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 THE SCOTT COUNTRY. By Rev. W. 
 
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 DOUGALL 
 
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 KlTTON 
 
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 By H. SNOWDEN WARD 
 
 Published by A. k C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W
 
 TIIK DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY, FROM THE GREEN COURT. 
 
 " A long narrow vaulted passage, paved ivith flagstones, vulgarly known by 
 the name of the 'Dark Entry.'" 
 
 The Legend of " Nell Cook." 
 r ronlisptece.]
 
 *J 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 LITERARY LANDMARKS OF 
 THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES G. HARPER 
 
 Ml 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE BRIGHTON ROAD," "THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD," 
 
 "THE DOVER ROAD," "THE BATH ROAD," "THE EXETER ROAD," 
 
 " THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," " THE NORWICH ROAD," " THB 
 HOLYHEAD ROAD," " THE CAMBRIDGE, ELY, AND KING'S LYNN 
 ROAD," AND "STAGE-COACH AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE* 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ADAM & CHARLES BLACK 
 
 1906
 
 FlttST EDITION PUBLISHED JANUARY, 1004
 
 " INGOLDSBY " has always been of that comparatively 
 small number of authors who command a personal 
 interest and affection. Reading the " LEGENDS " you 
 cannot choose but see that when he sat down, often at the 
 midnight hour, to dash off the fun and frolic that came 
 so readily to his mind, it was a part of himself that 
 appeared upon the page. He did not and could not, 
 when he wrote for publication under a pseudonym, 
 be other than himself, and did not self-consciously 
 draw a veil of style around him and speak, a cloaked 
 figure lacking ordinary human attributes^ or as other 
 than a man of the world. He claimed no sacerdotal 
 privileges^ and we know, from the published " Life 
 and Letters " by his son, that he was in his life and 
 intimacies ', as the Reverend R. H. Barham, the same 
 genial wit and humorist he appeared as " 'Tom In-
 
 VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 goldsby" He must y therefore^ have been a likeable 
 man, and those who knew him were fortunate persons. 
 The next best thing to knowing him is to know some- 
 thing of the Ingoldsby Country ', that corner of Kent 
 where he was born and whose legends he has put to 
 such splendid literary uses. The " INGOLDSBY LEGENDS " 
 have so long since become a classic that it is indeed some- 
 what surprising that no literary pilgrim^ for love of 
 their author and interest in his career^ has before this 
 traced the landmarks of his storied district. 
 
 CHARLES G. HARPER. 
 
 PETERSHAM, SURREY. 
 January -, 1904.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY I 
 
 II. BARHAM : THE AUTHOR OF THE INGOLDSBY 
 
 LEGENDS 7 
 
 III. CANTERBURY 28 
 
 IV. THE CATHEDRAL : THE MURDER OF 
 
 BECKET 41 
 
 V. TAPPINGTON HALL 63 
 
 VI. ROMNEY MARSH 77 
 
 vii. ROMNEY MARSH (continued} ... 98 
 
 VIII. OLD AND NEW ROMNEY, AND DYM- 
 
 CHURCH HO 
 
 IX. HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE . . .124 
 
 X. FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD . . .143 
 
 XI. FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD (continued] . 1 59 
 
 XII. THE BACK OF BEYOND . . . .165 
 
 XIII. THE BACK OF BEYOND (continued) . . 181
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 XIV. THE COASTWISE ROAD : FOLKESTONE TO 
 
 DOVER AND SANDWICH .... IQ2 
 
 XV. SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE . 2O8 
 
 XVI. SARRE AND RECULVER TO CANTERBURY 222 
 
 XVII. THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY .... 233 
 
 XVIII. SOME OUTLYING INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 257
 
 The " Dark Entry," Canterbury, From the Green Court 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Sketch Map : The Ingoldsby Country .... 5 
 "Tom Ingoldsby :" the Rev. Richard Harris Barham . 13 
 No. 6 1, Burgate Street, Canterbury . . . Facing 14 
 St. Mary Magdalene, Burgate Street, Canterbury . . 15 
 
 Westwell 16 
 
 The Hall, No. 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury . Facing 16 
 
 The Barham Coat-of-Arms 18 
 
 No. 4, St. Paul's Churchyard 22 
 
 Amen Corner, where Barham died .... 24 
 
 Ruins of St. Mary Magdalene, after the Fire of 
 
 December 1886 ....... 26 
 
 Canterbury Castle ... . . . 32 
 
 The Dane John, Canterbury . ... 34 
 
 The Dark Entry 37 
 
 ,,,,,,..... 3 
 " The Martyrdom," Canterbury Cathedra ... 52 
 
 The Vale of Barham 65 
 
 The " Eagle Gates," Broome Park . . . .67 
 Broome Park, the Real Original of Tappington 
 
 Hall Facing 68 
 
 Tappington, from the Folkestone Road .... 69 
 
 Denton Facing 70 
 
 Denton Church and Court 71 
 
 Tappington Hall 73
 
 x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The " Merchant's-Mark " of Thomas Marsh of Marston . 74 
 Tappington Hall : Night . . . . . Facing 74 
 Warehorne ......... 79 
 
 A Sundial, Warehorne Church 81 
 
 Warehorne ......... 82 
 
 The Royal Military Canal at Warehorne ... 84 
 Snargate ......... 100 
 
 Brookland 102 
 
 Ivychurch 104 
 
 Newchurch, on Romney Marsh : " This recondite 
 
 region ; this fifth quarter of the globe " . .105 
 
 Old Romney 1 1 1 
 
 New Romney . . . . . . . .116 
 
 A Martello Tower 119 
 
 Dymchurch Wall . . . . , . . .121 
 
 122 
 
 The " Smugglers' Nest," Hy the 127 
 
 Hythe, from the Road to Sandgate . . . ,128 
 
 Folkestone 132 
 
 The Stade, Folkestone 135 
 
 Folkestone Harbour -137 
 
 Folkestone in 1830. After J. M. W. Turner, R.A. 
 
 Facing 140 
 Romney Marsh, from Lympne 144 
 
 Lympne Castle I4 6 
 
 A Cottage Tablet, Lympne I47 
 
 A Kentish Farm I4 8 
 
 The Ruined Chapel, Court-at-Street . . . .149 
 
 An Old Sundial, Aldington l ^ l 
 
 Aldington It - 4 
 
 Cobb's Hall ^ 
 
 Aldington Knoll ^ Q 
 
 Bilsington Woods jgj 
 
 Bilsington Priory .... T 6 2 
 
 Bilsington Church l6 - 
 
 Orlestone Hill 
 
 . 104 
 
 Saltwood Castle
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Westenhanger House . . . . . . . 175 
 
 Lyminge . . . . . . . . .182 
 
 Lyminge Church 183 
 
 Old Houses at Elham 185 
 
 Acryse 187 
 
 The Preceptory, Swingfield Minnis . . . .190 
 
 The " Lone Tree " 197 
 
 East Langdon ........ 199 
 
 " Marston Hall " 200 
 
 The " Three Horseshoes," Great Mongeham . . . 201 
 
 St. Peter's, Sandwich . 205 
 
 The Barbican, Sandwich 209 
 
 Sandwich, from Great Stonar . . . . .210 
 Richborough, and the Kentish Coast-line towards Rams- 
 gate . ... ... 213 
 
 The Smuggler's Leap 215 
 
 Monkton . . . . . . . . .217 
 
 i, 218 
 
 The " Ville of Sarre " 220 
 
 Chislett 223 
 
 Reculver 225 
 
 Fordwich 228 
 
 Fordwich Town Hall 230 
 
 Sturry 232 
 
 The Devil's Footprint 234 
 
 Minster-in-Sheppey 243 
 
 Tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland 245 
 
 The Horse-vane, Minster-in-Sheppey .... 246 
 
 The Soul, from a Monument in Minster-in-Sheppey 
 
 Church . . . . . . . . . 249 
 
 The Estuary of the Medway, from the Road near Minster- 
 in-Sheppey 251 
 
 Shurland Castle 253 
 
 Netley Abbey 261 
 
 Salisbury Plain : where the Lavington Road branches off 
 
 to the left from the one to Devizes . . . 266
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 THE present writer foregathered a little while since 
 with a man who had been to the uttermost parts of 
 the earth. He had just returned from Australia, 
 and was casually met on what the vulgar call the 
 " Tuppenny Tube," travelling from the Bank to 
 Shepherd's Bush. It was a humorous anti-climax 
 to all those other journeys, but that is not the point 
 here to be made. He was full, as might have been 
 expected, of tales strange and curious of those 
 outposts of civilisation he had visited, and of legends 
 of places whose names generally ended with two 
 gulps and a click where civilisation was an un- 
 known quantity. But to this man, who had been 
 everywhere and elsewhere, who had crossed the 
 Dark Continent when it was still dark, England, his 
 native land, was largely a sealed book. Even as one 
 spoke with him it could be perceived how perfect 
 an exemplar he was of many globe-trotting Britons 
 who roam the world and can talk to you at first
 
 2 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 hand of Bulawayo or the Australian bush, but are 
 instantly nonplussed if the subject of rural England 
 be broached. 
 
 When he was done talking of places with savage 
 and infinitely-repetitive names, composed of fantasti- 
 cally-arranged vowels, with never a consonant to 
 consort with them, he was asked if he knew Kent. 
 " Kent ? " he repeated, in Jingle-like fashion, 
 <c why, yes. Canterbury Cathedral, hop-gardens, 
 Charles Dickens, Rochester, Dover, and and all 
 that," he concluded, with a vague sweep of his arm. 
 u Run through it on y'r way to Paris," he added, in 
 an explanatory way. And that was all he knew of 
 Kent : a place you run through, on the way to 
 somewhere else ! a country observed from fleeting 
 and not very attentive glances obtained from a 
 railway-carriage window ! Such glances furnished 
 him fully forth in all he had cared to know of the 
 Garden of England ! 
 
 Not that one fully subscribes to that familiar 
 epithet of praise, which must have originally been 
 given by a Cockney who knew no better. Who 
 that ever has sojourned in the west, and has known 
 lovely Devon, would for a moment give Kent that 
 pride of place ? Now, if it were called the 
 " Market Garden of England ! " What ? 
 
 But this is not to say that Kent is not very beau- 
 tiful ; only it is not Devon. I do not pillory Kent 
 because it is not something else, and would by no 
 means contemn its chalky soil because of any affec- 
 tion for the good red earth of that other shire. Kent 
 has its lovable qualities, and when you have eliminated 
 the thronging tramps, the paper and other factories, 
 the objectionable hop-pickers, the beanfeasters, and
 
 INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 the multitudinous yahoos who people its nearer 
 Cockneyfied districts, there is a very considerable 
 residuum of exquisite country. The elimination of 
 all those items would be what the slangy term a 
 " big order " ; but the tourist who knows, and even 
 the tourist who does not actually know, but can infer 
 and deduce, need never lose himself in the Kent of 
 commerce and blackguardism. He seeks out, and 
 by instinct finds, the best ; and, having found the 
 best that Kent affords, is ready to declare that it is 
 hard to beat. It is, for example, impossible to match, 
 even in Devon, the beauty of that fertile fruit and 
 hop-bearing belt of country which begins at New- 
 ington, a few miles below Chatham, and continues 
 beside the Dover Road, past Teynham and Faver- 
 sham, and on to Canterbury. It is a beauty that 
 appeals alike and at once to the artist and the man 
 with carnal appetites and fleshly longings ; for, once 
 off the dusty high-road, it is a constant succession of 
 orchards and hop-gardens, wherein it is pleasant to 
 lie on sunny afternoons in the dappled shade of the 
 apple, pear, or cherry-trees, with the swede-eating 
 sheep for sole companions, and the noise of the toil- 
 some world coming restfully over the hedgerows. 
 
 It is a noisy and a toilsome world. There goes the 
 roar of the big guns down at the Medway forts ; 
 the clear note of the bugles sings up faintly like an 
 anthem from amid a naughty nest of vipers out of 
 Chatham and New Brompton (we are being duly taken 
 care of!) ; the whistling and rushing of the railway 
 trains are never still, and you can hear that holiday 
 world which takes its vacation strenuously, " pip- 
 pipping " on cycles, " poop-pooping " on motor-cars, 
 and playing the yearnful concertina on the passing
 
 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 break like anything, t'other side of the merciful 
 hedge. Even if you could not hear them, the signs 
 of their passing would be evident in the cloud of 
 chalk-dust which, like the pillar of cloud by day 
 that guided the Children of Israel, marks their 
 route. But the Land of Promise sought by those 
 pilgrims, at such speed, is not ours. How should 
 it be ? Theirs is ever the Next Place ; ours is 
 Here. Theirs is the Promise without fruition ; ours 
 is granted to the full, and Now, wherever we be. 
 That is if we be indeed wise in our generation, and 
 content with the happy moment. One understands 
 that same happy moment, here and now, to be 
 passed in the consumption of ripe cherries out of a 
 cool cabbage-leaf, in the shade of the boughs that 
 bore them. This is one way in which beauteous 
 Kent appeals, as we have said, to the carnal man, 
 who perceives that if indeed Devonshire cream be 
 good, equally good are the kindly fruits of Kent. 
 
 If Kent be essentially the Market Garden of 
 England, rather than pre-eminently the Garden 
 in the picturesque sense, certainly this country 
 yields to none other in historic or literary interest. 
 That coast where Caesar and Augustine, easily first 
 among the great personages of history, landed ; 
 this fertile county which contains the Metropolitan 
 Cathedral of the Church of England ; the neigh- 
 bourhood of Rochester and Maidstone, linked with 
 the literary activities of Charles Dickens, must needs 
 hold the affections of Englishmen, irrespective of 
 the physical and aesthetic attractions of scenery. 
 But there is another great literary figure connected 
 with Kent, both by birth and by reason of his 
 having exploited many of its rural legends in
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 his merry verse. Richard Harris Barham was 
 born at Canterbury, and in his Ingoldsby Legends 
 created an Ingoldsby Country, which he had already 
 
 SHECTKISS 
 
 peopled with many notable characters before death 
 cut him off in his prime. The capital of the 
 Ingoldsby Country is Canterbury ; its very heart 
 and core is comprised within the district to the east
 
 6 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 of a line drawn due south from Whitstable to 
 Canterbury, Denton, and Hythe ; and its frontiers 
 make an indeterminate line to the west, beyond 
 Romney Marsh and Ashford. The whole north 
 coast of Kent, including Sheppey, the Swale, and 
 the littoral of the Thames and Medway, is part and 
 parcel of Ingoldsby Land, whose isolated and far- 
 off dependencies are found at Shrewsbury, the scene 
 of " Bloudie Jack " ; or Salisbury Plain, where the 
 " Dead Drummer " is located ; at Wayland Wood, 
 near Wymondham, in Norfolk, where the legend of 
 the " Babes in the Wood " belongs ; and at Netley 
 Abbey, the scene of a fine poem. London, too, 
 has its Ingoldsby associations, duly set forth in these 
 pages.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 BARHAM : THE AUTHOR OF THE INGOLDSBY 
 LEGENDS 
 
 THERE are coteries, circles inner and outer, in the 
 world of letters, and there have always been. There 
 are some in this time of ours whose members think 
 they are of the giants whose memory the world will 
 not willingly let die. There were other coteries when 
 the nineteenth century was but newly come into its 
 second quarter, when the period that is now known 
 as Early Victorian was in the making, and when 
 the Queen was young. The members of those 
 literary brotherhoods are gone, each one to his 
 place, and the memories of the most of them, of the 
 books they wrote, the jokes they cracked, of their 
 friendships and quarrels, are dim and dusty to-day. 
 The taste in humour and pathos is not the taste 
 of this time, which laughs at the pathos, and finds 
 the humour, when not dull, merely spiteful and 
 vindictive. When you rise from a perusal of 
 Douglas Jerrold's wounding wit, you think him 
 ungenerous and a cad, De Quincey's frolics merely 
 elephantine, Hood's facilities dull, and Leigh Hunt's 
 performances but journalism. 
 
 All this is but the foil to show the brilliant 
 humour, the fun, and the truly pathetic note of 
 Richard Harris Barham's writings to better effect,
 
 8 THE 1NGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Time has breathed upon the glass through which 
 we see the lives and performances of Barham's 
 contemporaries, and has obscured our view of them ; 
 but the author of the Ingoldsby Legends remains, 
 almost alone among that Early Victorian band, as 
 acceptable to-day (nay, perhaps even more accept- 
 able) than he was fifty years ago. 
 
 The Ingoldsby Legends will never be allowed to 
 die. Indeed, we live in times when their admirable 
 sanity might well be invoked as a counterblast to 
 modern neurotic conditions, and a healthy revulsion 
 from superstitious revivals. Written at that now 
 historic time when the Ritualistic innovations and 
 tendency towards Roman Catholicism of the new 
 school of theology at Oxford were agitating English 
 thought, they express the common-sense scorn of 
 the healthy mind against the mystification and 
 deceit of the religion that the Reformation pitched, 
 neck and crop, out of England, close upon three 
 hundred and seventy years ago, and for which the 
 large-minded tolerance of to-day is not enough. 
 Domination is its aim, but no mind that can enjoy 
 the mirth and marvels of the Legends has any room 
 for such ghostly pretensions, and their continued 
 popularity is thus, by parity of reasoning, something 
 of an assurance. The Ingoldsby Legends are included 
 in the Index Expurgatorius of Rome. 
 
 Superfine critics have in recent years declared 
 that Barham's fun has grown out of date, and that 
 they cannot read him as of old. But your critic 
 commonly speaks only for himself; and moreover, 
 the superfine, who cannot read Dickens, for example, 
 have been sadly flouted of late by the still increasing 
 popular favour of that novelist.
 
 BARHAM 9 
 
 It was in the fertile county of Kent that Barham 
 was born, in the midst of a district that has ever been 
 the cradle of Barhams. Eight miles to the south 
 of the old Cathedral of Canterbury, and near by the 
 Folkestone Road, there lies, secluded in a deep 
 valley, an old-fashioned farmhouse, unpretending 
 enough to the outward glance, but quaint and 
 curious within. This is the old manor house 
 of Tappington Everard, mentioned so often and 
 so familiarly in the Ingoldsby Legends, and for 
 many centuries the home of Richard Harris 
 Barham's ancestors. " Tom Ingoldsby " himself 
 was, indeed, born at Canterbury, near the Cathedral 
 precincts, and first saw the world beneath the shadow 
 of that great Church, of whose glories he was in 
 after years to tell in his own peculiar and inimit- 
 able way. His father, made rich by hops, was a 
 man of consideration at Canterbury, and filled an 
 Aldermanic chair with all the dignity that comes 
 of adipose tissue largely developed. He was, in 
 fact and few words, a fat man, and it was probably 
 in reference to him that Tom Ingoldsby, in later 
 years, wrote of the u aldermanic nose" trumpeting 
 in the Cathedral during service. 
 
 The Rev. Richard Harris Barham, the self-styled 
 " Thomas Ingoldsby," claimed descent from the De 
 Bearhams, anciently the FitzUrses, whose posses- 
 sions extended round about Tappington for many 
 miles of this fair county of Kent. He delighted to 
 think that he was descended from one of those 
 four knights who, on that dark December day of 
 1170, broke in upon the religious quiet of the 
 Cathedral and slaughtered Becket in the north 
 transept. When their crime was wrought the
 
 io THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 murderers fled, FitzUrse escaping to Ireland, where 
 he is said to have taken the name of MacMahon, 
 the Irish equivalent of his original patronymic, 
 which was just the Norman-Latin for " Bear's Son." 
 
 He died an exile, leaving his Manor of Barham to 
 his brother, who, so odious had the name of Fitz- 
 Urse now become, changed it for an Anglicised 
 variant, and called himself " De Bearham." Even- 
 tually the aristocratic prefix " De " fell out of use, 
 and in course of time even Bearham became 
 " Barham." 
 
 The Barhams held place and power here for 
 centuries, giving their name to the village of Barham, 
 which nestles, embowered in foliage, beneath the 
 bleak and bare expanse of Barham Downs ; their 
 estates dropping from them little by little until, in 
 the time of James I., the remaining property was 
 alienated by a Thomas Barham, a nerveless, unworthy 
 descendant of the fierce FitzUrses, who sold it to 
 the Reverend Charles Fothcrby, Archdeacon of 
 Canterbury. Thus were the Barhams torn from 
 their native soil and rendered landless. 
 
 The adjoining manor of Tappington, next 
 Barham, had been held in 1272 by one Gerrard de 
 Tappington, as one knight's fee. In the reign of 
 Henry VIII. it was purchased by a certain John 
 Boys, who died in 1544, when his son, William 
 Boys, alienated a small portion of the demesne to a 
 person named Verrier, and the manor, with the 
 remainder of the demesne, to one Marsh, to whose 
 descendants it passed until at length sold by 
 Colonel Thomas Marsh to Mr. Thomas Harris, 
 hopfactor of Canterbury, who died in 1729, and 
 whose daughter and sole heiress had, by a singular
 
 BARHAM ii 
 
 freak of fate, married a John Barham, bringing him 
 not only the old manor of Tappington, or Tapton 
 Wood, as it has sometimes been styled, as her 
 dower, but also some portions of the long-lost lands 
 of those whom he claimed for ancestors, including 
 the manors of Farmstead (called in olden times 
 Barhamstead). 
 
 It will be noted that it was a John Barham not 
 necessarily one of the Barhams of Tappington who 
 thus secured the Harris heiress. Kent contains 
 more than one family of the name, but let us hope, 
 for the sake of sentiment, that all Barhams, of 
 whatever district, descend from the original assassin. 
 It would certainly have been a grievous thing to 
 Tom Ingoldsby if he had been compelled to cherish 
 a doubt of the blood-boltered genuineness of his 
 own ancestry. We have, indeed, some slightly 
 different versions of what became of the FitzUrse 
 family. One tells us that a branch lingered long in 
 the neighbourhood of Williton, in Somerset, under 
 their proper name, which became successively 
 corrupted into Fitzour, and Fishour, and at last 
 assumed the common form of Fisher. This is 
 good news for Fishers anxious to assume long 
 descent, even if they have to date from a murderer. 
 Time throws an historic condonation over such 
 things, and many an ambitious person who would 
 not willingly kill a fly, and who would very naturally 
 shrink from owning any connection with a homicidal 
 criminal now on his trial, would glow with pride at 
 an attested family tree springing from that blood- 
 thirsty knight. 
 
 Another tale gives the Italian name of Orsini as 
 a variant of FitzUrse, If there be anything in it,
 
 12 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 then assuredly the notorious Orsini of the infernal 
 machine, who attempted the life of Napoleon III., 
 was a reversion to twelfth century type. 
 
 Other Barhams there are known to fame : Henry, 
 surgeon and natural history writer, who died in 
 1726, and was one of the family of Barhams of 
 Barham Court ; and Nicholas Barham, lawyer, of 
 Wadhurst, Sussex, who died in 1577, and was 
 descended from the Barhams of Teston, near Maid- 
 stone. Nicholas was ever a favourite Christian 
 name with all branches of the family, and Tom 
 Ingoldsby so named his youngest son the " Little 
 Boy Ned " of the Legends. 
 
 The witty and mirth-provoking Reverend Richard 
 Harris Barham, destined to bear the most dis- 
 tinguished name of all his race, was fourth in 
 descent from the peculiarly fortunate John Barham 
 who wedded the Harris hopfields and the Harris 
 daughter. His father, himself a " Richard Harris " 
 Barham was that alderman of capacious paunch 
 of whom mention has already been made. He 
 resided at 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury, a large, 
 substantial house of pallid grey brick, plain almost 
 to ugliness outside, but remarkably comfortable 
 and beautifully appointed within, standing at the 
 corner of Canterbury Lane. A brick of the garden 
 wall facing the lane may be observed, scratched 
 lightly with " M. B. 1733." 
 
 To this house he had succeeded on the death of 
 his father, Richard Barham, in 1784. He did not 
 very long enjoy the inheritance. 
 
 The alderman was of truly aldermanic proportions, 
 for he weighed nineteen stone. Existing portraits 
 of him introduce us to a personage of a more than
 
 "TOM INGOLDSBY": THE REV. RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM. 
 From a drawing by his son, the Rev. Richard Harris Dalton Barham
 
 I 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Falstaffian appearance, and the tale is still told how 
 it was found necessary to widen the doorway at 
 the time of his funeral. For eleven years he lived 
 here; and here it was, December 6th, 1788, that 
 the only child of himself and his housekeeper, 
 Elizabeth Fox, was born. 
 
 Elizabeth Fox came Irom Minster-in-Thanet. 
 A miniature portrait of her shows a fair-haired, 
 bright-eyed woman, with abundant indications of 
 a sunny nature, rich in wit and humour. It is 
 quite clear that it was from his mother Ingoldsby 
 derived his mirthful genius, just as in a companion 
 miniature of himself, painted at the age of six, 
 representing him as a pretty, vivacious little boy 
 with large brown roguish eyes, he bore a striking 
 likeness to her. 
 
 It is singular to note that the future rector of St. 
 Mary Magdalene in the City of London was as an 
 infant baptised at a church of precisely the same 
 dedication that of St. Mary Magdalene in Burgate 
 Street, a few doors only removed from his birthplace. 
 The tower only of that church is now standing, the 
 rest having been pulled down in 1871. It is still 
 possible to decipher some of the tablets fixed against 
 the wall of the tower, but exposed to the weather 
 and slowly decaying. There is one to Ingoldsby's 
 grandfather, Richard, who died December nth, 
 1784, aged 82, and to his grandmother, Elizabeth 
 Barham, who died October 2nd, 1781, aged 81 ; 
 and other tablets commemorate his aunts Eliza and 
 Sarah, who died September 26th, 1782, and Decem- 
 ber 1 6th, 1784, aged respectively forty-six and 
 forty-four years. 
 
 Ingoldsby was only in his seventh year when a
 
 very serious thing befell, for his father, the alderman, 
 died in 1795. Those who love their Ingoldsby and 
 everything that was his, as the present writer does, 
 will be interested to know that he was buried at 
 Upper Hardres (" Hards," in the Kentish speech), 
 
 ST. MARY MAGDALENE, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY. 
 
 a small and lonely village, four miles from Canterbury, 
 on the old Stone Street, as you go towards Lympne 
 and Hythe. There, in the village church, high up 
 on the south wall of the nave, the tablet to his 
 memory may be found. What became of Elizabeth 
 Fox is beyond our ken. We are told, in the Life
 
 i6 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and Letters of Richard Harris Bar/iam, by his son 
 the Reverend Richard Dalton Barham, that she was 
 at the time a confirmed invalid. 
 
 To three guardians had been given the adminis- 
 tration of the comfortable patrimony of the boy, and 
 by them he was sent to St. Paul's School, then in 
 the City of London. Thence he went to Brasenose, 
 Oxford, leaving the university with a modest B.A., 
 degree in 1 8 1 1 . Meanwhile the villain of the piece 
 had been at work, in the person of a dishonest 
 attorney, one of his guardians, by whose practices 
 his fortune was very seriously reduced. Returning 
 to Canterbury, he seems to have contemplated 
 studying for the law, but quickly relinquished the 
 idea, and prepared himself for the Church. He was 
 admitted to holy orders, and in 1813, in his twenty- 
 fifth year obtained a curacy at Ashford. This was 
 
 WESTWELL. 
 
 exchanged in the following year for the curacy of 
 the neighbouring village of Westwell. Thus he was 
 fairly launched on his professional career, becoming
 
 BARHAM 17 
 
 successively Rector of Snargate and Curate of 
 Warehorne, Minor Canon of St. Paul's and Rector 
 of the united parishes of St. Mary Magdalene with 
 St. Grcgory-by-St.-Paul's, and finally, by exchange 
 in 1842, Rector of St. Faith-by-St.-Paul's a fine 
 mid-nineteenth century specimen of the " squarson." 
 A competent genealogist, an accomplished antiquary, 
 a man of letters, he, by force of his sprightly wit, 
 welded the fragmentary legends of the country but 
 largely those of his native county of Kent into 
 those astonishing amalgams of fact and fiction which, 
 published first, from time to time, in Bent/ey's 
 Miscellany, were collected and issued as the Ingoldsby 
 Legends. It is not the least among the charms of 
 those verses that fact and fiction are so inextricably 
 mixed in them- that it needs the learning of the 
 skilled antiquary to sift the one from the other ; 
 and so plausible are many of his ostensible citations 
 from old Latin documents, and his fictitious 
 genealogies so interwoven with the names, the 
 marriages and descents of persons, real and imaginary, 
 that an innocent who wrote some years ago to Notes 
 and Queries, desiring further particulars of what he 
 thought to be genuine records, is surely to be 
 excused for his too-ready faith. 
 
 The assumed name of " Ingoldsby " is stated by 
 his son to be found in a branch of the family 
 genealogy, but inquiry fails to trace the name in 
 that connection, and it may be said at once that the 
 Kentish Ingoldsbys are entirely figments of Barham's 
 lively imagination. Yorkshire knows a family of 
 that name, of whom Barham probably had never 
 heard anything save their name. He was a man 
 of property, and modestly proud of the descent he
 
 i8 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 claimed, and though by no means rich, his place 
 was among 
 
 The Mite of the old county families round, 
 Such as Honeywood, Oxenden, Knatchbull and Norton, 
 Matthew Robinson, too, with his beard, from Monk's Horton, 
 The Faggs, and Finch-Hattons, Tokes, Derings, and Deedses, 
 And Fairfax (who then called the castle of Leeds his). 
 
 He was, in fact, " armigerous," as heralds would 
 say, and the arms of his family were not those 
 
 lioncels of the Shur- 
 lands impaled with the 
 saltire of the Ingoldsbys, 
 of which we may read 
 in the Legends but as 
 pictured here. It may 
 be noted that another 
 Barham family the 
 Barhams of Teston, near 
 Maidstone bore the 
 three bears for arms, 
 without the distinguish- 
 m g fesse '> and that they 
 are shown thus on an 
 old brass plate in Ash- 
 ford church, which In- 
 goldsby must often have 
 seen during his early 
 curacy there. 
 
 When, however, he 
 talks of the escutcheons 
 displayed in the great hall of Tappington, charged 
 with the armorial bearings of the family and its 
 connections, he does more than to picturesquely 
 embroider facts. He invents them, and the " old 
 
 THE BARHAM COAT-OF-ARMS.
 
 BARHAM 19 
 
 coat " " in which a chevron between three eagles cuisses 
 sable is blazoned quarterly with the engrailed saltire 
 of the Ingoldsbys " which Mr. Simpkinson found 
 to be that of " Sir Ingoldsby Bray, temp. Richard I." 
 is one not known to the Heralds' College. 
 
