master, in the year 1819."
Returning to Chislett and the breathless route of Smuggler Bill and his
companions, Up Street hamlet, and Westbere are passed; Westbere itself
in a deep hollow on a slip road plunging down romantically from that
dreary highway. Then comes the long, bricky, dusty, gritty village of
Sturry, whose name is taken from the River Stour, on which it stands,
or rather, in which it stood, for it was once encircled by that now
shrunken stream, and its original style was "Esturei," or "Stour
Island." In midst of the village a turning to the left will lead the
explorer to a little jewel of a place, lying forgotten by the Stour
banks. He leaves populous Sturry behind, and comes, over little brick
bridges as hump-backed as Quilp or Quasimodo, and by rustling alders,
into a spot long since retired from worldly activities--enters, in
fact, that decayed port of Canterbury, Fordwich.
[Illustration: FORDWICH.]
Canterbury was once a seaport! How incredible it seems, now that
Whitstable, the nearest point on the coast, is seven miles away, and
the Stour so small a stream that even for rowing-boats it is at the
present time scarce navigable. Yet to this very village of "Fordige"
as the local speech has it, the salt tide came up the estuary in
days well within the historic period. Not merely vague Romans, but
historical personages--palpable human beings who have personally left
great flat-footed, heavy-handed marks on the pages of our national
story--have landed at the still-existing quay, at which it is even yet
possible for one to land from a skiff, and so to parallel experiences
for one brief glorious moment of historic self-consciousness with no
less a personage than the Black Prince himself, who stepped ashore here
from no skiff, but directly from the caravel that brought him across
the Channel, fresh from his cruelties in Guienne and Spain. Those who
welcomed him home--the Mayor and burgesses of Fordwich--were as cruel
and savage as he in their unchivalric municipal way; the times were
sodden with cruelty, supersaturated with ferocity, and the rejoicings
at the warrior's home-coming did but serve as an afternoon's respite
for those petty malefactors who awaited their doom in the two dark and
dismal cells even yet existing beneath the old town hall and court
house standing so picturesquely by this self-same quay. Not the whole
of that curious building can claim so great an age, for the general
aspect of it is scarce earlier than Elizabethan times. Indeed, it has
latterly been made to look quite smart and neat, its nodding roof
carefully squared, the lichen and stonecrop removed, and some nice new
brickwork here and there inserted. "Restoration" seeks out the veriest
holes and corners and culs-de-sac of the land, and "makes up" old
buildings into new, like old dowagers masquerading as girls again.
Fordwich town hall filled many functions. In it were transacted
all the business affairs of the old port; in it, too, justice was
dealt out in rough and ready fashion to the miscreants of yore, and
executed swiftly, and still more roughly and readily, outside. The
justice of the Cinque Ports, of which Fordwich was a member, was
by no means tempered with mercy, and was as blood-thirsty as those
early laws of the Israelites duly set forth with much horrifying
circumstantiality in Leviticus. Theves Lane, in Fordwich, led in
ancient times to "Thefeswelle," the well in which convicted thieves
were judicially drowned. Thieves with a preference for the easiest
death commonly selected Dover for their operations in those times, for
when the inevitable happened, the Dover authorities flung them from the
cliff-top, and so they ended swiftly and mercifully with broken necks,
a better way than being dropped down a well and the lid then put on,
as here at Fordwich, or being buried alive or smothered in the harbour
mud, after the Sandwich style.
[Illustration: FORDWICH TOWN HALL.]
The dungeons beneath the town hall are provided with only a narrow
barred opening, shuttered from the outside and admitting the least
possible rays of light. On their walls may yet be seen the many scrawls
of old-time prisoners. In one cell were secured those who had offended
against the municipal authority of Fordwich, and in the other the
captives of the Monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury were laid by
the heels; for two jurisdictions, the cause of many jealousies, ruled
here. In none was there more heat shown than in the sole right and
privilege of fishing for trout at Fordwich, claimed by the monastery
and bitterly disputed by the port.
The rough, whitewashed interior of the court-room is simple but highly
curious. The primitive bench and bar where prisoners were arraigned and
causes heard are still here. Prosecutors had a difficult task in those
days. Sometimes the court would decide that ordeal by battle was the
best way of settling a dispute--a mean way, it will be acknowledged, of
shirking its judicial responsibilities--and would secure seats outside
to witness the fray, which suggests too engrossing a love of sport;
at other times, when the court did patiently hear and adjudicate upon
plaints, it left the prosecutor with the disagreeable task of executing
the convicted felon himself,--both successful ways of discouraging
litigation.
A good deal more modern than those barbarous practices, but still
of a respectable antiquity, is the ducking-stool, resting on a
transverse beam of the interior roofing. It is long since this engine
for punishing scolds was used; not, perhaps, altogether by reason of
gentler modern methods, nor that the feminine arts of scolding and
nagging are decayed, but doubtless because the punishment was not
effectual, and the last state of the nagged and henpecked, after the
nagger and pecker had been ducked, was worse than the first. The old
clumsy wooden crane at the angle of the town hall, still overlooking
the river, was the place whence the scolding wives of Fordwich, first
firmly bound, were slung in the chair, swung out over the stream, and
ducked, deeply overhead. Raving with fear and shrieking with fury they
were ducked again and again, while their good men, standing amid the
delighted crowd, miserably anticipated a worse time than ever--and, by
all accounts, generally got it.
[Illustration: STURRY.]
Leaving Fordwich and returning to Sturry, the Canterbury road is
regained. At its extremity, where one crosses the Stour, Sturry
retrieves its reputation and exchanges its hard-featured street for
a pretty riverside grouping, where the church, an ivy-covered ruined
red-brick gateway of Sturry Court, and a plentiful background of trees
make a gracious picture. It is the last picture of the kind on this
route, for Canterbury is less than two miles ahead, entered past the
barracks and by its least attractive streets.