SHORNCLIFFE CAMP--THE ROYAL MILITARY CANAL--HYTHE--ROMNEY MARSH--
THE MARTELLO TOWERS--THE “HOLY MAID OF KENT”
From Sandgate the seashore goes level for many miles, through Seabrook
and Hythe, and across Romney Marsh to Dungeness. Not until Sussex is
reached and Winchelsea passed do the cliffs again rise, confronting the
sea.
Hard by Sandgate Castle stands the centenary monument on the modest
parade to Sir John Moore, the hero of Coruña, unveiled November 19th,
1909. The spot is appropriate because, at the back of Sandgate, up
away out of sight, is Shorncliffe Camp, closely associated with that
distinguished soldier. The military works in these parts, along a coast
so peculiarly exposed to foreign invasion, are many and important.
Henry the Eighth, as we have seen, was diligent in fortifying these
low-lying shores, and there came a time, two hundred and sixty-five
years later, when the Government of that day was equally concerned
about a possible French attack. Then, in 1805, was constructed the
famous “Royal Military Canal,” which extends a distance of about
twenty miles from Rye to Hythe, with its sluices here at Seabrook,
adjoining Sandgate railway-station. The canal is thirty feet wide and
nine feet deep in the middle. Its function was, in connection with a
regular line of martello towers on the beach, to hamper and impede a
landing-force.
“Mr. Pitt’s Military Canal,” as it was in those days styled, formed
the target for many shafts of ridicule. “The French,” said Ingoldsby,
“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.’”
Here, where the Canal’s sluices pour their waters into the sea, are
remains of military works, intended to defend this vital spot, with
Shorncliffe Camp above. The world wags still with an amiable slowness
here, the old horse-tramway through Sandgate to Hythe, belonging to
the South-Eastern Railway, leaving the main road and progressing along
the beach. The only trouble is the constant succession of motor-cars,
generally racing at illegal speeds along these flat roads and producing
clouds of dust.
[Illustration: HYTHE.]
Seabrook melts insensibly into Hythe, that quaint old place whose
name, signifying “the harbour,” proves how changed are the local
conditions from those remote times when the little town first arose.
Then ships came up to it. To-day the sea is distant across a mile-long
waste of shingle, and, of all the four parishes in it, but one now
remains; with but one church. This, the noble Early English church
of St. Leonard, is of much architectural interest; but it is sadly
to be supposed that the average holiday-maker is more attracted by
the gruesome collection of ancient skulls, exhibited in the crypt,
or undercroft. You may see these poor relics, if you have a mind to
it, for the fee of threepence, and the curiously morbid taste widely
distributed among sightseers brings in a plentiful harvest of pennies
and threepenny-bits, all through the summer. The collection at present
consists of some six hundred skulls and a neatly arranged stack of
bones that once formed the framework of about seven thousand men. They
are supposed to be the remains of men of some distant age who fell in
battle by the seashore; and, whether they died in the hour of victory
or of defeat, we may perhaps assume, now that their bones, so many
centuries later, bring a modest income to the church of Hythe, that
they did not die in vain. But whether they would have chosen to be a
show for the curious and the vulgar is another matter. For myself, I
think it a scandal and an indignity, and consider that the clergy of
Hythe, past and present, deserve the greatest censure for holding and
continuing the exhibition.
Were it not that scientific men, examining the skulls, have declared
them all to be those of men, we might most fittingly assume that this
undercroft was merely a charnel-house, like those seen in Brittany,
to which the bones of the older occupants of the churchyard are from
time to time removed; but since the remains _are_ only those of men,
and as many of the skulls exhibit gashes, the vague ancient legends
of some great battle appear to be not without foundation. But at what
period that great fight was fought, and between what opposing races, is
uncertain. Hasted, in his “History of Kent,” tells us that the battle
was fought A.D. 456, between the Britons and the Saxons, and that the
Saxons were utterly defeated: “Vortimer still followed the retreating
Saxons, and, coming up with them again on the seashore near Folkestone
in the year 456, fought a third battle with them between that place
and Hythe, gaining a complete victory. Nennius and others say it was
fought in a field on the shores of the Gallic Sea, where stood the
Lapis Populi.”