 Behind that farcical " Mr. Simpkinson, from Bath," 
 liirks a real person, and one not unknown to those 
 who have read Britton and Brayley books on 
 Cathedral antiquities. John Britton, the original of 
 Simpkinson, was, equally with his contemporary 
 Barnam, an antiquary and genealogist of accomplish- 
 ment, and a herald of repute. Barham would not 
 have allowed as much, for there was, it would seem, 
 a certain amount of ill-feeling between the two, 
 which resulted in the satirical passages relating to 
 u Mr. Simpkinson " to be met with in the pages 
 of the Ingoldsby Legends. They tell us that he was, 
 among other things, " an influential member of the 
 Antiquarian Society, to whose ' Beauties of Bagnigge 
 Wells ' he had been a liberal subscriber " ; and that 
 " his inaugural essay on the President's cocked-hat 
 was considered a miracle of erudition ; and his 
 account of the earliest application of gilding to 
 gingerbread a masterpiece of antiquarian research." 
 In all this one finds something of that rapier-thrust 
 of satire, that mordant wit which comes of personal 
 rivalry ; and the heartfelt scorn of a man who loved 
 architecture, and was, indeed, a member of the first 
 Archseological Institute, but who whole-heartedly 
 resented the introduction of picnic parties into 
 archaeological excursions, and revolted at popularis- 
 ing architecture and antiquarian research by brake 
 parties, in which the popping of champagne corks 
 punctuated the remarks of speakers holding forth
 
 20 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 on the architectural features of buildings in a style 
 sufficiently picturesque and simple to hold the atten- 
 tion of the ladies. Those who have found how 
 unconquerable is the indifference of the public to 
 these things will appreciate to the fullest extent the 
 feelings of Tom Ingoldsby, while yet reserving 
 some meed of admiration for John Britton's labours, 
 which did much to advance the slow-growing know- 
 ledge of Gothic architecture in the first half of the 
 century. His work may halt somewhat, his archi- 
 tectural knowledge be something piecemeal and 
 uninformed with inner light ; but by his labours 
 many others were led to pursue the study of ecclesi- 
 astical art. 
 
 But the humour with which Barham surrounded 
 " Mr. Simpkinson's " doings took no count of his 
 accomplishments, as may be seen in the excursion 
 to " Bolsover Priory," narrated in " The Spectre of 
 Tappington." " Bolsover Priory," said Mr. Simpkin- 
 son, "was founded in the reign of Henry VI. 
 about the beginning of the eleventh century. Hugh 
 de Bolsover had accompanied that monarch to the 
 Holy Land, in the expedition undertaken by way 
 of penance for the murder of his young nephews 
 in the Tower. Upon the dissolution of the 
 monasteries, the veteran was enfeofFed in the lands 
 and manor, to which he gave his own name of 
 Bolsover, or Bee-Owls-Over (by corruption Bolsover) 
 a Bee in chief over Three Owls, all proper, being 
 the armorial ensigns borne by this distinguished 
 crusader at the siege of Acre." 
 
 Thus far Simpkinson. Now Barham turns, with 
 good effect, on the ignorant sightseers to whom 
 ruins are just a curiosity and nothing more.
 
 BARHAM 21 
 
 " * Ah ! that was Sir Sidney Smith/ said Mr. 
 Peters ; ' I've heard tell of him, and all about 
 Mrs. Partington, and ' 
 
 " ' P., be quiet, and don't expose yourself! ' sharply 
 interrupted his lady. P. was silenced, and betook 
 himself to the bottled stout. 
 
 '* * These lands,' continued the antiquary, c were 
 held in grand sergeantry by the presentation of 
 three white owls and a pot of honey ' 
 
 " c Lassy me ! how nice ! ' said Miss Julia. Mr. 
 Peters licked his lips. 
 
 u ' Pray give me leave, my dear owls and honey, 
 whenever the king should come a-rat-catching in 
 this part of the country.' 
 
 " c Rat-catching ! ' ejaculated the Squire, pausing 
 abruptly in the mastication of a drum-stick. 
 
 " * To be sure, my dear sir ; don't you remember 
 that rats once came under the forest laws a minor 
 species of venison ? " Rats and mice, and such 
 small deer," eh ? Shakespeare, you know. Our 
 ancestors ate rats ; and owls, you know, are capital 
 mousers ' 
 
 " * I seen a howl/ said Mr. Peters." 
 
 " Bolsover Priory " is one of those few places 
 mentioned by Ingoldsby that have not been identified 
 with any real place in Kent. It might have been 
 taken to mean the ruins of the Preceptory at 
 Swingfield Minnis, some two miles from Tapping- 
 ton, had not Barham expressly said, in his prefatory 
 notes to the "Witches' Frolic," that they were not 
 the same. 
 
 The literary landmarks associated with Barham's 
 residence in London are readily traced. On leaving 
 Kent in 1821 to take up his residence in London,
 
 22 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 he, for a time, rented the upper part of the house, 
 still standing, No. 51, Great Queen Street, Holborn. 
 There his eldest surviving daughter, Caroline 
 Frances Barham, afterwards Lady Bond, was born, 
 
 NO. 4, ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD, DEMOLISHED 190!. 
 
 July 22nd, 1823. In 1824, following his appoint- 
 ment to the rectorship of St. Mary Magdalene, the 
 family removed to a house numbered " 4 " on the 
 south side of St. Paul's churchyard, and there 
 remained until 1839, when an exchange was made 
 to a house in Amen Corner, Paternoster Row
 
 BARHAM 23 
 
 the first house through the gateway by arrange- 
 ment with Sydney Smith, who was leaving it 
 to reside in Green Street, Mayfair. 
 
 He describes the garden at the back of this house 
 as " containing three polyanthus roots, a real tree, a 
 brown box border, a snuff-coloured jessamine, a 
 shrub which is either a dwarf acacia or an overgrown 
 gooseberry bush, eight broken bottles, and a tortoise- 
 shell tom-cat asleep in the sunniest corner, with a 
 wide and extensive prospect of the back of the 
 ' Oxford Arms,' and a fine hanging wood (the 
 ' new drop ' at Newgate) in the distance." 
 
 But the sprightly wit, the sound common-sense, 
 the good-natured satire, were doomed to early 
 extinction. It was in the prime of life, and when 
 he might well have looked forward to .further con- 
 solidating and extending the fame his genius had 
 already brought, that the blow fell which laid him 
 low. He had already, some twenty years earlier, 
 suffered some slight temporary trouble with a 
 sensitive throat, and although in general a robust 
 man, was in that respect peculiarly liable to the 
 weather. It happened, unfortunately, that he was 
 present as a spectator at the opening by the Queen 
 of the new Royal Exchange, October 28th, 1844. 
 It was a bleak day, and, sitting at an open window 
 in Cheapside placed at his disposal by a friend, he 
 caught a chill from whose effects he never recovered. 
 The evil was a stubborn inflammation of the throat, 
 which clung to him throughout the winter, and by 
 degrees reduced the strong man to an alarmingly 
 weak condition. In the February of 1845 he was 
 induced to visit Bath, in the hope of recovery in 
 that mild atmosphere, but an imprudent return to
 
 24 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 London in the treacherous month of March, in 
 order to attend a meeting of the Archaeological 
 
 AMEN CORNER, WHERE BARHAM DIED, 
 
 Association, aggravated the malady. Still, that 
 strong physique struggled against illness, and he 
 once more partly recovered, only to be again laid
 
 BARHAM 25 
 
 low by a cold caught at an April vestry meeting 
 in St. Paul's. It was, however, not merely an ex- 
 aggerated susceptibility to cold that by this time 
 dogged his every excursion into the open air, but 
 the grossly mistaken treatment of his medical man, 
 who had inflamed the malady by applying caustic 
 to the uvula. At the beginning of May, although 
 reduced almost to the condition of a helpless child 
 by his sufferings, he was taken again to the west ; 
 this time to Clifton, near Bristol. Unhappily, the 
 local practitioner who was called in to attend him 
 was by no means a properly qualified man, and on 
 hearing of the mistaken treatment already followed, 
 could think of nothing better than to continue it. 
 It is not remarkable, under the circumstances, that 
 he experienced no relief from the climate of Clifton, 
 but grew steadily weaker. It was a sad time, for 
 his wife was simultaneously laid low with illness. 
 Everything devolved upon his daughter, Frances, 
 then only in her twentieth year, for his son Dick 
 was away in Cambridgeshire, doing duty as a clergy- 
 man. 
 
 The dying man for the truth could be no longer 
 disguised kept a spirit of the supremest cheerful- 
 ness and Christian courage. His humorous verses 
 on the incidents of his distressing illness originally 
 composed as replies to the inquiries of anxious 
 friends and afterwards published in the collection 
 of Ingoldsby Lyrics as " The Bulletin," are no whit 
 inferior to the productions of his careless health. 
 
 When recovery at Clifton seemed hopeless, he 
 was removed again to London, to the house he had 
 occupied for the last six years, and made a grim 
 joke as they assisted him into the house, on the
 
 26 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 appropriateness of his being brought at that juncture 
 to Amen Corner. A few days he lay there, life 
 ebbing away from sheer weakness ; his mind still 
 clear, and divided between making the most careful 
 disposition of his property and fond memories of 
 
 RUINS OF ST. MAKY MAGDALENE, OLD FISH STREET HILL, CITY 
 OF LONDON, AFTER THE FIKE OF DECEMBER 1886. 
 
 that " little boy Ned " who had died, untimely, 
 some years before. It was then he wrote that last 
 poem, the beautiful " As I Laye a-thynkynge," 
 printed at the end of all editions of the Ingoldsby 
 Legends as " The Last Lines of Thomas Ingoldsby." 
 There is not, to my mind, anything more exquisitely 
 beautiful and pathetic in the gorgeous roll of English
 
 BARHAM 27 
 
 literature than the seven stanzas of the swan-song 
 of this master of humour and pathos. It is wholly 
 for themselves, and not by reason of reading into 
 them the special circumstances under which they 
 were written, that so sweeping a judgment is made. 
 That they have never been properly recognised is 
 due to the Wardour Street antiquity of their spelling, 
 and still more to that strange insistence which ordains 
 that the accepted wit and humourist must always 
 be " funny " or go unacknowledged. It is a strange 
 penalty ; one that would seek to deprive the 
 humourist of all human emotions save that of laughter, 
 and so make him that reproach of honest men 
 a cynic. 
 
 It was on June lyth, 1845, that Barham died, 
 untimely, before the completion of his fifty-seventh 
 year. He was buried in the vaults of his former 
 church, St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street Hill, 
 one of those half-deserted city churches built by 
 Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. 
 There he might have lain until now, but for the 
 fire of December 2nd, 1886, which destroyed the 
 building. For at least four years the blackened and 
 roofless ruins stood, fronting Knightrider Street, 
 and then they were removed, to make way for 
 warehouses. The contents of the vaults were at the 
 same time dispersed, the remains of Tom Ingoldsby 
 being removed to Kensal Green Cemetery, while the 
 tablet to his memory was appropriately transferred to 
 St. Paul's, where, in the crypt, it may still be seen.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 CANTERBURY 
 
 There stands a city, neither large nor small, 
 Its air and situation sweet and pretty. 
 It matters very little, if at all, 
 Whether its denizens are dull or witty ; 
 Whether the ladies there are short or tall, 
 Brunettes or blondes ; only, there stands a city ! 
 Perhaps 'tis also requisite to minute, 
 That there's a Castle and a Cobbler in it. 
 
 THUS wrote Ingoldsby of his native city of Canter- 
 bury, in " The Ghost," and <c sweet and pretty " its 
 air and situation remain, sixty years since those lines 
 were penned. For the changes that have altered 
 so many other cities and towns have brought little 
 disturbance here. No manufactures have come to 
 to abolish the prettiness of the situation ; the air 
 the atmospheric air is sweet and fragrant as of yore, 
 and that other air the demeanour and deportment 
 of Canterbury is still, as ever, gravely cheerful, as 
 surely befits the capital city of a Primate whose 
 Church is still a going concern. 
 
 Ingoldsby was exactly right in his epithetical 
 summing-up, for prettiness and not grandeur is the 
 characteristic of the gentle valley of the Stour, 
 wherein Canterbury is set. Approach it from what- 
 ever quarter you will, and you will find prettiness 
 only in the situation. Even when viewed from the
 
 CANTERBURY 29 
 
 commanding heights of Harbledown and St. Thomas's 
 Hill, the only grandeur is that of the Cathedral, and 
 that is extrinsic, a something imported into the 
 picture. Nay, even the uprising bulk of that 
 cathedral church gains in effect from being thus set 
 down in midst of a valley that is almost with equal 
 justness called a plain, and whose features may, 
 without offence, or the suspicion of any thought 
 derogatory from their beauty, be termed so feature- 
 less. 
 
 Unquestionably the best direction whence to enter 
 this ancient capital of the Kentish folk this Kaint- 
 ware-bury of the Saxons, the Durovernum of the 
 Romans is from Harbledown, whence the pilgrims 
 from London, or from the north and west of 
 England, entered. Only thus does the stranger 
 receive a really accurate impression. With emotions 
 doubtless less violent than those of the mediasval 
 pilgrims to the shrine of the blessed martyr, St. 
 Thomas, but still strongly aroused, he sees the west 
 front of the 'Cathedral, its two western "towers," 
 and the great central " Bell-Harry " tower displayed 
 boldly before him, in the level, and may even 
 identify the more prominent of the public buildings. 
 Descending from this hill, he passes through the 
 ancient suburb of Saint Dunstan, and enters the 
 city beneath the frowning portals of the West Gate. 
 
 If, on the other hand, the modern pilgrim arrives 
 per Chatham and Dover Railway, he will be dumped 
 down in quite a different direction, on the south 
 side of the city, near Wincheap Street, in which 
 thoroughfare he will be able, without any delay, to 
 discover his first Ingoldsby landmark in Canter- 
 bury, in the shape of the " Harris's Almshouses,"
 
 3 o THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 founded in 1729 by that ancestral Harris whose 
 daughter his great-grandfather had married. They 
 are five quite humble little red-brick houses, with 
 a garden at the back, endowed for the support of 
 two poor parishioners of St. Mary Magdalene, two 
 of Thanington, and one of St. Mildred's. The 
 value is the modest one of about 9 a year. An 
 unassuming tablet on the central house of the row 
 tells this story : 
 
 MR. THOMAS HARRIS 
 
 of this City 
 Founder of these Five 
 
 Aims-Houses 
 hath endowed them with 
 
 Marly Farm in Kent 
 
 for the Maintenance of five 
 
 Poor Familys for ever. 
 
 Ingoldsby the Reverend Richard Harris Barham 
 became a governor of this charity on his attaining 
 his majority, as already alluded to in the sketch of 
 his birth and career. 
 
 The district of Wincheap only becomes tolerable 
 after leaving the railway behind. This outlying 
 part, without the city walls, was of old that place 
 of degradation where the scourgings and stripes, 
 the whips and scorpions of mediaeval punishments, 
 were inflicted ; where offending books ay, and 
 the horror of it, the Protestant martyrs were 
 burnt of yore. In this "Potter's Field" that is 
 not now more than a struggling little suburb where 
 all the littlenesses of life are prominent, and few 
 of its beauties are to be seen, there has of late been 
 erected a great granite memorial pillar, surmounted 
 by the ' c Canterbury Cross," on the site of the stake
 
 CANTERBURY 31 
 
 at which forty-one victims of the Marian persecution 
 perished. Shackle and stake, faggot and gyve, rivet 
 and torch, how busy they were ! It is a beautiful 
 sentiment that rears this monument on the spot 
 where they suffered who testified for Jesus ; but it 
 should stand, plain for all men to see, in the 
 Cathedral Close itself. 
 
 Our course from this point into the city leads 
 up to the Castle, mentioned in the Legends, and 
 especially in that early one, < The Ghost," in whose 
 stanzas are found many exquisitely apposite local 
 Canterbury touches. That Castle is, in its secular 
 way, as interesting as the Cathedral in its 
 ecclesiastical : 
 
 The Castle was a huge and antique mound, 
 Proof against all the artillery of the quiver, 
 
 Ere those abominable guns were found, 
 
 To send cold lead through gallant warrior's liver. 
 
 It stands upon a gently-rising ground, 
 Sloping down gradually to the river, 
 
 Resembling (to compare great things with smaller) 
 
 A well-scooop'd, mouldy Stilton cheese but taller. 
 
 The Keep, I find, 's been sadly alter'd lately, 
 
 And, 'stead of mail-clad knights, of honour jealous, 
 
 In martial panoply so grand and stately. 
 
 Its walls are fill'd with money-making fellows, 
 
 And stuffd, unless I'm misinformed greatly, 
 
 With leaden pipes, and coke, and coals, and bellows, 
 
 In short, so great a change has come to pass, 
 
 'Tis now a manufactory of Gas. 
 
 It is immediately fronting the street that this 
 keep of old romantic Norman times is found, with 
 the smoke and noxious fumes, the chimneys and 
 retorts, of the City of Canterbury Gas-light and 
 Coke Company, very insistent to eyes and nose,
 
 32 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 in the rear ; and, if you look down a by-street 
 " Gas Street " is the vulgar name of it and peer 
 into the empty roofless shell of that keep, you will 
 discover it to be still a coal-bunker, and that those 
 who, in the rhyme of Ingoldsby, manufacture 
 "garss," are not more gentle with historic ruins 
 than they were in 1825, when it was first put to 
 this use. These shattered walls that, quarried by 
 
 CANTEKUUKY CASTLE. 
 
 time and the hands of spoilers, do indeed, as 
 Ingoldsby suggests, resemble one of those great, 
 well-scooped cheeses found in the coffee-rooms of 
 old-fashioned hotels, were built by two very great 
 castle-builders ; by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, 
 and William de Corbeil, Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 What Gundulf began for his master and over-lord 
 William the Conqueror, William de Corbeil 
 completed for Henry I. Among all the great 
 castle keeps of England it ranked third in size,
 
 CANTERBURY 33 
 
 and in that respect was inferior only to those of 
 Colchester and Norwich. It looks a very poor 
 third indeed nowadays, and so battered and reduced 
 that a hundred keeps are more upstanding and 
 impressive. Alas ! for that poor castle, its career 
 was never an heroic one. It surrendered tamely 
 to Louis, the Dauphin of France, in 1216, and for 
 long years afterwards was a prison for Jews on 
 occasions when persecutions of the Chosen People 
 broke out. From that use it declined to the lower 
 level of a debtor's prison. 
 
 Not far distant from it are the Dane John 
 gardens, a public park of by no means recent origin. 
 It has been for more than a hundred years what it 
 is now, and is perhaps one of the very best wooded 
 and most picturesque urban parks in existence. 
 Antiquaries have long since ceased to trouble about 
 the odd name, which appears to have originally 
 come from an estate here, belonging to the Castle, 
 and variously named the " Castle " or " Donjon " 
 Manor. The huge prehistoric mound within its 
 area was remodelled, heaped seventeen feet higher, 
 crowned with a monument that halts between Gothic 
 and Classic, and ringed round with a spiral walk 
 about 1790. The very long and very complacent 
 statement on that monument, telling how, when, 
 and by whom all these things were done, is itself a 
 monument of self-satisfaction. 
 
 The city walls, with their towers at regular 
 intervals, even yet in very good preservation, bound 
 the Dane John grounds in one direction. Still 
 goes a broad walk on the summit of those walls, 
 and the pilgrim might imagine himself a sentry 
 guarding the mediaeval city, were it not that dense
 
 34 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and sordid suburbs spread beyond, on whose blank 
 walls soap and cheap tea advertisements alternate 
 with others crying the virtues of infants' foods and 
 the latest quack nostrums. 
 
 Canterbury is Canterbury yet, and Becket is still 
 its prophet, but some things be changed. Electric 
 
 THE DANE JOHN, CANTERBURY. 
 
 lighting of a marvellously poor illuminating quality 
 it is true, and vastly inferior to the gas they brew at 
 the Castle, but yet electric lighting of sorts some- 
 what remodernises its streets ; but it is still true, as 
 at any time since Popery came down crash, that 
 you cannot obtain lodging without money, or 
 miracles, whether or no. Becket, however, still 
 pervades the place. His arms the three black
 
 CANTERBURY 35 
 
 Cornish choughs, red-beaked and clawed, on a blue 
 field have been adopted by the city, and every 
 shop patronised by visitors sells china or trinkets 
 painted or engraved with them. Pictures of the 
 transept where he fell on that day of long ago ; 
 yea, even photographs of the skull and bones dis- 
 covered some years since, and thought to be his, 
 are at every turn. Becket is not forgot, and a 
 certain portly Tudor shade the wraith of one who 
 ordained all worship and reverence of him to cease 
 and every vestige of his shrine and relics to be 
 destroyed must surely be furiously and impotently 
 angered. Little need, however, for that kingly 
 shade to be thus perturbed ; this modern and 
 local cult of Saint Thomas is only business at 
 Canterbury and very good business, too. 
 
 Still goes the tourist- pilgrim along the way to 
 the Cathedral trod by the sinners of mediaeval times, 
 to purge them of their sins and start afresh. Where 
 they turned off to the left from the main street, 
 down Mercery Lane, the present-day visitors still 
 turn, and the Christchurch Gate, at the end of 
 the narrow lane, opens as of old into the Cathedral 
 precincts. It is a wonderful gatehouse, this of 
 Christchurch, built by Prior Goldstone nigh upon 
 four hundred years ago, and elaborately carved 
 with Tudor roses, portcullises, and things now so 
 blunted by time that it is difficult to distinguish 
 them. Time has dissolved much of the worthy 
 Prior's noble structure, like so much sugar. 
 
 It was here, in this open space in front of the 
 Gate, that the quaint Butter Market stood until 
 quite recently. Tardily eager to honour one of 
 her sons, Canterbury was so ill-advised as to sweep
 
 36 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 away the curious Butter Market to make room for 
 the new memorial to Christopher Marlowe, the great 
 dramatist of Shakespearean times, whose birthplace 
 still stands in St. George's Street. It is a cynical 
 freak of time that honour should be done to 
 Marlowe at such a spot, for the Church in his life- 
 time held him to be " a wretch," a " filthy play- 
 maker," an "atheist and a sottish swine," and it 
 was thought that the unknown person who slew 
 him in his thirtieth year was someone who thus 
 revenged his insults to religion. 
 
 The Marlowe Memorial deserves attention. It 
 is in the form of a nude bronze figure representing 
 the Muse of Poetry, placed on a stone pedestal, and 
 in the act of playing upon a lyre ; but it is an 
 exceedingly plump and eminently erotic, rather than 
 intellectual, figure thus made to stand for the Muse 
 a Doll Tearsheet, with a coarse, sensual face, most 
 inappropriately shaded by a wreath of poetic bays. 
 The last touch of vulgarity is that especially muni- 
 cipal idea of giving the whole thing a smart finish 
 by surrounding it with four ornate street-lamps. 
 
 Burgate Street, branching off" from this point to 
 the right, is the street where Barham was born ; but 
 our present business is to the Close, and round the 
 south side of the Cathedral to the east end, where 
 the Norman infirmary ruins stand. Turning here 
 to the left, a narrow, stone-paved passage, in between 
 high, ancient walls, leads crookedly through the 
 romantic remains of the domestic buildings of the 
 old monastery to the cloisters and the north side of 
 the Cathedral. It is a twilight place, even now, in 
 the brightest days of summer, and was once, before 
 portions of it were unroofed, much darker. That
 
 CANTERBURY 
 
 37 
 
 was the time when it obtained its existing name of 
 the " Dark Entry." If the pages of the Ingoldsby 
 Legends are opened, and the legend of "Nell 
 Cook " is read, much will be found on the subject 
 
 THE DARK ENTRY, 
 
 of this gloomy passage. That legend is the " King's 
 Scholar's Story " : the terror of a schoolboy of King 
 Henry VIII. 's school, on the north side of the 
 precincts, at the prospect of being sent back by the
 
 3 8 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 haunted entry after dark, on a Friday, when the ghost 
 of Nell Cook was supposed to have its weekly outing. 
 
 THE DARK ENTRY, CANTERBURY. 
 
 Well might anyone believing in ghosts and omens 
 especially desire not to meet that spirit, for such an
 
 CANTERBURY 39 
 
 encounter was supposed to presage the death of 
 the person within the year : 
 
 " Now nay, dear Uncle Ingoldsby, now send me not I pray, 
 Back by that Entry dark, for that you know's the nearest 
 
 way; 
 
 I dread that Entry dark with Jane alone at such an hour, 
 It fears me quite it's Friday night ! and then Nell Cook 
 
 hath pow'r." 
 
 " And who, silly child, is Nell Cook ? " asks 
 Uncle Ingoldsby ; and the King's Scholar answers : 
 
 " It was in bluff King Harry's days, while yet he went to 
 
 shrift, 
 And long before he stamped and swore, and cut the Pope 
 
 adrift ; 
 
 There lived a portly Canon then, a sage and learned clerk ; 
 He had, I trow, a goodly house, fast by that Entry dark. 
 
 " The Canon was a portly man of Latin and of Greek, 
 
 And learned lore, he had good store, yet health was on 
 
 his cheek. 
 The Priory fare was scant and spare, the bread was made 
 
 of rye, 
 The beer was weak, yet he was sleek he had a merry eye. 
 
 " For though within the Priory the fare was scant and thin, 
 The Canon's house it stood without ; he kept good cheer 
 
 within ; 
 
 Unto the best he prest each guest, with free and jovial look, 
 And Ellen Bean ruled his cuisine. He called her ' Nelly 
 
 Cook/" 
 
 It is not a very proper story that the King's 
 Scholar unfolds ; of how a " niece " of the Canon 
 comes to stay with him, and arouses the jealousy 
 of the good-looking cook, whose affections that 
 " merry eye " of the Canon had captured. Nell 
 Cook thereupon successfully poisons the Canon
 
 4 o THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and the strange lady with "some nasty doctor's 
 stuff," with which she flavours a pie destined for 
 the Canonical table, and the two are found as the 
 Scholar tells : 
 
 " The Canon's head lies on the bed, his niece lies on the 
 
 floor! 
 They are as dead as any nail that is in any door ! " 
 
 Nell Cook, for her crime, says Tom Ingoldsby, 
 adapting to his literary uses the legend long current 
 in Canterbury, was buried alive beneath one of the 
 great paving-stones of the " Dark Entry " ; when, 
 local history does not inform us : 
 
 But one thing's clear that's all the year, on every Friday 
 
 night, 
 Throughout that Entry dark doth roam Nell Cook's unquiet 
 
 sprite. 
 
 And whoever meets Nell Cook is bound to die 
 some untimeous death within the year ! Certainly, 
 the Dark Entry is not a place greatly frequented 
 after nightfall, even nowadays but that is perhaps 
 less by reason of superstitious fears than because 
 it leads to nowhere in particular.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CATHEDRAL ! THE MURDER OF BECKET 
 
 IT is by the south porch that the Cathedral is 
 entered. Let none suppose this to be the veritable 
 Cathedral that Becket knew ; that was replaced, 
 piece by piece, in the succeeding centuries, all save 
 the Norman transept where he met his fate. The 
 nave, by whose lofty, aspiring perspective we 
 advance, was built in 1380 upon the site of that 
 of the twelfth century. According to the testimony 
 of the time, it was in a ruinous condition. Conceive, 
 if you can, the likelihood of one of those particularly 
 massive Norman naves like those of Tewkesbury and 
 Gloucester, which this resembled, becoming ruinous ! 
 The more probable truth of the matter is that the 
 feeling of the time had grown inimical to those 
 cavernous interiors of the older architects, and sought 
 any excuse for tearing them down and building 
 in their stead in the lightsome character of the 
 Perpendicular period. 
 
 This nave, then, much later than Becket's era, 
 leads somewhat unsympathetically to that most 
 interesting spot in the whole Cathedral, the north 
 transept. Here is the " Martyrdom," as that massive 
 Norman cross-limb where Becket fell beneath the
 
 42 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 swords and axes of his murderers is still called. 
 You look down into it from the steps leading into 
 the choir and choir-aisles, as into a pit. Little 
 changed, in the midst of all else that has been altered, 
 this north transept alone remains very much as it 
 was when he was slain, more than seven hundred 
 years ago, and the sight of its stern, massive walls 
 does much to bring back to those who behold them 
 that fierce scene which, in the passage of all those 
 years and the heaping of dull verbiage piled up by 
 industrious Dryasdusts and beaters of the air, has 
 been dulled and blunted. 
 
 Barham our witty and mirthful Tom Ingoldsby 
 felt a keen personal interest in this scene, for was 
 not his ancestor as he conceived him to be 
 Reginald FitzUrse, the chief actor in that bloody 
 scene of Becket's death ? He is flippant, it must 
 be allowed, in the reference he makes to the occur- 
 rence in the Ingoldsby Legends : 
 
 A fair Cathedral, too, the story goes, 
 
 And kings and heroes lie entombed within her ; 
 
 There pious Saints in marble pomp repose, 
 
 Whose shrines are worn by knees of many a sinner ; 
 
 There, too, full many an aldermanic nose 
 Roll'd its loud diapason after dinner ; 
 
 And there stood high the holy sconce of Becket, 
 
 Till four assassins came from France to crack it. 
 
 Historians have not yet agreed upon the character 
 of Becket, and no final conclusion is ever likely to 
 be arrived at upon the vexed question of who was 
 right and who wrong in the long-drawn contention 
 between King and Archbishop. It is easy to shirk 
 the point and to decide that neither was right ; but 
 another and a more just resort is to declare, after
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 43 
 
 due consideration, that in the attempted secular 
 encroachments of the Crown, and in the resistance 
 of the Archbishop to any interference with the 
 prerogatives and jurisdiction of the Church and the 
 clergy, both sides were impelled by the irresistible 
 force of circumstances. Becket was of English origin, 
 and the first of the downtrodden Saxon race who 
 had won to such preferment since the Norman rule 
 began. Thus, besides being bound to defend the 
 Church, of which he had become the head, he was 
 regarded by the people, who idolised him, as their 
 champion against those ruling classes whose mailed 
 tyranny crushed them to earth. 
 
