THE WEALD AND THE MARSH
Ashford as we see it to-day, a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants,
is altogether a modern place and really in the worst sense, for it
owes its importance and its ugliness to the railway; it is a big
junction and the site of the engineering works of the South Eastern
and Chatham Company. Lacking as it is in almost all material
antiquity, it has little that is beautiful to show us, a fine church
with a noble tower that has been rather absurdly compared with the
Angel Steeple at Canterbury--nothing more--and its history is almost
as meagre. It stands, the first town of the Kentish Weald, where the
East Stour flows into the Great Stour, in the very mouth of the deep
valley of the latter which there turns northward through the Downs. To
the North, therefore, it is everywhere cut off by those great green
uplands, save where the valley, at the other end of which stands
Canterbury, breaks them suddenly in twain. To the south it is cut off
by a perhaps greater barrier; between it and the sea, stands the
impassable mystery of Romney Marsh. In such a situation, before the
railways revolutionised travel in England, how could Ashford have had
any importance? Even the old road westward from Dover into Britain,
the Pilgrims' Way to Stonehenge or Winchester passed it by, leaving it
in the Weald to follow the escarpment of the Downs north or west. No
Roman road served it, and indeed it was but a small and isolated place
till the Middle Age began to revive and recreate Europe. Even then
Ashford was probably late in development.
Its history, if one may call it history, is concerned with the owners
of the manor of Ashford and not with any civil or municipal records.
Indeed the earlier chroniclers, though they speak of Great Chart and
Wye, know nothing of Ashford which in Domesday Book appears to have
consisted of a few mills and a small church, the manor being in
possession of Edward the Confessor, while St Augustine's at Canterbury
and Earl Godwin held certain lands thereabout. Hugh de Montfort got
what the King and Earl Godwin had possessed, after the Conquest, but
the Monastery of St Augustine's seems to have continued to hold its
land. We know nothing more of Ashford, which, as I have said, till
late in the Middle Age consisted of a church and two mills and a dene
for the pannage of hogs in the Weald. It is not one of the many
owners of the Manor who is remembered to-day in Ashford as its
benefactor, but the Lord of the Manor of Ripton during the Wars of the
Roses, Sir John Fogge, who was Treasurer of the Royal Household and a
Privy Councillor. In the fourteenth century the church had passed to
Leeds Abbey, and with the abbey the church of Ashford remained until
the suppression, when it passed to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.
It was not, however, the Abbey of Leeds that rebuilt it as we see it, a
poor example it must be confessed in spite of the nobility of the
tower, of the latest style of English Gothic architecture, the
Perpendicular. It was Sir John Fogge, who for this and other reasons,
is the father of the town. He lies in a great tomb in the chancel. As
for the Smyths, who lie in the south transept, Thomas, and Alicia his
wife held the manor of Ashford in the sixteenth century. Alicia was the
daughter of Sir Andrew Judde to whom the manor of Ashford had been
mortgaged in the time of Henry VII. Her son, Sir Michael Smyth, lies
close by. The family were later ennobled and bore the title of
Viscounts Strangford.
For the outside world, however, Sir John Fogge is not Ashford's
greatest son. This honour belongs surely to Jack Cade whom Shakespeare
speaks of as the "headstrong Kentish man John Cade of Ashford," and
who, according to the poet, if headstrong, proved in the end so feeble-
minded that in Shakespeare's play we might seem to have a picture of
one suffering from general paralysis of the insane. Jack Cade, however,
was, as we are beginning to realise, a much greater and more
significant figure than Shakespeare allows us to see.
But Ashford is not made for lingering, it is all for departure, the
roads, if not the trains, lead swiftly away north, south, east and
west. As for me I went by the south-west road which said twelve miles
to Tenterden.
I went under a fine rain on a day of married white and blue, and even
before I had forgot Ashford, which was long before I crossed the Stour,
the rain had ceased, the sun shone forth and a great wind came out of
the marsh and the sea full of good tidings, so that climbing up to
Great Chart I laughed in my heart to be in England on such a day and on
such a road.