Another historian places the date of the battle three hundred and
eighty-seven years later. “A.D. 843,” he says, “in the reign of
Ethelwolf, the Danes landed on the coast of Kent, near to the town of
Hyta, and proceeded as far as Canterbury, great part of which they
burnt. At length Gustavus (then Governor of Kent) raised a considerable
force, with which he opposed their progress; and, after an engagement
in which the Danes were defeated, pursued them to their shipping on the
sea-coast, where they made a most obstinate resistance. The Britons,
however, were victorious, but the slaughter was prodigious, there being
not less than thirty thousand left dead. After the battle the Britons,
wearied with fatigue, returned to their homes, leaving the slain on
the field of battle, where, being exposed to the different changes of
the weather, the flesh rotted from the bones, which were afterwards
collected and piled in heaps by the inhabitants, who in time removed
them into a vault in one of the churches of Hyta, now called Hythe.”
Hythe owes a great deal to the memory of William Pitt, whose Military
Canal has, in the more than a hundred years since it was made, become
one of the loveliest of waterways, on which splendid boating, under
the shade of century-old trees, may be had. Leaving the town, the road
comes at once, past the bridge over the Canal and by the “Duke’s Head”
inn, into the romantic region of Romney Marsh.
Romney Marsh was in merry Tom Ingoldsby’s time so out of the way that
he could find it possible to say, with that humorous exaggeration
which enshrines some little truth, “the world, 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.”
The last witch eloped with the ultimate smuggler, full seventy years
since, but Romney Marsh remains, a beautiful open expanse of wide
horizons, clear skies, and succulent pastures. The coastwise road runs
across its levels, seven miles to New Romney, with the village of
Dymchurch in between, Dymchurch Wall keeping out the sea. This, viewed
from the inner side, is a lofty grassed earthen bank, faced seawards
with a masonry “apron,” as engineers style it; while at regular
intervals the martello towers of an olden scheme of coast-defence are
features of the way. Cobbett, writing in 1825, was very severe upon
them:
“I had baited my horse,” he writes, “at New Romney, and was coming
jogging along very soberly, now looking at the sea, then looking at the
cattle, then the corn, when my eye, in swinging round, lighted upon a
great round building, standing upon the beach. I had scarcely had time
to think about what it could be, when twenty or thirty others, standing
along the coast, caught my eye; and, if any one had been behind me,
he might have heard me exclaim, in a voice that made my horse bound,
‘The _martello towers_, by ----!’ Oh, Lord! To think that I should be
destined to behold these monuments of the wisdom of Pitt and Dundas
and Perceval! Good G--! Here they are, piles of bricks in a circular
form about three hundred feet (_guess_) circumference at the base, and
about one hundred and fifty feet circumference at the top. There is a
doorway, about midway up, in each, and each has two windows. Cannons
were to be fired from the top of these things, in order to defend the
country against the French Jacobins!
“I think I have counted along here upwards of thirty of these
ridiculous things, which, I daresay, cost five, perhaps ten, thousand
pounds each; and one of which was, I am told, _sold_ on the coast of
Sussex, the other day, for two hundred pounds! There is, they say, a
chain of these things all the way to Hastings! I daresay they cost
millions. But far indeed are these from being all, or half, or a
quarter of the squanderings along here. Hythe is half _barracks_; the
hills are covered with barracks, and barracks most expensive, most
squandering, fill up the side of the hill. Here is a canal (I crossed
it at Appledore) made for the length of thirty miles (from Hythe, in
Kent, to Rye, in Sussex) to _keep out the French_; for, those armies
who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube were to be kept back
by a canal made by Pitt, thirty feet wide, at the most! All along the
coast there are works of some sort or other, incessant sinks of money;
walls of immense dimensions; masses of stone brought and put into
piles. Then you see some of the walls and buildings falling down; some
that have never been finished. The whole thing taken together,” he
concludes, “looks as if a spell had been, all of a sudden, set upon the
workmen; or, in the words of the Scripture, here is the ‘_desolation of
abomination, standing in high places_.’”
