SHEPPEY
It was in the Swale that Augustine baptized King Ethelbert on Whit
Sunday, June 2nd, A.D. 596, and thus made him a child of God. On
Christmas Day the following year he similarly baptized 10,000 of the
King’s subjects, but exactly where these chilly ceremonies took place
is not recorded. In any case, if the Swale were as muddy then as it is
now, the converts must have come out extremely dirty.
[Illustration: LOWER HALSTOW.]
The one and only way into Sheppey without ferrying into it is
across the Kingsferry Bridge, which here spans the Swale, and is an
electrically worked swing-bridge of the South-Eastern and Chatham
Railway. It is also a road-bridge. Sometimes a week will pass before it
is required to be opened to allow a sailing-vessel to pass. The charge
for crossing varies from a modest penny for cyclist or pedestrian, up
to one shilling and sixpence for a motor-car.
It has for such a long time past been the almost universal custom to
speak or write of the “Isle of Sheppey” that it becomes a convenience
to follow the popular way; but really the name “Sheppey” includes the
designation “island”; being the modern form of the Saxon name for it,
“Sceapige,” the “sheep island.” It is said that the Romans knew it
as _Insula Ovium_, the Isle of Sheep; and certainly it has remained
through all the succeeding ages a place where flocks have been kept
and have flourished. In this connection William Camden gives us some
interesting facts relating to Sheppey in his day:
“This Isle of Sheepe, whereof it feedeth mightie great flockes, was
called by our auncestours Shepey--that is the Isle of Sheepe.” He then
proceeds to speak of the “fatte-tailed sheepe, of exceeding great size,
whose flesh is most delicate to taste. I have seen younge lads, taking
women’s function, with stools fastened untoe their buttockes to milke,
yea, and to make cheese of ewes milke.”
[Illustration: THE KENTISH COAST: _Sheppy to Deal_]
Centuries ago this industry disappeared, and although the Roquefort
cheeses we nowadays import from France in great quantities are similar
and popular products, nothing of the kind is now made in Sheppey, or
anywhere in England.
The “fat-tailed sheep” will nowadays be sought in vain in Sheppey.
There are many of the ordinary breeds, but, on the honour of a
traveller, none of that type.
This intimate, yet in some ways remote, island off the Kentish mainland
is but eleven miles in length by five broad, and would thus seem to
afford little scope for variety; but within this small compass is found
scenery of very varied description, ranging from the wide-spreading
marshes beside the Swale to a high ridge or backbone, on whose highest
point stands the village of Minster-in-Sheppey. A peculiar feature of
the low, marshy part of the island is found in the ancient mounds known
as “cotterels,” usually said to be burial-places of the Danes; they are
large and irregular grassy hillocks, which may more probably be the
spoil from olden drainage-trenches. Thus heaped up, they formed, either
by accident or intention, refuges for sheep in time of floods. Two of
these are seen on the way from Kingsferry.
The chief town of the island, the dockyard town and port of Sheerness,
is six miles from Kingsferry. On the way to it you pass near
Queenborough, originally “Kingborough,” but renamed by Edward the Third
in honour of Queen Philippa, when a fortress was also built. Of that
castle, in whose design that distinguished Bishop, William of Wykeham,
had a hand, nothing now remains, and the railway station, which
stands on the site of it, although no doubt a more useful institution
nowadays, frankly makes no attempt at romance. Queenborough is now a
rather plaintive-looking town of one broad street, devastated by the
gruesome odour, resembling putrid meat, emanating from extensive and
diabolically prosperous chemical-manure works. It will thus be judged
that Queenborough is an excellent place not to visit. The church itself
contains nothing of interest except a battered and illiterate brass on
the wall, to one “Henry Knight, sometime maior of this Towne, who was
Master of a ship to Greenland, and Harpined there 24 Veiages.
“In Greenland I Whales, Sea horse and Beares did slay,
Though now my bodie is in tombe, in Clay.”