Great Chart, as I saw while still far off, is a village typical of this
country that I love, if indeed a place so completely itself is typical
of anything: a little English village, but it outfaces the whole world
in its sureness of itself, its quietness and air of immemorial
antiquity. Many a city older by far looks parvenu beside Great Chart.
Let us consider, with tears if you will, what they are making of Rome
and be thankful that our ways are not their ways. For what wins you at
once in Great Chart is the obvious fact that it has always stood there
on its hill over the Weald, and as far as one may see at a glance, much
the same as it stands to-day. And what delights you is the church there
on the highest ground, on the last hill overlooking the great Weald, a
sign in the sky, a portent, a necessary thing natural to the landscape.
What you see is a rectangular building with three eastern gables over
three Decorated windows, a long nave roof over square Perpendicular
windows and clerestory, flat outer roofs and tall western Tower, a
noble thing significant of our civilisation and the Faith out of which
it has come.
Within, one finds a church like and yet unlike that at Ashford. Nave
and chancel are of the same width, and the arcades run from end to end
of the church really without a break, though half way a wall, borne by
three arches, crosses the church separating the chancel and its
chapels from the nave. The central arch of the three is of course the
chancel arch, but the wall it bears does not reach to the roof so that
the nave, clerestory and roof are seen running on beyond it. All this
is curious rather than lovely, but like every other strangeness in
England of my heart, it is to be explained by the long, long history
of things still--Deo gratias--remaining to us, so that when I said
that our buildings were growths rather than works of art I spoke
truth.
The church of St Mary of Great Chart is not mentioned in the Domesday
Survey, but that a church existed here in the twelfth century is
certain, for even in the present building we have evidences of Norman
work, for instance in the walling of the south chapel, and in the
vestry doorway. According to the Rev. G.M. Livett, [Footnote: K.A.S.
26.] the Norman nave was as long as that we have, which is built in
all probability on its foundation. The aisleless Norman church,
however, had a central tower to the east of the present chancel arch
and transepts, as well as a chancel. This church appears to have stood
till the fourteenth century, when it was entirely rebuilt and
reclaimed, and all the lower part of the present church built, to be
heightened and lengthened at the end of the fifteenth century when the
clerestory and the chancel arcade were built, a new aisle wall set up
on the north and the south aisle raised, the rood loft built or
rebuilt.
We are reminded of all this history by the fine altar tomb in the
north chapel where lie William Goldwell and Alice his wife (d. 1485).
Their son James was Vicar of Great Chart in 1458, and became Bishop of
Norwich in 1472, when he obtained from the Pope "an indulgence in aid
of the restoration of Great Chart church which had been damaged by
fire." Here is the cause and the source of the fifteenth century
alterations and the church we see. The brasses in the church are also
interesting. Many of them commemorate the Tokes of Godinton, who
founded the almshouse in the village, which, rebuilt more than once I
think, we still see. All these things and more than these the great
yew in the churchyard has seen as its shadow grew over the graves.
From Great Chart I went on through the spring sunshine across the
Weald to Bethersden, whose quarries have supplied so much of the grey
marble one finds in Kentish churches, in the monuments and effigies
and in the old manor houses in the carved chimney-pieces fair to see.
These quarries are now all but deserted, but of old they were the most
famous in Kent, which is poor in such things. Most of the stone for
the cathedrals and greater religious houses in the county came from
Caen, whence it was easily transported by water; but this stone not
only weathered badly, but was too friable for monumental effigies or
sculpture. For these harder stone was needed, resembling marble, and
this Bethersden supplied, as we may see, in the Cathedrals of
Canterbury and Rochester and especially at Hythe where the chancel
arcade is entirely built of it.