The martello towers seem to have thoroughly obsessed Cobbett, for he
presently bursts forth again, to tell us how they were “erected to keep
out the Jacobin French, lest they should come and assist the Jacobin
English. The _loyal_ people of this coast were fattened by the building
of them. Pitt and his loyal _Cinque Ports_ waged interminable war
against Jacobins. These very towers are now used to keep these _loyal_
Cinque Ports themselves in order. These towers are now used to lodge
men, whose business is to sally forth, not upon Jacobins, but upon
_smugglers_. Thus, after having sucked up millions of the nation’s
money, these loyal Cinque Ports are squeezed again: kept in order, kept
down, by the very towers which they rejoiced to see rise to keep down
the Jacobins.”
Seventy-six of these martello towers were erected along the flat places
of the Kent and Sussex shores in the first years of the nineteenth
century, when Napoleon threatened us with invasion. They cost,
according to their size, from £10,000 to £20,000 apiece, and were
constructed of such a thickness of brick, with a vaulted brick roof,
that they were thoroughly bomb-proof. The thickness of the brick walls
varies from six feet on the rear, or landward, side, to nine feet
facing the sea. The interior consists of a base, intended to serve as
the magazine, with two rooms above, for the garrison. On the roof was
mounted a swivel-gun, while on either side of each tower a howitzer was
planted, as a flank defence. The martello towers are said to have been
introduced from Italy, on whose Mediterranean coast, we are told, they
had first been built for the purpose of defending the seaboard against
the pirates who once infested those seas. It is even said that their
name, “Torri di Martello,” derives from the warning to neighbouring
villages sounded on the approach of a pirate ship by striking a bell
with a hammer, in Italian _martello_; but another derivation is given
from a circular fort on the seashore at Martella, in Corsica, reduced
only after severe fighting in the time of Nelson.
At any rate, they do not deserve the ridicule that has been showered
upon them, from the time of their building until the present day.
They had never an opportunity of being put to the test, for Napoleon
thought better of his projected invasion; but time has been on the side
of these much-abused forts, for Lord Kitchener’s blockhouses on the
African veldt, not altogether remotely resembling them, were largely
instrumental in bringing the weary and inglorious great Boer War to a
close.
The history of the martello towers during the last few years, forms
an interesting footnote to Cobbett’s denunciations. Some, near Hythe,
have been undermined and split in half by the sea, and others have
been, at great labour and expense, demolished. Others yet have been
let by the War Office at modest rentals to romantic people on the look
out for something unconventional in the way of a seaside bungalow.
Should any romantic reader of these pages desire to do the like, I have
no doubt the War Office will be quite ready to let others of these
forts that have never fought the foe. Indeed, now and again official
advertisements may be seen, inviting tenders for renting some of them,
for twelve months. The Department has by no means extravagant notions
as to the value of them as “desirable residences,” and an offer of
£4 or £5 is pretty sure to win acceptance. It is not an extravagant
rental, but, on the other hand, there are obvious drawbacks from a
residential point of view. It is not every one who would be content
with a home that looks externally like a gigantic pork-pie and has
the defects of possessing but three rooms, one on the ground-floor
(originally intended for a powder-magazine) with no windows, and two
above, dimly illuminated by loopholes in the walls. Indeed, in the
winter months life in a martello tower must be almost as gloomy as
in a prison. But summer, to be sure, brings compensations, for the
interior is then apt to be delightfully cool, and the concreted roof,
originally designed to hold a swivel-gun and other ordnance, forms an
ideal platform for deck-chairs. Nor need this open-air life on the roof
be at all exposed to the gaze of the public, for a four-foot parapet
runs round, screening it from too great publicity.