 A prime difficulty in judging the character of 
 Becket is the extraordinary change in his conduct 
 after he had been induced to accept the Primacy, 
 that goal and crown of the clerical career ardently 
 desired by all, and attained by Becket in his forty- 
 third year. Long the favourite of the King, and 
 already, as Chancellor, at the height of power and 
 magnificence, there was little advantage in this 
 elevation to the throne of Saint Augustine, and he 
 seemed singularly unfitted to fill it, for until that 
 juncture he had been among the most worldly of 
 men. As Chancellor, his magnificence had out- 
 shone that of the King, he himself was gay and 
 debonnair, clothed in purple and fine linen, feasting 
 royally, and with hundreds of knights in his train. 
 Nothing that the world could give had he denied 
 himself. He was not only impressed personally 
 with his unfitness, but the monks of Canterbury 
 themselves, in conclave, desired to elect one of their 
 own choice. It was, therefore, against the desire 
 of the Church and against his own better judgment,
 
 44 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 foreseeing as he did much of the trouble that was 
 to come, that he was given the headship. 
 
 But once enthroned, his conduct changed. He 
 dismissed his magnificent household, feasted no more, 
 expended his substance in charity and himself in 
 good works ; became, indeed, and in very truth, 
 that Right Reverend Father in God which the 
 simulacra, the windbags, the ravening wolves, the 
 emptinesses that for hundreds of years have occupied 
 his place, are styled. The sinner saved must be 
 prepared for misunderstandings it is part of the 
 cross and burden he has taken up. The scarlet sins 
 of the unregenerate are remembered against the 
 saint, and his saintliness becomes to his old boon 
 companions a hypocritical farce. That is why 
 Becket's contemporaries did not understand him ; 
 that, too, is why so many, dimly fumbling by the 
 rush-light glimmer of their little sputtering intel- 
 ligences, presently choked and dowsed in the dusty, 
 cobwebby garrets of incredible accretions of lies, 
 mistakes, perversions and general rag-bag of pitiful 
 futilities, have been left wandering in infinite dark- 
 ness, and content so to wander in estimating him. 
 
 It was the sinners whose poisonous tongues did, 
 by dint of much persistence, estrange the King's 
 affections from Becket within a year, and their 
 innuendoes were remembered when a growing 
 struggle over disputed privileges found the Arch- 
 bishop immovably set upon what he regarded as his 
 duty, and not at all prepared to favour the King. 
 If Henry had supposed the Archbishop whom he 
 had created would be in every sense his creature, he 
 must have been furious at his gross mistake. The 
 fury of the Norman kings was like the unrestrained
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 45 
 
 paroxysms of a raving maniac, and opposition threw 
 them into transports of rage, felt severely by animate 
 and inanimate objects alike. This second Henry, 
 whose eyes were said to have in repose been gentle 
 and dove-like, is no exception. Ill fares the 
 messenger who brings him bad news as ill some- 
 times as though he had brought about the untoward 
 things of which he tells. Slight displeasure means 
 a thump, a resounding smack on the face from the 
 Royal hands, or a right Royal kick on that part 
 where honour is so easily hurt. May not enquiring 
 minds, diligently bent on running to earth the 
 origin of the still existing etiquette of retreating 
 backwards from the presence of the sovereign, 
 find it in a natural desire of courtiers at all 
 hazards to protect that honour ? 
 
 Conceive, then, the really Royal rage of this King, 
 bearded by someone not to be dissuaded, persuaded, 
 admonished, or let or hindered in any particular. 
 He became like a wild beast, tearing whatever came 
 in his way, flinging off his clothes, throwing himself 
 on the floor and gnawing the straw and rushes, and 
 not merely kicking the posteriors of messengers, but 
 flying at them with intent to tear out their eyes. 
 
 What was that which wrought such enmity 
 between such old-time friends ? Not merely one, 
 but many things, but first and last among them the 
 determination of the King that the clergy, instead of 
 being amenable for offences only to the ecclesiastical 
 courts, should be answerable to the civil tribunals. 
 This, the earliest of the at last happily successful 
 series of blows at clerical privilege, seemed to Becket 
 almost sacrilegious, and he determined to protect 
 the Church against what was, he honestly thought,
 
 46 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 according to his lights and his sacerdotal sympathies, 
 an unwarranted attack. 
 
 By all accounts this saint was not, in his new 
 character, the most tactful of men. With the old 
 courtier days gone by, he had discarded the courtier- 
 like speech, and austerely held his own. Jealous of 
 him, several great dignitaries of the Church sup- 
 ported the King : among them the Archbishop of 
 York, and the Bishops of London and Salisbury. 
 Becket, as their spiritual chief, hurled excommunica- 
 tion at them, and it was even feared that he would 
 do the same by the King. Then, in fear of his life, 
 he went into six years' exile, ended by a pretence of 
 reconciliation that was patently a pretence, even 
 before he sailed for England. He was weary of 
 exile, and ready to lay down his life for the 
 Church. 
 
 It was early in December 1 1 70 that he returned 
 to Canterbury, " to die," as he prophetically had 
 said, before embarking. Quarrels, insults, and petty 
 persecutions met him, and thus sped December to 
 its close. On Christmas Day he preached in the 
 Cathedral on the text, as he read it (an all-important 
 reservation), " On earth, peace to men of good will." 
 " There is no peace," he declared, " but to men of 
 good will," and with solemn meaning, readily under- 
 stood by the great congregation that heard him, 
 spoke of the martyrs who had fallen in olden days. 
 It was possible, he added, that they would soon 
 have another. 
 
 " Father," wailed that assembled multitude, "why 
 do you desert us so soon ? To whom will you 
 leave us ? " But, heedless of the interruption, 
 he passed from a plaintive strain to one of fiery
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 47 
 
 indignation, ending, in a voice of thunder, by a full 
 and particular excommunication of many of his 
 enemies and persecutors. " May they be cursed," 
 his voice resounded through the building, " by Jesus 
 Christ, and may their memory be blotted out of 
 the assembly of the saints, whoever shall sow discord 
 between me and my lord the King." So saying, he, 
 with mediaeval symbolism, dashed down a lighted 
 candle upon the stones, to typify the extinction 
 of those accurst, and, with religious exaltation on 
 his face, left the pulpit, saying to his crossbearer, 
 " One martyr, St. Alphege, you have already ; 
 another, if God will, you will have soon." 
 
 Already, while he spoke, his furrow was drawing 
 to its end. Over in Normandy, where the King 
 was keeping Christmas, the Archbishop of York 
 and the Bishops of London and Salisbury were 
 suggesting that it would be a good thing if there 
 were no Becket. <c So long as Thomas lives," said 
 one, " you will have neither good days, nor peaceful 
 kingdom, nor quiet life." 
 
 The thought thus instilled into the King's mind 
 threw him into a frenzy. " A fellow," he shouted 
 " a fellow that has eaten my bread has lifted up his 
 heel against me ; a fellow that I loaded with benefits 
 has dared to insult the King and the whole Royal 
 family, and tramples on the whole kingdom ; a 
 fellow that came to Court on a lame sumpter-mule 
 sits without hindrance on the throne itself. What 
 sluggard wretches, what cowards, have I brought up 
 in my Court, who care nothing for their allegiance 
 to their master ! Not one will deliver me from this 
 low-born, turbulent priest ! " So saying, he rushed 
 from the room, doubtless to roll in one of those
 
 48 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 ungovernable Plantagenet rages upon the floor of 
 some secluded chamber. 
 
 The four knights who from among that Court 
 sprang forth to prove themselves, even to the awful 
 extremities of sacrilege and murder, true King's 
 men, were Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Moreville, 
 William de Tracy, and Richard le Bret. In the 
 light of later events, the monkish chroniclers, eager 
 to discover the marvellous in every circumstance of 
 the tragedy, found a dark significance in their very 
 names. FitzUrse, they said, was of truly bear- 
 like character ; De Moreville's name proclaimed 
 him to be of " the city of death " ; Le Bret was 
 "the brute." With so much ingenuity available, 
 it is quite surprising they could not twist Tracy's 
 name into something allusive to murder ; but they 
 had to be content with the weak suggestion that 
 he was of " parricidal wickedness." All save Le 
 Bret had been knights owning fealty to Becket while 
 he was Chancellor. 
 
 It is detailed in these pages, in the description 
 of Saltwood Castle, how they landed in England 
 and made for Canterbury. A dreadful circumstance 
 is that they knew perfectly well on whom to call 
 when they reached the city, and waited upon a 
 sympathiser with the King, Clarembald, the Abbot 
 of St. Augustine's, who is thus sufficiently im- 
 plicated. 
 
 From the Abbot's lodging they sent a com- 
 mand, ordering the Mayor to issue a proclamation 
 in the King's name forbidding any help being 
 given to the Archbishop. Then they took horse 
 again and rode to the Palace, accompanied by their 
 men-at-arms, whom they posted in a house hard
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 49 
 
 by the gateway. The short day of December 29th 
 was nearly at its close when they drew rein in the 
 courtyard beneath the great hall of the Palace, 
 where the Archbishop and his household had but 
 just retired from supper. They had left their 
 swords outside, and came as travellers, their mailed 
 armour concealed under long cloaks. Entering the 
 hall they met the seneschal, who ushered them into 
 the private room where the Archbishop sat, among 
 his intimates. " My lord," he said, " here are four 
 knights from King Henry wishing to speak with 
 you " ; and they were bidden enter. 
 
 FitzUrse began the furious discussion. The 
 knights had seated themselves on the floor at the 
 Archbishop's feet, and waited until he should finish 
 the conversation he was holding with a monk. 
 When Becket turned and looked calmly at each in 
 turn, ending with saluting Tracy by name, Fitz- 
 Urse it was who broke in with a contemptuous 
 " God help you ! " 
 
 The Archbishop's face flushed crimson. He was 
 a man of vehement nature, and it is wonderful that 
 he restrained himself from striking that insolent 
 intruder. " We have a message from the King 
 over the water," continued FitzUrse ; " tell us 
 whether you will hear it in private, or in the hearing 
 of all." 
 
 Within the hearing of all that message, such 
 as it was, was given. It was but a reiteration of 
 old demands and old grievances, made to goad the 
 Archbishop into fury, and to afford an excuse for 
 an attack upon him. The discussion aroused both 
 sides to anger, and the knights, calling upon all 
 to prevent the Archbishop from escaping, dashed
 
 50 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 off, with the cry of " To arms ! " for their 
 swords. 
 
 But Becket harboured no thoughts of escape. 
 Although he perceived that death was near, he 
 made no retreat, being indeed, by this time, fanatically 
 bent upon the martyr's crown. Outside, the signal 
 had been already given to the men-at-arms, who 
 now came pouring in, with shouts of cc Reaux ! " 
 or " King's men." The knights now returned, 
 their swords girt about them. Already, however, 
 the Archbishop's attendants had closed and barred 
 the doors, and were endeavouring to save him from 
 that death he seemed to welcome. With kindly 
 violence they pushed and pulled him by obscure 
 passages from the Palace and along the cloisters, 
 while the blows of axes and the splintering of wood 
 told how in their rear the murderers were hewing 
 their way onward. Thus at last, strenuously 
 resisting, he was impelled towards the door that 
 opened from the cloisters into the north transept. 
 
 Once within the Cathedral the monks bolted the 
 door behind them, and in their haste excluded some 
 of their brethren, thus left, unprotected, to face the 
 onrush of armed men. Hearing these unfortunate 
 ones vainly knocking for admittance, Becket, exerting 
 all his authority, commanded the door to be opened ; 
 and when he found his words disregarded, broke 
 away from those who held him and drew back the 
 bolts with his own hands. 
 
 Seeing the way thus made clear for those pursuing 
 men of wrath, the crowd of anxious monks 
 surrounding the Archbishop immediately turned 
 and fled to those hiding-places they knew of. Only 
 three remained, dauntless, by their chief. These
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 51 
 
 were Robert of Merton, William FitzStephen, and 
 Edward Grim, who stood by him, vainly imploring 
 him to flee. Only one concession he made to their 
 entreaties. He would go to the choir, and there, 
 before the high altar, the holiest place in the 
 Cathedral, with all dignity make an end. 
 . It was as he was thus ascending the steps from the 
 transept that the knights burst into the sacred 
 building. Bewildered at first by the almost complete 
 darkness, they could only shout at random, " Where 
 is Thomas Becket, traitor to the King ? " No 
 answer. Then, falling over a monk, came an oath, 
 from FitzUrse, and the question, " Where is the 
 Archbishop ? " Becket himself answered, and 
 descending again into the transept, confronted 
 them. He stood in front of what was then the 
 the Chapel of St. Benedict, and calmly asked, 
 " Reginald, why do you come into my church 
 armed ? " For answer FitzUrse thrust a carpenter's 
 axe he had found against his breast, and with a 
 savage oath declared, " You shall die : I will tear out 
 your heart ! " " Fly ! " exclaimed another, not so 
 eager to commit the sin of sacrilege, before which 
 the mediaeval world recoiled ; " Fly ! or you are a 
 dead man ! " striking him with the flat of his sword, 
 to emphasise the warning. 
 
 Then the four united their efforts to drag him 
 from the Cathedral, but without success. Himself 
 a powerful man, he seized Tracy and flung him 
 heavily upon the pavement. FitzUrse, advancing 
 upon him with a drawn sword, he called by a vile 
 name, adding, " You profligate wretch, you are my 
 man ; you have done me fealty ; you ought not 
 to touch me." No fear, it will be seen, in all this,
 
 52 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 THE "MARTYRDOM," CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. 
 
 but a not unreasonable fury, somewhat obscuring the 
 martyr spirit. Fury on both sides, for FitzUrse,
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 53 
 
 losing the last atom of restraint, and yelling " Strike ! " 
 aimed a blow with his great, two-handed sword 
 that, had it been better directed, must have smote 
 off the Archbishop's head. As it was, it merely 
 skimmed off his cap. Becket, who must have been 
 momentarily surprised to find himself still alive, 
 then covered his eyes with his hands, and bending 
 his head, was heard to commend his cause and the 
 cause of the Church to God, to St. Denis of France, 
 to St. Alphege and all the saints of the Church. 
 Tracy then dealt a blow, partly intercepted by Grim, 
 whose arm, protecting the Archbishop, was broken 
 by it. By this time blood was trickling down the 
 Archbishop's face. He wiped it away and mur- 
 mured, " Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my 
 spirit ; " and then, falling at a further blow from 
 Tracy, " For the name of Jesus, and for the defence 
 of the Church, I am willing to die." There he 
 lay, and so lying, received a tremendous stroke 
 from Richard le Bret, who accompanied it with the 
 exclamation, " Take this, for love of my lord 
 William, brother of the King ! " That stroke not 
 only clove away the upper part of the skull, but the 
 sword itself was broken in two. Vengeance was 
 accomplished. 
 
 When the assassins fled from that scene of blood, 
 it was quite dark. They went as they had come, 
 by the cloisters, shouting that they were " King's 
 men," and cursing and stumbling over unfamiliar 
 steps. A servant of the Archdeacon of Sens was 
 sufficiently unfortunate to be wailing for the cruel 
 death of the Archbishop when they passed*, and 
 foolish enough to be in their way. They fell over 
 him, and, still heady with that struggle and the lust
 
 54 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 of blood, gave him in passing a mailed kick, 
 and so tremendous a sword-thrust that for long 
 afterwards he had sufficient occasion to lament for 
 himself. 
 
 It was something of an anti-climax to their 
 murderous passions that they should, as they now 
 did, repair to the Archbishop's Palace and make 
 a burglarious raid upon the gold and silver vessels 
 of the church, and loot from Becket's stables the 
 magnificent horses he kept. With this personal 
 plunder, and with a mass of the Archbishop's 
 documents and papers seized on behalf of the King, 
 they were preparing to depart when the very unusual 
 circumstance in December of a violent thunderstorm 
 set a final scene of horror upon that closing day. 
 
 The news fell heavily upon the people of Canter- 
 bury, who reverenced Becket far more than did 
 those within the Church who had immediately sur- 
 rounded him ; and the citizens came rushing like 
 an irresistible torrent into the Cathedral as soon 
 as they heard of the sacrilegious deed. 
 
 Like the greater number of our cathedrals, this 
 of Canterbury has been greatly altered since that 
 time. It was into a Norman nave that the excited 
 populace thronged a building that must have 
 closely resembled the still-existing nave of that 
 period at Gloucester, gloomy and dark at the best 
 of times, but on this December evening a well of 
 infinite blackness, faintly illuminated by the distant 
 lights twinkling in the choir and on the high altar. 
 This horror-stricken crowd was only with great 
 difficulty forced back and at last shut out, and it 
 was long before the monks returned to the transept 
 where the Archbishop had fallen before the blows of
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 55 
 
 the four. There his body lay in the dark, as it had 
 been left, his blood still wet on those cold stones, as 
 Osbert, the chamberlain, entering with a single light, 
 held out at arm's length in that cavern of blackness 
 and unimaginable gloom, steps in it, and, if he 
 be not quite different from other men, shudders 
 and almost drops his glimmering candle when he 
 finds what awful moisture that is in which he has 
 been walking. Osbert alone has ventured to seek 
 his master. Where, then, are the others of his 
 household ? In hiding, like those monks who, now 
 that all is still, venture, like rats, to come from their 
 hiding-holes in chapel and triforium, or from secret 
 places contrived for such emergencies in the roof. 
 
 The Archbishop lay upon his face, the upper part 
 of his scalp sliced off by that whirling blow of 
 Tracy's, and the contents of his head spilled over 
 the pavement, just as a bowl of liquid might be 
 overset. Osbert, with rare fortitude, replaces that 
 scalp as one might replace a lid, and binding the 
 head, he and the monks between them place the 
 body upon a bier and carry it to the high altar in 
 the choir. 
 
 There were those among the monks who felt 
 small sympathy for Becket. To them he was but 
 a proud worldling whose remarkable preferment to 
 the Primacy had been scandalous, and whose quarrels 
 with the King had been, they thought, dictated 
 more for the advancement of his own personal 
 authority than for sake of a purely impersonal desire 
 to preserve and cherish the rights of the Church. 
 He had been elected Archbishop by desire of the 
 King and against the feeling of the Priory, and 
 they thought he should, in consequence, have been
 
 56 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 more complaisant to Royal demands. They were 
 not a little jealous of the man set to rule over them, 
 and moreover, could not at once perceive the 
 martyr and the saint in the dignitary thus at last 
 struck down in that long struggle. They were 
 horror-stricken at the sacrilege of it, but did not 
 burst into grief and lamentations for the individual 
 until that happened which put a very different 
 complexion upon the dead Archbishop's character. 
 Far into the night, as the monks sat in the choir 
 around that silent figure, his aged friend and 
 instructor, Robert of Merton, told them of the 
 secret austerities of his later life, and made a 
 revelation that wholly changed their mental attitude. 
 To prove his words, he exposed the many layers of 
 the clothing to those who gathered round, and 
 showed how, beneath all, and next the skin, the 
 " luxurious " Archbishop had worn the habit of a 
 monk, and had endured the disciplinary discomfort 
 of a hair-shirt. There, too, on the skin, were 
 visible the weals of the daily scourgings by which 
 the Archbishop mortified the flesh. Nor was this 
 the sum of his virtues, for when, a little later, his 
 garments were removed, previous to interment, they 
 were found to be swarming with vermin ; that 
 hair-cloth, itself so penitential, densely populated 
 with a crawling mass whose presence must have 
 made it more penitential still. According to the 
 accounts of those who beheld these transcendent 
 proofs of sanctity, the hair-cloth was bubbling over 
 with these inhabitants, like water in a simmering 
 cauldron. 
 
 At sight of such unmistakable evidences of 
 holiness the brethren went into hysterics, " See ?
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 57 
 
 see," they said to one another, " what a true monk 
 he was, and we knew it not ! " an oblique and 
 unpleasing reflection upon the personal habits of the 
 monastic orders. They kissed him, as he lay dead 
 there, and called him " St. Thomas," and at last, 
 unwilling that any tittle of his sanctity should be 
 impugned, buried him in his verminous condition. 
 
 Meanwhile, newly alive to the saintly character 
 of him whom they now clearly perceived to be a 
 martyr, orders were given to rail off the spot where 
 he had fallen, and for every trace of his blood to 
 be jealously preserved. But unhappily for the 
 Church, the common people, who had from the 
 moment of his death regarded their Archbishop as 
 a martyed saint, had already soaked up the greater 
 part of that precious blood in strips hastily torn 
 from their clothes, and had been given his stained 
 and splashed outer garments. These were losses 
 that could never be made good, but they did not 
 greatly matter to those who could so dilute the little 
 remaining blood that it sufficed to supply the 
 uncounted thousands of pilgrims who made pilgrim- 
 age to the shrine of St. Thomas for the space of 
 three hundred and fifty years, and took away with 
 them little phials containing, as they fondly believed, 
 so intimate a relic of England's most powerful 
 saint. 
 
 In spite of the dark legends that tell how 
 vengeance overtook the assassins, it does not seem 
 to be the fact that they were adequately punished 
 for their fearful crime, and certainly no Royal 
 displeasure lighted upon them. " The wicked," 
 we are told, " flee when no man pursueth," and 
 the knights, fearful of the revenge that might be
 
 5 8 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 taken upon them by the people of Canterbury, rode 
 off, unhindered, with their small escort of men-at- 
 arms, to Saltwood. Within that stronghold they 
 felt safe. That they would have been equally safe 
 at Canterbury we may suppose, for Robert de Broc, 
 shut up within the strong walls of the Archbishop's 
 Palace, felt strong enough to threaten the monks 
 with what he would do if they dared so honour the 
 dead Prelate as to bury him among the tombs of 
 the Archbishops. He would, he declared, tear out 
 the body, hang it from a gibbet, hew it in pieces, 
 and throw the fragments by the highway, to be de- 
 voured by swine or birds of prey. It is quite evident 
 that Robert de Broc was a good hater and a very 
 thorough partisan of the King. The monks did 
 well to be afraid of him, and meekly forbearing from 
 giving offence, laid their martyr in the crypt. 
 
 The four lay only one night at Saltwood. The 
 next day they rode to the old manor-house of 
 South Mailing, near Lewes, itself a property be- 
 longing to the Archbishops, and throwing down 
 their arms and accoutrements upon a dining-table 
 in the hall, gathered comfortably round the cheerful 
 hearth, when says the legend the table, unwilling 
 to bear that sacrilegious burden, started back and 
 threw the repugnant load on the ground. The 
 arms were replaced by the startled servants, who 
 came rushing in with torches ; but again they were 
 flung away, this time with even greater force. It 
 was one of the knights who, with blanched face, 
 declared the supernatural nature of this happening. 
 
 The following morning they were off again, 
 bound for Hugh de Moreville's far distant York- 
 shire castle of Knaresborough, where they remained
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 59 
 
 for one year. It would have been too scandalous 
 a thing for the King to receive his bravos at once, 
 for he had a part of his own to play that would 
 have been quite spoiled by such indecent haste 
 a dramatic part, but one that fails to carry any 
 conviction of its sincerity. It was at Argenton 
 that he heard of the successful issue of his com- 
 mission, and on receipt of the news isolated himself 
 for three days, refused all food but milk of almonds, 
 rolled himself in penitential sackcloth and ashes, and 
 grievously called upon God to witness that he was 
 not responsible for the Archbishop's death. " Alas ! " 
 exclaimed that trembling hypocrite, " alas ! that it 
 ever happened." 
 
 But it is not in empty lamentations, real or 
 feigned, that penitence is found. The assassins 
 went unpunished, and, together with others of 
 Becket's bitterest enemies within and without the 
 Church, were even promoted. Before two years 
 had passed the four knights were found constantly 
 at the King's Court, on familiar terms with him 
 and his companions in hunting. It is a cynical 
 commentary upon the kingly penitence that one of 
 the murderers, William de Tracy, became Justiciary 
 of Normandy. But something had to be done to 
 expiate a deed whose echoes rumbled horrifically 
 throughout Europe. The Pope, Alexander III., 
 indicated a course of fighting against the infidel 
 in the Holy Land, and it seems probable that they 
 did so work off their sins ; all except Tracy, who, 
 having made over his Devonshire manor of Daccombe 
 to the Church, for the maintenance of a monk for 
 ever, to celebrate masses for the repose of the souls 
 of the living and the dead, set out for Palestine,
 
 60 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 but was for so long driven back by contrary winds 
 that he almost despaired of setting foot abroad. 
 This especial retribution meted out to him was for 
 the particular heinousness of having dealt the first 
 effective blow at the martyr. When at last he 
 was carried to the coast of Calabria, he was seized 
 with a mysterious disease at Cosenza, a disease 
 whose agonies made him tear the flesh from his 
 bones with his own hands. Thus entreating, 
 " Mercy, St. Thomas ! " he perished miserably. 
 
 The mysticism of the time told many dreadful 
 legends. Dogs refused to eat from the tables of 
 the murderers ; grass would not grow where their 
 feet went ; those they loved were doomed to misery 
 and death. 
 
 From the King a certain humiliation was demanded, 
 but it amounted to little beyond an oath, taken on 
 the gospels before the Papal legates, that he had 
 not ordered or desired the murder, and an expressed 
 readiness to restore property belonging to the See 
 of Canterbury. This easy satisfaction was given at 
 Avranches, in May 1172, but if it was sufficient 
 for the Pope it did by no means calm the English 
 people, who saw in the cumulative domestic troubles 
 and foreign disasters of the time the wrath of 
 Heaven. The greater penance of 1 1 74 was accord- 
 ingly decided upon. Arriving from Normandy on 
 July 8th, he journeyed to Canterbury, to the 
 shrine of the already sainted martyr, by the Pilgrims' 
 Road, living the while upon bread and water. 
 Coming to Harbledown, he resigned horseback for 
 a barefooted walk into the city. Thus, with a mere 
 woollen shirt and a cloak, he came to the Cathedral, 
 kneeling in the porch, and then proceeding directly
 
 THE CATHEDRAL 61 
 
 to the scene of the martyrdom, where he again knelt 
 and kissed the stone where the Archbishop had died. 
 From that spot, he was conducted to the crypt, 
 where the tomb still remained, and, placing his head 
 and shoulders in the tomb itself, received on his 
 shoulders five strokes of a rod from each bishop 
 and abbot present, and three each from the by- 
 standing eighty monks. This discipline must have 
 killed him had those monks laid on with the hearty 
 goodwill customary with prison warders ; but their 
 stripes were mere formalities, and the King departed 
 the next morning, after passing a solitary fasting 
 vigil in the crypt, where, during the solemn hours 
 of the night, he had had ample opportunity of 
 repentance. From Canterbury he rode to London, 
 absolved and with a whole skin. 
 
 The nation saw much virtue in this public repara- 
 tion. How could they fail so to do when the affairs 
 of the realm took an immediate and decided turn 
 for the better, when the King of Scots, long a 
 terror in the north, was captured at Alnwick, and 
 when the invading fleet of Henry's own rebellious 
 son was repulsed ? The forgiveness and the miracu- 
 lous intercession of the beatified Thomas were 
 prompt and efficacious. 
 
 The cult of this peculiarly sainted person was 
 extraordinary, and far transcended that of any other 
 martyr. To his shrine, erected in a place of 
 especial honour, and encrusted with gold and gems, 
 the pilgrims of many nations and many centuries 
 flocked, greatly to the enrichment of the Church. 
 The miraculous cures wrought at his tomb, and the 
 marvellous legends that clustered around the story 
 of his life and death, were the theme of ages. But
 
 62 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the gross superstitions, and the grosser scandals, 
 tricks, and miscellaneous knaveries that were en- 
 couraged by that martyr-worship had discredited 
 him by the time of Henry VIII. , that less super- 
 stitious age when it was possible for the King and 
 his advisers to declare " Thomas Becket " a traitor, 
 to submit his relics to every indignity, to destroy 
 them and his shrine, and to seize all the endow- 
 ments and valuables connected with his worship. 
 
 The great destruction wrought at the Reformation 
 accounts for the scantiness of Becket's memorials. 
 Here, in the " Martyrdom," only the Norman walls 
 that looked down upon the scene, and some portions 
 of the pavement, are left. A square piece of stone, 
 inserted in the middle of a large slab, marks the 
 exact spot where he fell, and tells how the original 
 stone, regarded as of a peculiar sanctity, had been 
 at some time or another removed.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 TAPPINGTON HALL 
 
 THE central point of the Ingoldsby Country 
 is, of course, the Ingoldsby manor house of 
 Tappington Hall. To discover this we must leave 
 Canterbury by the Dover Road, and, climbing up 
 to the rise of Gutteridge Gate, where a gibbet stood 
 in ancient times and a turnpike-gate until recent 
 years, drop down into the village of Bridge, whose 
 name derives from an arch thrown at an early period 
 across the River Stour. At the summit of the 
 corresponding rise out of Bridge, the road, running 
 exactly on the site of the Roman Watling Street, 
 comes to that bleak and elevated table-land known 
 as Barham Downs, the scene of Caesar's great battle 
 with the Britons on July 23rd, A.D. 56. Twenty- 
 seven thousand Roman soldiers, horse and foot, met 
 the wild rush of the Britons, who, with the usual 
 undisciplined and untaught courage of uncivilised 
 races, flung themselves upon the invaders and were 
 thrown back by the impenetrable wall of the serried 
 phalanxes. Recoiling dismayed from this reception, 
 they were instantly pursued by the Roman cavalry 
 and cut up into isolated bands, who fought courage- 
 ously all that fatal day in the dense woodlands. 
 Protected by mounds and trenches defended with 
 
 63
 
 64 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 palisades of stakes cunningly interwoven with brush- 
 wood, they prolonged the hopeless contest until 
 nightfall, and then fell back. Caesar, describing 
 these woodland forts as cppu/a, gives especial at- 
 tention to one particularly troublesome stronghold. 
 " Being repulsed," he writes, " they withdrew them- 
 selves into the woods and reached a place which 
 they had prepared before, having closed all approaches 
 to it by felled timber." This retreat was captured 
 by the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, who, throw- 
 ing up a mound against it, advanced, holding their 
 shields over their heads in the military formation 
 known as " the tortoise," and drove out the de- 
 fenders at the sword's point. 
 
 This, the last place to hold out, is, despite the 
 eighteen and a half centuries that have passed, still 
 to be seen in Bourne Park, on the summit of Bridge 
 Hill, and is familiarly known in the neighbourhood 
 as "Old England's Hole." "Never forget," the 
 old countryfolk have been wont to impress their 
 children c< never forget that this is Old England's 
 Hole, and that on this spot a last stand for freedom 
 was made by your British forefathers." 
 
 Everyone in the neighbourhood knows Old 
 England's Hole. It is seen beside the road, on the 
 right hand, just where the cutting through the crest 
 of the hill, made in 1829, to ease the pull-up for the 
 coach-horses, begins. At that same time the course 
 of the road was very slightly diverted, and, instead 
 of actually impinging upon this ancient historic 
 landmark, as before, was made to run a few feet 
 away. Now the spot is seen across the fence of 
 the park, the old course of the road still traceable 
 beside it, as a slightly depressed grassy track,
 
 66 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 plentifully dotted with thistles. The stronghold 
 consists of a crater-like hollow, encircled by earthen 
 banks, still high and steep. A great number of 
 ash-trees and thorns, some very old, gnarled, and 
 decayed, grow on these banks, and cast a dense shade 
 upon the interior. 
 