Something too we may learn at Bethersden of the true nature of the
Weald. I shall have something to say of this later, but here at any
rate the curiously difficult character of this country in regard to
the going may be understood, though of course less easily now than of
old. It is said that before, at the end of the eighteenth century,
the excellent system of roads we still use was built up, the ways
hereabouts were so bad--they are still far from good--that when spring
came it was customary to plough them up in order that they might dry
off. We hear of great ladies going to church in carriages drawn by
teams of oxen. Hardly passable after rain, the roads, says Hasted,
were "so miry that the traveller's horse frequently plunged through
them up to the girths of the saddle; and the waggons sank so deep in
the ruts as to slide along on the nave of the wheels and axle of
them. In some few of the principal roads, as from Tenterden hither,
there was a stone causeway, about three feet wide, for the
accommodation of horse and foot passengers; but there was none further
on till near Bethersden, to the great distress of travellers. When
these roads became tolerably dry in summer, they were ploughed up, and
laid in a half circle to dry, the only amendment they ever had. In
extreme dry weather in summer, they became exceedingly hard, and, by
traffic, so smooth as to seem glazed, like a potter's vessel, though a
single hour's rain rendered them so slippery as to be very dangerous to
travellers." The roads in fact were and are, little more than lanes
between the isolated woods across the low scrub of the old Weald.
The church of Bethersden is dedicated to St Margaret. It follows the
local type having a nave with north and south aisles and a chancel with
north and south chapels, vestry, south porch and western tower. The
place is not mentioned in Domesday Book, but about 1194 we find
Archbishop Herbert confirming the church of St Margaret of
Beatrichesdenne, with the chapel of Hecchisdenne (Etchden) to the
Priory of St Gregory in Canterbury. No sign of this Norman church
remains, the building we see in Bethersden being mainly Perpendicular;
but the double lighted windows at the west end of the north aisle are
Early English and there is a Decorated niche under the entrance to the
rood left. The tower is modern, but possesses a fourteenth century
bell.
It is curious that though the church is dedicated to St Margaret and
the fair, according to Hasted, was held upon July 20th, St Margaret's
day, the place should be spoken of as Beatrichesdenne as though there
were some local St Beatrice; but of her we know nothing.
Bethersden is connected with the Lovelaces for they owned it, Richard
Lovelace, the poet, having sold Lovelace Place to Richard Hulse, soon
after the death of Charles I. Three members of the Lovelace family
lie in the church, their tombs marked by brasses; William Lovelace
(1459) another William Lovelace, gentleman (1459), and Thomas Lovelace
(1591).
From Bethersden I went on to High Halden, which stands upon a ridge
out of the Weald, a very characteristic and beautiful place, with a
most interesting church dedicated to Our Lady. Indeed I do not know
where one could match the strange wooden tower and belfry and the
noble fourteenth century porch, masterpieces of carpentry, which close
on the west the little stone church of the fifteenth century. Within
the most interesting thing left to us is the glass in the east window
of the south chancel where we see the Blessed Virgin with her lily,
part of an Annunciation. There, too, in another window are the arms of
Castile and of Leon, a strange blazon to find in the Weald of Kent.
But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of
this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and
dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the
south of High Halden.
If we look at the ordnance map we shall see that the town of Tenterden
is set upon a great headland thrust out by the higher land of the
Kentish Weald, southward and east towards those low marshlands that
are lost almost imperceptibly in the sea, and are known to us as
Romney Marsh. This great headland, in shape something like a clenched
fist, stands between the two branches of the Rother, the river which
flows into the sea at Rye, and which was once navigable by ships so
far up as Small Hythe just under the southern escarpment of the
headland upon which Tenterden stands. Hither so late as 1509 the
Rother was navigable, and we find Archbishop Warham on the petition of
the people licensing a small chapel there of St John Baptist still in
existence, for the use of the inhabitants and as a sanctuary or a
graveyard for the burial of those wrecked on the "sea-shore" _infra
predictum oppidum de Smallhyth_.
Now in this lies all the greatness of Tenterden. Rye, which had early
been added to the Cinque Ports, was a place of very considerable
importance, but upon the east it was entirely cut off by Romney Marsh,
upon the west, too, a considerable marshland closed by a great and
desolate hill country closed it in, but to the north was a navigable
river, a road that is, leading up into England, and at the head of it
a town naturally sprang up. That town was Tenterden, and her true
position was recognised by Henry VI., when he united her to Rye. Till
then she was one of "the Seven Hundreds" belonging to the Crown.