We shall, however, better judge what Romney Marsh is like by mounting
to the high lands that overlook it; that ridge which is crested
picturesquely by Lympne Church and Castle on the right, marking the
ancient coast line in the times of the Romans. What is now the Marsh
was then a shallow lagoon where the Roman vessels rode at anchor; and
to this day the remains of the Roman seaport of _Portus Lemanis_,
called “Studfall Castle,” strew the tumbled grassy slopes beneath
Lympne Castle, in fragments of massive masonry. It is an excessively
steep climb, past Botolph’s Bridge, up to Lympne; that “Lymme Hill, or
Lyme,” of which Camden wrote. He tells us, truly enough, that this “was
sumtyme a famose haven, and good for shyppes that might come to the
foot of the hille. The place is cawled Shipway or Old Haven. Farther,
at thys daie the lord of the V ports kepeth his principal court a lytil
by est from Lymme hill.”
The Court of Shepway, to which Camden thus alludes, was the chief
legislative and executive body of the Cinque Ports. It made the laws
governing that confederacy of ports, and pronounced decrees.
A subsidiary court of the Cinque Ports, inferior to the Court of
Shepway, was in remote times held in the open air on Dymchurch beach.
This was the “Court of Brodhull,” and was later removed to Romney.
Shepway Court also was an open-air assembly, presided over by the
Lord Warden. Here offenders were tried upon charges of high treason,
failure of ship-service, false judgment, and treasure-trove. Process
upon conviction was summary. Convicted disturbers of the King’s peace,
debasers of coin, and plunderers of ships or ships’ gear to the
value of twenty pence were at once drawn around Shepway on hurdles
and afterwards hanged. An even more terrible fate awaited any jurat
disclosing the King’s counsel, his fellows and his own. He was bound
hand and foot to a stake set upon the seashore where the tide ebbed and
flowed, his throat was cut, and his tongue drawn out through the slit.
The Lord Warden was always, from the earliest times, sworn in at the
Court of Shepway upon his appointment. The first Lord Warden was Earl
Godwin. This ceremony continued here until 1597, when Lord Cobham took
the oath at Bekesbourn. Meanwhile the business of the ancient Court had
been transferred to Dover. The composition of this open-air assembly
was, the Lord Warden, with the Mayor of Sandwich on his right and the
Mayor of Dover on his left; on the right of the Mayor of Sandwich,
the Mayor of Hastings; and the Mayors of Romney, and Hythe, Winchelsea
and Rye, Faversham, Folkestone, or Fordwich, Lydd, Pevensey or Seaford,
and Tenterden, respectively in succession, right and left.
[Illustration: LYMPNE.]
At Shepway Cross, on the hill-top, we turn left into Lympne, which was
once pronounced locally as a two-syllabled word, “Limn-ey”; obviously
derived from the old Roman _Lemanis_. How or why the intruding “p” came
into the place-name is unknown, and cannot be traced back further than
Morden’s map of Kent, about 1680.
The great Early English church adjoins the castle, originally one of
the numerous seats of the Archbishops of Canterbury, and afterwards
for centuries a farmhouse. This interesting building, with remains of
fourteenth-century work, was sold about 1907 to Mr. F. J. Tennant,
the millionaire brother-in-law of Mr. Asquith. Until that time the
public had access to the place; but it has since been restored and
huge additions made, wholly changing the aspect of the spot. Before
these developments it was possible to wander anywhere at will about
the ruins of the castrum on the undercliff; but now one is restricted,
and goes between limits of barbed-wire, and hedged in with threatening
prohibitions. It is to be observed that never before in all its history
had the castle suffered siege or violence, until this transformation
had been effected. And then its warlike history began, in the
determined irruption of a band of those “bold, bad ones,” the silly
suffragettes, who stormed the terraces and flung stones through the
dining-room windows during one of Mr. Asquith’s visits. The great gods
laugh at the exquisite irony of the situation!
From the ridge on which Lympne is placed one looks down over the whole
extent of Romney Marsh, with the Military Canal down in the foreground,
and out in middle distance the curving sweep of the shore, accented at
intervals by the line of martello towers. It is beautiful by day, but
touched to nobility at night, under the gleam of the harvest moon.