 Barham Downs, stretching for three miles, wind- 
 swept and bare, above the valley of the Lesser 
 Stour, form a tract of country that must needs 
 appeal strongly to the imaginative man. Only the 
 bunkers and other recent impudent interferences of 
 some local golf club have ever disturbed the ancient 
 lines of Roman entrenchments. 
 
 Barham Downs are, of course, the " Tappington 
 Moor," of that terrible legend, the " Hand of 
 Glory," which opens the collection of the Ingoldsby 
 Legends in many editions : 
 
 On the lone bleak moor, At the midnight hour, 
 
 Beneath the Gallows Tree, 
 
 Hand in hand The Murderers stand, 
 
 By one, by two, by three ! 
 
 And the Moon that night With a grey, cold light, 
 
 Each baleful object tips ; 
 
 One half of her form Is seen through the storm, 
 
 The other half's hid in Eclipse ! 
 
 And the cold Wind howls, And the Thunder growls, 
 
 And the Lightning is broad and bright ; 
 
 And altogether It's very bad weather, 
 
 And an unpleasant sort of a night ! 
 
 Barham village, a very different place, lies below, 
 snugly embosomed amid the rich trees of the Stour 
 valley, sheltered and warm. From this point its 
 tall, tapering, shingled spire peeps out from among 
 the massed trees, and a branch road leads dir ctly
 
 THE "EAGLE GATES," BROOME PARK.
 
 68 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 down to it and to that park and mansion of Barham 
 Court which, had his ancestors of remote times done 
 their duty by posterity, the author of the Ingoldsby 
 Legends firmly believed would have been his. 
 
 But here we are come, on the high road, to a 
 striking entrance to a park. The place seems 
 strangely familiar, yet the " Eagle Gates," as the 
 countryfolk call them, of this domain of Broome 
 Park are certainly unknown to us. The mystery 
 is only explained by referring to the woodcut which 
 prefaces most editions of the Ingoldsby Legends, 
 and purports to be a view of " Tappington, taken 
 from the Folkestone Road." Then it is seen that 
 the illustration rather closely resembles this spot, 
 with the trifling exceptions that eagles, and not 
 lions, surmount the pillars, and that the mansion 
 of Broome is really not to be seen through the 
 gateway, although clearly visible a few yards away, 
 when it is seen to be not unlike the house pictured. 
 Many have been the perplexed pilgrims who have 
 vainly sought the ancestral Ingoldsby gates and 
 chimneys between Canterbury and Folkestone, 
 lured to the quest by the original Preface to the 
 Legends. Broome Park, whose lovely demesne is 
 criss-crossed by turfy paths and tracks freely open 
 to the explorer, is beautifully undulating and thickly 
 wooded. In its midst stands the mansion, built 
 in the last years of the seventeenth century by 
 one of the extinct Dixwell family, and gabled, 
 chimneyed, and generally as picturesque as Barham 
 " most pseudonymously " described it, under the 
 title of " Tappington Hall." 
 
 The Oxenden family have long owned the 
 beautiful old place, which still contains a " powdering
 
 TAPP1NGTON HALL 
 
 69 
 
 closet," as used in the bygone days of huge head- 
 dresses and powdered hair. My lady would sit 
 in her boudoir with her head thrust through a 
 hatch in the wall into the " powdering closet " a 
 contrivance necessary to prevent the powder being 
 scattered over everything. 
 
 TAPPINGTON, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD. 
 
 Here, by the " Eagle Gates," the road branches, 
 the left-hand route continuing to Dover, the right- 
 hand to Folkestone. This is the "beautiful green 
 lane " of the Preface to the Legends. a Here," says 
 that Preface, addressed to the incredulous who 
 did not believe in the existence of Tappington Hall 
 " here a beautiful green lane, diverging abruptly 
 to the right, will carry them through the Oxenden
 
 70 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 plantations and the unpretending village of Denton, 
 to the foot of a very respectable hill as hills go 
 in this part of Europe. On reaching its summit, 
 let them look straight before them and if, among 
 the hanging woods which crown the opposite side 
 of the valley, they cannot distinguish an antiquated 
 manor house of Elizabethan architecture, with its 
 gable ends, stone stanchions, and tortuous chimneys 
 rising above the surrounding trees, why, the sooner 
 they procure a pair of Dollond's patent spectacles 
 the better. If, on the contrary, they can manage 
 to descry it, and, proceeding some five or six fur- 
 longs through the avenue, will ring at the Lodge- 
 gate they cannot mistake the stone lion with 
 the Ingoldsby escutcheon (Ermine, a saltire en- 
 grained Gules) in his paws they will be received 
 with a hearty old English welcome." 
 
 Let us, then, proceed along the Folkestone Road, 
 with the Oxenden plantations now grown into 
 dense woods of larch and pine on the right. 
 Wayfarers are scarce, and the lovely scenery of 
 Broome Park and the road into Denton is quite 
 solitary. A ladder-stile leaps the rustic fence, birds 
 chatter and quarrel in the trees, but as you come 
 into the hamlet of Denton, it is, in its quaint old- 
 world appearance and apparent emptiness, like some 
 stage scene with the actors called off. Denton is 
 a triangular strip of village green, surrounded by 
 picturesque cottages, and with the old sign of 
 the " Red Lion " inn planted romantically in the 
 centre. Beyond it comes Denton Court, screened 
 from the road by its timbered park, with Denton 
 Chapel close by. Of this you may read in the 
 Legends ; but those who, relying too implicitly upon
 
 I 
 
 z 
 
 a
 
 TAPPINGTON HALL 71 
 
 Barham's statements, seek the brass of the Lady 
 Rohesia, with the inscription 
 
 " Bpraie for je aotole of ge Hafcp 
 
 lor alle Christen aotolcs " 
 
 will be doomed to disappointment, for it is one of 
 his picturesque embellishments upon fact. 
 
 Denton Chapel is a building of the smallest 
 dimensions, belonging to the Early English and later 
 periods, but not distinguished by many mouldings 
 or other features by which the date of a building 
 is most readily to be fixed. It consists only of a 
 nave and a plain tower ; but on the north wall, 
 beside the pulpit, there is a sculptured stone which 
 may arouse the curiosity of the passing architect. 
 It is probably a dedication cross, but the incised 
 letters upon it have hitherto baffled elucidation.
 
 72 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 More amusing, perhaps, is the colony of white 
 owls which haunt the chapel, and from their perch 
 on the beams above the chancel deposit upon the 
 altar unmistakable evidence of their visits. 
 
 And now we come to Tappington. The valley 
 opens wide, and on either side of it climb gently- 
 rising hills clothed with thin woods, the Folkestone 
 Road ascending the shoulder of the hills to the left. 
 From it we look down upon a beautiful flat expanse 
 of meadow-land ; but no lodge-gate, no stone lions, 
 no avenue, and certainly not the slightest trace of 
 a park nor of a grand manor house can be seen. 
 Only an old farmstead, half-smothered in ivy and 
 creepers, is seen, in midst of the open meadow. It 
 is a dream of rustic beauty, but it is not the 
 manor house of Barham's vivid fancy and pictur- 
 esque pen. If, however, the rich details with which 
 he clothed the old farm buildings of Tappington are 
 lacking, it yet remains of absorbing interest, quite 
 apart from the literary memories it embodies. The 
 old house, and the remains of a former grandeur 
 still visible in the half-obliterated foundations of 
 demolished buildings, attract attention. There it 
 stands, a squat building of mellowed red brick, 
 crossed and recrossed with timbering. Its rust-red 
 roof is bowed and bent, and, in place of the clustered 
 chimneys of fiction, one short and stout chimney 
 springs from the centre of the roof-ridge, while 
 another crowns the gable-end. In the meadow are 
 traces of an old well which, before the greater part 
 of Tappington Manor House was, at some unknown 
 period, pulled down, stood in a quadrangle formed 
 by a great range of buildings. Creepers and ivy 
 clothe the front of the old house, and a garden,
 
 74 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 full of all manner of old-fashioned flowers, extends 
 on either side of the entrance. 
 
 The interior is of more interest than might be 
 supposed from a glance at the outside. A magnifi- 
 cent old carved-oak staircase conducts upstairs from 
 the lower rooms, and on the walls hang portraits 
 old portraits indeed, but quite fictitiously said to 
 be Ingoldsbys, and in fact derived by some later 
 owner of the property from Wardour Street, or other 
 such ready source, where not merely Ingoldsbys, but 
 ancestors of every kind, are procurable on demand. 
 One, with an armorial shield and the name of 
 " Stephen Ingoldsby " painted on it, glowers sourly 
 from the topmost stair, where the blood-stained 
 flooring still bears witness to an extraordinary 
 fratricide committed here two hundred and fifty 
 years ago. 
 
 It is quite remarkable that, while Barham invented 
 and transmuted legends that had Tappington for 
 their centre, he never alluded 
 to this genuine tragedy. It 
 seems, then, that when all 
 England was divided between 
 the partisans of King and 
 Commons, and Charles and 
 his Parliament were turning 
 families one against the other, 
 Tappington Manor House was 
 inhabited by two brothers, de- 
 scendants of that "Thomas 
 Marsh of Marston" who is 
 the hero of that prose legend, 
 " The Leech of Folkestone," and whose merchant' s- 
 mark is still to be seen here, carved on the newel 
 
 THE-MERCHANT'S-MARK" 
 MARSH OF
 
 TAPPINGTON HALL 75 
 
 of the great staircase. These two brothers had 
 taken different sides in the struggle then going 
 on, and quarrelled so bitterly that they agreed never 
 to speak to one another, living actually in different 
 parts of the then much larger house, and only using 
 this staircase in common as they retired to or 
 descended from their particular apartments. 
 
 One night, by evil chance, they met upon the 
 stairs. None knew what passed between them, or 
 whether black looks or bitter words were exchanged ; 
 but as the Cavalier passed, his Puritan brother drew 
 a dagger and stabbed him in the back. He fell, 
 and died on the spot, and the stains of his blood 
 are there to this day visible, indubitably, to one's 
 own physical eyes. 
 
 The good people farming folks from Westmore- 
 land who lately occupied the house, showed the 
 stranger these stains, outside what is known as the. 
 bedroom of " Bad Sir Giles," who, to quote " The 
 Spectre of Tappington," "had been a former proprietor 
 in the days of Elizabeth. Many a dark and dismal 
 tradition is yet extant of the licentiousness of his life 
 and the enormity of his offences. The Glen, which 
 the keeper's daughter was seen to enter, but never 
 known to quit, still frowns darkly as of yore ; while 
 an ineradicable blood-stain on the oaken stair yet 
 bids defiance to the united energies of soap and sand. 
 But it is with one particular apartment that a deed 
 of more especial atrocity is said to be connected. A 
 stranger guest so runs the legend arrived unex- 
 pectedly at the mansion of the ' Bad Sir Giles.' 
 They met in apparent friendship ; but the ill-con- 
 cealed scowl on their master's brow told the 
 domestics that the visit was not a welcome one."
 
 76 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Next morning, the stranger was found dead in his 
 bed, with marks of violence on his body. He was 
 buried in Denton churchyard, on the other side of 
 the highway to Folkestone. For the rest of the 
 tale, and how the spectre was supposed to have pur- 
 loined Lieutenant Seaforth's breeches, the Ingoldsby 
 Legends themselves must be consulted. 
 
 Tappington has again passed away from the 
 Barhams. Ingoldsby's son, the Reverend Richard 
 Harris Dal ton Barham, Vicar of Lol worth, 
 Cambridgeshire, resigned that living in 1876, and 
 retired to Dawlish, South Devon, where he died in 
 1886 ; but considerably earlier than that date he had 
 agreed, having no children, to sell the property and 
 divide the proceeds with his two sisters. This was 
 accordingly done. 
 
 Although the scenery is so sweetly beautiful, the 
 soil is said to be very poor mostly unfertile red 
 earth, mixed with great quantities of flints, the rest 
 chalk. A great extent of the property is still 
 coppice and scrub wood. An advertisement of 1 8 90, 
 offering the place to be let, is interesting : 
 
 FARM. KENT. Tappington Everard, Denton, near 
 Canterbury, comprising Homestead, with Picturesque 
 Residence (formerly occupied by the Rev. R. H. Barham, 
 author of the Ingoldsby Legends} and about 245 Acres of 
 Land, of which 144 Acres are Pasture, and 101 Acres 
 Arable. Rent ^220. Early possession may be had. 
 For terms and further particulars apply to Messrs. 
 Worsfold & Hayward, Land Agents, Dover, and 80, 
 Cannon Street, London, E.G.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 
 
 THE scene now changes to Komney Marsh. It 
 was in 1817, in his twenty-ninth year, that Barham 
 came to this recondite region, the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury having collated him to the rectory of 
 Snargate, with which went at that time, by some 
 mysterious ecclesiastical jugglery that does not 
 concern us, the curacy of the parish of Warchorne. 
 He lived by preference there, rather than in the 
 malarious marsh itself, at Snargate, and thus 
 the vicarage house that stands, amid a recent 
 melancholy plantation of larches, to the left of the 
 road on entering the village, has its interest, for 
 we may suppose that in it he lived, although, to 
 be sure, it has undergone alterations, and its stuccoed 
 abominations and feeble attempts at Gothic design 
 must be later than his day. It is a disappointing 
 house to the literary pilgrim who loves his Barham 
 gaunt and dismal-looking as you pass it ; but 
 the site is interesting, for we must by no means 
 forget that it was here, driven to it by the 
 weariness of being confined to the house after 
 breaking his leg in a gig accident, in 1819, 
 that he turned to literary composition. A novel 
 called Baldwin was the result. It was published 
 
 77
 
 78 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 anonymously, and was not nor, as a perusal of 
 it satisfies one, did it deserve to be a success. He 
 was only serving his apprenticeship to letters, and 
 had not yet discovered himself. That he speedily 
 improved upon this first effort becomes evident 
 in his succeeding work, begun immediately after the 
 completion of the first. This, partly written here, 
 was the novel of My Cousin Nicholas, a work of 
 splendid and rollicking humour now undeservedly 
 forgotten. Before he had finished the manuscript 
 a change came over his professional prospects, for 
 in 1821 he was induced to apply for a minor 
 canonry of St. Paul's Cathedral, and when, to his 
 surprise, he was elected, removed to London, and 
 neither Warehorne nor Snargate knew him any more. 
 Those who make this pilgrimage will think his 
 unbounded joy at leaving his country cure perhaps 
 a little indecent : 
 
 Oh, I'll be off ! I will, by Jove ! 
 
 No more by purling streams I'll ramble, 
 Through dirty lanes no longer rove, 
 
 Bemired, and scratched by briar and bramble. 
 
 He was eager for London, and preferment. 
 
 As for Warehorne itself, it is one of those smallest 
 of villages with the biggest of churches which give 
 the stranger the alternatives of supposing either 
 that it has decayed from some former prosperity 
 or that the piety of whoever built the big church 
 outran his discretion. Perhaps he who originally 
 built it was a sinner of more than usual calibre, the 
 magnitude of whose misdeeds is thus feebly reflected 
 to after ages in this architectural expiation. It is a 
 thought of one's very own, but essentially Barhamesque
 
 80 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 so imbued with the spirit of the master does the 
 pilgrim become. But at any rate, if the original 
 portions of the church be Norman and Early 
 English, the great heavy tower of dull red brick is 
 commonplace eighteenth century, and owes nothing to 
 ideas of vicarious atonement, which were not pre- 
 valent at the time of its building. " Commonplace " 
 I have called it, and so indeed it is, and unimagina- 
 tive to boot, but that is not to deny the impressive- 
 ness it gives the view. It has quite the right tone 
 for the grim place, overhanging the mist-laden, sad- 
 faced marsh, and the trees that have grown up 
 around it have in some freakish sympathetic mood 
 grown in quite the proper dramatic way. There 
 they slant across the sky, the sweeping poplars ; there 
 between them you can glimpse the churchyard yews ; 
 and there, I doubt not, the least imaginative can 
 picture the smugglers of Romney Marsh topping 
 the rise, each one with a couple of brandy-tubs across 
 his shoulders. Nay, to go further a mental 
 excursion for which we have due warranty in the 
 authentic published records of Barham's own resi- 
 dence here we may perceive the rector of Snargate 
 coming home o' nights to wife and children at 
 Warehorne rectory, and meeting on the way, in the 
 dark, those self-same free-traders. " Stand ! " they 
 cry ; and then, with relief, " It's only parson ! 
 Good-night t'ye, sir ! " Had it been someone else, 
 say a preventive man, they would have knocked 
 him senseless to the ground, as the mildest measure 
 they could afford. 
 
 Here, down a curving and suddenly descending 
 road, we came unexpectedly to a railway and its closed 
 level-crossing gates, a surprising encounter in
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 
 
 81 
 
 these wilds. It is the Ashford to Rye branch of the 
 South-Eastern or more grandiloquently, since its 
 alliance with the London, Chatham and Dover, 
 the " Great Southern " Railway : great, they say, in 
 nothing but its charges and delays. 
 
 Warehorne, to the backward view from the foot 
 of this descent, looks another place its church, seen 
 
 A SUNDIAL, WAREHORNE CHURCH. 
 
 to be really on a heigh' surrounded by apple 
 orchards. 
 
 No sooner is the level crossing passed than we 
 are come to a bridge spanning a broad waterway 
 running right and left. This marks our advent 
 upon Romney Marsh, for here is the famous Royal 
 Military Canal, a national defence that has never 
 been called on to prove its usefulness, and has ever 
 been, since its projection and execution in 1805, the 
 subject of much satire at the expense of the military 
 
 6
 
 82 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 engineers who designed and constructed, and the 
 Government that authorised it. 
 
 The origin of the canal is found in the natuially 
 open condition of this coast, and in the old fears of 
 
 WAREHORNE. 
 
 invasion, not so long since dead ; for there are still 
 those who vividly recollect such alarms even in the 
 reign of Napoleon III. 
 
 The long range of the south coast between 
 Eastbourne and Folkestone a stretch of, roughly, 
 fifty miles is remarkable for the low sandy or 
 shingly shores that offer easy landing for boats. 
 The smugglers, during many centuries, found the 
 beaches of Dymchurch, the marshes of Winchelsea, 
 Rye, and Romney, places exactly fitted to the
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 83 
 
 needs of their shy midnight business, and it has 
 always been seen that the landing of a foreign 
 foe could most readily be effected by an invading 
 force on these low sand spits and shingly promon- 
 tories assuming the simultaneous absence of our 
 fleet and the presence of a dead calm. Lying 
 directly opposite France, whose coast can, under 
 favourable conditions, be seen, now like a grey 
 cloud, and again, when sunshine strikes the distant 
 cliffs, gleaming white, the unprotected state of the 
 Kent and Sussex littoral has always occasioned 
 much Uneasiness in times of war or rumours of 
 war. It has never been forgotten that Cassar 
 landed at Deal, or that William the Norman came 
 ashore at Pevensey, and those hoary historical 
 lessons have served to afflict many statesmen with 
 nightmares, away from the time when Henry VIII., 
 in 1539, built his squat castles and potbellied 
 bastions at Sandown, Deal, Sandgate, and Walmer, 
 in fear of a Continental combination against him, 
 and personally saw that they were well and truly 
 built ; down to the years of Napoleon's threatened 
 descent, when the Military Canal was dug and the 
 long line of Martello towers built. What says 
 Ingoldsby of the canal ? Why, this : 
 
 "When the late Mr. Pitt was determined to 
 keep out Buonaparte and prevent his gaining a 
 settlement in the county of Kent, among other 
 ingenious devices adopted for that purpose he 
 caused to be constructed what was then, and has 
 ever since been conventionally termed, a ' Military 
 Canal.' This is a not very practicable ditch, some 
 thirty feet wide and nearly nine feet deep in the 
 middle, extending from the town and port of
 
 84 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Hythe to within a mile of the town and port of 
 Rye, a distance of about twenty miles, and forming, 
 as it were, the end of a bow, the arc of which 
 constitutes that remote fifth quarter of the globe, 
 Romney Marsh, spoken of by travellers. Trivial 
 objections to the plan were made at the time by 
 cavillers; an old gentleman of the neighbourhood, 
 
 THE ROYAL MILITARY CANAL, AT WAREHORNE. 
 
 who proposed, as a cheap substitute, to put down 
 his own cocked-hat upon a pole, was deservedly 
 pooh-pooh'd down ; in fact, the job, though rather 
 an expensive one, was found to answer remarkably 
 well. The French managed, indeed, to scramble 
 over the Rhine and the Rhone, and other insignifi- 
 cant currents ; but they never did, or could, pass 
 Mr. Pitt's < Military Canal/ "
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 85 
 
 Satire is writ large, in a fine bold Roman hand, 
 over that description of the Military Canal, is it 
 not ? and really, the difficulty of outflanking, or 
 even of overpassing, this insignificant waterway 
 would have been small had Napoleon ever set forth 
 from Boulogne. But he never did, and so its 
 defensible properties remain only x. One thing 
 it does do most thoroughly : being dug at the 
 foot of the ground falling to the levels, it sets 
 visible limits and bounds to the marshland, and 
 in a striking manner makes you understand that 
 here you are come into another and strange region. 
 From Hythe, under those earthy clifflets it goes 
 by way of Lympne, Hurst, Bonnington, Bilsington, 
 Ruckinge, Warehorne, and Appledore, and thence 
 to within hail of Rye, and is nowadays a most 
 picturesque object. The word " canal " does by no 
 means accord it justice. You picture a straight- 
 cut stretch of water, yellow and malodorous, with 
 barges slowly voyaging along, the bargees smoking 
 rank shag and indulging in ranker language ; but 
 that is quite unlike this defence of Old England. 
 It is not straight, its waters are clean, there are not 
 any barges ; but there are overhanging trees, 
 clusters of bulrushes, strange water-plants, and an 
 abundance of wild life along its solitary way. 
 Before railways were, and when even the few roads 
 of the marsh were almost impassable, the canal 
 was very useful to the inhabitants of the district, 
 when goods came and went along it by packet- 
 boats ; but they have long since ceased to ply. So 
 long since as 1867 it was proposed to sell 
 this obsolete defence to a projected railway company, 
 but it escaped that fate.
 
 86 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 They are chiefly beech-trees that line the banks, 
 generally on the inner side, where the heavy raised 
 earthworks and the corresponding ditch for 
 defenders are still very prominent. 
 
 We are introduced to the Marshland at the 
 beginning of the prose legend, "The Leech of 
 Folkestone." " The world," we are told, " 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 favour- 
 able, i.e. stormy, seasons, weathering Dungeness 
 Point in an eggshell, or careering on her broomstick 
 over Dymchurch Wall. A cow may yet be some- 
 times seen galloping like mad, with tail erect, and 
 an old pair of breeches on her horns, an unerring 
 guide to the door of the crone whose magic arts 
 have drained her udder*." 
 
 This "recondite region," as he very happily 
 calls it, is still, sixty years after the description 
 was written, a peculiar and eerie tract. Among 
 the most readily defined of districts, Romney Marsh 
 proper extends from Hythe on the east, along the 
 coast to New Romney, in a south-westerly direction, 
 and is bounded by the high-road between that 
 town and Snargate on the north-west ; the circuit 
 being completed by the line of the Royal Military 
 Canal. Other marshes, indistinguishable by the eye 
 from that of Romney, extend westward and up to 
 and beyond Rye and the river Rother, across 
 the border from Kent into Sussex. These are, 
 severally, Dunge Marsh, Walling Marsh, and 
 Guildford Level. 
 
 Romney Marsh obtains its name from the Anglo-
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 87 
 
 Saxon Ruimn-ea, the marshy water the same root- 
 word which gave Ramsgate its original name of 
 Ruims-geat. We do not know by what name the 
 Romans knew the district ; but it is quite certain 
 that when they came to Britain, and for two centuries 
 later, the area now covered with pastures and 
 scattered hamlets was a great lagoon, fed by the 
 rivers Rother and Limen and the many landsprings 
 that even in these comparatively arid times gush 
 from the ragged edge of the high ground between 
 Hythe and Warehorne. With every flood tide, 
 the sea mixed its salt waters with the fresh brought 
 down by the rivers, which at the ebb flowed out 
 into the sea at a point where, now nearly four miles 
 inland, the tiny village of Old Romney is seen, 
 standing on its almost imperceptible hillock. The 
 Rother, now a very insignificant stream, was diverted 
 from its old course by the terrible storm of 1280, 
 and now seeks the sea at Rye, and the Limen has 
 long been a mere brook ; but when the Romans 
 established themselves here, those river-channels were 
 broad enough and deep enough to afford safe passage 
 for the vessels of that time, and the anchorage 
 within the great shingle-bank that then protected 
 the lagoon from where Hythe now stands to New 
 Romney was by far the best and safest on this 
 coast. It is difficult at first to fully grasp these great 
 changes that have so altered the appearance of this 
 great tract of country within the historic period ; 
 but, once understood, they make a fascinating study 
 and give the marsh a deeper interest. Then only 
 is it possible to reconstruct the forgotten scene : the 
 calm waters of the magnificent harbour stretching 
 away for miles, to the densely wooded slopes of
 
 88 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Ruckinge, Bonnington, and Hurst, where the oaks 
 and the brushwood were mirrored in the shallow 
 reaches, and the clustered vessels could be seen 
 anchored in the fairway. 
 
 At the remotest end of this lake, where Lympne 
 and Studfall Castle are now, were the harbour and 
 fortress of Port as Lemanis, taking their name from 
 the river Limen, and forming perhaps the chief 
 commercial port of that time, just as Rutupium and 
 Regulbium were the military and naval stations. 
 From that point ran a road, straight as though 
 measured by a ruler, fourteen miles inland, across 
 country, to the Roman station and town of Duro- 
 vernum : the lonely road now marked on the map 
 as " Stone Street " ; the station that city we now 
 know as Canterbury. 
 
 At some late period in the Roman domination 
 this magnificent harbour was found to be silting 
 up. Many things have changed since those remote 
 days, but the prevailing winds and the general set 
 of the sea-currents in the Channel remain unaltered. 
 Even then the westerly gales and the march of the 
 shingle from west to east were altering the geography 
 of this coast, just as they are active in doing now, 
 adding, as they do in every year great deposits of 
 shingle to that projecting beak of Dungeness which 
 was not in existence in the Roman era. 
 
 The consternation of the merchants and the 
 shipping interest of Portus Lemanis at this gradual 
 silting up of the harbour must have been great, 
 but we know nothing of it, nor of the measures that 
 must needs have been taken to prevent it. Probably 
 it was the clearing of the wooded inland country 
 that caused these changes, quite as much as the set
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 89 
 
 of the shingle ; for it was the dense woods that gave 
 the Rother and the Limen their once robust exist- 
 ence, and when they were cut down and the 
 moisture they generated was lost, those rivers would 
 lose that strength of current necessary to scour away 
 the shingly bars that began to accumulate in the 
 estuaries. The mischief was, of course, long in the 
 doing, and probably two hundred years passed before 
 it was seen that the harbour and the port were 
 doomed. 
 
 When that fact became at last impressed upon 
 the Romans, they altered their policy. Ceasing any 
 attempt they had made to keep the waterway open, 
 they allied their efforts to the forces of nature, 
 and, building walls to keep the sea out and the 
 rivers within their courses, began that sustained 
 work which has at last, after some sixteen hundred 
 years, made Romney Marsh what we now see it. 
 It was they who first built upon the shingle where 
 Dymchurch Wall now keeps the sea at bay, and 
 their work was the " Rhee Wall " the rivi vallum 
 of their language that, running from Appledore 
 to Romney, kept the fresh water out of the land 
 it was now their earnest endeavour to reclaim. 
 Portus Lemanis, of course, was ruined, but, equally 
 of course, not at once. How rarely does one 
 actually picture the real length of the Roman stay 
 in Britain, which actually comprised over four 
 hundred years ; or, to put it in a picturesque 
 comparison, a period of time equal to that between 
 our own day and the reign of Henry VIII. 
 For half of their colonial period say from a time 
 corresponding to that between the reign of Queen 
 Anne and that of Edward VII, they were engaged
 
 90 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 in enclosing and draining the marsh, and there must 
 have been ample time for the inhabitants of Portus 
 Lemanis to realise the position. Did the Roman 
 scheme, we wonder, allow them compensation ? 
 
 By the time that their empire fell to pieces, and 
 their troops and colonists were withdrawn from 
 Britain, they had succeeded by degrees in altering 
 this scene into a bog, and then into fenced-off 
 enclosures intersected with drains and having a 
 great reedy expanse of lake in the centre, where the 
 wild fowl nested in myriads. Something very like 
 this scene, although on a smaller scale, may now be 
 observed at Slapton Sands, between Dartmouth and 
 Torcross in South Devon, where a shingle bank 
 divides the scene from a long length of a freshwater 
 lake, choked with aquatic plants and teeming with 
 wild life. 
 
 This scene of reclamation must have reverted to 
 a very wild condition in the savage centuries after 
 the Romans had left, and we hear nothing of any 
 further works until the eighth century, when the 
 monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, were granted 
 the western portion of the marsh, and reclaimed 
 much of it around New Romney. 
 
 It was somewhere about this period, when it was 
 difficult to convict a writer of untruth, that Nennius, 
 Abbot of Bangor, in his History of the Britons, told 
 his pleasant fable about Romney Marsh. His 
 imagination was not limited by his ever having 
 visited Kent, and so, sitting in the scriptorium at 
 Bangor, he could give his lively fancy full play. 
 He describes it as " the first marvel of Britain, for 
 in it are sixty islands, with men living in them. It 
 is girt by sixty rocks, and in every rock is an eagle's
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 91 
 
 (not a mare's) nest. And sixty rivers flow into it, 
 and yet there goes into the sea but one river, which 
 is called the Limen." For a series of picturesque 
 lies that would be difficult to beat, outside the 
 Arabian Nights, whose tales do not pretend to be 
 other than fiction. 
 
 It was by the efforts of the monastery of Christ 
 Church that the harbour of New Romney, two miles 
 farther down than the ancient Rother mouth, was 
 begun, and, in spite of Danish incursions and 
 frequent lapses into barbarism, the work went surely 
 forward, so that in the Norman period, the eleventh 
 and twelfth centuries, the marsh was grazing ground 
 for sheep, settled and prosperous, with numerous 
 villages and churches, whose Norman architecture 
 bears witness to the truth of history, as written in 
 dryasdust deeds and charters. 
 
