SANDWICH
Approaching Sandwich, whose towers and roof-tops rise picturesquely
ahead from the level marshes, mingled with the masts and spars of a few
vessels lying at the town quays, a belt of spindly trees is passed,
stretching away to the left. They are trees of a considerable height
and size, but they wear an ill-nourished appearance, as they cannot
fail to do when we consider how poor the soil on which they grow. It
is, in fact, nothing but sand and pebbles. One solitary residence,
Stonar House, stands amid these weird woods. The spot keeps an air of
reticence and melancholy, appropriate enough, for it is the site of a
vanished town: the empty space where once stood and flourished the town
and port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an old, and at one time a greater and
more prosperous, rival of Sandwich. Rarely ever has a town vanished
so utterly as this. We first hear of it in A.D. 456, when the Britons
routed the invading Saxons at a spot fixed by the old annalist “in a
field close to the Inscribed Stone [_Lapis Tituli_, in the original
Latin] on the shores of the Gallic sea.” What was that stone? No one
can say. Here again was fought a battle: when Edmund Ironside defeated
the Danes, in 1019.
[Illustration: FISHERGATE, SANDWICH.]
Stonar was situated on an island at the mouths of the Stour and
Wantsum. Some archæologists who are not satisfied with the generally
received legend of Ebbsfleet believe it was here Augustine landed. The
converted King Canute made a grant of it to St. Augustine’s Abbey at
Canterbury, and in the deeds accompanying the gift we find it named
“Estonores.” The name should properly, no doubt, be spelled Stonor: the
stone on the edge, or shore. Its _alias_, “Lundenwic,” derived from its
position on the then navigable channel of the Wantsum, on the short-cut
round to the Thames and London by Reculver; “wic,” like the “wich” of
Sandwich, being the Norse _vik_, for bay or channel.
Sandwich was at last overtaking Stonar in the race for prosperity, and
Stonar was already decaying when a great storm in 1365 overwhelmed the
sandy island on which it was situated. This disaster had been to some
extent retrieved when a French expedition landed in 1385 and burnt what
had been rebuilt. Fate was too strong for that unfortunate port, and it
then sank into utter oblivion. Antiquaries claim to have discovered the
site of its church, but of buildings not the slightest traces remain
above ground, and the sea that once destroyed it long ago rendered the
site useless by retreating over a mile away.
Such is the history of Stonar, and almost to the same complexion have
the vagaries of sea and sands brought its once successful rival,
Sandwich.
The town of Sandwich is so comparatively little known that when its
name arises it is first of sandwiches--ham or other--or of the
Sandwich Islands, that one thinks; the ancient town taking the remote
place of _tertium quid_ and coming last. Yet, indirectly, Sandwich
gave a name both to the eatables and the islands, by the intermediary
of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, that bright particular star among the
rabbit-warren of ennobled Montagues in the eighteenth century who was
known familiarly as “Jemmy Twitcher,” and was great at the Admiralty,
and greater perhaps as a gambler. In his honour Captain Cook named
Hawaii and its archipelago the “Sandwich Islands”; and the gamester’s
intentness upon the hazards of play and disinclination from breaking
off for meals led him to keep hunger off at the card-table by eating
meat between slices of bread; called, after him, “sandwiches.”
The ancient town and reverend Cinque Port of Sandwich is entered by a
bridge across the Stour and thence by passing under the arch of the
old Barbican, a curious outwork of the times when walls and gates were
necessary for the town’s security. The only other remaining gate is the
Fishergate, along the same quay, built in 1578. The road from Ramsgate
and the bridge across the Stour to the Barbican are comparatively
modern innovations, the only entrance from this side being formerly by
ferry to Fishergate. The bridge was first built in 1755, and is in part
an iron swing-bridge, permitting the passage of small vessels to the
upper quays. Against its parapets lean the idle, the born tired, and
the infirm of Sandwich the livelong day; some staring into the water,
or vaguely across the sandy flats; others facing north, expending a
fascinated stare upon the activities of the brewery, which is the
busiest thing in the town. There are more imposing entrances than this
to English towns; the bold gates and frowning towers of Canterbury and
of York bring back mediævalism, a living thing; but no other approach
is so truly quaint as that to Sandwich by the Barbican. Little,
squatty round towers with their lower half chequered black and white
in flint and stone, and their upper part finished with peaked roofs
like witches’ hats, give an effect almost unreal in their completely
picturesque setting, with the curious tower of St. Peter’s peering over
the roof-tops. It is so rarely complete that you almost suspect it to
be the lath-and-plaster and painted canvas building of the entrance,
let us say, to a “Cinque Port Exhibition.” But it is undeniably real,
unquestionably genuine, and is but the introduction to much else of an
old-world character that Sandwich contains.