[Illustration: LYMPNE CASTLE AND CHURCH.]
Half a mile out of Lympne, on the way to Aldington, a rough and obscure
lane turns to the left, out of the road, between some new residences
which have just been built. It is not at first a particularly inviting
way, but it leads to a singular undercliff scene, where an ancient
cottage, completely wrapped in creepers, even to roof and chimneys,
stands on a plateau which has the appearance of having slid bodily
half way down the cliff. This indeed is exactly what, in the words of
Hasted, the historian of Kent, did happen one night in the year 1727.
So evenly and silently did this take place that the farmer and his wife
knew nothing of it until they awoke next morning to the new point of
view presented from their windows. The cottage is known as the “French
House,” from the fine view hence of the coast of France.
Immediately at the end of the next hamlet, Court-at-Street, a steep,
rough lane deeply sunk between rugged banks and overhung with trees
leads down to the Marsh, or rather, to a little plateau or undercliff
looking upon it. It is a beautiful view you get hence, a variant of
other beautiful glimpses on the way from Lympne to Appledore, taking
in the flat Marsh and the Royal Military Canal and the long sweep of
coast curving to Dungeness. But something other than a mere view-point
makes the spot interesting. It is a little building, roofless and
otherwise in ruins, that stands there; a building with one remaining
architectural feature in the shape of a late doorway, probably of the
time of Henry the Seventh. This was anciently a chapel. The reason
of its being placed in a situation so obscure is lost, but there must
have been an excellent one for such a choice, for mediæval chapels
commonly stood, as shops do now, in positions that commanded traffic,
and for the same reason: that they should secure the notice and the
custom of wayfarers, by whose alms and offerings they were largely
supported. At the time when the story presently to be told was enacted
this chapel had already fallen upon evil times. Whatever relics it had
possessed had--as modern theatrical managers say of their unsuccessful
plays--“failed to attract”--and the hermit who once had lived there
was gone.
[Illustration: ROMNEY MARSH: THE MARTELLO TOWERS AND MILITARY CANAL:
MOONLIGHT.]
But it has a late story of its own, a tragical story of the tragic and
epoch-making age of Henry the Eighth. In those last few years when it
was still roofed and weather-proof it was used by the cunning priests
of a declining and damnable creed for the purpose of keeping alive
their almost exploded superstitions. Reformation was in the air, in
things spiritual and temporal alike, and the religious houses were
presently to be dissolved and to be made loose their hold upon the
large proportion of English soil they had accumulated by centuries of
bequests. Some sign, any sign, was required by the doomed clergy of
that age by which the pretensions of their class could be bolstered
up and the actions of a King bent upon reform discredited; and such a
sign, the religious of Canterbury acutely believed, could be made to
appear from the strange possession, demoniacal or angelic--that had
suddenly befallen a peasant girl in Aldington, one Elizabeth Barton,
at that time a servant in the employ of Master Thomas Cobb, bailiff to
the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Cobb lived in the little house still
standing at Aldington, and now known as “Cobb’s Hall,” and was startled
when his maid-servant suddenly developed strange and terrifying
behaviour, and began to rave on religious matters. To modern ideas the
symptoms detailed in the lengthy old accounts of Elizabeth Barton’s
career would seem to point to epileptic fits, followed by religious
mania; but the simple folk of those times thought her inspired, and
those others who were not so simple, and knew a good deal better,
took excellent good care that the notion of her inspiration should
be well nursed. Religious mania is generally the product of outside
influences acting upon a diseased body and an ill-balanced mind; and
it may be suspected, since the crisis in the affairs of the Church was
then the chief topic in the mouths of all men, that Elizabeth had been
influenced by the talk she heard, and by the preaching of the then
rector of Aldington, Richard Masters. In her trances and somnambulistic
exploits and in her ravings the ordinary people thought her possessed
of evil spirits; but Richard Masters declared she had always been a
devout girl, and he now professed, when called to her bedside, to have
heard her say “very godly certain things concerning the seven deadly
sins and the Ten Commandments.” This, in the view of the Church,
was inspiration. Masters journeyed to London, and at Lambeth Palace
acquainted the old and failing Archbishop Warham with this strange
portent, and was encouraged to keep diligent account of all her
utterances.