 The Church derived a splendid profit from the 
 enterprise with which it had thus developed its 
 property. Fat fields yielded toll of rent and wool ; 
 the important harbour of New Romney collected 
 rich shipping dues. And then ! then befell a series 
 of the greatest tempests ever known on these 
 shores the storms of 1236, 1250, 1286, and 1334. 
 The first two wrought much havoc, but the great 
 February storm of 1286 was the worst, when the 
 wind and the sea choked up the harbour with 
 shingle and diverted the course of the Rother, and, 
 tearing down the sea-defences, lay the hardly-won 
 lands once more under salt water. This crowning 
 disaster paralysed all effort. Only by degrees, 
 and unaided, did the waters subside. The un- 
 fortunate inhabitants had lost all ; many lost their 
 lives ; the port of Romney was crippled. Tradition
 
 92 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 even goes so far as to tell how fifty-two thousand 
 persons were drowned in a tidal wave. Worst of 
 all, the great monastery of Christ Church, ruled 
 at that time by men more grasping than enter- 
 prising, expended nothing to make those misfortunes 
 lighter. The port and harbour of New Romney, 
 in especial, brought into flourishing existence by 
 the statesmanlike policy of the early churchmen, 
 was ruined by the later, who at this hour of need 
 treated it merely as a source of revenue, and refused 
 to undertake those works which, embarked upon 
 in time, might have preserved its importance. 
 Great shingle-banks filled the harbour entrance, and 
 only the smallest vessels could enter. So affairs 
 remained, the townsfolk feebly delving and 
 clearing the obstructions, unaided, for close upon 
 half a century, when the furious storm of 1334 
 undid all their work and finally crushed their spirit 
 of resistance. At this time, also, the district was 
 exposed to foreign attack. 
 
 Thus it was that, in the reign of Edward IV., 
 the marsh was, for its better government and to 
 induce settlement and reclamation of the drowned 
 lands, placed under the control of the bailiff and 
 jurats appointed by the charter of February 23rd, 
 1461. In the introduction to this measure, the 
 marsh was declared to be "much deserted, owing 
 to the danger resulting from foreign invasion 
 and to the unwholesomeness of the soil and situa- 
 tion." To support that statement, and to show that 
 this scheme was not altogether successful, comes 
 the very interesting description by Lambarde, who, 
 a hundred years later, says, "The place hath in 
 it sundry villages, although not thick set, nor much
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 93 
 
 inhabited, because it is Hyeme malus, Aestate molestus^ 
 Nunquam bonus Evill in winter, grievous in 
 summer, and never good " ; or, in the once familiar 
 Kentish phrase, the marsh provided " wealth with- 
 out health," good grass but unwholesome air. 
 
 Freed from the paralysing ownership of the 
 Church, on the Reformation an effort was made 
 to encourage settlers in this almost deserted region 
 by granting those who held land within its limits 
 freedom from many of those imposts with in- 
 comprehensible names that must have made the 
 lot of mediaeval taxpayers unhappy. "Toll and 
 tare," "scot and lot," "fifteen and subsidy," were 
 the particular extortions excused to these adven- 
 turous persons, and to quote Lambarde again, " so 
 many other charges as I suppose no one place 
 within the Realm hath. All which was done (as 
 it appeareth in the Charter itself) to allure men 
 to inhabit the Marsh which they had before 
 abandoned, partly for the unwholesomeness of the 
 soil, and partly for fear of the enemie, which had 
 often brent and spoyled them." 
 
 These inducements did not have much effect, 
 for although many taxes were remitted, there was 
 still that special local tax levied to provide funds 
 for keeping the sea defences in repair, and that 
 alone was, and still remains, a heavy burden on 
 the land. Thus many of the deserted villages of 
 the marsh were never re-populated, as we may 
 still see in the ruined churches and waste sites in 
 its midst. 
 
 But the marsh was not wholly devoid of popula- 
 tion. As the waters subsided and grass grew again, 
 so the flocks increased ; and the ancient trade of
 
 94 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 smuggling, which began in the time of Edward I. 
 in the illegal exportation of wool, flourished all the 
 more from this being a lonely district in which 
 it was difficult for strangers to find their way. 
 This, the first phase in the long and varied history 
 of smuggling, was then known as " owling," and 
 the dangerous trade at once enlisted men fully 
 as courageous and desperate as those who, in later 
 ages, when lace, tea, tobacco, and brandy were the 
 chief items in the contraband industry, terrorised 
 the countryside and warred with the preventive 
 service in many a midnight skirmish. " Owling " 
 took its name from the signal-calls of the smugglers 
 to one another on black and moonless nights. They 
 imitated the weird shrieks of those nocturnal birds, 
 and never was such a place for owls as Romney 
 Marsh in the brave times of contraband. 
 
 The exportation of wool was at first only 
 taxed, but later was entirely prohibited. The 
 object aimed at in depriving the Continent of 
 wool was the extinction of the foreign weaving 
 industries, and the establishment of the clothing 
 trade in this country. To insure the fleeces not 
 being shipped abroad by men eager for personal 
 gain and indifferent to patriotism or national policy, 
 the taxes on bales varied from twenty to forty 
 shillings in the reign of Edward I., but exportation 
 was wholly forbidden by Edward III., whose Queen 
 ardently desired to introduce colonies of Flemish 
 weavers to use our home-grown wool within these 
 shores. Punishments ranging from death down to 
 mutilation of ears or hands were provided for those 
 who infringed this severe law, but these penalties had 
 few terrors for the marshfolk, secure in their boggy
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 95 
 
 fastnesses. The marsh produced some wool, and 
 the inland districts a great deal more, and every 
 shearing season, impudently flaunting all laws and 
 prohibitions, long lines of pack-horses, laden with 
 woolpacks, found their way to New Romney and 
 quiet places along this coast, on their way to 
 France. For every new restrictive amendment of 
 the laws the smuggling exporters of wool had an 
 ingenious evasion, and so the contest went on for 
 centuries. The law was the more successfully 
 outwitted and defied because the landowners and 
 every rural class were financially interested in the 
 illegal trade. Although, as a special effort against 
 wool leaving the country, shearers were at last 
 required to shear only at certain specified times, 
 and to register the number of fleeces, this provision 
 was openly broken. In 1698 it was enacted that 
 no man living within fifteen miles of the sea in 
 Kent or Sussex should buy any wool, unless he 
 entered into sureties that none of what he bought 
 should be sold to any person within fifteen miles 
 of the coast ; and wool-growers were required to 
 account for the number of fleeces they owned, and 
 state the places where they were stored. But 
 legislators might have saved themselves the trouble, 
 for it was calculated that forty thousand packs of 
 wool continued to be illegally conveyed annually to 
 Calais. The Devil might as reasonably be expected 
 to reprove sin as the local magistrates and persons 
 in authority to suppress the lucrative trade in which 
 they waxed rich. 
 
 Under such circumstances, the officials who were 
 entrusted with the administration of these laws 
 led a very hard life. They were the Ishmaels
 
 96 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 against whom every man's hand was raised, and the 
 more strictly they performed their duty, by so much 
 more were they hated. One striking incident has 
 survived out of many such that must have happened. 
 The mounted excise officers who in 1694 patrolled 
 the district made a capture of ten men escorting a 
 large pack-horse train of wool-bales to some pushing- 
 off place for France, and haled them before his wor- 
 ship the Mayor of New Romney. Sworn informa- 
 tion and due process of law were followed, and Mr. 
 Mayor was desired to commit the captives to prison. 
 Instead of doing so, he strained his discretionary 
 powers to the utmost, and admitted them to bail. 
 Possibly he had an interest in that very consignment 
 thus put under embargo, or at the very least of it 
 claimed friendship with, or was under neighbourly 
 or business obligations to those to whom it did 
 belong so thoroughly bound up with smuggling 
 was every detail of trade and intercourse in the 
 marsh. This admission of the whole gang to bail 
 was but the second act of the comedy, of which the 
 seizure was the first, and it was followed by another, 
 and a more stirring one. During the night the 
 furious populace of Romney burst in upon the 
 Revenue men, and so threatened them with violence 
 that the Mayor's son advised them, in God's name, 
 begone, lest worse befell. 
 
 Most excellent advice, and they take it. Half- 
 dressed, and flinging themselves upon their horses 
 in haste, they ride out of Romney with the whole 
 town after them, and the town's pots and kettles 
 hurtling in the air after pursued and pursuers alike, 
 Jacob Rawlings, as good a freetrader as anyone, and 
 hating an Exciseman as he ought to hate the Devil,
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 97 
 
 is downed by a saucepan intended for a King's 
 officer ; Nehemiah Crutwell, who thinks good wool 
 ought never to be taxed, has got a cut in the cheek 
 from a brass skillet, flung with uncertain aim ; the 
 sconce of another is cracked by a broomstick in- 
 tended for the crupper of one of the horses. Off 
 they go into the night, pursued by fifty armed 
 men, vowing death and destruction, and not until 
 they have floundered across Guildford Level, and 
 are come to Camber Point and Sussex, do their 
 enemies draw off".
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 ROMNEY MARSH (continued') 
 
 THERE is no fault to be found with the present 
 condition of the road that leads from Warehorne 
 to Snargate. It winds amazingly, but the surface 
 is good and the width sufficient to keep the most 
 inexpert drivers of traps or riders of cycles from 
 steering into the black dykes that line it. Far 
 otherwise, however, is it with the tracks that branch 
 off boldly here and there and lure the unwary into 
 extraordinary remotenesses where the guide-book 
 measurements and acreage of the marsh seem a 
 mockery, and its limits recede with every step. 
 Lonely cottages, where the " lookers," or shepherds, 
 or the dykers live, are passed at infrequent intervals, 
 each one a forbidding box of dull brick, with its 
 generally unkempt garden and numerous chickens, 
 and its great pile of faggots or brushwood for 
 winter's firing. In this wilderness may be found 
 many of those deserted sites already mentioned ; 
 the shapeless walls of ruined churches alone telling 
 silently of the great flood and the drowned villages. 
 Eastbridge Chapel, Orgarswick, Blackmanstone, and 
 Hope Chapel are the chief of these. Newchurch 
 and Ivychurch are striking exceptions to this old 
 tale of destruction. They belong to the same 
 
 9 s
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 99 
 
 Early English period, with later additions, and are 
 large, handsome structures. Standing on ground 
 rising ever so slightly higher than the sites of their 
 unfortunate neighbours, they escaped destruction, 
 to tell us how well, and on how grand a scale 
 they builded who first brought the marsh under 
 cultivation. 
 
 Romney Marsh is still so greatly in a state of 
 nature that the black-headed gull breeds freely in 
 its reedy dykes, although, to be sure, the demand 
 for plovers' eggs causes much havoc to be wrought 
 among its nests by denizens of the neighbourhood, 
 who earn a very excellent livelihood by supplying 
 London poulterers. The simple native and the honest 
 poulterer both do very well, and so long as the 
 London consumer of expensive " plover's " eggs 
 knows no better, why, no harm is done. 
 
 Snargate stands on that fine, straight, broad, and 
 level road from Appledore to New Romney which 
 bears the strongest evidence of having once been 
 a raised causeway across the morasses, and is in fact 
 identical with the Rhee Wall, already mentioned 
 as having been built by the Romans to keep out 
 the river Rother. " Snargate " was originally the 
 name given to a sluice from the marsh into the river 
 at this point. An inn, the church, a few old 
 cottages, the vicarage that is now the sum-total 
 of Snargate, whose flint and stone battlemented 
 church-tower peeps over the surrounding trees, and 
 forms a pretty picture for a great distance down 
 the long perspective of the road. A near approach 
 shows it to be not only surrounded with trees, but 
 hemmed in by them, and so closely that they obscure 
 the light from the plain, leaded casement windows,
 
 too THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and cast a green, mildewy, fungoid shade over all. 
 Great gloomy churchyard yews, planted, perhaps, by 
 the first church-builders, grow at close quarters and 
 carpet the ground with thick and vivid moss, and 
 two giant trees that look like pollard beeches, but 
 on closer inspection are seen to be ashes, stand 
 sentinel by the south porch, and lift eerie phalangin- 
 ous branches dramatically upright. 
 
 It is a fine old church, built in the graceful Early 
 
 SNARGATE. 
 
 English style, and on quite a large scale ; but now 
 uncared for and horribly damp. When, having 
 obtained the keys, you swing back the groaning 
 door, the reek of the dampness smites you coldly 
 in the face, and the odour of it produces a sneeze 
 that goes hollowly reverberating up and down the 
 mildewed interior. Emptiness and damp are the 
 interior characteristics of Snargate church its pave- 
 ments slimy with moisture, the walls alternately 
 livid and green with it. It is not surprising that 
 Barham preferred to live at Warehorne.
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 101 
 
 Brenzett village is larger and livelier than Snargate. 
 From it Brookland, Ivychurch, and Newchurch are 
 most easily reached the first, on the right-hand 
 side of this causeway road to New Romney, in 
 Walling Marsh ; the others to the left, in the Marsh 
 of Romney. Brookland is distant one mile from 
 the main road, on a by-way that, if you follow it 
 long enough, brings you dustily into Rye ; dustily, 
 because the traffic that resorts to Brookland station 
 cuts up the surface to an astonishing extent ; 
 astonishing, because that traffic is necessarily of 
 small dimensions, seeing that this is merely a branch 
 railway leading to the very verge and outer rim of 
 the world at Dungeness. An infallible sign of this 
 scarcity of road traffic is the action of the keeper 
 of the level crossing by the station, whom one 
 suspects to be also station-master, ticket-collector, 
 porter, and signalman combined. He touches his 
 hat to the passing tourist, and, glad to hear the 
 voice of a stranger, exchanges remarks on the weather. 
 
 From afar off, along the flat road, the whimsical 
 bell-tower of Brookland church rises, like some 
 strange portent. If the stranger has not heard of 
 it before, he speculates, perplexed, as to what it 
 can possibly be, for, seen in silhouette against the 
 sky, it presents the weirdest kind of outline. Imagine 
 three old-fashioned candle-extinguishers, placed one 
 upon the other, and you have that odd campanile 
 very closely imitated. It stands apart from the 
 church, is of massive oak framing, weatherboarded, 
 and thickly and most liberally tarred. The wildest 
 local legends exist, purporting to account for this 
 freak, the most specious of all telling how the builder 
 of the church finding he had lost by the contract,
 
 102 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 set this up in place of the stone tower originally 
 contemplated. The real reason for this detached 
 wooden belfry is found in the old-time nature of 
 the site, too waterlogged to be capable of giving 
 support to so heavy a structure as a stone tower. 
 A wicked old satirical allusion to this unusual 
 feature, still current in the village or perhaps 
 rather, considering its nature, in the surrounding 
 villages declares that when a bachelor and a maid 
 
 BROOKLAND. 
 
 are married in Brookland church, the belfry will leap 
 up and occupy a place on the roof. As marriages 
 here are not uncommon, and the belfry keeps its 
 place, this, it will be allowed, is a grievous saying. 
 An old writer, with a naive assumption of innocence, 
 noting this example of local humour, pretends not 
 to understand the libellous gibe. " What it doth 
 portend," he remarks, " I know not." He should 
 have inquired, say, at Brenzett or, indeed, any- 
 where save at Brookland, whose inhabitants are still 
 touchy on the subject ; as well they may be, since
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 103 
 
 every passing stranger, posted in local lore, lets 
 off a joke or makes jocular inquiry. 
 
 Returning to the main road, a signpost directs 
 into the heart of Romney Marsh, by way of 
 Ivychurch and Newchurch. Ivychurch, whose tower 
 is dimly visible from the road in the soft atmosphere 
 of the marsh, is a mile and a half distant, and 
 stands as isolated from the world as a place well 
 may be and yet remain a " going concern." What 
 is there of Ivychurch ? A few farmsteads, a few 
 more cottages, an oast-house or so, a village inn, 
 and an amazingly large church. Apart from New 
 Romney church, which is that of a town and there- 
 fore not comparable with that of this rural parish, 
 the great church of Ivychurch is by far the largest 
 in the whole district, and fully deserves to be 
 called the Marshland Cathedral. It could accom- 
 modate, fifty times over, the present population 
 of the parish, and the irresistible inference is that 
 this must, six hundred years ago, when the great 
 church was built, have been the most densely 
 peopled region of the marsh. Nowadays, like 
 all its fellow churches, it is damp and mouldy 
 and a world too large. Nay, more : its vast 
 empty interior is falling into decay, and the north 
 aisle is made to serve the purpose of a coal-cellar ; 
 while, because the windows are broken, the wildfowl 
 of this " recondite region " have made it a favourite 
 roosting-place. It is an eerie experience, having 
 procured the keys and unlocked the door, to be 
 met with a tremendous whirring of wings, and to 
 be almost knocked down with the surprise of a 
 moorhen flying in one's face. Funds are accumu- 
 lating for a restoration of this church ; but, unless
 
 io 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the people come back to the land, why expend so 
 much good money ? Better were it that this should 
 go the way of the other ruined churches of the 
 marsh if there be none to worship. The wheel 
 of fortune, however, still turns. God grant the 
 time be at hand when the yellowing corn becomes 
 again that predominant feature in the landscape 
 
 IVYCHURCH. 
 
 it never has been in the eyes of the present genera- 
 tion ; that the farmer may again find his industry 
 pay, and we be no longer dependent upon the 
 foreigner for our food supplies. 
 
 But not even in the most prosperous agricultural 
 times has remote Ivychurch been a favourite residence 
 with its rectors, of whom the most famous in modern 
 times was that cleric-novelist, the Rev. G. R. Gleig,
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 
 
 105 
 
 Chaplain-General of the Forces. He was appointed to 
 Ivychurch in 1822, and held it until his death in 1 8 8 8 ; 
 and rarely in all that time did he pay the parish a visit. 
 An amusing tale is told in this connection, of Dr. Tait, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, visiting the marshland and, 
 coming to Ivychurch, holding the churchwardens in 
 conversation. "I trust," said the Archbishop, u you 
 have no fault to find with your rector." 
 
 NEWCHURCH, ON ROMNliT MARSH: "THIS RECONDITE REGION; THIS FIFTH 
 QUARTER OF THE GLOBE." 
 
 "Why," chorused those astonished office-holders, 
 " we ain't seed him for forty year ! " 
 
 " Ah ! " rejoined the Archbishop, who was not an 
 argumentative man, " you will find him very agree- 
 able when you do meet him ! " And he smiled away 
 the awkward situation in a ready manner, worthy of 
 the oleaginous and soapy Samuel Wilberforce himself. 
 
 Newchurch, nearly three miles farther into the 
 marsh, was new seven hundred years ago, when 
 the church was built. It is second only in size 
 to Ivychurch, with the same lichenous damp,
 
 io6 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 but better cared for, and the centre of a quite 
 considerable village, as villages go in these parts. 
 There must actually be sufficient inhabitants in the 
 parish to quarter fill the building ! Newchurch 
 makes a pretty picture, thoroughly characteristic of 
 the marsh. From it the eye ranges to the wooded 
 cliffs at Bilsington, to Aldington Knoll, and to 
 Lympne, with its castle and church, looking fairy- 
 like and ethereal in the shimmering light of a 
 summer afternoon ; or in the other direction to 
 where the marsh is bounded by the sea. The 
 picture of Newchurch itself is seen here, and is 
 more eloquent than mere words can be. In it 
 you perceive how this is an epitome of the marsh, 
 with windmill and rushy dyke in the foreground, 
 and farmsteads, rickyards and church, companion- 
 able together, and in appearance mutually dependent, 
 in middle distance : the infinite levels of this inter- 
 esting district appearing in the background. It is 
 not by mere chance or by any figment of literary 
 imagination that farms and church here look so 
 dependent upon one another. They actually were 
 so in the marsh, much more than is indicated by 
 that tithing of the unhappy farmer customary all 
 over the country. It was the Church, in the form 
 of the monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, that 
 originally reclaimed the marsh and brought it under 
 cultivation, and the Church was, by consequence, 
 landlord. Long years of patient labour had resulted 
 in winning these lands for agriculture, and the 
 monastery fully earned the profits it eventually 
 secured from its long-continued enterprise. Its piety 
 was of two kinds, of that practical sort which makes 
 two blades of grass grow where but one grew before,
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 107 
 
 and thus improves our temporal condition in this 
 vale of tears ; and of that spiritual and intellectual 
 variety which, having founded settlements for the 
 husbandmen, saw to it that his immortal as well 
 as his earthly part should have due sustenance. This 
 is no place to tell how in the course of centuries 
 that Church fell away from its high ideals : here 
 still survive neighbourly farm and parish place of 
 worship, to prove that they once existed. 
 
 It is here, in the middle of the marsh, that you 
 perceive how little given to change arc the local 
 methods. Sheep are still to be found here in 
 thousands, and still tended, as from time immemorial, 
 by that variety of shepherd known in these parts 
 as a " looker." Ingoldsby names the manservant 
 of Thomas Marsh of Marston, " Ralph Looker," 
 and derived the name, doubtless, from this local title 
 for shepherd. 
 
 The terms of a " looker's " employment are 
 curious, and look wretchedly poor, but as they have 
 survived, and show no signs of being revised in 
 these times when labour is scarce on the farms and 
 farmers eagerly compete for help, they cannot be 
 worse than methods of paying shepherds in other 
 parts of the country. A " looker " does everything 
 connected with sheep-tending at an inclusive payment 
 of one shilling and sixpence an acre per annum. 
 For this he looks after the flocks, sees them through 
 the horrors of the lambing season, shears them in 
 summer, succours them in winter, and cures their 
 ailments throughout the year. The sum seems 
 pitiful, but when calculated on farms of six hundred 
 acres or so, works out fairly well. 
 
 One comes to love the marsh, to delight in its
 
 io8 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 byways, and to welcome opportunities for extended 
 exploration. From Newchurch it is easily possible 
 to find a way back to the main road without retracing 
 one's footsteps. That way lies near the spot marked 
 on ordnance maps as " Blackmanstone Chapel," a 
 ruin so thoroughly ruinated that it is difficult to find 
 and not worth seeing when found. Blackmanstone 
 Chapel was apparently founded by one Blacheman, 
 who held the manor in the time of Edward the 
 Confessor, but, in common with many such chapels, 
 it seems to have been founded more for the repose 
 of a single erring soul than to satisfy any crying 
 spiritual need of the neighbourhood. The adjoining 
 parish of St. Mary the Virgin is more fortunate. It 
 keeps its ancient church in excellent condition. On 
 its pavement the curious may note an epitaph to 
 one Daniel Langdon, " Common Expenditor " of 
 Romney Marsh, 1750. 
 
 The cautious explorer of the marsh is careful to 
 carry his nosebag with him, in the shape of some 
 pocketable light refreshment, for the inns are in- 
 frequent, and the farm-folk, although hospitable 
 enough, cannot always supply even the most modest 
 demands of the stranger. Milk even that un- 
 failing product of a farm is not always to be had, 
 for the morning's supply may already have been 
 sent off to the nearest railway station, and the five 
 o'clock afternoon milking hour be not yet come. 
 Moreover, farmers generally entering into a contract 
 to supply a certain quantity cannot always afford 
 to sell even a single glass. As for farmhouse bread 
 and cheese, dismiss from your mind all thoughts 
 of home-baked bread or local cheese in these times. 
 The bread will often be a tin loaf from the baker's
 
 ROMNEY MARSH 109 
 
 of Ashford, Hythe, or Littlestone ; and the cheese 
 well, here is the apology of a farmer's wife : " I'm 
 sorry we've no Dutch cheese, but here is some 
 American ; we think it very good." Can such things 
 be ? you ask. Can they be, indeed ? Are they 
 not the commonplace experiences of all those few 
 who really explore the innermost recesses of the 
 country and feel the pulse and count the heart-beats 
 of rural life ? Is there not something radically wrong 
 with England when a farmer's wife can make such 
 a speech as that, and not think it strange ? In the 
 dying words of the late Lord Winchilsea, a true 
 friend of farming, " God save Agriculture ! " when 
 in an English dairying district the farmers buy 
 Dutch and American cheese. 
 
 But that is not the only alien article in the farm- 
 houses. Tawdry German glassware and " ornamental " 
 china " decorate " the " best parlour," and the dole- 
 ful wailings of American organs on Sundays give 
 evidence of the religious instincts of the farmer's 
 family and agonise the unhappy wayfarer. Old 
 England is certainly being cosmopolitanised (good 
 word ! ) in every direction ; here is another instance, 
 for what do we see on the barn-walls and posting- 
 stations but the announcement, addressed to the 
 rustics, of a " Fete Champetre " to be held in aid 
 of a church restoration fund. In the days before 
 Hodge left off saying " beant " and took to using 
 the more cultivated phrase " is not," like the Squire 
 and the Parson, he would supposing him able to 
 read at all have asked, wonderingly. " What be 
 this 'ere Feet Shampeter ? " and that would have 
 been a very learned Squire or Parson who could 
 have correctly explained the meaning.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY AND DYMCHURCH 
 
 RETURNING from this excursion into the intimate 
 things of the marsh, and making for New Romney, 
 attention is arrested by the view of a group of a church 
 and two houses at a little distance from the road. 
 This the map proclaims to be Old Romney, that 
 sometime seaport, busy and prosperous in Saxon 
 times, before ever the Normans came to follow the 
 retreating sea and to found New Romney, a mile 
 and more away. Old Romney is so very old that 
 it has forgotten its past, and antiquaries can tell 
 little or nothing of it ; but with our vision illumined 
 by legitimate imagination, we can picture that old 
 port in no uncertain way, perched upon its slight 
 eminence and overlooking the mingling of salt water 
 and fresh at this long-vanished mouth of the 
 Rother ; the Saxon ships beached on the shingle- 
 falls, or stuck fast in the alluvial mud of still bayous. 
 Where those keels came to anchor, the ploughman 
 drives his furrow, and where the wooden houses of 
 that old town stood, the broad fields of oats, beans, 
 and turnips ripen in the sun. The population of 
 the whole parish of Old Romney, with its outlying 
 hamlets and cottages, numbers not more than a 
 hundred and fifty, and of village there is but this
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY in 
 
 lonely group of church, vicarage, and two farm- 
 houses. The church itself, Norman and Early 
 English though it be, is of the rural type, and thus 
 tells us that already, when it was built, the place had 
 sunk into insignificance. There it stands, on its 
 scarcely perceptible knoll, its broad-based tower, 
 constructed of flint and shingle grouting, eloquent of 
 the Has Been, and still indifferent, as for seven 
 hundred years past, to the To Be. Dynasties, social 
 conditions, the whole polity of a nation, have 
 
 OLD ROMNEY. 
 
 changed, time and again, since that old tower firs 
 arose beside this Rhee Wall road. All the little 
 injustices, oppressions, and disasters, all the joys and 
 sorrows of seven centuries, all those flouts of cynic 
 Circumstance that in their time seem so great and 
 poignant, have passed it by, and still, with its im- 
 memorial attendant yew-tree, it looks upon this 
 ancient road, calmly contemptuous of the wayfarers 
 that come and go. There is that in this merely 
 rural church which impresses one much more deeply 
 than or in an altogether different way from the
 
 112 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 sight of a cathedral. The great minster means 
 intellectual and religious exaltation ; here a sense of 
 the futility of men and things of the evanescent 
 nature of those who build and of the astounding 
 permanency and indifference of the things they rear 
 clutches the heart with the grip of ice. Not here 
 the sursum corda of the pilgrim, but the gloom of 
 the pessimist and the tears of those who sorrow for 
 the littleness of our little span are called forth by 
 the solitude, the isolation and minatory prominence 
 of this marshland church. For though it be neigh- 
 boured by farmsteads, the brooding spirit of the 
 place is communicated to them, rather than their 
 domestic cheerfulness irradiating its aloofness. In 
 fine, only the stolid and the unimaginative should 
 live at Old Romney, whose minor key deepens into 
 a sadder intensity when day draws to its close, as 
 the shadows lengthen and the cattle come, lowing, 
 home to byre. 
 
 I would do much to avoid Old Romney at such 
 time o' day, coming to it by preference in early 
 morning, when the summer sun is hot upon the 
 earth, but not so hot nor so long risen that it has 
 had time to dry the dew upon the fragrant wild 
 thyme of the grass. Then there is hope in the 
 atmosphere, and the Past does not lie with so dead 
 a weight upon the Present and the Future. 
 
 But to continue to New Romney. There, on 
 the way, across the level, seen dimly through the 
 heat-haze, and scarce distinguishable from a ragged 
 clump of trees, rises the shattered wall that is the 
 sole relic of Hope Chapel, one of the ruined en- 
 deavours of the marsh. Hope All Saints is tradi- 
 tionally said to have been the first settlement in the
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY 113 
 
 district, and named " Hope " it is a simple, artless 
 belief as expressive at once of the anxieties and 
 the trustfulness of those original settlers, who 
 selected that comprehensive dedication of " All 
 Saints " with the businesslike idea of enjoying as 
 extended a patronage as possible among the bright 
 and shining ones of the New Jerusalem. Alas ! 
 for the protection thus sought. Hope has been 
 deserted time out of mind, and the walls of its 
 chapel are a shapeless and solitary mass. Such 
 also is the condition of Mydley Chapel, in Dunge 
 Marsh, on the right-hand side of the road, whose 
 ruined gable-end is seen standing out prominently, 
 like an inverted \. 
 
 Within sight, surrounded by that almost in- 
 variable circlet of trees which seems to lovingly 
 enfold the churches, the villages, and the townlets 
 of the marsh, and to shelter them from the cold 
 blasts of change, as also from those of the weather, 
 is New Romney, the four angle-tourelles or dwarf 
 pinnacles of its church tower not one quite the 
 counterpart of any of its fellows prominent above 
 all else. 
 
 Rounding an acute bend in the road, and passing 
 a few scattered nondescript sheds and outbuildings, 
 we come with surprising suddenness into the old 
 Cinque Port that is so surprisingly called " new." 
 A dog dozing in the middle of the broad, empty 
 street, a piano being somewhere injuriously practised 
 upon, the sound of a laugh in the parlour of an 
 old inn these sights and sounds comprise the life 
 and movement of New Romney on a mid-day of 
 this midsummer in the early twentieth century. 
 