Sandwich is a little town. For all its ancient importance--the
Liverpool of olden times--it was never large, and the ancient,
grassy ramparts that almost encircle it were at no time a hindrance
to expansion. Mediæval Canterbury, in common with another walled city
and town, threw out suburbs, which may be seen to this day outside the
walls, looking almost the age of the original place; but Sandwich,
however crowded it may have grown within the walls, had never any
suburbs. A seaport at once so wealthy and prosperous, and so exposed
to raids from over-sea as was this in the olden days of fire and
sword, could not afford to give such hostages to fortune as unprotected
suburbs would be. The history of Sandwich, a tale of repeated burnings
and pillagings, sufficiently shows that even behind its defences it
could not withstand the many furious attacks made from time to time.
Apart from the many such disasters of early times, of which history
speaks but vaguely, we hear of the town being laid waste in 1046 by
vikings; of damage done in 1052 by the rebel Earl Godwin, and of
constant forays in mediæval times, including the burning by the French
in 1216. It again suffered severely at the hands of the French in 1400,
1438, and 1457; and in 1470, in an attack by the rebel Earl of Warwick;
and only when the power and prosperity of the port had decayed did
the town know peace. “He who is low need fear no foe,” truly says the
jingling proverb.
To-day the size and shape of the town are what they always were. The
ramparts still look out upon the open, level meadows, and not only
are there no suburban developments, but there is even room within the
ancient ceinture for expansion. It is a strange fall from ancient
eminence.
We hear nothing of Sandwich before A.D. 665, when Wilfrid, Bishop of
Northumbria, is recorded to have landed in the haven that then had
apparently begun to make the fortune of the place. He came ashore
“happily and pleasantly.” Richborough was already dead as a port,
and the twin ports of Stonar and Sandwich were thriving upon its
decay. Very rare and fragmentary are these early notices of Sandwich,
and it is not until A.D. 851 that we again hear of it, in a severe
defeat of invading Danes, administered by Athelstan. That date marks
the beginning of an era of troubles caused by those fierce piratical
Northerners, ending for a time only in 1016, when the Danes under
Canute made themselves masters of the country. In all that century
and a half the viking ships, with the dreaded device of the Black
Raven, became, as we are told by a recent writer, “a familiar but
always unwelcome sight.” Unwelcome! Yes, indeed. A thought too mild,
perhaps, that word; because we know those Danish pirates to have been
so peculiarly unwelcome that when they were caught, their captors
expressed their hatred by skinning them alive and nailing their hides
upon the church-doors. Such treatment left no room for doubt.
In the defensive measures early undertaken against these marauding
hosts some historians trace the first inception of that famous alliance
of seashore towns known as the “Cinque Ports,” among which, although
Dover has always been accounted chief, Sandwich certainly makes the
better figure in olden story. Of all those seaports in that brotherhood
whose privilege it was to bear the proud and strange dimidiated arms
of the half-lions and half-boats, Sandwich suffered more severely at
the hands of the foreigner, it was more honoured, it rose to loftier
heights of prosperity, made greater sacrifices, and in the end its
decay was the more marked. It will be convenient here to concisely tell
the story of those ports.
The Cinque Ports, as a confederacy, arose from an early necessity for
guarding the south coast against the sea-rovers and other piratical
hordes out of the north of Europe, who began to harry these shores
so early as the time of the Romans. In the later years of the Roman
occupation of Britain, when the grip of that masterful people was
growing enfeebled with luxurious habits, and when not even the twin
great fortresses of _Regulbium_ and _Rutupiæ_ sufficed to overawe those
fierce strangers, it had been found necessary to provide especially for
the defence of these ports, and to appoint a commander whose particular
charge the great stretch of coast from Yarmouth, down past the Thames
and Medway, and so on to the Kentish and Sussex coasts, should be. This
official was the _Comes littoris Saxonici_, that is to say, the “Count
of the Saxon Shore.”