And then Elizabeth Barton suddenly recovered, and was in the scullery
again, cleaning pots and pans and dishes. We may picture the
disappointment Masters experienced, on his return, to find his prodigy
become suddenly so commonplace.
But it was too late for this poor Elizabeth to be allowed to return
obscurely to her domestic duties. Cobb’s house was besieged by the
curious, who came merely to look at her, and by the superstitious, who
had heard she could prophesy, and by the ailing, who thought that a
laying on of hands would cure them.
Two monks were brought over from Canterbury, to make a religious seer
and prophetess of her, and Cobb was persuaded that the best room in
the house, and not the scullery, was her proper place. These two
emissaries, Doctor Bocking and Dan William Hadley, gave her a course
of instruction in the _Acta Sanctorum_, and taught her to believe
herself of the company of saints and equal to such miraculous deeds
as theirs. Thus arose the title by which she is known in history, the
“Holy Maid of Kent.” She now experienced a recurrence of her cataleptic
states, but appears more often to have made a pretence of them. Her
instructors removed her at this juncture to this lonely Chapel of Our
Lady at Court-at-Street, which had for some time past, with the general
decay of pilgrimage and the growing disbelief in relics, been doing
very badly. The removal was made the occasion for a great and striking
religious procession, and two thousand persons assembled to witness
a promised miracle: a promise said to have been made to Elizabeth by
the Virgin Mary that she should be cured if she visited that shrine.
Elizabeth was carried to the place, with every appearance of severe
affliction, “her face wondrously disfigured, her tongue hanging out,
and her eyes being in like manner plucked out and lying upon her cheek.
There was then heard a voice speaking within her belly, as it had been
in a tunnel, her lips not greatly moving; she all that while continuing
by the space of three hours or more in a trance.”
And the voice spoke of the joys of heaven and the torments of hell and
of the efficacy of pilgrimage and the beauty of giving to Holy Church.
“And,” continues the account, “after she had lyen there a long time,
she came to herself again, and was perfectly whole.” It was, in short,
a very clever and successful exhibition of acting and ventriloquy, and
completely captured the crowd.
The Virgin now desired her to repair to the Priory of St. Sepulchre
at Canterbury, and to assume the name of Sister Elizabeth and take
Dr. Bocking for her spiritual instructor. There she was gradually
coached into religious and political prophecies, and began to launch
threats against the King in respect of his divorce and of his proposed
marriage with Anne Boleyn. She declared--and forced her way into
his presence at Canterbury, on his return from France, to declare
it--that he should not reign a month after that marriage and should
die “a villain’s death.” But the King, quite unmoved, married as he
had intended, and a month passed, and he seemed none the worse. The
Holy Maid, like many another prophet before and since, was obliged to
move the date of the anticipated retribution forward, and still the
vengeance of Heaven did not descend. The obvious inference is that
Elizabeth was not in the confidence of Providence; but through the
reports of the monks of Canterbury, who spread the most extraordinary
accounts of her life in the Priory, in which the devil in person was
said to have appeared, in an attempt to commit an indecent assault
upon her, she was widely looked upon as divinely inspired. Sir Thomas
More, regarded by all competent persons as one of the most learned and
cultured persons of that age, believed in her.
For three years she continued her extraordinary career of fraud and
blasphemy, and then the heavy hand of the King descended upon her and
her accomplices. One can only feel surprised that it had been delayed
so long, for Henry the Eighth was not usually long-suffering under
insult.