Nor is Sheerness precisely a joyous holiday resort. It is a place of
strength, guarding the entrance to the Thames and Medway, and will
have to stand in the forefront of any attack; but exactly wherein its
strength resides is not at all apparent to the layman. No doubt booms
and floating mines, although not spectacular defences, would play a
foremost part. The history of this congeries of four towns--Blue Town,
Marine Town, Banks Town, and Mile Town--that constitute Sheerness is
not a glorious one. The site was a swamp until reclamation was begun
under James the First. Continued in the next reign, and through the
Commonwealth, the Admiralty in the time of Charles the Second selected
this as the site for a dockyard and fortifications to protect Sheppey
from invasion. Pepys tells us, under date of August 18th, 1665, how
“we,” the King and others, “walked up and down, laying out the ground
to be taken in for a yard to lay provisions for cleaning and repairing
of ships, and a most proper place it is for the purpose.”
On February 27th, 1667, the King and the Duke of York were at Sheerness
to lay out the design for the fortifications, which, four months later,
were destroyed by the Dutch.
An odd survival, found where least expected, remains here. Few who walk
the planks of the Cornwallis Jetty realise that they are laid over the
forgotten hull of the old man-o’-war _Cornwallis_, seventy-four guns,
which figured in the Navy a hundred years ago. Down beneath remains
the dim interior of that wooden line-of-battle ship, with the original
portholes.
[Illustration: MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY.]
For the rest, Sheerness to-day is sheerly and frankly ugly, and
Cockney, and quite unashamed. The look of it is as though long lengths
of the Old Kent Road and the dullest, dreariest purlieus of Camberwell
had come down to the sea and forgotten to return. Let us, then, leaving
it behind, hasten along the shore, past the obsolete Barton’s Fort
and the hideous brick-and-iron railed Admiralty range-finders that
form abominable eyesores on the beach, and make for Minster. To reach
that hill-top village, the woebegone attempted developments of a
building-estate styled “Minster-on-Sea,” a place without shape or form,
are passed; but, these things left behind, the unspoiled country of
Sheppey is entered. The “monasterium,” whence Minster derives its name,
was the ancient Priory of St. Saxburga, founded in early Saxon times.
The square gatehouse of the nunnery, standing by the church, is all
that remains of that religious house, and even this building, fashioned
of the most amazing admixture of brick, stone, and flint has been
wholly secularised and converted into a dwelling-house.
The church is intrinsically interesting for its architecture, its
monuments, and its brasses, including the very fine and early brasses
of Sir John de Northwode--that knight who, according to the irreverent
Ingoldsby, received a black eye from a brickbat at the siege of
Shurland Castle--and his wife, Joan, about 1320; but it is far more
so as a literary landmark. It is, of course, closely associated with
that most engaging among the “Ingoldsby Legends,” the story of “Grey
Dolphin,” one of the most genuinely humorous things in literature,
which bears reading over and over again, and will remain fresh when the
marks of many a later funny fellow have been forgotten. Sir Robert de
Shurland, the hero of that story, was a real flesh-and-blood person,
who flourished in the thirteenth century and was a very earnest,
strenuous, and warlike knight--not at all a farcical person. He went
out in the Crusade of 1271, and at a later date was knighted for
gallantry at the siege of Caerlaverock. The ladies, it would seem,
liked this doughty character. “If I were a young demoiselle,” says an
old metrical romance, “I would give myself to that brave knight, Sir
Robert de Shurland.”
In the church is the singular tomb of this warrior, with a recumbent
effigy not in the least resembling the portrait drawn of him by
Ingoldsby, for he is shown to be tall and thin, not short and stockish.
Otherwise, the description is exact; and it is indeed the effigy of a
“warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. His hands
are clasped in prayer”--or they would be, had not the arms been shorn
off at the elbows--“his legs, crossed in that position so prized by
Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier
of the Faith in Palestine. Close beside his dexter calf lies sculptured
in bold relief a horse’s head.” Ingoldsby, you see, together with the
antiquaries of his time, thought the cross-legged effigies on ancient
tombs invariably indicated that the person represented had been a
Crusader. It has since been proved to demonstration that this was not
the case, and that this curious pose was only a convention of the age.