 The newness of New Romney is now only a 
 
 8
 
 11 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 battered and outworn figure of speech, to be taken 
 relatively and with reference to that Old Romney 
 we have just left. What the streets of New Romney 
 were like when it really was new about the time of 
 the Norman Conquest we cannot conceive ; how 
 they looked when it had already grown to a re- 
 spectable age, when the Late Norman church of 
 St. Nicholas was built, we can form no idea. But 
 it is certain that this was once a town of goodly size 
 and great prosperity. At the time when the Cinque 
 Ports were constituted, Romney was thought worthy 
 to be of the company, and to be equal fellow with 
 Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, and Hythe ; but so 
 early as 1351 it was so decayed by reason of its 
 misfortunes at the hands of tempests and the 
 contrary sea- currents that shoaled and silted-up its 
 harbour, that the unfortunate port could not send 
 out its quota of ships for the national defence, and 
 was penalised accordingly, losing for a time many 
 of its Cinque Port privileges. When Queen 
 Elizabeth visited the town, and granted it the empty 
 honour of a Mayor and Corporation, it was very 
 much in the condition it occupies now. Of its five 
 churches, only one the one still standing was 
 left, the sea was two miles distant, and her " poor 
 town of Romney " would have been sore put to it 
 to do her honour, except for the liberality of certain 
 substantial men whose purses were equal to the 
 heavy calls such Royal visits made. But, it may 
 be asked, if the town were in such sore case, whence 
 came the wealth of those substantial burgesses ? Ay, 
 whence ? Why, from that unchartered industry of 
 smuggling of whose history we have already heard 
 so much. The port and town might decay, but
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY 115 
 
 for centuries before Elizabeth's time and until the 
 first half of the nineteenth century had almost gone, 
 the " owling " trade in the exportation of wool, 
 and the import smuggling of exciseable articles, 
 enriched many a highly-respectable family and kept 
 a whole army of longshore loafers in comfortable 
 circumstances. Strangers with astonishment saw 
 substantial mansions in these wilds, eloquent in their 
 every appointment of a high degree of prosperity, 
 and Ireland, writing on Kent at the beginning of 
 the nineteenth century, could not comprehend the 
 existence here, where there was no distinguishable 
 commerce, of the " numbers of stout, hale-looking 
 men " who were always loafing about, without any 
 visible occupation. If Mr. Ireland had walked 
 abroad o' nights, he would have discovered that 
 those aimless persons were then very busily employed, 
 and he would probably have received a crack over 
 the head from one or other of them, if thought too 
 curious. The smuggling fraternity did not welcome 
 curious strangers. 
 
 But Ireland can scarce have been so ignorant as 
 not to comprehend so very obvious a thing. Either 
 he was not sufficiently frank in his writings, or else 
 assumed a clumsy and not easily-detected archness. 
 For the thing was notorious and patent to everyone. 
 Long before and after his day, Hasted, the historian 
 of Kent, described New Romney as a town of one 
 hundred and eighty houses and one thousand in- 
 habitants, " chiefly such as follow a contraband trade 
 between this kingdom and France." But gone are 
 those times, and the town is now too listless either 
 to grow, or to die and so make an end. 
 
 The country is in the middle of the town at
 
 ii6 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Romney. The stranger who glances down the 
 quiet street can see the cows grazing round the 
 corner ; " baa " comes from flocks and herds, in 
 successful competition with the rare ting-a-ling of 
 alarum-bells on shop-doors, infrequently opened ; 
 and the crows and jackdaws hold a noisy witenage- 
 mot among the embowering trees of the church- 
 yard the " God's Acre " of this one remaining 
 
 NEW ROMNEY. 
 
 church of St. Nicholas, that patron saint who im- 
 partially looked after the interests of sailors and 
 thieves. Thieves were, indeed, in the Middle Ages 
 known by the polite title of " St. Nicholas' clerks " 
 hence perhaps the vulgar term of " nicking " for 
 stealing. 
 
 It is a fine old Norman building, this church of 
 St. Nicholas, with a tower arcaded and panelled in 
 the well-known Norman style, and a grand, black- 
 browed, ponderous interior, infinitely eloquent of
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY 117 
 
 old-time importance. The old altar tomb to Richard 
 Stuppeneye, Jurat of the Marsh in 1509, in times 
 before Mayors of Romney, stands at the east end 
 of the south aisle, and was the spot where the 
 business of the town was transacted in days before 
 a town hall was erected ; times when men 
 thought it no ill to employ the house of God in 
 between whiles for certain secular purposes. Stup- 
 peneye's tomb, as an inscription states, was erected 
 by his great-grandson in 1622, "for the use of 
 the ancient meeting and election of Maior and 
 Jurats of this port towne." And surely, if there 
 be anything in associations and surroundings the 
 town's business was like to be hallowed by the place 
 where it was conducted, just as the annual election 
 of a mayor beside the worthy Stuppeneye's resting- 
 place should have secured a fitting magistrate. Let 
 no one cite the mayor who sympathised with and 
 aided the " owlers " as an instance of an unfit 
 representative being chosen, for no one outside the 
 Revenue ever thought any form of smuggling sinful. 
 But old customs were broken some nine years since, 
 and no longer is the mayor chosen beside the tomb 
 of that worthy jurat. 
 
 Close beside this monument may be noticed, on 
 the floor, a stone to "Edward Elsted, many years 
 Riding Officer of this Place," who died in 1757, 
 aged 51, doubtless, if he was a true and faithful 
 servant of the Revenue, to the great joy of the 
 smuggling interests of the town ; for by the term 
 " Riding Officer," we are to understand a mounted 
 official of the Preventive Service to be indicated. 
 
 For the rest, New Romney may easily be dis- 
 missed. There is the " New Inn," with a frontage
 
 n8 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 perhaps not older than one century, but with an 
 interior that was only new five hundred years ago, 
 where the smuggling cult used to hold convivial 
 and profit-sharing meetings ; there is the Town 
 Hall next door, and there is the broad street with 
 never a new building in it, or anywhere at all in 
 the town. Sandwich is commonly held up as an 
 example of a Cinque Port utterly decayed and dead 
 as Queen Anne, or as the Pharaohs, or anything or 
 anyone of whose demise there cannot possibly be 
 any doubt, but there are new houses and other 
 unmistakable signs of a living existence there, while 
 here the town, reduced to the merest existence, 
 simply continues mechanically, like a clock not yet 
 run down. It is not an unpleasing nay, it is 
 even an interesting place, but it gives an odd, 
 weather-beaten, bleak impression, not perhaps so 
 much to the eye as to the mind. It is possible 
 to visit New Romney when the thermometer registers 
 eighty in the shade, and for the mind to convey 
 that bleak impression so acutely to the senses that 
 the body shivers. 
 
 If, however, you want something really gaunt 
 and shivery, why then, Littlestone-on-Sea will give 
 all you desire in that sort, in full measure and 
 brimming over. Littlestone-on-Sea might with 
 equal propriety and more exact descriptiveness be 
 named Littlestone-at-the-World's-End. It stands 
 on the shingle-banks that have been thrown up 
 by the sea to ruin Romney, and it is a mere line 
 of sad grey stucco houses with their faces to the 
 immensity of the sea, their backs to the emptiness 
 of the marsh, and their skylights looking up into 
 the vastness of the sky. The place is a resort of
 
 OLD AND NEW ROMNEY 
 
 119 
 
 golfers in summer, an emptiness in winter, and all 
 the year round an eyesore to those who fare the road 
 between Romney and Dymchurch, and cannot fail 
 to observe those gaunt houses in the distance, 
 notching the coast-line in a hateful commonplace 
 of detached- and semi-detachedness. 
 
 Here, along this coastwise road, between this 
 point and Hythe, we make close acquaintance with 
 
 A MARTELLO TOWER. 
 
 the Martello towers. A ready way of describing 
 the shape of one of these towers is to picture it as 
 an inverted flower-pot. The proportions of height 
 and circumference are very nearly the same, and 
 what architects and builders would call the u batter" 
 i.e., the narrowing slope of the sides runs at very, 
 closely the same angle. 
 
 They are just upon a century old. Built solidly, 
 of honest brickwork through and through, in the 
 days of the Great Terror, no enemy's fire has ever
 
 120 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 been directed against them, but several have been 
 used as targets for the heavy ordnance and high 
 explosives of the modern gunners of Lydd and 
 Dungeness, and, with a great deal of labour and at 
 huge expense, at last destroyed. Some few, also, 
 have been undermined and ruined by the encroach- 
 ments of the sea. There were originally seventy-six 
 of these towers, costing from ,10,000 to 20,000 
 apiece, according to size. The usual size is thirty 
 feet in height, with a diameter of forty feet at the 
 base, diminishing to thirty at the top. They are in 
 two storeys, with a bomb-proof roof formerly sur- 
 mounted by a cannon mounted on a swivel-carriage. 
 The walls vary from a thickness of nine feet on the 
 seaward side to six on the landward, which would 
 not be so greatly exposed to assault. Their name 
 is said to derive from that circular fort at Martella, 
 in Corsica, captured only after a long and desperate 
 resistance in the time of Nelson. It has been left 
 for modern times to thoroughly vindicate the plan 
 of the military engineers who designed this first line 
 of defence along an unprotected coast. Fortunately, 
 there has never been any occasion to put these to the 
 test, and it was not until the same blockhouse 
 principle was introduced on the veldt in the second 
 Boer War, that the weary campaign was brought at 
 last to a close. 
 
 This tower, standing at the entrance to Dymchurch, 
 behind the famous Wall, has been put to a whimsical 
 use, for it is in occupation by a poor family, whose 
 rent of half-a-crown a week, due to the War Office, 
 is guaranteed by the vicar. A Martello tower makes 
 a squalid home. Very little light can struggle 
 through the deep and narrow embrasures, and the
 
 DYMCHURCH 
 
 121 
 
 interior is grimly suggestive of a mausoleum. The 
 ragged duds drying from flaunting clothes-lines, the 
 position of the tower planted in a scrubby waste, 
 with domestic refuse strewed about, and the stark 
 
 DYMCHURCH WALL. 
 
 nakedness of the brick, combine to make an inglorious 
 and repellent picture. 
 
 Here begins that famous three miles length of 
 bulwark against the sea, Dymchurch Wall. Witches 
 no longer skim across it on their broomsticks, but 
 when the wind comes booming out of the Channel 
 from a lowering sky, and the seagulls fly screaming 
 low upon the water, you will, quite possibly, not 
 believe and tremble, but will understand what you 
 will by no means comprehend only by reading the 
 printed page that it is, to the imaginative, a 
 "whisht" place. The modern marshmen are not 
 imaginative, fancy does not breed in their brains, and 
 all they see in a storm is the chance of a rich 
 aftermath of driftwood ; but their forebears heard a 
 voice in every wind, and handled every besom with
 
 122 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 that respect due to a thing which, under cover of 
 night, might have been, and might be again, an 
 unholy sort of Pegasus, bound for some Satanic 
 aerial levee. 
 
 Dymchurch village shelters very humbly behind 
 this Wall, from whose summit one looks down 
 upon it, or, on the other side, down upon a long, 
 vanishing perspective of solitary sands and blackened, 
 rotting timber groynes. The Wall is about twelve 
 
 DYMCHURCH WALL. 
 
 feet high, with a curved, concave "apron*' of 
 boulders toward the sea, and an abrupt turfy slope 
 on the inland face. The summit affords a fine 
 continuous walk, and has been an undisguised 
 earthen and grassy path since a few years ago, 
 when 35,000 worth of paving-stones, provided 
 to make it look neat and town-like, were swept 
 away to sea in a storm. 
 
 Bungalows have now begun to appear here and 
 there inside the Wall adjoining Dymchurch, for
 
 DYMCHURCH 123 
 
 there are summer visitors to whom the solitude 
 and the unconstrained freedom of the empty sands 
 are welcome ; but, situated as they are, close against 
 the inner face of the Wall, they have the blankest 
 sort of outlook.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 
 
 FROM Dymchurch, five miles of excellent road bring 
 one into Hythe, that old Cinque Port whose early 
 Saxon name means " harbour," and thus tells those 
 among us who are thinking men how important 
 a place it was of old. u 'The Harbour," definitely 
 and emphatically it was, of capital importance in 
 those far-away times when Sandwich, Romney, 
 Dover, Folkestone, and others were of less moment ; 
 but even by the time the Cinque Ports came into 
 existence it had declined to inferior rank among 
 its brethren, and when Dover was required to 
 furnish twenty-one ships for the defence of the 
 nation, and Winchelsea and Hastings respectively 
 ten and six, Hythe, Sandwich, Rye, and Romney 
 were assessed at only five each. Where is that 
 harbour of which some vestiges remained to the 
 time of Elizabeth ? that haven which, according 
 to Leland, was " strayt for passage owt of Boloyn ? " 
 Where but choked up, embedded, and deeply 
 overlaid beneath a mile-long waste of shingle ! The 
 glory of that storied port is buried " full fathom 
 five." Everywhere is shingle. A world of it 
 expands before the vision as one comes out of the 
 marsh towards the town, and Martello towers and 
 forlorn congeries of more modern forts stand 
 
 124
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 125 
 
 islanded in midst of it. From the sunlit glare of 
 this waste the road enters Hythe, through an 
 exquisitely beautiful woodland, open and unfenced 
 from the highway, with the landward ridge of 
 hills and the Military Canal approaching on the 
 left. 
 
 u Hythe hath bene," says Leland, " a very greate 
 towne yn length, ande conteyned IIII paroches, 
 that now be clene destroied." The greatest sur- 
 viving evidence of that ancient estate is the one 
 remaining church of St. Leonard, which tops the 
 hill behind the High Street and is the crown 
 and distinguishing mark of Hythe from afar off. 
 It is chiefly of Early English architecture, and an 
 exquisite example of its period, with a noble chancel 
 like the choir of a cathedral, and a remarkable crypt 
 or undercroft, stacked with a neatly-disposed heap 
 of many hundreds of skulls and large quantities 
 of human bones. No one knows in any definite 
 manner how, why, or when these gruesome relics 
 were brought here, but legendary lore tells how 
 they are the remains of those who were slain in 
 some uncertain fight so uncertain that whether 
 between Britons and Romans, Romano-British and 
 Saxons, or Saxons and Danes is not stated. Borrow, 
 in his LavengrOy plumps for Danes, more perhaps 
 because he had a prejudice for that hypothesis 
 than from any evidence he could have produced, 
 if asked. That many of the owners of those 
 skulls did actually meet a violent death is quite 
 evident in the terrific gashes they exhibit. One 
 may see these poor relics for threepence, and Hythe 
 does a roaring trade with the morbid in photo- 
 graphs of the shocking collection ; but it were better
 
 126 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 they were decently buried and given rest from the 
 handling and the flippant comments of the shallow- 
 minded crowd. 
 
 One refuses further to discuss skulls in the 
 holiday sunshine of Hythe, whose long, narrow 
 street is cheerful and pulsing with life. Hythe 
 street is one of those humanly interesting old 
 thoroughfares which one is inclined, in the mass, 
 to call picturesque ; but on reflection it is seen to 
 be really always about to become so, as you advance, 
 and never to actually arrive at any very remarkably 
 picturesque climax. The Georgian town hall, 
 standing on pillars, is interesting, and so, too, is 
 that queer little building called the <c Smugglers' 
 Nest," claiming to be a look-out place of some of 
 the many " freetraders " who carried on operations 
 from the town. For the rest, Hythe is old- 
 fashioned and by no means overwhelmed, as many 
 of its neighbours are, by modernity. Here the 
 four separate and distinct streams of seafaring, 
 military, agricultural, and shop-keeping life pool 
 their interests and mingle amicably enough, under 
 the interested observation of a fifth contingent, the 
 summer visitors who find the unconventional 
 attractions of the shingle and the unspoiled place 
 more to their taste than the modish charms of 
 Folkestone. 
 
 Just where Hythe ends and Seabrook begins, 
 the Military Canal comes to a dusty and somewhat 
 stagnant conclusion on the flat foreshore. Lest 
 the dreaded invader should not play the game 
 properly, and meanly attempt to land his troops 
 on the open and undefended beach beyond the 
 tract of country cut off by that u not very practicable
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 127 
 
 ditch," a Martello tower was set up on the little 
 shoulder of a hill overlooking this spot, and there 
 it remains to this day. A grey, grim, giant hotel 
 
 THE ' SMUGGLERS' NEST," HYTHE. 
 
 stands isolated out upon the shingle-banks, and 
 would offer a splendid mark for any modern invader 
 who should descend upon the coast and do the
 
 128 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 neighbourhood the kindness to blow its hideous 
 presence away. 
 
 That stranger who might pass from Hythe to 
 Sandgate and know nothing of the separate exis- 
 tence of Seabrook would have every excuse, for 
 it bears every outward appearance of belonging to 
 one or other. It is largely a recent development, 
 
 HYTHE, FROM THE ROAD TO SANDGATE. 
 
 and in so far a pleasing one, for its pretty new 
 gabled seaside red-brick cottages, giving immediately 
 upon the shore, are in the best of taste and have 
 delightful gardens, where the little bare-legged boys 
 and girls of the visitors sit in the sun or sprawl, 
 book-reading, upon the steps. Opposite these, 
 evidences of an enlightened taste, some grey 
 " compo " villas cast a gloom over those who glance
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 129 
 
 upon them and tell us how stupid were those times 
 of some thirty years ago, when such sad-faced houses 
 arose everywhere at the seaside in this grey climate 
 that calls aloud for the cheerfulness of colour in 
 building. 
 
 Sandgate, into which Seabrook insensibly merges, 
 sits so close upon the shore that it is credibly re- 
 ported the lodging-house landladies live on the upper 
 floors of their houses in those empty winter months 
 when the winds blow great guns and the seas come 
 pouring into the basements, bringing with them 
 large deposits of that plentiful shingle, fragments 
 of sea-wall, and twisted remnants of promenade 
 railings. Year in and year out, the sea and the 
 Local Board, or Urban District Council, or what- 
 ever may be the name of the authority that rules 
 Sandgate, play a never-ending game. In the 
 summer the authority builds up a sea-wall, and, in 
 effect, says to the sea, " You can't smash that \ " 
 And the sea sparkles and drowses in the sun and 
 laps lazily upon the shore, and artfully agrees. But 
 when the visitors have all gone home, and the 
 equinoctial gales go ravening up and down the 
 Channel, then Londoners open their morning papers 
 and say to their wives, " You remember that sea- 
 wall at Sandgate, my dear, where we used to sit in the 
 shade : it was entirely washed away yesterday by the 
 sea ! " But by the time their next holiday comes 
 round there is a newer wall there, on an improved 
 pattern. That, too, is either utterly destroyed in 
 the following winter and flung in fragments into 
 neighbouring gardens, or else, with the roadway and 
 the kerbs and lamp-posts, the pillar-boxes and the 
 whole bag of tricks, swept out to sea and lost.
 
 130 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 And so the game goes on. It is a costly one, 
 and a heartbreaking for those folks who have semi- 
 basement breakfast-rooms and ever and again experi- 
 ence the necessity of excavating their furniture out 
 of the shingle-filled rooms, like so many Layards 
 digging out the Assyrian relics of Nimroud and 
 Baalbec. When such things can be, the desire of 
 adjoining Folkestone for Sandgate and the deter- 
 mination of Sandgate not to be included within the 
 municipal boundaries of its great neighbour are 
 not readily to be understood. 
 
 Dramatic things happen at Sandgate. Vessels 
 are cast away upon the road, their bowsprits coming 
 in at the front doors, while shipwrecked mariners, 
 instead of being flung upon an iron-bound coast, are 
 projected against the palisades of the front gardens. 
 At such times the variety of jettisoned cargo that 
 comes ashore is remarkable. One day it will be a 
 consignment of Barcelona nuts ; another, a ship-load 
 of boots ; what not, indeed, from the jostling com- 
 merce that goes up and down that crowded sea- 
 highway, the Channel. When the Benvenue was 
 wrecked inshore here, at the close of 1891, and lay 
 a menace to passing ships, that happened which sent 
 Sandgate sliding and cracking in all directions. 
 The wreck was blown up with dynamite, and soon 
 afterwards the clayey clifflet that forms the founda- 
 tion for the north side of Sandgate's one street 
 slipped suddenly down, wrecking some houses and 
 cracking many others from roof to foundation. 
 Many, including the London newspapers, thought 
 it was an earthquake. 
 
 Since then, Sandgate has largely altered, and 
 instead of being rather an abject attempt at a seaside
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 131 
 
 resort, has been brightened by re-building and 
 cheered by the overflow to it from Folkestone's 
 overbrimming cup of prosperity. Still stands Sand- 
 gate Castle on the sea-shore, one of Henry VIII. 's 
 obese, tun-bellied blockhouses, very much in shape 
 like that portly Henry himself, as we may safely 
 declare now that Tudors no longer rule the land ; 
 but the very thought would have been treason, and 
 its expression fatal, in that burly monarch's own day. 
 
 There is a choice of ways into Folkestone by 
 steeply-rising Sandgate Hill, or by the flat lower 
 road, where a modern toll-gate stands to exact its 
 dues for the convenience. This way the cyclist 
 saves the climb, and pilgrims in general are spared 
 the villa roads of the hill approach to the town, 
 coming to it instead through pleasant woods, with 
 the tangled abandon of the Leas undercliflf rising 
 up to the left. 
 
 Folkestone chiefly interests the Ingoldsby pilgrim 
 because of that eloquent and humorous description 
 of the old town to be found in "The Leech of 
 Folkestone." There was then no new and fashionable 
 town to be described, and the place was " a collection 
 of houses which its maligners call a fishing-town, 
 and its well-wishers a watering-place. A limb 
 of one of the Cinque Ports, it has (or lately had) 
 a corporation of its own, and has been thought 
 considerable enough to give a second title to a noble 
 family. Rome stood on seven hills Folkestone 
 seems to have been built upon seventy. Its streets, 
 lanes, and alleys fanciful distinctions without much 
 real difference are agreeable enough to persons who 
 do not mind running up and down stairs ; and 
 the only inconvenience at all felt by such of its
 
 132 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 inhabitants as are not asthmatic is when some heedless 
 urchin tumbles down a chimney or an impertinent 
 pedestrian peeps into a garret window. 
 
 " At the eastern extremity of the town, on the 
 sea-beach, and scarcely above high-water mark, stood, 
 in the good old times, a row of houses, then de- 
 nominated ( Frog Hole.' Modern refinement sub- 
 sequently euphemised the name into ' East-street ' ; 
 
 FOLKESTONE. 
 
 but * what's in a name ? * the encroachments of 
 Ocean have long since levelled all in one common 
 ruin." 
 
 Nothing of the sort has happened. East Street is 
 still there, and { ' East Street" yet, but no one has 
 ventured to identify any house with that occupied by 
 that compounder of medicines, " of somewhat doubt- 
 ful reputation, but comparative opulence," Master 
 Erasmus Buckthorne, " the effluvia of whose drugs
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 133 
 
 from within, mingling agreeably with the * ancient 
 and fishlike smells ' from without, wafted a delicious 
 perfume throughout the neighbourhood." 
 
 It was to this picturesquely-described place that 
 the Master Thomas Marsh of the legend and his 
 man Ralph wended their way to consult that learned 
 disciple of Esculapius with the fly-blown reputa- 
 tion ; coming to it by " paths then, as now, most 
 pseudonymously dignified with the name of roads." 
 
 Folkestone, the fisher-village, the " Lapis Populi " 
 of the Romans and the " Fulchestane " of Domesday 
 Book stood in a pleasant country now quite lost 
 sight of, built over, and bedevilled by the inter- 
 minable brick and mortar of the great and fashion- 
 able seaside resort that Folkestone is at this day. 
 It Jay, that fisher-haven, in a hollow at the seaward 
 end of a long valley bordered by the striking hills 
 of the chalk downs that are only now to be 
 glimpsed by journeying a mile or so away from 
 the seashore, past the uttermost streets, but were 
 then visible at every point. Down this valley came, 
 trickling and prattling in summer, or raging in 
 winter, a little stream that, as it approached the 
 sea, flowed in between the crazy tenements of the 
 fisher-folk and smugglers who then formed the sole 
 population who then were the only folk of 
 Folkestone. This was the " Pent Stream," which 
 found its way into the sea obscurely enough, oozing 
 insignificantly through the pebbles where the Stade 
 and the Fishmarket now stand, by the harbour. 
 Alas ! for that forgotten rill ; it is now made to 
 mingle its waters with a sewer, and to flow under 
 Tontine Street in a contaminated flood. 
 
 It is true that the small natural harbour was
 
 134 
 
 improved so early as 1810, or thereabouts, by 
 Telford, but it was not until after 1844, when the 
 South-Eastern Railway was opened, that Folkestone 
 began to grow, and the original village began to 
 be enclosed within the girdle of a " resort " quite 
 alien from it in style, thought, and population. 
 
 There is no love felt for modern Folkestone by 
 the inhabitants of the old town, who resent the 
 prices to which things have been forced up by the 
 neighbourhood of the over-wealthy, and resent still 
 more the occasional descent from the fashionable 
 Leas of dainty parties bent on exploring the queer 
 nooks, and amusing themselves with a sight of the 
 quaint characters, that still abound by the fishing- 
 harbour. To those parties, every waterside lounger 
 who sports a peaked cap and a blue jersey, and, 
 resting his arms upon the railings by the quay and 
 gazing inscrutably out to the horizon, presents a 
 broad stern to the street, is a fisherman, and the 
 feelings of a pilot, taken for a mere hauler upon 
 nets and capturer of soles and mackerel, are often 
 thus outraged. 
 
 For the spiritual benefit of the fisherfolk and 
 others of the old town, there is planted, by the 
 Stade, a " St. Peter's Mission," established there by 
 well-meaning but stupid folk who look down, 
 actually and figuratively, from the modern town upon 
 this spot, and appear to think it a sink of iniquity. 
 But iniquities are not always, or solely, resident 
 in sinks ; they have been found, shameless and 
 flourishing, in high places. There are those among 
 the fisher population who take the creature 
 comforts the coals and the blankets of the 
 mission, and pocket the implied affront ; but there
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 
 
 135 
 
 are also those others who, with clearer vision or 
 greater independence of character, do not scruple 
 to think and say that a mission for the salvation 
 of many in that new town that so proudly crowns 
 the cliffs would be more appropriate. "What," 
 
 THE STADE, FOLKESTONE. 
 
 asked an indignant fisherman " what makes them 
 'ere hotels pay like they does ? " and he answered 
 his own query in language that shall not be printed 
 here. " If them as goes there all had to show 
 their marriage-lines first," he concluded, " it's little 
 business they'd do " ; and his remarks recalled and 
 illuminated the story of a week-end frequenter of
 
 136 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 one of the great caravanserais whose Saturday to 
 Monday spouses were so frequently changed that 
 even the seared conscience of a German hotel- 
 manager was revolted. 
 
 Folkestone's fishing-harbour is wonderfully pic- 
 turesque. Beside it stands the Stade, a collection 
 of the quaintest, craziest old sail-lofts and ware- 
 houses, timbered and tarred and leaning at all sorts 
 of angles. Down in the harbour itself the smacks 
 cluster thickly. The rise and fall of the tide here 
 is so much as eighteen feet, and at the ebb to 
 descend upon the sand and to look up and along 
 toward the Leas is to obtain the most characteristic 
 and striking view in the whole place. There, 
 perched up against the sky-line, is the ancient 
 parish church of St. Eanswythe, in modern times 
 frescoed and bedizened and given up to high church 
 practices. There, too, the custom has recently 
 been introduced of going in procession, with cross 
 and vestments, to bless the fishing-nets. One 
 wonders what scornful things Ingoldsby would have 
 said of these doings within the Church of England, 
 and indeed the fishery seems neither better nor 
 worse for them. 
 
 That sainted princess, Eanswythe, daughter of 
 the Kentish King Eadbald, is said to be buried 
 within the church. She was one of the most 
 remarkable of the many wondrous saints of her 
 period, and performed the impossible and brought 
 about the incredible with the best of them. She 
 brought water from Cheriton to Folkestone, making 
 it run up hill, and incompetent carpenters who 
 had sawn beams too short had but to invoke her 
 for them (the beams, not the carpenters) to be
 
 138 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 instantly lengthened to any extent desired. Monks, 
 too, it was said, whose cassocks had been washed, 
 and shrunk in the process, could always get them 
 unshrunk in the same marvellous way ; but this 
 must be an error of the most flagrant kind, for 
 we know that those holy men washed themselves 
 little, and their clothes never. But whatever 
 marvellous things she could do, she was not 
 capable of the comparatively simple feat of pre- 
 venting her original conventual church being washed 
 away by the sea. 
 
 Folkestone people were of old very largely the 
 butt of the neighbouring towns. They were said to 
 be stupid beyond the ordinary. Twitted on some 
 occasion that has escaped the present historian 
 with not being able to celebrate a given event in 
 poetry, the town produced a poet eager to disprove 
 the accusation. To show what he could do in that 
 way, he took as his theme a notable capture that 
 Folkestone had just then made, and wrote: 
 
 A whale came down the Channel ; 
 The Dover men could not catch it, 
 But the Folkestoners did. 
 
 He was, it will be conceded, not even so near an 
 approach to a poet as that mayor who read an 
 address to Queen Elizabeth, beginning with, 
 
 "Most Gracious Queen, 
 Welcome to Folkesteen." 
 
 to which Her Majesty is said to have replied, 
 
 "You great fool, 
 Get off that stool ! " 
 
 But doubtless these be all malicious inventions.
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 139 
 
 Certainly, though, " great Eliza " did visit Folkestone, 
 and we can have no doubt that the usual address 
 was read can even see and hear in imagination 
 that mayor reading abysmal ineptitudes " um-um- 
 er-er," like some blundering bumble-bee, the at- 
 mosphere growing thick and drowsy with falsities, 
 platitudes, and infinite bombast, until that virginal 
 but vinegary monarch cuts him rudely short. We 
 can see O ! most clear-sighted that we are ! that 
 tall and angular spinster, sharp-visaged, with high, 
 beak-like nose, greatly resembling a gaunt hen 
 but a very game hen actually cutting short that 
 turbid flow of mayoral eloquence ! we wonder she 
 does not peck him. 
 
 Still hazardously up and down go those old streets 
 and lanes of the old town Beach Street, North 
 Street, Fenchurch Street, Radnor Street, and East 
 Street, whence you look out upon Copt Point and 
 the serried tiers upon tiers of chalk cliffs stretching 
 in the direction of Dover. Still the Martello tower 
 stands upon that point, as it stands in the illustra- 
 tion of Folkestone by Turner, but the swarming 
 population of to-day has blotted out much of that 
 obvious romance that once burst full upon the 
 visitor. The romance is still there, but you have 
 to seek it and dig deep beneath the strata of modern 
 changes before it is found. Trivial things dot the 
 i's, cross the t's, and generally emphasise this 
 triumph of convention. " Lanes " become " streets," 
 and that quaintly illiterate old rendering, " Ren- 
 davowe " Street, was long since thought by no means 
 worthy of more educated times, and accordingly 
 changed to the correct spelling of " Rendezvous " 
 it now bears.
 
