NEW ROMNEY--SMUGGLING DAYS--BROOKLAND--FAIRFIELD--SMALLHYTHE
The town of New Romney, new nine hundred years ago, is located afar
off, not by its houses, which are few indeed, but by the trees that
encircle it, and give a very direct denial to its urban claims. Founded
to replace Old Romney, deserted by the sea, as a seaport, the sea
began again to retreat so long ago as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and is
now a mile and a half to two miles distant, at the melancholy and
hopeless-looking cluster of houses known as Littlestone-on-Sea, where
there are golf-links on which Parliamentary matches are played. There
the opposing champions in the House of Commons contend amicably, much
to the surprise of the general public, who imagine--poor fools--that
all the fury and tub-thumping at Westminster is honest emotion, and do
not realise that it is all part of the great Game of Make-Believe for
which, whether amused or not, we have all to pay.
There were once no fewer than five churches at New Romney. Now there
is but one. “Here,” wrote Cobbett, in 1825, “there is a church (two
miles only from the last, mind!) fit to contain one thousand five
hundred people, and there are, for the people of this parish to live
in, twenty-two or twenty-three houses! And yet the _vagabonds_ have
the impudence to tell us that the population of England has vastly
increased.”
[Illustration: NEW ROMNEY CHURCH.]
The “vagabonds” pilloried in this wrong-headed outburst were quite
correct; the population had indeed greatly increased, but that of New
Romney and Old Romney alike had, for the best of reasons, declined.
Moreover, Cobbett did not know--nor do people generally stop to
consider--that the numerous and roomy old churches throughout the
country do not necessarily give the measure of the ancient population.
As even now, the size or frequency of churches depended to a great
extent upon the comparative piety and wealth of the neighbourhood.
The great church of St. Nicholas, the surviving one of New Romney, is
a fine specimen of the late Norman style, with tombs of the old Mayors
and jurats. The floor-level is so much below the level of the ground
outside that one descends several steps into the building. The town
itself is scarce less quiet and undisturbed than the interior of the
church itself. It is still technically a Cinque Port, and a Mayor is
annually elected. Also there is something in the nature of a town gaol;
but it is a curiosity rather than a necessity.
I cull this interesting item from a newspaper of October 1913, to show
something of the quiet that has now descended upon the place.
“SINLESS CINQUE PORT.--During the last six months the fines and fees
at the police court of New Romney, the ancient borough and Cinque Port,
have amounted to 2_s._ In this time only one minor case was heard,
although the borough, which includes Littlestone-on-Sea, has a Mayor
and eight magistrates, as well as three policemen.”
A very different New Romney from that of centuries ago, which was a
place such as Longfellow wrote of, with--
“... The black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.”
But the town, although reduced in size, experienced a gorgeous time
centuries later; a time that ended only in the early years of the
nineteenth century. The sea had gone out of sight, but the smuggling
trade brought much wealth here.
This was indeed an ideal district for the smugglers who infested the
coasts of Kent and Sussex. Every dyke--or “dick,” as the country
people pronounce the word--was a temporary storehouse for tubs of
contraband spirits, placed there on hurried occasions, until leisure
could be found to convey them into more private hiding; and those
enterprising revenue officers who on fine days wandered the marshes
with iron rods, probing at a venture among the reeds and bulrushes, not
infrequently made lucky discoveries.
But it was when night had shut down, thick and rimy, over these
levels that in those old times they woke to business. Many a cargo
of gin or cognac, successfully landed along the coast on the Kentish
or the Sussex side of the Rother, was conveyed by the smugglers’
labourers across Guilford Level and Walling Marsh, and no one in
the neighbourhood who observed how usually flush of money were the
agricultural labourers of the surrounding villages was in the least
mystified as to the source of their gains. Those men knew better than
any others the obscure paths and short-cuts of the levels, and could in
any weather pick their way with certainty in places where those less
expert would presently find themselves at the best confronted by an
impassable dyke; or, at the worst of it, floundering in profound depths
of mud and water. History informs us very fully of the ferocious nature
of the Kentish and Sussex smugglers, who were by no means afraid of
blood-guiltiness; but there can be no doubt that most of the mysterious
disappearances of revenue men from time to time from this neighbourhood
were caused by mischances at the dykes in foggy weather, and not by
violence.