This warden of the coasts was not ill provided with fortresses. There
were, in all, nine. In addition to _Regulbium_ and _Rutupiæ_, there
was the like defence of _Garianonum_, now known as Burgh Castle, near
Yarmouth; _Branodunum_, Brancaster in Norfolk; _Othona_, now known as
St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, near Bradwell, Essex; the original castle at
Dover, _Portus Lemanis_, now Lympne; _Anderida_, Pevensey; and _Portus
Adurni_. The fortunes of the various Counts of the Saxon Shore are
unknown. All records are lost in the final overthrow of civilisation
after the departure of the Romans, and when the conquering Saxons had
established themselves here, they were strong enough for a long time to
hold what they had made their own, without the necessity for vigilant
defence of the coast. It was only when the Saxons, in their turn, had
begun to feel the effects of ease and luxury, and when they, too, had
suffered from piratical rovers, that coast-defence again became urgent.
And the protection of our shores has been, more or less, a matter of
urgency ever since, and so remains.
But not until the time of Edward the Confessor did the actual
confederation of the Cinque Ports come into existence, and not until
after the Conquest do we hear with any certainty of it. It is not
clear, amid the mists of antiquity from which this history emerges,
whether the ports concerned took the initiative or whether the duty of
providing ships and men for the King’s use (or for national defence, as
we might nowadays express it) was laid upon them against their will.
But the privileges and exemptions granted to these associated ports in
return for their supply of ships, men, and munitions amply recouped the
cost of the service imposed upon them. The original Cinque Ports were
Dover, Sandwich, Hastings, Hythe, and Romney. At a later period Rye and
Winchelsea were added, under the special designation of the “Ancient
Towns.” Each port had its subsidiary “members.” Thus the “members”
attached to Dover were Margate, Folkestone, Faversham, and St. Peter’s,
Broadstairs. Those belonging to Sandwich were Deal, Walmer, Stonar,
Ramsgate, Sarre, Reculver, Fordwich, and Brightlingsea, away in Essex;
to which Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Dunwich in Suffolk may perhaps
be added, although Dunwich was early swept away by encroachment of the
sea, and Yarmouth, as a place of considerable size, fully conscious of
its own dignity, always resented the authority assumed by Sandwich over
its fishery, and eventually, in 1663, won its complete independence.
Romney comprised Lydd, Dungeness, Eastweston, and Promwell; Hythe
took in merely West Hythe, and to Hastings belonged the remote and
completely inland village of Bekesbourne.
The story of the Cinque Ports is, above all else, an object-lesson
in the supreme, although generally unacknowledged, importance of the
trading, or middle classes, without whose enterprising activities
and courage and resource the nation long since would have ceased to
exist. It has always been convenient to ignore the services to the
community performed by traders, who on the one hand give employment and
on the other pay the greater proportion of rates and taxes, and from
whose enriched families the failing and impoverished aristocracy has
throughout the centuries been recruited.
Although, as already said, the idea of the Cinque Ports confederation
goes back into dim antiquity, we have few early facts. The first
Warden of whom we have any certain information is John de Fiennes, in
the time of William the Conqueror, and the earliest charter extant is
that of 1277, the sixth year of the reign of Edward the First. By that
document we learn something of the status and scope of this remarkable
association. Those ports were among the richest communities at that
time within the kingdom. They no longer suffered, as of yore, from
pirates, although they were the first to feel the vengeance of the
foreigner when war broke out; and thus they were not so immediately
concerned as of old in guarding their own shores. But the King in those
times, before such a thing as a royal navy had come into existence,
had need of ships wherewith to conduct his foreign wars, and the
merchant-vessels of Sandwich, of Dover, and of these other maritime
communities were the only craft then available. Not even in those
high-handed feudal times was it possible to seize ships at will; some
centuries earlier a compact had been made with the ports, which were
then definitely associated. They undertook to supply vessels, according
to their relative importance. Thus under Henry the Third, in 1229, the
Cinque Ports, as a whole, were to furnish fifty-seven ships, each with
a crew of twenty-one men and a boy (a “gromet,” or “garcion,” as he was
called) for fifteen days, at their own cost; and as long afterwards as
might be required, on pay. The varied importance of the contributory
ports seems to be reflected in the ships each then contracted to supply
towards the tally. Thus Dover is set down for twenty-one; Winchelsea
ten; Hastings six; and Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Rye five each.