 1 40 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Modern Folkestone is already, by effluxion of 
 time, becoming sharply divided into modern and 
 more modern. The ancient Folkestone we have 
 seen to be the fishing village, the first development 
 from whose humble but natural existence, in days 
 when seaside holidays began to be an institution 
 and the " resorts " set out upon their career of 
 artificiality, was the " Pavilionstone " of Dickens and 
 Cubitt. The trail of Cubitt, who built that South 
 Kensington typified by the Cromwell Road, and 
 was followed by his imitators throughout the western 
 suburbs of London in the 'fifties and 'sixties, is all 
 over the land, and is very clearly defined on the 
 Folkestone Leas, whose houses are in the most 
 approved grey stucco style. The Leas therefore 
 are not Folkestone, but, as Dickens dubbed them, 
 lt Pavilionstone," or, more justly, Notting-Hill-on- 
 Sea. They and their adjacent contemporary streets 
 are the seaside resort of yesterday ; the red-brick 
 and terra-cotta houses and hotels, in adaptation of 
 Elizabethan Gothic and Jacobean Renaissance, that 
 of to-day, a newer and grander place than Cubitt 
 conceived or Dickens knew. 
 
 All those magnificent streets, those barrack-like 
 hotels, all those bands and gay parterres, and all 
 the fashion that makes Folkestone the most expensive 
 seaside resort on the south coast, are excrescences. 
 That only is Folkestone where you really do smell 
 the salt water and can seek refuge from the cigar- 
 smoke and the Eau-de-Cologne, the wealthy, the 
 idle, and the vicious, to come to the folk who earn 
 their livelihood by the sea and its fish, and are 
 individual and racy of the water and the always 
 interesting waterside life.
 
 ~
 
 HYTHE AND FOLKESTONE 141 
 
 The inquirer fails to discover why that hotel, the 
 " Pavilion," of which Dickens was so enamoured, 
 and from whose style and title he named the 
 newly-arising town u Pavilionstone," was given that 
 sign. Napoleon declared, in the course of his great 
 naval works at Cherbourg, that he was resolved to 
 rival the marvels of Egypt ; was Cubitt, in his 
 building and contracting way, eager to emulate the 
 plasterous glories of George IV.'s marine palace, 
 the " Pavilion " at Brighton, or, at any rate, to 
 snatch a glamour from its name ? The " Pavilion " 
 has been once, certainly perhaps twice rebuilt 
 since Dickens wrote, and is now, they say, palatial, 
 and with every circumstance of comfort ; but when 
 Pavilionstone was in the making, it seems to have 
 been a sorry sort of a hostelry, in which voyagers 
 for Boulogne had sharp foretastes of the slings and 
 arrows of outrageous fortune which awaited those who 
 resigned themselves to the cross-Channel passage at 
 that period. This, says Dickens, is how you came 
 here for that discomfortable enterprise : " Dropped 
 upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone 
 Station at eleven o'clock on a dark winter's night, 
 in a roaring wind ; and in the howling wilderness 
 outside the station was a short omnibus which 
 brought you up by the forehead the instant you 
 got in at the door ; and nobody cared about you, 
 and you were alone in the world. You bumped 
 over infinite chalk until you were turned out at a 
 strange building which had just left off being a barn 
 without having quite begun to be a house, where 
 nobody expected your coming, or knew what to do 
 with you when you were come, and where you were 
 usually blown about until you happened to be
 
 1 42 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. 
 At five in the morning you were blown out of bed, 
 and after a dreary breakfast, with crumpled company, 
 in the midst of confusion, were hustled on board a 
 steamboat, and lay wretched on deck until you saw 
 France lunging and surging at you with great 
 vehemence over the bowsprit." 
 
 The miseries of crossing between Folkestone and 
 Boulogne are very greatly assuaged in these times, 
 but still the summer visitants who have exhausted 
 a round of pleasures find a perennial and cruel joy 
 in repairing to the pier, where they can gloat over 
 the miserables who, yellow and green-visaged, step 
 uncertainly ashore after a bad passage.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 
 
 FROM Hythe, where many roads meet, there goes 
 a very picturesque way along the high ground over- 
 looking Romney Marsh a route intimately asso- 
 ciated with " The Leech of Folkestone." It is uphill 
 out of Hythe, of course : indeed, among all the 
 roads out of the town, only the coast routes are flat. 
 
 Lympne is the first place on the way that 
 " Lymme Hill, or Lyme " which Leland says " was 
 sumtyme a famose haven, and good for shyppes 
 that myght cum to the foote of the hille. The 
 place ys yet cawled Shypway and Old Haven." 
 
 That it is not now c ' good for ships " is quite 
 evident to anyone who takes his stand on the clifF- 
 top and views that fifth quarter of the globe, 
 Romney Marsh, from this most eloquent of all 
 view-points. Full three miles away, as the crow 
 flies, the summer wavelets whisper on the beach, 
 and between the margin of the sea and this crum- 
 bling cliff-edge, whose foot once dabbled in the 
 waters of the haven, are pastures that have been the 
 anchorage of ships. 
 
 Grey buildings of high antiquity rise from the 
 clifF-top and command the mapped-out marshland. 
 The stern tower of Lympne church, forming a 
 beacon for mariners, is next door neighbour to 
 
 143
 
 I 4 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Lympne Castle, once a residence of the Archdeacons 
 of Canterbury. That " castelet embatayled," in 
 the words of Leland is now a farmhouse. Like the 
 church, it was largely built from the stone of the 
 Roman castle down below the cliff; that ancient 
 Portus Lemanis whose feet rested in the waters 
 of the haven and to whose walls the crowding 
 vessels ranged in the grand colonial days of Imperial 
 Rome. Stutsfall Castle the countryfolk call those 
 shattered walls that tell of Roman dominion, rendered 
 <c Studfall " on the map. 
 
 It is from these crumbling, earthy cliffs of 
 Lympne that one obtains the best and most com- 
 prehensive view of Romney Marsh, spread out 
 like an isometric drawing, below. From here the 
 eye ranges over the grey-green levels, until lost 
 in the dim haze of Dungeness, ten miles away. 
 There curves the bay, like the arc of a bended bow, 
 going in a magnificent semicircular sweep into the 
 distance, its margin dotted at regular intervals 
 with those pepper-boxes, the Martello towers, which 
 it was hoped would have made it so hot for 
 Napoleon had he ever descended upon these shores. 
 Nearer at hand almost, indeed, at our feet goes 
 the Royal Military Canal, its waters hid from this 
 view-point, but its course defined by the double 
 row of luxuriant trees that clothe its banks. 
 Between foreground and far distance, in a welter 
 of foreshortened fields and hedgerows, lie hid the 
 many hamlets and villages of the marsh. From 
 here it can be seen and felt how open this district 
 is to every breeze that blows, but it needs for the 
 traveller to descend into those levels for him to 
 discover how fiercely the winds lurk behind the
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 14$ 
 
 contorted hedges of the ridiculously-winding roads, 
 leaping forth at the corners and seizing one with 
 the rude grip of a strong man. Save for the direct 
 road that leads from Hythe to Dymchurch and 
 New Romney, and that other from thence to 
 Snargate and Appledore, the marshland ways are 
 mazy and deceptive, impassable ditches and drains 
 rendering likely-looking short cuts impracticable. 
 To approach a place coyly, and as though really 
 going away from it, is the road method of Romney 
 Marsh, and to strike boldly in the direction of any 
 given spot is to make tolerably sure of never 
 reaching it. Thus, when the stranger with dismay 
 perceives the distant village for which he has been 
 setting forth slipping by degrees behind him, he 
 should know that he is on the right road, but 
 when he observes its church tower towering straight 
 ahead, then let him pause and anxiously inquire the 
 way. When these facts are borne in mind there 
 will be little wonder that Romney Marsh was among 
 the last strongholds of superstition and smuggling. 
 
 The last smuggler has long since died, less in the 
 odour of sanctity than of unexcised schnapps, and 
 not since sixty years ago has a witch been credibly 
 reported, sailing athwart the moon on a besom. 
 Now, when cattle fall victims to the ills common 
 to them, instead of *' swimming " the nearest 
 half-daft and wholly ill-favoured old woman, the 
 farmers send to Hythe or Ashford for a veterinary 
 surgeon. 
 
 It is a romantic view-point, this outlook from 
 Lympne cliff, and quite unspoiled. You can have 
 it wholly to yourself the livelong day, except for 
 the occasional passage of a farm hand, whose natural 
 
 10
 
 146 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 LYMPNE CASTLE. 
 
 avocations take him past. It has not become a 
 show-place and, by consequence, self-conscious. A 
 steep and rough undercliff, a tangled mass of under- 
 growth clinging to the cliff itself, a cottage nestling 
 beneath, and church and castle stark against the 
 skyline that is Lympne from below. The purest 
 of water spouts from the cliff-face, from a pipe the 
 shrunken representative of the river Limen and 
 landsprings give the fields a perennial verdure. 
 
 Lympne, despite its weird spelling, is merely 
 u Lim " ; how or why the u p " got into the place- 
 name is unknown. The village a small and 
 drowsy one describes a semicircle enclosing the 
 church and its neighbour, and though pretty, is not 
 in any way remarkable, save that it has an inn oddly 
 named the " County Members," and a cottage 
 bearing the quaintly pretty tablet pictured on the next 
 page. The church is a grim stern church, exactly 
 suited to its situation, with massive Early Norman 
 and Early English interior, disdainful of ornament. 
 The heavy door of the north porch is boldly 
 patterned in nails, " A. G. C. W. 1708." 
 
 It is a Roman road that runs along the cliff-top 
 through Lympne to Aldington, passing the hamlet 
 of Court-at-Street that was once the Roman
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 
 
 N OS 
 
 " Belerica," and emerging upon the " open plain " 
 of Aldington Frith. " Allington Fright " as the 
 Kentish peasantry name it, is still an open expanse. 
 The airs of romance blow freely about it to-day, 
 as of old, and although from the high ground by 
 Aldington Forehead distant glimpses of Hythe and 
 its big neighbour, Folkestone, whether you desire 
 it or not, are obtained, the place is solitary, and 
 the. country, still unspoiled, dips down southward 
 
 to "The Mesh" and 
 
 the sea, over crumbling 
 earthy cliffs, tangled with 
 impenetrable bracken, 
 blackberry brambles, and 
 hazel coppices. This is 
 the especial district of 
 that fine prose legend, 
 " The Leech of Folke- 
 stone " " Mrs. Bother- 
 by's Story," as Ingoldsby 
 names it. The place has 
 ever been the home of 
 superstition and the miraculous. To quote Ingoldsby 
 himself, " Here it was, in the neighbouring chapelry, 
 the site of which may yet be traced by the curious 
 antiquary, that Elizabeth Barton, the ' Holy Maid 
 of Kent,' had commenced that series of supernatural 
 pranks which eventually procured for her head an 
 unenvied elevation upon London Bridge." Although 
 that eminent pluralist and cautious though fiery 
 reformer, Erasmus, was Rector of Aldington in 1511, 
 and opposed, alike by policy and temperament, to 
 shams and spiritual trickery, the old leaven of super- 
 stition worked freely in his time, and, indeed, survived 
 
 A COTTAGE TABLET, LYMPNE.
 
 148 THE 1NGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 until recent years. Nay, more than that, these 
 solitudes still harbour beliefs in the uncanny. The 
 district, as of old, has an ill name, and the warlocks 
 and other unholy subjects of Satan, once reported 
 to make its wild recesses their favourite rendezvous, 
 are found even now, in confidential interludes, to 
 be not wholly vanished from the rural imagination. 
 The moralist, from his lofty pinnacle, of course 
 condemns these darkling survivals, but there be 
 
 A KENTISH FARM. 
 
 those, not so committed to matter-of-fact, who, re- 
 volting from the obvious and the commonplace, 
 welcome the surviving folklore, and, plunging into 
 its haunts, forget awhile the fashion of Folkestone, 
 Sandgate, and Hythe. 
 
 The allusion in "The Leech of Folkestone" to 
 the " neighbouring chapelry " is a reference to an 
 ancient chapel of Our Lady whose roofless walls 
 are still to be found on the undercliff at the road- 
 side hamlet of Court-at-Street, situated on a little
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 
 
 149 
 
 unobtrusive plateau midway between the level of 
 the road from Hythe to Aldington and the drop 
 to Romney Marsh. This, in those old days, was 
 one of those minor places of pilgrimage which, 
 
 THE RUINED CHAPEL, COURT-AT-STREET. 
 
 possessing only an inferior collection of relics and 
 being situated in out-of-the-way nooks and corners, 
 could not command the crowds and the rich offer- 
 ings common at such shrines as those of St, Thomas
 
 150 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 a Becket, and other saints of his calibre. It is, 
 indeed, a shy and retiring place, and the stranger not 
 in search of it and not careful to make minute 
 inquiries would most certainly miss the spot. It 
 is gained down a short steep trackway beside the 
 Court Lodge Farm, and, when found, forms a 
 pleasing and unconventional peep the delight of 
 the artist, and at the same time his despair, because 
 he cannot hope to convey into his sketch that last 
 accent of romance the place owns. Here, where the 
 track dips down and becomes a hollow way, the 
 great gnarled roots of the thickly-clustering trees are 
 seen in their lifelong desperate clutch at the powdering 
 soil, and the trunks, wreathed here and there with 
 ivy, shouldering one another in their competition for 
 light and sustenance, form a heavy and massive 
 frame to the picture beyond a picture of ruined 
 chapel and sullen pool, fed by landsprings from the 
 broken cliff, and level marsh beyond, bounded only 
 by that insistent row of Martello towers, and by 
 the dull silver of the sea. 
 
 The story of the " Holy Maid of Kent " is intim- 
 ately connected with this chapel. It seems that in 
 1525 there was living at the cottage still standing at 
 Aldington, and called " Cobb's Hall," one Thomas 
 Cobb, bailiff to my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 who, among his many other fat manors, owned all this 
 expanse of Aldington, then largely a hunting forest. 
 We do not know much of Thomas Cobb, but of his 
 servant-maid, Elizabeth Barton, we possess a fund 
 of information, now humorous and then tragical. 
 Like Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Barton was quite a 
 humble and uneducated peasant-girl. Her ver) 
 name is rustic, " barton " being a term even now in
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 
 
 use to denote a barn or cattle-shed. In midst of 
 her service at " Cobb's Hall " this poor Elizabeth 
 is stricken down by an extraordinary complication of 
 internal bodily disease and mental affliction. 
 
 Alas ! poor Elizabeth no longer shall you scour 
 pots or cleanse plates ; no 
 more for you are the 
 homely domestic duties 
 of the bailifFs home ! 
 
 Wasted by sufferings 
 that all the arts of the pur- 
 blind medical practitioners 
 of that time could not 
 assuage, those doctors de- 
 clared that there was some- 
 thing more than ordinary 
 in her affliction. Some 
 merely thought their 
 science not sufficient for a 
 cure ; others, anxious for 
 the professional credit of 
 themselves and the practice 
 of medicine, darkly hinted 
 that here was an instance 
 of demoniacal possession ; 
 and others yet, listening to 
 the half-conscious ravings 
 of the unhappy girl, took 
 another view, and, de- 
 voutly crossing themselves, averred that this was 
 a visitation from God, and that she was becoming 
 possessed of a divine knowledge of things to be. A 
 perusal of the quaint and voluminous contemporary 
 records of Elizabeth Barton's career disposes one to 
 
 OLD SUNDIAL, ALDINGTON.
 
 152 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the belief that her ailments brought on a condition 
 of temporary, but recurrent, religious mania. She 
 had always been a devout girl, as the parish priest, 
 Richard Masters, was ready to declare ; but neither 
 he, nor any of his time, knew anything of mania of 
 the religious variety, and when, called to her bedside, 
 he saw and heard her in trances and somnambulistic 
 excursions, implicitly believed that the " very godly 
 certain things concerning the seven deadly sins and 
 the Ten Commandments " she was heard to narrate 
 were inspired. Those who had believed her de- 
 moniacally possessed were refuted by these pious 
 sayings. The Devil, it was obvious, had no part in 
 these things, but the Holy Ghost was working, 
 through the medium of this poor peasant girl, to 
 great events. 
 
 That was a time when such manifestations were, 
 from the point of view of the Church, eminently 
 desirable. Reformation was knocking at the gates 
 of Popery thunderous knocks and not to be denied. 
 The Roman Catholic clergy and their religion were 
 fast becoming discredited, and it was necesaary to 
 bolster up it and them by any means. The story 
 of Joan of Arc, although a hundred years old, was 
 by no means forgotten, and it was thought that 
 what the farm-maiden of Domremy could do for 
 the Crown of France, this native product of Kentish 
 soil might achieve for the Catholic Church in 
 England. 
 
 So Richard Masters, enthusiastic, took horse and 
 rode all the way from Aldington to Lambeth Palace, 
 where the old and doting Archbishop Warham, in 
 fear and rage at the impious dealings of Henry VIII. 
 with Holy Church, received the story of this,
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 153 
 
 Kentish miracle with a hope that something might 
 come of it. A good deal actually did so come, but 
 not greatly to the advantage of Roman Catholicism. 
 
 " Keep you," said he, " diligent accompt of all 
 her utterances : they come surely of God, and tell 
 her 'that she is not to refuse or hide His goodness 
 and works." 
 
 As a result of this ghostly advice of the Arch- 
 bishop, Masters returned and persuaded Bailiff Cobb 
 that pot-scouring and scullery-work were occupations 
 distinctly beneath the dignity of one clearly the elect 
 of the Holy Spirit, and she was promoted immedi- 
 ately to the place of an honoured guest in his house. 
 At the same time she experienced a recovery, and 
 became again the clumsy, big-footed country wench 
 of yore. Meanwhile, however, the fame of her 
 " prophecies " was bruited about in all that country- 
 side the cunning Richard Masters saw to that and 
 Cobb's house became a place of pilgrimage. Some 
 came for the merely vulgar purpose of having their 
 fortunes told ; others sought the laying on of hands, 
 for one so gifted could surely cure the ailing ; and 
 all combined to make Cobb's life a misery. 
 
 None was more disappointed at her recovery and 
 consequent descent from supernatural heights to her 
 former commonplace level than Elizabeth herself, 
 and she determined to simulate her former natural 
 trances. This iniquity seems to have been suggested 
 by the Church, in the persons of two monks sent by 
 the Archbishop from Canterbury. Those worthies, 
 the cellarer of the Priory of Christ Church, one 
 Doctor Bocking, and Dan William Hadley, took 
 her under instruction. They educated the previously 
 ignorant girl in the marvellous legends of the. old
 
 154 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Catholic female saints, taught her to believe herself 
 one of that company, and coached her in all the 
 abstruse doctrines of their religion. In her recurring 
 cataleptic states, sometimes real, but oftener feigned, 
 she re-delivered all these doctrines, and naturally 
 astonished those who had known her for ignorant 
 and absolutely without education, into a belief in 
 her divine mission. 
 
 At this juncture it was thought desirable to 
 transfer her to the neighbouring Chapel of Our 
 
 Lady, where she might not only work good to the 
 Church in general, but attract pilgrims and their 
 offerings to the shrine, which of late had been 
 doing very bad business, and was scarcely self- 
 supporting. No one in our own times understands 
 the art of advertisement better than did the religious 
 of those days, and the occasion of her transference 
 from Cobb's Hall to the Chapel was made the 
 occasion for a great ceremonial. She had given 
 out that she " would never take health of her body 
 till such time as she had visited the image of Our 
 Lady " at that place, and, indeed, declared that the
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 155 
 
 Virgin had appeared to her and promised recovery 
 on her obedience. 
 
 On that great day the thing had been made 
 so public there were over two thousand persons 
 present to witness the promised miracle, the whole 
 concourse singing the Litany and repeating psalms 
 and orations while Elizabeth was borne to the spot 
 on a litter, acting to perfection the part of one 
 possessed, " her face wondrously disfigured, her 
 tongue hanging out, and her eyes being in a manner 
 plucked out and lying upon her cheeks. There 
 was then heard a voice speaking within her belly, 
 as it had been in a tunne, her lips not greatly 
 moving ; she all that while continuing by the space 
 of three hours or more in a trance. The which 
 voice, when it told anything of the joys of Heaven, 
 spake so sweetly and so heavenly that every man 
 was ravished with the hearing thereof; and con- 
 trarywise, when it told anything of Hell, it spake 
 so horribly and terribly that it put the hearers in 
 a great fear. It spake also many things for the 
 confirmation of pilgrimages and trentals, hearing of 
 masses and confession, and many other such things. 
 And after she had lyen there a long time, she came 
 to herself again, and was perfectly whole " ; and no 
 wonder, for she was shamming all the while, with 
 the aid of a cunning ventriloquist, who thus spoke 
 so sweetly of Heaven and so horribly of Hell. 
 
 But this " miracle " so successfully imposed upon 
 the people that she was, without exception, regarded 
 as a saint. The Virgin, on second thoughts, per- 
 sonally desired her not to take up her residence 
 in the Chapel, but to take Dr. Bocking for her 
 spiritual father, to assume the name of Sister
 
 156 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Elizabeth, and to proceed to the Priory of St. 
 Sepulchre, in Canterbury. The blasphemies easy to 
 the Catholics of that time could not possibly be 
 better shown than by this narration. 
 
 Her progress of impudent imposture at Canter- 
 bury is more than surprising it astounds the 
 inquirer. She delivered oracles, which were printed 
 and commanded a large sale, and to her, for advice 
 on the religious questions then agitating the realm, 
 resorted many of the noblest and best in the land. 
 Of course, with the tuition and under the protection 
 of the Church, her opinions and advice were dis- 
 tinctly against the King, whom she grew so rash 
 as to threaten, on the question of his divorce and 
 re-marriage. Nay, more, she found it possible to 
 admonish the Pope. Sir Thomas More believed 
 in her holy mission ; Catherine of Aragon, the 
 divorced Queen, supported her ; Henry alone cared 
 not a rap for her prophecies of disaster. She actually 
 forced a way into his presence at Canterbury, on 
 his return from France. He should not, she 
 declared, reign a month after he married Anne 
 Boleyn, and " should die a villain's death " ; but 
 he married her and nothing happened. Strange to 
 say strange, after all we have heard of Henry's 
 ferocity nothing either happened at that time to 
 the " Holy Maid " herself. She postponed the date 
 of the coming disaster put it forward a month 
 and still nothing happened. Greatly to the surprise 
 of many, the King still reigned and seemed happy 
 enough. 
 
 Meanwhile the most extravagant claims were made 
 for the " Holy Maid." Once every fortnight, from 
 the chapel in the Priory, she was, amidst celestial
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 157 
 
 melodies, taken up to Heaven, to God and the 
 saints. Her passage to the chapel lay through the 
 monks' dormitory, and, according to the acts of 
 accusation levelled against her, her pilgrimages to 
 that chapel were not altogether so innocent of 
 carnal things as could have been desired. Angels 
 constantly visited her in her cell, and when they 
 had departed came the Devil himself, horned, hoofed, 
 and breathing sulphureous fumes, in manner appro- 
 priate. Accounts the monks gave of this last 
 visitor were, however, not always received with that 
 respectful belief anticipated, and so the Maid 
 submitted to a hole being burnt in her hand, to 
 convince the incredulous that Old Nick had come 
 and attempted her virtue. It is impossible to quote 
 the grossly indecent monkish stories ; but they are 
 ingenious, as also was their practice of escorting 
 pilgrims to the outside of her cell when the Evil 
 One was supposed to be present. The visitors 
 observed with their own physical eyes, and smelt, 
 with their own nostrils, the " great stinking smokes, 
 savouring grievously," that then issued from the 
 crevices of the door ; and went away, fearing 
 greatly. Later, when she was arrested, a stock of 
 brimstone and assafcetida was discovered in her 
 apartment, and these diabolical stinks found ready 
 explanation. 
 
 She ran a course of three years' blasphemous 
 deception before the Act of Attainder was prepared, 
 under which she and several of her accomplices 
 were arrested, found guilty of high treason, and 
 executed at Tyburn. That same Richard Masters 
 who discovered her existence to the religious world, 
 Dr. Bocking and four others suffered with her,
 
 1 58 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 on April 2ist, 1534. Her last words have their 
 own interest. " Hither," said she, addressing the 
 people, " 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 which at this time here suffer. 
 And yet I am not so much to be blamed, con- 
 sidering 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. And I, 
 being puffed up with their praises, fell into a proud 
 and foolish fantasye with myself, and thought I 
 might feign what I would, which thing hath brought 
 me to this case, and for the which I now cry to 
 God and the King's Highness most heartily mercy, 
 and desire all you good people to pray to God 
 to have mercy on me, and all them that here suffer 
 with me." 
 
 " If," says Lambarde, who was amused by the 
 Maid's impudent career " if these companions could 
 have let the King of the land alone, they might 
 have plaied their pageants as freely as others have 
 been permitted, howsoever it tended to the dishonour 
 of the King of Heaven."
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASH FORD (continued] 
 
 "COBB'S HALL" stands prominently to the left of 
 the road, after passing by the village of Aldington, 
 and is a very noticeable old half-timbered rustic 
 
 COBB'S HALL. 
 
 dwelling-house, now interiorly divided into two 
 cottages. In the up-stairs bedroom of one may be 
 seen the remains of a fine decorative plaster ceiling 
 and a strange pictorial plaster frieze surmounting 
 a blocked-up fireplace. This singular design is old 
 enough to have been here in Elizabeth Barton's 
 
 159
 
 160 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 time, and she must have been familiar with its 
 representations of Adam and Eve and their highly 
 problematical surroundings of queer birds and beasts, 
 not modelled from the life, and now, after centuries 
 of wear and many coats of paint, so blunted and 
 battered that it is difficult to tell certainly whether 
 any particular plaster protuberance is intended for 
 an elephant, a sheep, or a crow. 
 
 To the left of Aldington, on a road through the 
 
 ALDINGTON KNOLL. 
 
 alder thickets, hugging the edge of the cliffs, is 
 Aldington Knoll, a very remarkable hillock rising 
 boldly and bare from above the surrounding brush- 
 wood and coppices. In the legend of "The Leech 
 of Folkestone " it is described as " a sort of woody 
 promontory, in shape almost conical, its sides covered 
 with thick underwood, above which is seen a bare 
 and brown summit, rising like an Alp in miniature." 
 To this spot it was that Master Marsh resorted, at 
 the rising of the moon, for his meeting with the
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 161 
 
 conjuror, Aldrovando. Barham well chose this 
 legendary Knoll of Aldington for that miraculous 
 seance, for this is not only a well-known landmark, 
 but is the subject of much folklore. Thus, the 
 older rustics will tell how the Knoll is said to be 
 guarded by drowned sailors, keeping watch and 
 ward over a gigantic skeleton with a great sword, 
 
 BILSINGTON WOODS. 
 
 unearthed " once upon a time " by a reckless 
 digger for the treasure once popularly supposed to 
 be buried here. Something very terrible happened 
 to that unfortunate spadesman, and since then a 
 general consensus of rustic opinion has left the Knoll 
 alone. A local rhyme tells how 
 
 Where he dug the chark shone white 
 To sea, like Calais Light ; 
 
 but that is poetic license, the prehistoric barrow for 
 
 ii
 
 1 62 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 BILSINGTON PRIORY. 
 
 such it seems to be that crests the Knoll is of 
 yellow sand and gravel. 
 
 Beyond, in a tract of country thickly covered with 
 scrubwood, is the village of Bilsington, with 
 Bilsington Priory, now a farmhouse, standing remote 
 in midst of eight hundred acres of copse. It is a 
 Grimly picturesque house, this desecrated Priory of 
 St. Augustine, and doubly haunted firstly by a 
 prior who tells red-hot beads, and secondly by the 
 spook of a woman who was murdered by her 
 husband for accidentally smashing a trayfull of 
 china. The nightly crashings are said by the most 
 unveracious witnesses to still continue, but however 
 that may be, the place certainly is haunted by 
 innumerable owls, who roost fearlessly in some of 
 the deserted rooms.
 
 FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD 163 
 
 Away by the roadside is Bilsington village, its 
 moated Court Lodge Farm and parish church 
 grouped together. It was Bilsington bell that struck 
 One ! in " The Leech of Folkestone," and advised 
 Master Marsh that his torments were, for the time, 
 over. 
 
 By Ruckinge and Ham Street we come up 
 Orlestone Hill, that " Quaker-coloured ravine " 
 
 B1LS1NGTUN CHURCH. 
 
 described in the story of "Jerry Jarvis's Wig." 
 " The road," says Ingoldsby, " had been cut deep 
 below the surface of the soil, for the purpose of 
 diminishing the abruptness of the descent, and as 
 either side of the superincumbent banks was 
 clothed with a thick mantle of tangled copsewood, 
 the passage, even by day, was sufficiently obscure, 
 the level beams of the rising or setting sun, as they
 
 164 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 happened to enfilade the gorge, alone illuminating 
 its recesses." 
 
 The cutting is there to this day, but it must be 
 confessed that neither it nor the hill are so steep as 
 that description would have us believe. Here it was 
 that the body of Humphry Bourne was found, 
 
 ORLESTONE HILL. 
 
 murdered by Joe Washford, demoniacally possessed 
 and incited by the wig that Jerry Jarvis, the 
 scoundrelly solicitor of Appledore, had given him. 
 
 From the little church of Orlestone that, with a 
 picturesque black and white manor house crowns the 
 hill, it is five miles into the market-town, and railway 
 centre of Ashford.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND I THE HINTERLAND OF 
 FOLKESTONE AND HYTHE 
 
 THE business of getting out of Folkestone is a 
 weariful affair, for there are not only the heavy 
 rises in the roads to be surmounted, but the great 
 rolling chalk hills that shut in the valleys reverberate 
 the heat of the sun to a degree that is often stifling, 
 and in these latter days the tiresome hindmost 
 suburbs of Folkestone conspire to render the 
 explorer's lot a hard one, going back dustily inland, 
 beyond Radnor Park, until they join forces with 
 what was once the rural village of Cheriton Street. 
 