The marsh-men, the shepherds, and the agricultural labourers around
Brookland took part in an exceptionally furious encounter between
smugglers and a force of preventive men and naval blockaders that was
fought one night in February 1821. The goods had been landed to the
west of Rye, near Camber Castle, and a party of two hundred men had
assembled on the beach, to carry the tubs inland, when the landing was
rather belatedly discovered by the Naval Blockade look-out. An alarm
was raised, and a force of sailors from the Blockade, led by officers,
was sent in pursuit. The conduct of the smugglers sufficiently shows
their effective organisation. They did not fling away their tubs and
run. Not at all. Their march inland, past the solitary Great Cheyne
Court, towards Brookland was carried out with all the precision of a
well-ordered military retreat. They were not unprepared for attack,
and, besides those who did the carrying, there were the “batsmen,”
armed with the formidable weapons called “bats,” stout poles from
six to eight feet long, and other men who carried firearms. These
protectors fought a kind of rearguard action, covering the disposal of
the contraband, and did it so well that although the naval officers
frequently dashed forward, sword in hand, at the head of their men,
they made little impression. The retreat, in good order, and the firing
lasted until daybreak, when the tubs had all been hidden and it was
only left for the fighting men to disperse. An officer named Mackenzie
was killed in this affair, together with four smugglers, while the
wounded comprised three officers, six sailors, and sixteen smugglers.
Two smugglers, Cephas Quested and Richard Wraight, were captured, the
first mistaking an officer in the dark for a comrade, the other losing
touch with his fellows and walking into the arms of the enemy. Quested
was hanged at Newgate.
[Illustration: BROOKLAND CHURCH.]
Old Romney, two miles inland from Romney the new, is so immemorially
old that the days when the sea flowed to it, and the ships came to
its quays, are altogether forgotten. Sheep graze in fertile pastures,
and never a sign of the sea is evident. Yet there was a time when the
waters flowed inland to Appledore and Tenterden, a matter of eight
miles, and it is an historical fact that the Danish fleet sailed to
Appledore in A.D. 893. The very road by which the marsh is crossed
between New Romney and Appledore is a Roman causeway, or embankment,
still known as the Rhee Wall, along whose sides the waters lapped.
Beyond Old Romney, in the midst of Walland Marsh, is Brookland, whose
church is notable for its detached wooden tower, leaning to one side,
painted or tarred black, and in the shape of three extinguishers,
placed each upon the other. The windows are provided with wooden
shutters as a protection against the winds that blow, unrestrained,
across these levels. The ancient leaden font, one of the twenty-nine
leaden fonts in England, is of the early part of the thirteenth
century, and is decorated in relief with the signs of the zodiac,
and with figures illustrating the labours of the months. It is a
curious relic, and by far the most interesting of the twenty-nine. The
inscriptions above each month are in Norman-French: “Janvier, Fevrier,
Mars, Avril, Mai, Juin, Juillet, Avovt, Setenbre, Vitovvre, Novenbre,
Desenbre.” January is represented by a two-faced Janus, seated at a
table; February by a man sitting by a fire; March, a husbandman pruning
a vine; April, a bare-headed figure, robed, and in either hand a
blossoming branch; May, a sporting knight on horseback, carrying a hawk
on his left wrist; June, a mower; July, hayraking; August, reaping;
September, threshing; October, wine-pressing; November, a swineherd
knocking down acorns, while a pig feeds on them; and December, a man
with an axe, killing a pig.
Among the monuments in Brookland church is a table-tomb to John and
Thomas Plomer, father and son, jurats of New Romney, and their family.
One, we learn, was “Captain of ye selecte board, sometime burgis at
ye parliament for ye same towne, who was one of the portes Barons
in carrying ye canopie at the coronation of King James ye first of
England.”
[Illustration: FAIRFIELD CHURCH.]
Among the curious churches of this region, that of Fairfield, two miles
north-west from Brookland, is well worth visiting. It is not a large
church, nor beautiful, being, indeed, one of that very numerous company
popularly supposed to be the “smallest,” and of a quaint, rather
barn-like, appearance. It is not, in fact, the “smallest church in
England,” that distinction belonging to the little church of Culbone,
in Somerset, which is thirty-three feet in length. The length of
Fairfield church is about forty feet, and it is thus somewhere about
the same size as Bonnington. But it is very much less ecclesiastical in
appearance, being chiefly of seventeenth-century red brick.