Thus early were the merchants able to find a fleet for the King’s
needs; and they obtained substantial return for the service. The
Cinque Ports were given many valuable rights and privileges within and
without their own boundaries. They were governed under a Lord Warden
by a representative body of men freely chosen from each port, and were
independent alike of the counties and of the King’s writ, and directly
represented in Parliament and at the coronation of King and Queen. In
place of the aldermen and councillors of municipal corporations, the
freemen of the ports were styled “barons” and “jurats.” The right to
govern one’s own affairs was not recognised in those times, and the
concession granted to the freemen of the Cinque Ports was therefore of
considerable value. They were, moreover, given a privilege that would
be extremely valuable even now: that of trading free of toll everywhere
throughout the kingdom. They were, in the words of Edward the First’s
charter, “quit of all toll and custom, all lastage, tollage, passage,
carriage, rivage, and pontage.” They had also the more abstruse rights
of “Soc and sac, infangtheoff and utfangtheoff, wardship and marriage
of heirs,” and were freed from the King’s right of prisage of imported
wines.
The Cinque Ports navy, thus constituted, performed great services
during several centuries. It not only conveyed the King’s troops in
his wars with France, and Scotland, and in his subjugations of Ireland
and Wales, but fought with, and generally vanquished, foreign fleets.
It was only with the gradual growth of a royal navy, from the time of
Henry the Seventh, that the importance of the Cinque Ports flotilla
declined.
Its gradual declension was due rather to a rage for building big
warships than to any decay in the ports. Much the same forces were at
work then as those we see now. The Cinque Ports vessels were, in the
first instance, merchantmen, and when they had performed their military
service they resumed their trade. The great ships of war built by Henry
the Eighth, the _Mary Rose_ and the _Harry Grace à Dieu_, were the
Dreadnoughts of their age, and led to competitive building on the part
of foreign Powers. Among those leviathans the trading vessels of the
ports seemed insignificant; although it was left for a much later age
to prove that the fishing luggers of the Kentish coast could perform
useful acts; as when they were armed during the scare of Napoleon’s
projected invasion, and succeeded in capturing some French gunboats and
putting privateers to flight.
With the decline of their especial usefulness, and with the growth
everywhere of liberties, the peculiar privileges of the Cinque Ports
either became anomalous or absolutely worthless, and so at length the
office of Lord Warden grew more and more a mere ornamental distinction,
generally conferred upon a statesman towards the close of his career.
The honour is generally the coping-stone placed upon the achievements
of public life. Together with the decline of this once great office,
the various courts held for the conduct of Cinque Ports business have
either ceased to exist or are brought into an effete and unwonted
activity only on rare occasions, such as the Installation of a Lord
Warden, or a coronation, when the “barons” claim their ancient rights
of carrying a canopy over King and Queen. All these changes had come
gradually about at the time when reform generally was in the air, in
the first half of the nineteenth century, and most of these especial
privileges were formally abolished by the Municipal Corporations Act of
1835.
Sandwich was severely governed in mediæval times by its authorities,
the “jurats or barons,” but not one whit more severely than other
members of the Cinque Ports. The “common ordinances” proclaimed by
authority of these jurats included a curious variety of enactments. No
burgess was permitted to lend any money to spinners of wool on security
of their wool, nor to tailors on their cloth; no dealer in fish was
allowed to buy any fish in the market from a foreign fisherman, and
no poulterer might purchase any poultry from a foreigner “until the
better sort of people of the town had supplied themselves with what
they wanted for their own use.” “Foreigner” in these cases meant merely
a person who was not an inhabitant of Sandwich, not an alien.
Furthermore, any person who should wound another maliciously with
knife, sword, or the like, had the choice either of paying the Mayor
and commonalty sixty shillings, of going to prison for a year and a
day, or of having his hand perforated by the weapon with which the
wound was inflicted. Any woman convicted of scolding or quarrelling in
the street, or any public place, was to carry “the mortar,” a kind of
pillory, through the town, beginning and ending at the pillory gate,
and preceded by a piper, to whom she was to pay a penny for his music.