The horse’s head is shown rising from some strange carving intended to
represent waves, and is an allusion to the grant of “wreck of the sea”
which the knight had obtained where his manors extended to the shore.
This was ordinarily a privilege of the Crown. It gave him property in
all wreckage, waifs and strays, and flotsam and jetsam which he could
reach with the point of his lance when riding as far as possible into
the sea at ebb-tide.
Margaret Shurland, daughter and heiress of this personage, married
one William Cheyney. The altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas
Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
stands in the church and is a noble monument. He was a remarkable
man, for he filled important offices of State in the reigns of Henry
the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, and in all the
tragic changes of those changeful times lost neither head, fortune,
nor repute. He was Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle,
a Privy Councillor, and Treasurer of the Household. A man of wealth,
he demolished the old castle of Shurland and built in its stead the
mansion yet standing, long used as a farmhouse.
[Illustration: TOMB OF SIR ROBERT DE SHURLAND, MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY
CHURCH.]
Among the other monuments in Minster church is an alabaster effigy
sometimes considered to be that of one Jeronimo Magno, a Spanish
prisoner of war captured by Drake off Calais Harbour in Armada time.
For three years this unhappy hidalgo was kept prisoner aboard ship at
the Nore, and then death ended his trials, in 1591. Later criticism,
however, identifies the chain worn by the effigy as that of the Yorkist
faction: the chain of Suns and Roses, worn by adherents of Edward the
Fourth and the House of York; which would date back the monument by
some seventy years and thus dispose of the Spanish prisoner theory.
Another very interesting effigy is that of one Jordanus de Scapeia,
found in 1833 in the churchyard, buried five feet deep. The clasped
mailed hands hold a little mystic oval at the tips of the fingers,
bearing a tiny effigy intended to typify the soul.
Out in Minster churchyard on sunny days of wandering breezes the guns
of the distant forts and battleships that guard the coast are heard to
roar and mutter and rumble, according to their distance, and above the
peaked roof of the church tower twirls the odd horse-head weather-vane
which gives the local name, the “Horse Church.” Here are many stones to
the memory of Sheerness dockyard men; among them one with quaint and
weatherworn sculpture and curious verses to one Henry Worth, a gunner,
who died in 1770, aged fifty-seven:
[Illustration]
“Pallida Mors æquo pede pauperum Tabernas Regumque Turres.
Who e’er thou art, if here by Wisdom led
To view the silent mansions of the Dead
And search for truth from life’s last mournful page
Where Malice lives not, nor where Slanders rage,
Read on. No Bombast swells these friendly lines;
Here truth unhonour’d & unvarnish’d shines.
Where o’er yon sod an envious nettle creeps,
From care escap’d an honest Gunner sleeps.
As on he travell’d to life’s sorrowing end,
Distress for ever claim’d him as a friend;
Orphan & Widow were alike his care;
He gave with pleasure all he had to spare.
His match now burnt, expended all his priming,
He left the world, and us, without e’er whining,
Deep in the earth his Carcase is entomb’d,
Which Love & Grog for him had honeycomb’d.
Jesting apart, Retir’d from winds & Weather,
Virtue & WORTH are laid asleep together.”
Leaving this memorial to the charitable and love-worn Worth and his
grog-blossoms, we trace the road towards Eastchurch. Along to the
left, folded between the hills and sheltered from the winds, are vales
where elms and beeches thrive luxuriantly. Such a spot is the ravine
of Scrapsgate, very like the “chines” of the Isle of Wight, a charming
spot in spring, where one may always be sure of finding violets,
primroses, and bluebells in their season.
Scrapsgate was the scene of a mysterious tragedy many years ago. It has
long since been forgotten, and the only reminder of it now to be found
is a weather-worn tombstone in the obscure churchyard of the workhouse
at Minster, with the following inscription:
“O, earth
cover not my blood!