There is no village of Fairfield, and there are but two houses in
sight in the flat marsh-land. Away in the distance you see the church
of Stone in Oxney, cresting the uplands; the skylarks are singing
madly in the May skies, and sheep are grazing; but it is a solitary
spot. Dykes with tall rushes encircle the church, which for some years
before 1913 had been closed, and was fallen into a ruinous condition.
In the roof of this little building, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket,
there were holes; the small timber bellcote was all on one side, and,
of its three bells, one of them was cracked. The windows were broken,
the wind-shutters hanging down from them, forlorn. Through the broken
casements one might see the whitewashed interior, with the tiny
chancel, scarcely lofty enough for a man of average height to stand
in, upright, and the tall wooden pews: the whole a roosting-place for
birds. The deserted building was at last restored, chiefly from funds
granted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Fairfield is in summer
a prime curiosity; in winter, the church is generally inaccessible,
through being entirely cut off by flood-water. “A dark place,” said a
contemplative, solitary man, met in these wilds. Spiritually dark, he
meant. In other ways, Fairfield, standing amid clear, wide horizons,
with not a tree near it, is a place of exceptional light and sunshine.
The colour of the marshes is vivid and lovely; and not less lovely is
the golden hue of the lichened, red-tiled old roof of Fairfield church
itself, seen from a little distance.
[Illustration: SMALLHYTHE TOLL-GATE.]
There was a time when even Tenterden, now more than ten miles from the
sea, was by way of being in touch with it, through the little port
of Smallhythe, whose name is sometimes seen spelled on maps “Small
Hithe.” This remote little place, some two miles south of Tenterden, on
a by-road, stands strangely at a passage into the so-called “Isle of
Oxney,” which nowadays presents the appearance of an inland island, so
to speak. Looking at a map, no one would at the first glance suspect
Oxney of being an isle, but close inspection discovers the fact that it
is indeed surrounded by the Rother and its tributaries, and a canal. In
olden times, when the Rother was a broad estuary, Oxney was an isle in
very sooth, and it was possible for the not very large vessels of those
ages to be navigated to Smallhythe. In the reign of Edward the Third,
according to tradition, the harbour dues were greater than those of
Liverpool at the same time; and the sea is recorded to have flowed to
its quays certainly so late as 1508.
“Smallhead,” as the country people call it, is nowadays little like a
port. Its street is blocked by a toll-gate leading to a ferry across
the narrow stream. Here the pedestrian is mulcted of one farthing. If
he have a cycle, his total expenditure is one halfpenny. Toll for a
horse and cart is 6_d._; for a traction-engine with one truck attached,
10_d._; for a horse, mule, or ass, 1_d_.; bullock, cow, calf, or pig,
½_d_.; and sheep, 4_d_. per score. “We make everything pay,” says
the gatekeeper, “’cept a dog.” The gate is private property, and was
purchased some years ago for £600. The tolls then yielded over £1 a
week; but the income has greatly fallen since the other ferries into
the isle were freed.
Smallhythe has the unusual privilege of electing its own vicar, instead
of running the risk--sometimes the very real risk--of having to
receive a _persona non grata_ foisted upon the parish by a patron not
in touch with the needs of the place. The electors are the householders
and occupiers of land in the parish. This privilege arose out of the
establishment of the church in 1509. Until then, the nearest was
Tenterden church, but Warham, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, was
induced to license one here because of the complaints made by the
inhabitants of the bad state of the roads.
[Illustration: SMALLHYTHE CHURCH.]
The election takes place always on a Sunday, and the voting is given in
the church-vestry. Should an election not be held within six months of
the living becoming vacant, the privilege lapses and the presentation
becomes the property of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The last election was held May 7th, 1899, when the Rev. C. E. Pizey
was chosen, by a majority of one, to succeed his father, deceased. He
afterwards resigned, and the unsuccessful candidate, Mr. Raven, was
appointed in his stead.
[Illustration: SMALLHYTHE.]
The church is a small building of red brick, with red-brick mullions
to its windows--a curious example of early sixteenth-century work. Of
the charming old black-and-white half-timbered houses adjoining, that
next the toll-gate is the residence of Miss Ellen Terry.