The jurats had also power of life and death for offences that would now
be considered of only a minor kind. The women condemned to die were
drowned in the Guestling Brook; the men buried alive in the Thieves
Dunes, near by.
The treacherous receding of the sea, which, in leaving Richborough
high and dry, had ruined that original port and created Sandwich,
was in course of time to serve Sandwich in the like manner. Its
period of greatest prosperity would appear to have been about 1470.
It had then ninety-five vessels and 1,500 sailors, and the customs
revenue of the port was £17,000, equal to about twenty times that
sum in present values. But the drifting sands soon afterwards began
to create difficulties in the haven; and when, about 1535, a large
vessel belonging to Pope Paul the Fourth was sunk, by accident or
design, in the harbour it caused so serious a shoal that not all the
efforts of the townspeople could remove it. By 1640 the haven was a
thing of the past, but for close upon two centuries and a half hopes
were entertained of reopening it. At an early stage in these troubles
foreigners were had over from Holland to deal with the sands, and
petitions were from time to time presented to Queen Elizabeth and to
Parliament. And still the sandbanks accumulated, and by that time, late
in the eighteenth century, when the Government sent down engineers to
plan and estimate and report, it was discovered that nothing less than
a cut nearly two miles long, at a cost of about £360,000, would serve.
That project never progressed beyond the report stage, and Sandwich has
long been resigned to its fate. The distance to the sea, in a direct
line, is now two miles, across sandy water, partly grown with grass;
and ships coming up the Stour to Sandwich quays have to negotiate a
winding course of nearly four miles from the sea.
But it would be a mistake to assume that Sandwich was immediately
ruined by the closing of its haven. It so happened, about the time
when the sands were first closing in, in the reign of Elizabeth, that
religious persecution in the Netherlands was harassing the industrious
Flemish and French peoples whose commercial and industrial genius had
made the fortunes of that land. England’s textile and weaving trades
were poor in comparison with those of the Continent, and it was a
far-seeing statesmanship, as much as a fellow religious feeling, that
induced Elizabeth to grant the petition of the oppressed weavers
of bays and says, and other craftsmen in 1565, and afford them an
asylum from the ferocious persecution carried on by the Spaniards in
the Low Countries. Archbishop Parker well named the Dutch and French
refugees who by command of that great Queen were permitted to settle in
Sandwich, “gentle and profitable strangers.” Unlike the often diseased,
verminous, and generally vicious, ignorant, and tradeless aliens whose
free entry into the England of to-day is so rightly resented, those
immigrants brought with them, in addition to cleanly and industrious
and law-abiding habits, the mastery of trades and techniques that
England lacked. They were indeed profitable to the State, and they
largely saved Sandwich from such complete extinction as that which has
befallen Romney and Winchelsea.
This community originally numbered some four hundred persons, and
formed a class apart, with two chapels, a Flemish and a French, for
their own use. Their textile trades thrived, and sent forth colonies to
Colchester and other places; and, among other crafts, they introduced
market-gardening. Incidentally, also, they taught the wasteful and the
riotous English a new mode of life. I suppose those two chief races
that mainly go towards the making of the English people--the Celts and
the Anglo-Saxons--have wastefulness and a love of drink in common,
however else they differ. But these strangers added sobriety and
prudence to their industry, and brought much housekeeping cleverness
with them. It is but one example of their methods, but characteristic,
that they were the first to introduce oxtail soup. The English butchers
had always disposed of the tails with the hides, but these newcomers
had long known their value and bought them cheaply, in the way of their
housekeeping, until the English aptitude to learn at other people’s
expense sent up the price of those neglected appendages. It is quite
in keeping with the contrary nature of people and affairs that it was
after a time sought to discriminate unfavourably in taxation against
these people who had brought such benefits into the land. How matters
would eventually have shaped does not appear, for at that juncture
the strangers had begun to mingle with the English. They intermarried
and lost their foreign tongues, and, such is the English power of
assimilation, their very names have suffered similar changes. Thus,
although to this day many names in Sandwich are in their origin Dutch
or French, they have been altered so greatly, following the original
English inability to pronounce them, that they appear, on the face
of them, sufficiently British. All the poetry in them has been
obliterated in the process, and they have become quaint or grotesque.