Sacred
to the memory of
a man unknown, who was
found murdered on the
morning of the 22nd April 1814
near Scraps Gate in this parish, by
his Head being nearly severed from his body
A subscription
was immediately entered into and
one hundred guineas reward
offered on conviction of the
perpetrators of the
horrible act, but they remain at
present undiscovered.”
The perpetrators were never discovered. “Mysterious” I have described
this affair, but it was pretty widely understood at the time that
the stranger had met his fate at the hands of the smugglers who then
found Scrapsgate a convenient spot for their shy trade. His identity
and occupation alike remained unestablished, but the supposition was
then current that he was either a member of a smuggling band who had
turned informer and had been discovered in his treachery, or that
he was one of the revenue officers. The ferocity of the smugglers
who infested the coasts of Kent stuck at nothing, and this was by no
means an exceptional outrage, as the history of their desperate doings
sufficiently proves.
A complete and weird contrast from this lovely vale is Warden Point,
which lies off to the left of the way to Eastchurch, along two and a
quarter miles of solitary winding road. “At Warden Point,” I read in
a geological work, “is the finest exposure of the London clay.” And
it may be added that, in the many landslips which have occurred here
of late years, other things have been exposed. In short, the slipping
away of the cliffs has torn asunder the churchyard of Warden, with
the shocking result that the coffins and skeletons of the dead are
strewn about. You come to this Golgotha at a point where the road,
making straight for the cliffs’ edge, has been carefully barred, lest
the stranger should descend into the sea and there perish. To the few
cottages that stand here, all that is left of the village of Warden,
has been given the unlovely name of “Mud Row.” Forming part of the
garden fence of one of these is a sculptured stone tablet recording
that Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the
rebuilding of London Bridge, gave some of the stones of old London
Bridge to rebuild Warden church, in 1836; the ancient church having
been destroyed by encroachment of the sea. By 1870 the sea had further
advanced and the new church was closed, being demolished in 1877, when
the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the
last thirty years were removed to Minster. Now all that remains of
the churches of Warden is this dedication tablet, part of a garden
fence. Looking down here, across the yawning rifts and crevasses of the
land-ship, you see the poor exposed relics of the dead in the olden
churchyard, and out to sea the waters are discoloured with the washings
of the clay.
Eastchurch, a pretty village with a charming and well-kept old church,
is a pleasant place, associated recently with aviation and the Naval
Flying grounds. It is thus appropriate enough that a new stained-glass
window should have been placed here in 1912 to the memory of Charles
Stuart Rolls and Cecil Grace, who both lost their lives in flying.
Among other memorials is a tablet to Vice-Admiral Sir Richard King,
Bart., Commander-in-Chief at the Nore, who, having commanded the
_Achille_ at Trafalgar and come scatheless through that action, died of
cholera at Sheerness, aged 61. Here, too, is an elaborate monument to
Gabriel Livesey, who died at Eastchurch parsonage in 1622. His stately
recumbent effigy, under a canopy of coloured and gilded marbles, has in
front of it a group of children; among them the kneeling figure of his
son Michael, afterwards notorious as one of the Commissioners who tried
Charles the First and signed his death-warrant.
Close beside Eastchurch the striking group of Shurland Castle is
prominent. This is the embattled manor-house already referred to,
built on the site of Sir Robert de Shurland’s stronghold. The
building is most imposing from the front, but it puts all its goods
in the shop-window, so to say, for it is just a long, shallow house,
with nothing of interest within; and all the vast original ranges
of buildings in the rear have been demolished. It is, in fact, a
farmhouse, and it and the farm, in spite of the old Sheppey proverb,
“Sheppey grass none can surpass,” have been unlet for about twenty
years. Although the interior is commonplace itself, the front is
fine, in good red brick, with vitrified brick in diamond patterns,
and moulded brick chimneys. Among the paving-stones leading up to the
entrance is an Early English floriated stone coffin-lid, of some beauty.