Domesday Book knows nothing of her; as a place of importance, as a
town that is, she is a creation of Rye, and her development was thus
necessarily late and endured but for a season. I suppose the great
days of Rye to have been those of the thirteenth and fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries; and it was therefore during this period that
Tenterden began its career as a town. After the failure of the sea,
Rye sank slowly back into what it is to-day, but Tenterden would
appear to have stood up against that misfortune with some success,
for we find Elizabeth incorporating it under a charter.
There can be but few more charming towns in Kent than Tenterden as we
see it to-day, looking out from its headland southward to the great
uplifted Isle of Oxney beyond which lies the sea, and eastward over
all the mystery of Romney Marsh. The church which should, one thinks,
have borne the name of St Michael, is dedicated in honour of St
Mildred. It is a large building of the thirteenth, fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, the tower, its latest feature, being also its
noblest. Indeed the tower of Tenterden church, if we may believe the
local legend, is certainly the most important in Kent. For it is said,
and, rightly understood, there may after all be something in it, to
have been the cause of the Goodwin Sands. Fuller asserts "when the
vicinage in Kent met to consult about the inundation of the Goodwin
Sands (date not given) and what might be the cause thereof, an old man
imputed it to the building of Tenterden steeple in this county; for
these sands, said he, were firm sands before that steeple was built,
which ever since were overflown with sea-water. Hereupon all heartily
laughed at his unlogical reason, making that effect in Nature which
was only the consequent on time; not flowing from, but following after
the building of that steeple."
According to Latimer, however, it was Sir Thomas More who drew this
answer from the ancient, and if this be so, it certainly fixes the
date. "Maister More," says Latimer, "was once sent in commission into
Kent to help to trie out (if it might be) what was the cause of Goodwin
Sands and the shelfs that stopped up Sandwich haven. Thither cometh
Maister More and calleth the countye afore him, such as were thought to
be men of experience, and men that could of likelihode best certify him
of that matter, concerning the stopping of Sandwich haven. Among others
came in before him an olde man with a white head, and one that was
thought to be little lesse than an hundereth yeares olde. When
Maister More saw this aged man he thought it expedient to heare him say
his minde in this matter, for being so olde a man it was likely that he
knew most of any man in that presence and company. So Maister More
called this olde aged man unto him and sayd, 'Father,' sayd he, 'tell
me if ye can what is the cause of this great arising of the sande and
shelves here about this haven the which sop it up that no shippes can
aride here? Ye are the oldest man that I can espie in all this
companye, so that, if any man can tell any cause of it, ye of all
likelihode can say most in it, or at least wise more than any other man
here assembled.' 'Yea forsooth, good maister,' quod this olde man, 'for
I am well nigh an hundred yeares olde and no man here in this company
anything neare unto mine age.' 'Well, then,' quod Maister More, 'how
say you in this matter? What thinke ye to be the cause of these shelves
and flattes that stop up Sandwiche haven?' 'Forsooth syr,' quod he, 'I
am an olde man. I think Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin
Sandes. For I am an old man syr' quod he, 'and I may remember the
building of Tenterden Steeple and I may remember when there was no
steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden Steeple was in
building there was no manner of speaking of any flats or sands that
stopped the haven; and therefore I thinke that Tenterden steeple is
the cause of the destroying and decaying of Sandwich haven."
Post hoc, propter hoc and this silly old man has been held up to all
ensuing ages as an absurdly simple old fellow. But what after all if
he should be right in part at least?
Tenterden church, we are told, belonged to the Abbey of St Augustine
in Canterbury, which also owned the Goodwin Sands, part, it is said,
of the immense domain of Earl Godwin. Now it was in their hands that
the money collected throughout Kent for the building and fencing of
the coast against the sea had always been placed. We learn that "when
the sea had been very quiet for many years without any encroachings,"
the abbot commuted that money to the building of a steeple and
endowing of the church in Tenterden, so that the sea walls were
neglected. If this be so, that oldest inhabitant was not such a fool
as he seems to look.