But those typical Sandwich names, “Gutterbock” and “Poisson,” are in
their original form.
The textile trades in time deserted Sandwich, and at last left it to
a gentle sleep; and so it has drowsed away the last centuries. It is
not the “dead town” it is commonly reported to be, and by no means to
be judged by Cobbett’s uncomplimentary reference in 1823: “Sandwich,
which is a rotten borough. Rottenness, putridity, is excellent for
land, but bad for boroughs.” It was political rottenness that aroused
his indignation; but that was no especial attribute of Sandwich, and
therefore he need not have continued with the remark, “as villainous a
hole as one would wish to see.”
Wish _not_ to see, he doubtless meant, for nobody desires to see
villainous holes. But Sandwich was not of his political creed, hence
this fury.
So much has been said of Sandwich as a “dead town” that strangers who
first come to it full of the tales they have heard, of grass growing in
its streets--and, for all I know, moss growing on its inhabitants--
are likely to be surprised at its comparative vitality. Grass does
not grow like a lawn in the streets of Sandwich, in spite of all the
far-fetched stories of decay and desolation that it pleases eloquent
descriptive writers to tell, and it is something of a shock to find
a quite busy railway station just outside the ramparts and a very
modern “Stores” in whose windows are all sorts of twentieth-century
provisions, for which modern coin of the realm, and not the quaint
moneys of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth, must be tendered. All these
signs, including the occasional motor-cars that hurry through the
narrow streets, are very reassuring, or very disastrous, according to
your point of view.
At Sandwich, which is supposed (in the pages of those super-eloquent
writers aforesaid) to have given up the ghost long ago, but has done
nothing of the kind, there should certainly be no railway, and there
should be no room in a “dead” town for the gasworks which may be seen--
and smelt--on the quay, nor for the particularly large and busy
brewery in Strand Street. At the mediæval Sandwich, thus pictured, the
few remaining shopkeepers should stand in their doorways and address
passers-by with “What d’ye lack, my masters?” but they don’t; and the
thirsty wayfarer will call in vain for a posset of sack, a beaker of
canary or malvoisie at the “Red Lion” or “King’s Arms.” Beshrew me,
sirs, but he will need to content himself with a whisky-and-soda,
mineral-waters, or the product of the local brewery already mentioned.
I have no doubt, could he sample the old-style drinks, he would greatly
prefer the modern.
If one really wishes to see a dead town, Winchelsea, or New Romney,
or, better still, Old Romney, may be recommended. They are much more
dead--if it be in any way possible to institute degrees in these
things--than Sandwich.
But the census returns of a hundred years ago, compared with those of
1911, prove an increase of population in the town. They at the same
time disclose how small a place it is. The population in 1801 was
2,452; in 1901 it had risen to 3,170; but the 1911 census reveals a
decline of 130.
There is no grand architecture, of the wonder-compelling kind, in
Sandwich. It is all very quiet and modest and domestic, but at the
same time old-world and reverend. Of the three parish churches, St.
Clement’s, which stands hard by the place where the ancient sea-front
of Sandwich once opened out, is the most notable, and has a fine Norman
tower. The restoration it has experienced was paid for by the sale
of its bells--a quaint touch--and a modern set of tube-chimes now
replaces them. St. Peter’s is perhaps better known, because its tower
is taller and is capped with a curious Dutch-like turret, and rising
to a considerable height, viewed from a distance, across the flats, it
is the most prominent feature of the town. The tower is frankly and
unashamedly unarchitectural, and replaces the one that fell without
warning on October 13th, 1661. It fell disastrously into the church
and demolished the south aisle, making a mighty heap of wreckage. “The
rubidge,” says the contemporary account, “was three fathoms deep in
the middle of the church.” The roofless walls of that destroyed aisle
remain in part to this day. The tower that replaces the fallen building
is of a local grey brick made from the harbour mud, and would appear
from its style to have been designed and built by a local journeyman
bricklayer. But it is to be hoped that the modern passion for
remodelling plain buildings and putting them into a conventional dress
will pass this tower of St. Peter’s by; for Sandwich would scarce seem
the same Sandwich without it, and people who write about the town would
lose the cherished chance of being mildly funny at its expense.