[Illustration: HARTY CHURCH: FAVERSHAM IN THE DISTANCE]
Down from Eastchurch, we come out of the “hill country” of Sheppey,
along a beautiful avenue of overarching trees, to the Harty Road
station of the Sheppey Light Railway, and thence along the levels
to Leysdown and the long, flat shell-beach of Shellness, with the
pink-washed coastguard buildings at the extreme end, looking across
the Swale to Whitstable. History has been made at Shellness. It was on
December 11th, 1688, that James the Second fled, panic-stricken, from
his palace of Whitehall, before the advance of the Prince of Orange,
who had been proclaimed King in his stead in the market-place of Newton
Abbot, on November 7th, by the title of William the Third. The fugitive
sovereign, with a wig of unaccustomed modest cut and semi-clerical
clothes for disguise, made his hasty exit in company with Sir Edward
Hales, a Roman Catholic pervert whom he had recently appointed Master
of the Ordnance, Lieutenant of the Tower, and Privy Councillor. This
facile person brought with him a gentleman named Sheldon and a Mr.
Abbadie, who occupied the position of Page of the Backstairs. If you
do but consider a moment, there is something exquisitely appropriate
and humorous in a Page of the Backstairs taking part in such a fugitive
back-door departure. A librettist in comic opera could have thought of
no happier touch.
One is curious to know how it was that King James came to select such
a difficult, out-of-the-way place as Sheppey for his departure. He,
of course, sought some obscure point for embarkation, but there were
easily dozens of sufficiently quiet and unfrequented places suited to
his purpose, without taking this extreme trouble. The explanation is
that the King was really at this time almost beside himself, and his
mind was so disordered that he could not think coherently nor plan
anything. Hales was the master at this juncture. He was the owner of
property in Sheppey, and had a steward, one Bannister by name, whom
he could trust, at his house of Neat’s Court, Minster. The steward
was instructed to hire a vessel at Elmley, and did so, and some of
the party went aboard there and others were to be picked up here, at
Shellness, whence it was hoped to make a passage for France. The hoy
was on the point of departure, when Bannister’s livery was noticed by
the fishermen. It was a livery well known locally, and little liked
since Hales had rendered himself so obnoxious to the Protestants. The
spectacle, therefore, of Bannister assisting a company of strange
gentlefolk to embark from so unaccustomed a place, at such an
untimeous hour, in those times of social, political, and religious
disturbance, and in a craft so humble, was one to excite curiosity and
suspicion. The fishermen assembled to the number of fifty or sixty on
the beach, soon recognised Hales, and, that once done, there was no
escaping. They surrounded the fugitives, and prevented them by force
from leaving.
[Illustration: LATE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CHEST, OF GERMAN ORIGIN, CARVED
WITH REPRESENTATION OF A TOURNAMENT, HARTY CHURCH.]
We shall meet this party again, on the mainland, on the way to
Faversham; ourselves tracking laboriously round the coastline, to
Harty, which was once in the nature of an island, divided from Sheppey
by Cable Fleet and Crog Dick; but these have long been dry.
There are more imposing coastwise walks than this: there cannot well be
many duller. Imagine the dun-coloured waters of the Swale, bordered all
the way by a continuous grassy embankment, raised to protect the land
from being drowned; and further imagine this protective bank carefully
winding along the configuration of the shore, so that you progress with
painful slowness: there you have the route from Shellness to Harty.
Harty consists of a solitary farm, close by the little church. There
is no village, and almost the only other house is the “Ferry Inn” by
the waterside, half a mile away. In the church remains a curious and
highly dilapidated old chest 4 feet 6 inches long, its front carved
with a spirited scene representing two knights tilting. One of them
is seen on the point of being unhorsed by his opponent’s lance.
The tilting-saddles, with long shields for the riders’ legs, are
noticeable. The chest is of German origin, and dates from the close of
the fourteenth century. The reason of it being here is unknown, but one
may venture the opinion that it is one of the spoils of shipwreck.
From the “Ferry Inn” at Harty, across the unlovely Swale, it is a
half-mile passage, a long and laborious business for an oarsman.