I slept under the shadow of Tenterden steeple and very early in the
morning set out for Appledore, where I crossed the canal and came into
the Marsh. I cannot hope to express my enthusiasm for this strange and
mysterious country so full of the music of running water, with its
winding roads, its immense pastures, its cattle and sheep and flowers,
its far away great hills and at the end, though it has no end, the
sea. It mixes with the sea indeed as the sky does, so that no man far
off can say this is land or this is water.
It is famous as a fifth part of the world different from its fellows.
And indeed, if it resembles anything I know it is not with the wide
moors of Somerset, Sedgemoor, or the valley of the Brue, nor with the
great windy Fenland in the midst of which Ely rises like a shrine or
a sanctuary, I would compare it, but with the Campagna of Rome, whose
tragic mystery it seems to have borrowed, at least in part, whose
beauty it seems to wear, a little provincially, it is true, and whose
majesty it apes, but cannot quite command. It is the Campagna in
little; the great and noble mountains, the loveliest in the world are
sunk to hills pure and exquisite upon which, too, we may still see the
cities, here little towns and villages, as Rye, Winchelsea, Appledore,
Lympne or Hythe, dear places of England of my heart, and all between
them this mysterious and lowly thing not quite of this world, a
graveyard one might think, as the Campagna is, a battlefield as is the
Trasimeno plain, a gate and certainly an exit not only out of England
but from the world and life itself.
As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand
that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty,
it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure
of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are
uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape
without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is,
and we can bear it so. But no man could live in the Marsh for a day
without that gesture of human life that is there to be seen upon every
side. Lonely as it is, difficult as it is to cross, because of its
chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade
there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be
but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too,
and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite
explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has
lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at
his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has
redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the
dairyman with his cows, the carter with his great team of oxen in the
spring twilight returning from the fields. And then there are the
churches, whose towers stand up so strong out of the waters and the
mist so that their heads are among the stars, and whose bells are the
best music because they tell not only of God and his Saints but of
man, of the steading and of home.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF ROMNEY MARSH]
Take Appledore, for instance, with its fine old church, with its air
of the fourteenth century and its beautiful old ivy grown
tower, once a port they say, on the verge of the Marsh; what
could be more nobly simple and homely? Within, you may, if you
will, find, in spite of everything, all our past, the very altar at
which of old was said the Holy Mass, the very altar tomb maybe where,
upon Maunday Thursday Christ Himself was laid in the sepulchre, an old
rood loft, too, certain ancient screens complete, a little ancient
glass. What more can a man want or at least expect from England of my
heart? And if he demand something more curious and more rare, at Horn's
Place, not a mile away, is a perfect chapel of the fifteenth century
which served of old some great steading, where, for a hundred years
Mass was perhaps said every day and the Marsh blessed. Or take Snargate
with its church of St Dunstan. It, too, has a fine western tower of the
fifteenth century, but much of the church dates from the thirteenth,
and upon the north chancel roof-beams are heraldic devices, among them
an eagle and the initials W.R. And here is a piece of fine old glass in
which we may see the Lord Christ. Or take Ivychurch; so noble and
lovely a thing is the church that even without it catches the breath,
while a whole afternoon is not enough to enjoy its inward beauty. Or
take Brenzett, where, it is true, the church has been rebuilt, but
where you will still find a noble seventeenth century tomb with its
effigies in armour.
It is, however, at Romney, Old Romney and New, that we shall find the
best there is to be had I think in this strange country from which the
waters have only been barred out by the continual energy of man. We are
not surprised to find that New Romney is older than Old Romney, it is
almost what might have been expected, but no one can ever have come to
these places without wonder at the nobility of what he sees.