She was hanged, with Doctor Bocking and others of her accomplices
in religious deceptions and political offences, April 21st, 1534, at
Tyburn. “Hither,” said she, in her dying speech and confession, “I am
come to die. I have been not only the cause of mine own death, which
most justly I have deserved, but am also the cause of the death of all
these persons who at this time here suffer. And yet I am not so much
to be blamed, considering that it was well known unto these learned
men that I was a poor wench without learning, and therefore they might
have easily perceived that the things which were done by me could not
proceed in no such sort; but their capacities and learning could right
well judge that they were altogether feigned. But because the things
which I feigned were profitable unto them, therefore they much praised
me, and bare me in hand that it was the Holy Ghost, and not I that did
them.”
This, with much else, she confessed, admitting among other things that
a letter purporting to have been written by the Virgin Mary, in heaven,
and sent to a widow in London, was written by a St. Augustine’s monk
named Hawkhurst.
Aldington church tower rises in stately massiveness amid the plain
of Aldington Frith--“Aldington Fright,” as the country people call
it. It is a noble, though an unfinished building, begun about 1507,
and in progress until 1537. Those were not favourable times for new
church works, and the Archbishop’s palace--one of his many palaces--
close by, dated its decay from the same period. Nothing is left of
his park of more than a thousand acres, and of the palace itself,
its five kitchens, eight dove-houses, six stables, nine barns, and
other appurtenances on an equally generous scale, nothing now remains
but some few architectural fragments built into the walls of a
comparatively modern house.
Aldington is notable not only from its connection with the story of
the Holy Maid, but also because Erasmus was rector here for a short
period. His appointment in 1511 by Archbishop Warham was something in
the nature of a scandal, however well-meaning its object, which was
to provide him, as a learned, but poor, scholar, with a livelihood.
Erasmus was a Dutchman, quite ignorant of the English language, however
well versed in Latin; and either his awakened conscience, or the
growing indignation of the people of Aldington at having a tongue-tied
alien thrust upon them, presently led to his resigning. A charge of £20
per annum, then a large sum, fully equal to £200 present value, was
then made upon the living, and paid by his successor for his support.
After a short interval, Richard Masters, who figured prominently in the
affair of the Holy Maid, was appointed, and with varying fortunes he
held the rectory until his death, in 1558.
Beyond this we may fitly turn down again to the Marsh, past Bonnington
church, a tiny building standing close beside the Military Canal.
Thence across the levels, by winding roads, the way goes to Newchurch,
“new” so long ago that the origin is lost in antiquity. It is a
typical Marshland village, and the heavy tower of the church itself
leans forward in a manner suggesting imminent collapse. It has probably
suggested the same idea for three hundred years, or more; and so there
is certainly no immediate danger. Hereabouts the sheep are the chief
animate objects. Romney Marsh was ever a region famous for its flocks,
and from the earliest times the smugglers who smuggled wool out of the
country, regardless of the strict penal laws against the exportation
of fleeces, were more important than those who smuggled goods inwards.
They had their own special designation, and were known as “owlers,”
probably in the first instance from their signalling in the night with
calls like those of the owls.
[Illustration: BONNINGTON CHURCH.]
There are no “shepherds” here, on the Marsh. They are, in local
parlance, “lookers.” When the agricultural labourer in these parts
takes up with “ship,” he announces, “I be a-going a-lookering”;
lookering being, in fact, a variety of shepherding peculiar to these
surroundings, with special terms and conditions.
To trace these byways of the Marsh in spring, say in the third week
of May, when the thorn-trees are in bloom, is an experience to be
remembered; it is the best time of all the year to see Romney Marsh.
Then such remote spots as Ivychurch, in the very middle of it, seem
idyllic. “Ivychurch” does not, by the way, take its name, as might
be supposed, from ivy, but has its root in “ea,” for water, having
originally been situated on an islanded knoll ever so little raised
above the level of the wet marshes. The term “Marsh,” it should be
said, survives although the roads and byways are now as dry as those
of other scenes, thanks to the constant care of the jurats and other
officers whose functions are to keep the dykes deeply delved, the
sluices in order, and Dymchurch Wall in repair. In default of these,
Romney Marsh, or the greater portion of it, would again be drowned, for
it is at a lower level than the sea.