I do not think any stranger has ever been known to find his way
through Sandwich without making one or two false turns, for its
streets are winding and deceptive. The houses of the middle ages
are not represented in them at all, and it is a sixteenth and
seventeenth-century Sandwich you see, not the mediæval port. It is,
in general, a Dutch effect, as if those settlers under Elizabeth had
imported their views upon domestic architecture and had successfully
imposed them upon the town.
The native of Sandwich who has left his mark most visibly upon the
place is Sir Roger Manwood, who founded the Grammar School in 1563.
Manwood was born 1525, son of a local draper, and, entering the law,
became eventually Chief Baron of the Exchequer. An elaborate new
school-building, built 1895, stands in a solitary position outside the
town, at the very opposite end from the original school, now occupied
as a private residence and named Manwood Court. It stands at the very
extremity of Sandwich, as you go towards Canterbury, and is a very
striking building, with five gables and a high-pitched roof, and the
date, 1564, in great figures, sprawling in genuine sixteenth-century
ironwork along the frontage. Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Sandwich
in 1572, when she was elaborately entertained by the town, honoured Sir
Roger by staying at his house.
For the rest, there are dim, odd corners, where queer old timber
angle-posts, carved with grinning and demoniacal figures, start out of
the houses. Such an one is that which forms the chief adornment of the
“King’s Arms” inn and is dated 1592.
[Illustration: THE TOWN HALL, SANDWICH.]
The Town Hall is a curious old building within, although refaced and
rendered commonplace without. In it are held the Quarter Sessions
for Sandwich and the Liberties of Ramsgate, Walmer, and Sarre.
Brightlingsea’s law-cases were also formerly held here; and the Mayor
of that Essex seaport still has his chain of office placed on him here
by his overlord, the Mayor of Sandwich. Another mayoral peculiarity
is the black wand, instead of the usual white one, presented by the
clerk to his Worship on his assuming office. The town traditionally
thus went into mourning after the battle of Bloody Point. As this took
place in the year 851, it is quite evident that the men of Sandwich
are people with long memories, whom it would be an ill business to
offend. The Sessions Hall and police-court is a fine old room, the
court being entered past two weird old sculptured heraldic figures, a
lion and a dragon sitting up on their rumps and holding shields. These
are survivals of the town’s decorations when Queen Elizabeth visited
it, the dragon being, of course, the ancient Dragon of Wales. A number
of pictures of curious interest seen in the Mayor’s Parlour were found
in 1839, during some alterations to a house in Harnet Street. They
represent the battle of Sole (Southwold) Bay, the reception of Queen
Elizabeth, etc. The jury-box in the Sessions Court is worth notice.
It is one which used formerly to be set up at the opening of the
Court, and taken down at the conclusion of business, when its parts
were fitted into the panelling which lines the walls. Thus arose the
expression of “empanelling” a jury.
There is now a stir in the old streets of Sandwich. Somewhere about
1887 some enthusiastic golfers discovered in the wide-spreading sands
an ideal site for links on which to play that “royal and ancient”
game, at that time scarce known, even by name, to the generality of
Englishmen; and speedily the St. George’s Golf Club, since granted the
prefix of “Royal,” was established, on land--or rather sand--leased
and eventually purchased, from the Earl of Guilford, to whom the sea,
in closing the career of Sandwich as a port, has gracefully presented
this truly “unearned increment.” The present club-house was formerly
Great Downs Farm. Recently the trustees of the Earl of Guilford have
constructed a “private” road from Sandwich, across the sandy wastes, to
the sea, where they have erected a smart hotel, chiefly for golfers,
on what was the solitary shore. Sometimes, when the golfers have bored
each other almost to extinction with bragging of their remarkable feats
on the course, they lounge into Sandwich and patronise it. To those who
do not play golf all these developments are hateful and infuriating,
and the players seem to be persons who pretend at exercise, rather
than putting themselves to any real exertion; and on that score very
inferior to cricketers. Meanwhile the boys and growing lads of Sandwich
employed as “caddies” are being bred up to be idle, vicious, and
unemployable men.