At New Romney there were of old five churches, dedicated in honour of
St John Baptist, St Laurence, St Martin, St Michael, and St Nicholas,
for Romney was, in the time of Edward I., the greatest of the Cinque
Ports. It fell when, as we are told, in a great storm the course of
the Rother was changed so that it went thereafter to serve Rye, and
New Romney fell slowly down so that to-day but one of those five
churches remains, that of St Nicholas. But what a glorious church it
is, and if the rest were like it, what idea must we have of the
splendour of New Romney in the thirteenth century? This great Norman
church of St Nicholas with its partly fourteenth century nave, its
clerestory, its fine chancel with sedilia and Easter sepulchre, and
noble pinnacled tower is perhaps the greatest building in the Marsh.
It belonged to the Abbey of Pontigny and was served by its monks who
had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital
of all this district.
Nothing so glorious and so old remains in Old Romney, where the church
of St Clement has nothing I think, earlier than the thirteenth
century, and little of that, being mainly a building of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, and yet it is not to be despised, for where
else in the Marsh will you find anything more picturesque or anything
indeed more English?
Not at Dymchurch for all its Norman fragments. But Dymchurch is to be
visited and to be loved for other reasons than that of beauty. It is
the sentinel and saviour of the Marsh, for it holds back the sea from
all this country with its great wall, twenty feet high and twenty
feet broad and three miles long. Also here we have certain evidence of
the Roman occupation of the Marsh, and may perhaps believe that it was
Rome which first drained it.
I said that the church of St Nicholas at New Romney was the noblest
building in the Marsh. When I said so had I forgotten the church of
All Saints at Lydd, which is known as the Cathedral of the Marshes.
No, glorious as All Saints is, it has not the antiquity of St
Nicholas; it is altogether English and never knew the Norman. For all
that, it is a very splendid building with a tower standing one hundred
and thirty-two feet over the Marsh, a sign and a blessing. And yet
before it I prefer the bell tower, built of mighty timber, aloof from
the church, lonely, over the waters at Brookland. All Saints at Lydd
belonged to Tintern Abbey, but All Saints at Brookland to St
Augustine's at Canterbury, and as its font will tell us it dates from
Norman times, for about it the Normans carved the signs of the Zodiac.
Brookland, hard to get at, stands on the great road which runs south-
westward out of the Marsh and brings you at last out of Kent into
Sussex at Rye. It was there I lingered a little to say farewell.
As one looks at evening across that vast loneliness, so desolate
and yet so beautiful and infinitely subject to the sky, lying
between the hills and sinking so imperceptibly into the sea,
one continually asks oneself what is Romney Marsh, by whom
was it reclaimed from the all-devouring sea, what forces built
it up and gathered from barrenness the infinite riches we see?
Was it the various forces of Nature, the racing tides of the
straits, some sudden upheaval of the earth, or the tireless
energy of men--and of what men? Those seventeen miles of richest
pasture which lie in an infinite peace between Appledore and
Dungeness, to whom do we owe them and their blessedness? That wall at
Dymchurch which saves the marshes, Romney, Welland, Guildford and
Denge, who contrived it and first took advantage of those great banks
of shingle and of sand which everywhere bar out the great tides of the
straits and have thus created and preserved this strange fifth part of
the world? Was it the Romans? May we see in Romney Marsh the greatest
material memorial of their gigantic energy and art to be found in the
western provinces, a nobler and a greater work than the Wall as well
as a more lasting? And if this be so, how well is the Marsh named
after them, for of all they did materially in our island, this work of
reclamation was surely the worthiest to bear their name.
But to these questions there can perhaps never be an answer. Certainly
the very aspect of the Marsh recalls nothing so much as the Campagna
of Rome, in its nobility, loneliness and infinite subjection to the
sun, the clouds, and the sky, so that at evening there we might almost
think that Rome herself lay only just beyond that large horizon, and
that with an effort we might reach the great gate of San Giovanni e'er
darkness fell. It is as though in the Marsh our origins for once and
unmistakably were laid bare for us and we had suddenly recognised our
home.