 It is a remarkable stretch of country to which 
 one comes at last ; a tumbled area of bare, grassy 
 chalk downs, rising up into bold sugarloaf peaks 
 and cones, very dry and parching. Shorncliffe 
 Camp is hard by, occupying the high ground 
 between Cheriton and Sandgate, and up and down 
 this valley and these hillsides it is the fate of the 
 brave defenders of their country to be manoeuvred, 
 in season and out. When the soldiers of Shorncliffe 
 Camp look down from their windy eyrie upon 
 the long, dry course of the valley, they feel tired 
 and thirsty, and as they look on it every day this 
 amounts to saying that the thirst of Shorncliffe 
 Camp is a transcendent thirst, and not to be 
 
 165
 
 1 66 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 measured by ordinary standards. The sweating 
 swaddy's acute thirst is induced by reminiscent and 
 prospective agonies of drought in the reviews and 
 field-days, past and to come, in that waterless 
 bottom. 
 
 He and his forebears have been learning their 
 martial trade here for considerably over a hundred 
 years, for it was in 1794 that Shorncliffe Camp 
 was first founded. It housed the despondent and 
 ragged troops landed from the disastrous retreat 
 of Sir John Moore upon Corunna* They learn 
 their drill with every circumstance of unmilitary 
 squalor and untidiness at Shorncliffe, and although 
 they are turned out with pomp and display on grand 
 occasions, the dirt and raggedness of the camp 
 itself, and the makeshift out-at-elbows appearance 
 of men and material, do not form a picture of military 
 glory. Tommy u at home " at Shorncliffe is a very 
 different creature from the oiled and curled darling 
 of the nursemaids on the sea-front at Hythe or 
 Seabrook ; and with unshaven face, short pipe in 
 mouth, in shirt-sleeves and with braces dangling 
 about his legs, wandering among the domestic 
 refuse and garbage that plentifully bestrew the 
 place, looks very little like a hero. 
 
 It is very pleasant to leave the struggling shops 
 of the ultimate Folkestone suburbs behind, to forget 
 the strenuous struggles with bankruptcy waged by 
 those pioneer shopkeepers at the Back of Beyond, 
 and to bid good-bye at length to the last outposts 
 of the pavements, the kerbstones, and the lamp- 
 standards. It is not, however, so pleasing, having 
 put all these evidences of civilisation behind one, 
 to observe, peering over the distant hillside, a
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 167 
 
 vast building which on inquiry proves to be the 
 workhouse, another, and a rather grim, reminder 
 of that civilisation which in one extremity flaunts 
 in silks and satins on the Folkestone Leas, and in 
 the other sets its servants, the ministrants to all 
 that display, to eke out an objectless existence in 
 stuff and co r duroy within this giant barrack. It 
 is the dark reverse of the bright picture of south 
 coast life and fashion. 
 
 It is a relief to turn away from this evidence 
 of Folkestone's prosperity, and to secure a quiet 
 hillside nook whence, on one of those insufferably 
 hot days invariably selected for elaborate evolutions 
 and parades, to watch the sweating Tommies harried 
 up and down the blistering valley in the service 
 of their country, to the raucous and unintelligible 
 yells of commanding officers, comfortably and coolly 
 supervising their heated efforts from the easeful 
 vantage-point of horseback. The contemplative 
 pilgrim finds the energy thus displayed by rank 
 and file to be what a tradesman would call " splendid 
 value " for the reward of a shilling a day, but 
 dolefully admits to himself that not for less than 
 four times that pay can he obtain a man to do a 
 job of honest, but less laborious and exacting, work 
 in a private capacity. 
 
 Up yonder, on the hillside, the signallers are 
 working the heliograph and energetically waving 
 flags. Their energy makes one positively feel tired. 
 It is " Cassar's Camp " whence the bright dot-and- 
 dash signal-flashes of the heliograph are proceeding ; 
 if we were clever enough, or duly trained, we could 
 read the messages sent. We must not suppose, 
 because " Cassar's Camp " is so named, that Caesar
 
 168 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 himself, or any other Roman, ever camped there : 
 if he had camped in half the places so called, he 
 would have had no time for fighting. Julius Caesar, 
 in fact, is said to have camped, and Queen Elizabeth 
 to have slept, in more places than their poor ghosts 
 would recognise if they were ever allowed to revisit 
 these glimpses of the moon. Nay, even in " regions 
 Caesar never knew " his camps absurdly appear. It 
 is quite certain, for example, that the great general 
 was never in South Africa, and yet " Cassar's Camp," 
 overlooking Ladysmith, was the scene of much 
 fighting in the second Boer War. 
 
 A complete change from this scene of martial 
 glory and perspiration is Cheriton itself, where the 
 ancient church stands on a hilltop, away from 
 Cheriton Street. In the rear go the chasing lights 
 and shades of sun and clouds, racing over the 
 yellow-green of the grassy hills ; ahead plunges a 
 tree-shaded winding line leading unexpectedly to 
 the sea. It is the one unspoiled little rural oasis in 
 the urban and suburban deserts of a seaboard that 
 has grown fashionable. All too soon it ends, and 
 the villas of Seabrook are reached. 
 
 Seabrook and Hythe we have already seen. Now 
 let us strike boldly inland, and, leaving Hythe to 
 the left, tackle the perpetual rise and fall of the 
 roads that lead past the romantic castle of Saltwood 
 to the bosky glades of Westenhanger. 
 
 Saltwood Castle is a peculiarly interesting object 
 in the Ingoldsby Country, for it was the place where 
 the four knights who murdered Becket assembled, 
 on the night before the tragedy, and FitzUrse, 
 among them, was, as we have already seen, claimed 
 by Barham as his ancestor. The massive circular
 
 169 
 
 stone entrance-towers of the Castle come into view 
 as we turn inland and surmount the crest of the 
 hill at the back of Hythe. From this hilltop it is 
 seen how exquisitely beautiful was the situation of 
 Saltwood in days of old, before Hythe and its 
 neighbouring mushroom townlets had begun to 
 throw out their villas and suburban residences upon 
 the spurs of the downs, flouting the sylvan solitude 
 
 SALTWOOD CASTLE. 
 
 and mediaeval aloofness of that secluded fortress. It 
 lies a mile inland, at the head of a green and moist 
 valley, still thickly wooded, sloping to the sea. We 
 do not fully realise, until we take thought, the due 
 meaning of that beautiful name of Saltwood ; but, 
 dwelling upon its old history, and in imagination 
 sweeping away the modern accretions of houses, it 
 is possible to recover the look of that Saltwood of 
 old, when the woodlands were even more dense than 
 now, and extended to the very margin of the sea ;
 
 1 70 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 when a little pebbly brook came prattling from the 
 bosom of the downs beyond, and, overhung by 
 forest trees, found its way to the beach. The high 
 tides then oozed some little distance up the valley, 
 and the trees dipped their branches in the mingled 
 waters of sea and stream. No roads, save the 
 merest bridle-paths, then led up to the Castle, whose 
 towers rose from amid the encircling trees like some 
 fortress of fairyland. 
 
 From very early times Saltwood Castle was held 
 by the Archbishops of Canterbury. It was, indeed, 
 the seizure of this archiepiscopal castle and demesne 
 by the Crown, and the grant of them to Randulf 
 de Broc, that formed one of Becket's bitter grievances 
 against Henry II. De Broc and his relatives 
 were not only seated on the Archbishop's property, 
 but were given the custody of his palace at 
 Canterbury during his long six years' banishment, 
 and on his return in December 1170, strenuously 
 set themselves to be as insolent and as injurious 
 as possible. Randulf himself hunted down the 
 Archbishop's deer with the Archbishop's own hounds, 
 and seized a vessel off Hythe laden with wine, a 
 present from the King to Becket, killing some of 
 the crew and casting the survivors into the dungeons 
 of Pevensey. It was ill business quarrelling with 
 that heady family, unanimously bent upon spiting 
 and spoiling his Grace, from bloody murder and 
 the seizing and destroying of property down to acts 
 of wanton and provocative petty buffoonery. While 
 Randulf de Broc was committing murder and piracy 
 upon the high seas, his kinsman Robert, a renegade 
 monk, on Christmas Eve waylaid one of the Arch- 
 bishop's sumpter-mules and one of his horses and
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 171 
 
 cut off their tails. It was this minor indignity 
 that made the greater impression upon Becket's 
 mind. For it he cursed and excommunicated both 
 Randulf and Robert on Christmas Day from the 
 nave pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral. 
 
 Saltwood Castle, however, and the De Brocs bore 
 a still further part in the tragedy of Becker., now 
 fast drawing to its final act. When the four knights, 
 Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Moreville, William de 
 Tracy, and Richard le Bret, rushed forth from the 
 King's presence at his court of Bur, in Normandy, 
 on the night of December 24th, with murder in 
 their hearts, they agreed to cross the Channel by 
 two different routes, landing at Dover and at 
 Winchelsea and meeting here, in this fortalice of 
 Saltwood, where hatred sat embattled, already excom- 
 municated and given over in any case to damna- 
 tion, and so ready for any deed. Ghastly legends, 
 theatrical in the rich gloom of their staging, tell 
 how the four from over sea and Randulf de Broc 
 met here, and plotted together on this night of 
 December 28th the deed that was to be done on 
 the morrow ; arranging all the details of that act 
 of blood in the dark, with extinguished candles, 
 fearful of seeing each other's faces so strong a 
 hold did the event take of the popular imagination. 
 The next morning, calling together a troop of 
 soldiers in the King's name, they galloped off to 
 Canterbury, along the Stone Street, to the commission 
 of that crime whose echoes have come down to 
 us, still hoarsely reverberant, despite the passing of 
 more than seven centuries. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that here at Salt- 
 wood we see the veritable walls that sheltered those
 
 1 72 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 assassins. There is nothing remaining at Saltwood 
 that can take us back to the days of Becket. The 
 oldest, as well as the most imposing, part is the 
 entrance, whose great drum-towers, built or restored 
 by the cruel and haughty Archbishop Courtenay 
 about 1350, give a very striking impression to one 
 who stands beneath them of the almost impregnable 
 strength of such mediaeval strongholds before the 
 days of heavy ordnance the walls are so thick 
 and smooth, the loophole windows so high up and 
 small, the stout gate so strengthened with iron. If 
 to force such a place seems almost impossible in 
 cold blood, what of the time when it was defended 
 by determined persons who heaved heavy stones 
 from the battlements, so high up, upon the devoted 
 heads of the equally determined persons, so far 
 below ; when the molten lead poured down in 
 silvery cascades, to burn through the flesh to the 
 very bone, and the winged missiles sped from 
 the arbalasts into the liver of many a gallant 
 warrior ? 
 
 The oak door is heavy and brown; 
 
 And with iron it is plated and machicollated, 
 To pour boiling oil and lead down ; 
 
 How you'd frown 
 Should a ladle-full fall on your crown 1 
 
 One is altogether indisposed to quarrel with the 
 very thoroughgoing restoration that has given these 
 great entrance-towers so striking an air of newness, 
 for one instinctively feels that these towers must 
 have looked so in times when the garrison was 
 still kept up. While the place remained a fortress- 
 residence it would have been simply suicidal not
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 173 
 
 to maintain the entrance in the utmost state of 
 repair. 
 
 The arms of Courtenay the three-pointed label 
 and the three bezants supported by an angel, 
 still remain over the entrance, but Courtenay himself, 
 before whose frown his unfortunate tenants trembled, 
 and in whose rare and uncertain smiles they dared 
 to breathe in deprecating fashion, is forgotten 
 locally. In Cornwall, in Wales, or in any Celtic 
 part of Great Britain he would have survived in 
 wild diabolic legend, but in Kent, which has been 
 phlegmatic and matter-of-fact ever since Hengist 
 and Horsa and the rest of the Teutons landed, he 
 has long been consigned to dryasdust records, where 
 his memory lingers, inanimate. When a little of 
 the dust has been banged out of him, he can be 
 made to strut the stage again and lord it once 
 more, like the very full-blooded tyrant he was, 
 zealous in upholding the spiritualities and the 
 temporalities of the Church, and fanatic in the 
 exaction of deference and manorial dues to himself. 
 Did any poor hind or woodsman offend, ever so 
 unconsciously, in failing of that deference, why, 
 let him be seized and flung into some Little Ease 
 or earthly purgatory, damply underground, there 
 to reflect, with stripes, upon the majesty of Arch- 
 bishops in general, and of Courtenays in particular, 
 and to wonder when it shall please my lord to 
 release him. Meanwhile, his Grace has forgotten 
 all about his victim, and is thundering in his 
 manorial court against the trembling bailiffs and 
 townsfolk of his manor of Hythe, who have not 
 done him, as he imagines, that yeoman service 
 which is his due, and have now come to compound
 
 174 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 for that dereliction with fines in good coin and 
 propitiatory offerings for his table, such as porpoises 
 (the old records call them " porpusses ") and others 
 of the beastly dishes that mediaeval times delighted 
 in. All these folk had cause to rejoice when his 
 exacting Grace died in 1396, and made way for 
 a milder occupant of the seat of St. Augustine, 
 but they were not happy until the Reformation 
 came and the Church and the manor parted com- 
 pany. The property now belongs to the Deedes 
 family, but it needs no very prophetic eye to discern 
 the ultimate fate of Saltwood's ownership. It lies 
 too near the gates of the consorted towns of Hythe 
 and Folkestone and their satellites to be much 
 longer suffered to maintain its present serni-solitude, 
 and the day will come when it and its romantic 
 setting of woods will be offered to and purchased 
 by those towns as a public park. The landscape- 
 gardener will be let loose upon it ; winding gravel 
 paths of the kind that takes a league of path to 
 go a mile of distance will be made, and the public 
 will be requested to " keep off the grass " and 
 to "place all refuse in the receptacle provided for 
 the purpose " : all very parlourmaidenly, and the 
 essence of neatness and order, but well, there ! 
 one can imagine the choleric ghosts of De Broc 
 and Courtenay and those of many a gross man- 
 at-arms or warlike seneschal walking on the grass 
 in derision, or with ineffective kicks of impalpable 
 mailed feet seeking to demolish the receptacles. 
 
 Magnificently- wooded hills stretch from Saltwood 
 inland to Westenhanger, and the delightful road 
 goes full in view of the gorgeous sylvan beauties 
 of Sandling Park, presently to come to a broad
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 
 
 175 
 
 highway running due north and south, beside whose 
 straight course the ruined, ivy-clad outworks and 
 towers of an ancient mansion are seen, in whose 
 midst is planted an eighteenth-century mansion. 
 This is Westenhanger House, erected by Squire 
 Champneys in place of that older manor house 
 which was built on the site of a still more ancient 
 fortified place by Henry VIII. Like many another 
 manor of ancient descent, Westenhanger has been 
 
 WESTENHANGER HOUSE. 
 
 many times in and out of Royal possession. Its 
 odd name, inviting inquiry, really means no more 
 than, in modern parlance, " Westwood," and is 
 derived from the Saxon angra. It is mentioned in 
 a deed of St. Augustine's monastery as " Le Hangre," 
 and was early divided into two portions, Westen 
 and Osten (or eastern) Hanger. Remains of the 
 moat that once surrounded the old fortified mansion 
 are still to be seen, together with the defensible 
 towers. 
 
 Westenhanger stands upon the old Stone Street
 
 17$ THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 from Lympne to Canterbury, surrounded by densely 
 wooded parks and neighboured unromantically in 
 these times by a railway nay, more, a railway 
 junction. One might suppose that the force of 
 modernity could no further go, but that supposition 
 would be an error, for the grounds of the famous 
 old place have been of Jate years converted into 
 a racecourse, and Westenhanger House itself is 
 given up to the business of a new turf enterprise 
 a sufficiently thorough change from those remote 
 times when it was a bower of Henry II. and the 
 Fair Rosamond, that beauteous harlot of whom 
 Queen Eleanor was so very properly jealous, and 
 for whose safety from the queenly nails and tongue 
 the infatuated king built several artful retreats in 
 various parts of the country. The chief bower 
 of the wanton Rosamond was at Woodstock. Its 
 like, according to the old ballad-writers, was never 
 seen. It had a hundred and fifty doors, and a vast 
 number of secret passages, so cunningly contrived 
 that no one could find a way in or out without 
 the aid of a thread. Despite those precautions, or 
 possibly because there were a hundred and forty-nine 
 doors too many, the furious Queen Eleanor did 
 enter and poisoned the " Rosa Mundi " ; and " a 
 good job, too," will be the verdict of most people 
 with properly-developed domestic instincts. Rosa- 
 mond was buried in all the unmerited pomp and odour 
 of sanctity in Godstow Nunnery. If that shameless 
 young person had remained at Westenhanger, where 
 there was, apparently not so embarrassing a choice 
 of doors, she might have escaped the Queen's 
 vengeance altogether. Nothing, however, at Westen- 
 hanger is of so great an age as Rosamond's day,
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 177 
 
 although, to be sure, the remaining angle-towers 
 were built only some forty years later. 
 
 Stone Street, that goes so broad and straight on 
 towards Canterbury, is not the deserted road that 
 many are inclined to think it. Once a week it is 
 populated by a stream of carriers' covered carts going 
 between Canterbury and the obscure villages on 
 either side of the Roman way, not yet within touch 
 of railways ; and some very quaint survivals are to 
 be found on those occasions. There are carriers 
 from sleepy hollows who are as russet in complexion 
 and clothing from head to foot as the soil, and as 
 much a product of it as the trees and fruits. These 
 are those true Kentish men in whose mouths the 
 sound of " th " is impossible, and who pronounce 
 the definite article " the " like a Frenchman. To 
 hear a Kentish rustic holding forth upon the iniquities 
 of " de wedder " when he is intent upon abusing 
 the climate is as humorous an interlude as to listen 
 to a Kentish housewife who talks in unaccustomed 
 plurals and asks the hungry tourist at tea if he will 
 have any more " bread and butters." 
 
 Others there are in a way less rustic, if equally 
 provincial. These are those grand seigneurs in the 
 carrying line who sport ancient silk or beaver hats 
 and wear broadcloth of an antique cut broadcloth 
 that was once black and hats that of old were glossy. 
 If the clothes can scarcely be suspected of being 
 heirlooms, the hats certainly are. They are extremely 
 rare and genuine stove-pipes, calculated to impress 
 the rural neighbours with the dignity of the wearers 
 and to extinguish the casual stranger at Canterbury 
 with spasms of laughter. " He were giv' me by 
 my feyder," said Carrier Hogben of Postling, who, 
 
 12
 
 1 78 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 alas, is now gathered to his kin in the rural church- 
 yard ; and that amazing headgear seemed to gather 
 respect to itself when referred to in the masculine 
 gender. It seemed to stand more upright, and to 
 look more rigid, if that were possible. " Yes," he 
 repeated, " m' feyder givvimee, and Vs still a good 
 'un. Dey don't mek 'at's like 'e now," he added 
 with pride, as he carefully brushed it the wrong 
 way with his coat-sleeve, so that the nap stood up 
 like the fur of a cat when it sees a strange dog. 
 One used to heartily agree that hats of that sort 
 are not made nowadays. Hogben was then wont 
 to give a grunt of satisfaction. " does used to be 
 made to last," he would say, as he carefully replaced 
 that gruesome tile in the box that had held it close 
 upon forty years, " and folks when dey'd got a 
 good 'at, took care of 'im." 
 
 Having put away that impressive head-covering 
 and resumed his everyday clothes, " Mr. Jeremiah 
 Hogben," as he was respectfully known by his rustic 
 neighbours on carrying days and Sundays, became 
 simple " old Jerry " or " old Hogben " for the rest 
 of the week. It was as though a king had relin- 
 quished his robes and regalia and come among the 
 people as one of themselves. 
 
 Mr. Hogben, in common with the rest of the 
 countryside, had a good deal of inaccurate lore 
 respecting the Stone Street. According to him, it 
 was made by the builders of Canterbury Cathedral, 
 to convey stone quarried at Lympne to the scene of 
 operations. He declined to believe in the Romans. 
 They were " foreigners," and as such, incapable of 
 road-making " or anything else," as he sweepingly 
 declared. Mr. Hogben had seen a foreigner once :
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 179 
 
 an Italian with a monkey and a hurdy-gurdy organ, 
 who had found his way to Postling by mistake the 
 only manner in which strangers ever do find them- 
 selves in that village. Not having been present at 
 this rencounter, it is difficult to determine which of 
 the trio was the more astonished the monkey, the 
 Italian, or Mr. Hogben. Presumably the monkey, 
 for at sight of the carrier and his hat the terrified 
 animal escaped up a tree, whence his master only 
 recovered him after much trouble and many u Per 
 Baccos ! " " Swearing awful, he was," according to 
 Hogben. 
 
 " Do you understand Italian, then ? " we asked. 
 
 " Lor' bless ye, no, sir ; whatever put dat in 
 yer 'ed : no Eyetalian for me, so long as I can talk 
 Inglish ; and when dey tells me dat such as dem, 
 mid deir monkeys and orgins, made this ere road 
 what we're travelling on, why, I begs to not believe 
 a bit of it." 
 
 " But the modern Italians and the ancient Romans 
 are not precisely the same people." 
 
 a So gentlemen like you've told me afore ; but 
 what I says is, dey both comes from Italy, don't 
 dey ? Well den, it stands to reason dey're the 
 same. No people what goes about the country 
 playing hurdy-gurdies ever made this road, I'll 
 stake me life on't." 
 
 If Hogben had no respect for foreigners, his 
 manner indicated that he owned an awed kind of 
 deference to the memory of Lord Rokeby of Mount 
 Morris, past which park he had driven on his way 
 to and from Canterbury for many years. Which of 
 the several Barons Rokeby it was whose doings in 
 lifetime and whose post-mortem pranks were the
 
 180 THE 1NGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 theme of his discourses, does not appear. " He had 
 a goolden bart " (he meant " bath ") " for Sundays 
 and a marble one for week-days, and he'd sit in 'em 
 all de marciful day long and read de papers and 
 have his bit o' grub. When he got tired o' dat, 
 and t'ought he'd like a stroll, he'd just nip outer 
 de bart and walk about de park, as naked as Adam 
 before dey inwented fig-leaves. An' now " (? cause 
 and effect) " he drives down de Stone Street every 
 midnight, wid his head in his lap and four coal- 
 black haases, breading fire. No, I can't say I ever 
 seed him and dunnosiwanto : reckon I'd run awaiy. 
 I knewed a man what did see 'im, and it gran' nigh 
 druv 'im offn 'is 'ed." 
 
 Such are the legends still current at the Back of 
 Beyond, but they are dwindling away. Even old 
 Hogben could find it possible to say that " ghostesses " 
 were already " quite out-o'-doors " by which he 
 meant that they were out of fashion. But he was 
 bung-full of smuggling lore, and could illustrate his 
 stories with object lessons, as he drove his steady 
 course along the Stone Street. " 'See dat tree," he 
 would say, in passing a copse. " Dat's where de 
 Ransleys " naming a ferocious family of smugglers, 
 men and women, notorious for their cruelties and out- 
 rages " dat's where de Ransleys tied one of deir 
 haases, before dey were taken off to Maidstone Gaol." 
 The horse was starved to death, thus haltered, and 
 the gang, who had been known to beat a Revenue 
 officer to death, were almost heart-broken when 
 they heard of it. Such contradictions are we all.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND (continued) 
 
 IF we continued along this straight road, the Mecca 
 of the Stone Street carriers, Canterbury, would be 
 reached again. Instead, we turn to the right, and 
 in a mile and a half reach the Elham Valley and the 
 hoary village of Lyminge, looking very new when 
 viewed from a little distance, by reason of the 
 sudden eruption of red-roofed villas come to disturb 
 the ancient seclusion. Have a care how you pro- 
 nounce the name of this village, lest by some 
 uncovenanted rendering you proclaim yourself a 
 stranger. The cautious in these matters always 
 accost the first inhabitant met with, and ask him 
 the name of the place, a method never known to 
 fail unless the encounter takes place outside the 
 post-office and the inhabitant be a crusty one who, 
 curtly, and with an over-the-shoulder jerk of the 
 thumb, says, " You'll find it written up there." 
 
 By the united testimony of the phonetic spelling 
 of the thirteenth century and the twentieth century 
 pronunciation of the natives, " Lyminge " should 
 be enunciated with a short, not a long, " y " for 
 the first syllable ; while one should, for the second, 
 pronounce as in " singe " or a hinge." Authority 
 for the ancient pronunciation being the same as 
 
 ife
 
 1 82 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 now is found in the name of a thirteenth-century 
 rector, spelled " de Limminge," which clinches 
 the matter. It is, however, quite other-guesswork 
 with the meaning or the derivation of the name. 
 One school of antiquaries finds its origin in the 
 Latin name of the Stone Street, which when the 
 
 LYMINGE. 
 
 Romans came was, they tell us, an ancient British 
 trackway called the Heol-y-Maen, or Stone Path. 
 The Romans reconstructed both the path and its 
 name, which, in the Latinised " Via Limenea," was 
 as near as they could get to the uncouth tongue of 
 the Britons. Unfortunately for this ingenious 
 theory, Lyminge is a mile and a half from the Stone 
 Street. It really derived its name, in common with
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 
 
 183 
 
 Lympne, from the Flumen Limenea, or river 
 Limen, which once flowed down the valley, a con- 
 siderable stream, now shrunken to a tiny brook. 
 
 The Romans prevailed largely in these parts, and, 
 despite friend Hogben, performed some wonderful 
 things, even though " foreigners." They certainly 
 colonised at Lyminge, in whose church walls the 
 
 LYMINGE CHURCH. 
 
 red Roman tiles from some shattered villa are plenti- 
 fully worked in among the undoubted Saxon masonry. 
 The present church is the successor of what is con- 
 sidered to have been the first Christian basilica 
 erected under the Roman rule in this island, and 
 reconstructed about A.D. 640 by Ethelburga, daughter 
 of King Ethelbert, on the re-introduction of Chris- 
 tianity. Here that pious princess founded a Bene- 
 dictine nunnery, and here, in the fulness of time,
 
 184 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 she died. Portions of her religious establishment 
 long remained, and formed admirable pigsties, but 
 even those few relics have been improved away. 
 Very much, however, remains in and around the 
 church, to indicate its Roman origin and to prove 
 the old theory that it was reared upon a building 
 of three apsidal aisles. Indeed, the base of one of 
 those same apses is laid open to view on the south 
 side of the building, level with the gravel path. 
 This south side of the church is eminently picturesque, 
 with its wooden porch, and windows of widely- 
 different ages and styles, together with the ancient 
 flying buttress built against the south-east angle of 
 the chancel. 
 
 The Elham Valley, in whose basin Lyminge 
 lies nestled, runs up to Bridge and Canterbury, 
 and a branch of the South-Eastern Railway runs 
 down it, taking advantage of the easy gradients 
 in a manner common to railways. Places in it are 
 ceasing to be remote and can no longer strictly be 
 said to be Beyond, much less at the Back of it. 
 Thus we will not pursue this pleasant hollow in 
 the hills very far, but will cut across to Acryse. 
 But not before seeing Elham itself, the capital and 
 metropolis of the vale. 
 
 " E-lam ' ' for that, and not the more obvious 
 way, is the correct local shibboleth sits boldly in 
 the lap of the hills, visible afar off. Those who 
 hunt the fox with the East Kent Foxhounds know 
 it well, for the kennels are situated here, but few 
 else have made its acquaintance. It was once 
 in far-off times, when the ancient and beautiful 
 houses in its one broad street were new a market- 
 town, and if it has lost its trade it has by no means
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 
 
 185 
 
 OLD HOUSES AT ELHAM. 
 
 relinquished its dignity. This is no place to speak 
 at length of Elham church, whose tall tower and 
 tapering spire command the valley, nor is it the 
 place wherein to hold forth upon the library within 
 the church, bequeathed some hundreds of years ago 
 to the good folks of Elham by some old-world 
 benefactor, strong in his belief in the civilising 
 influence of literature when dispensed at the hands 
 of the local clergyman or perhaps merely anxious 
 to be rid of a mass of useless rubbish. That 
 library is reported to contain a valuable collection 
 of Great Rebellion tracts ; but what it does contain 
 no Elhamite can with certainty tell you, because 
 their reading runs in the lines of least resistance 
 which is equal to saying that they prefer the news 
 columns of their weekly paper to the crabbed 
 literature of that revolution which saved us from.
 
 1 86 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Popery more than two hundred years ago. For 
 that reason alone the position of church librarian 
 at Elham is a sinecure. 
 
 We have, for the purpose of seeing Elham, 
 proceeded a little too far for Acryse, and must 
 retrace our steps, ascending the steep hillsides to 
 the east for that purpose. 
 
 It is only by dint of much climbing that one 
 reaches Acryse, for it tops the range of uplands 
 that shut in the Elham valley. Climbing up the 
 lane by which Master Marsh and his man Ralph 
 descended, in the legend of " The Leech of Folke- 
 stone," the woods of Acryse are found clothing the 
 crest and extending densely into a shrouded table- 
 land, where the sun-rays percolate but dimly 
 through a heavy overarching interlaced canopy of 
 boughs. Acryse means " Oak Hill," but, whatever 
 the character of these woods may once have been, 
 the oak certainly is not the most numerous in them 
 to-day. If one tree preponderates over any other 
 species here, it is the beech, which in the dim light 
 and closely-serried ranks has grown so spindly that 
 it only begins to throw out branches at a height 
 of some thirty or forty feet from the ground. The 
 simpleton who could not see the wood for the trees 
 is proverbial, but it is at first impossible to see 
 Acryse, on account of -the woods. And no wonder, 
 for the woods are so large and Acryse so small. 
 There is not even the semblance of a hamlet. The 
 manor house and the adjoining manorial chapel form 
 the whole of the place, except some scattered few 
 cottages out of sight, for whose inhabitants the 
 chapel serves the function of parish church. The 
 Papillons, who once held the manor of Acryse, have
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 
 
 187 
 
 long since relinquished it, and Mackinnons have 
 for three generations past resided here. The butter- 
 fly crest of the old owners is therefore sought in 
 vain in manor house or chapel. Chapel and house 
 are discreetly secluded within the mossy woods, and 
 
 ACRYSE. 
 
 only the diminutive spire of the one and some few 
 glimpses of the out-buildings and bellcote of the 
 other are gained between the clustering tree-stems. 
 History, by association, is making at Acryse, for 
 it is the seat of that Colonel Mackinnon who 
 
 commanded the C,I.V. in the second Boer War,
 
 1 88 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 If signs of human habitation are small here, those 
 of bird-life are overwhelming. The woods of 
 Acryse are one vast rookery. In winter, when the 
 boughs are unclothed, their nests occupy every fork 
 of the branches, and all the year they make their 
 presence known, not only by the disfigurement of 
 the stranger's clothing as he walks under their 
 roosting-places, but by the rising and falling bursts 
 of cawing that mark all hours of the day, like a 
 perpetual session of Parliament with the Speaker 
 absent and the Irish members in individual and 
 collective possession of the House, each one talking 
 " nineteen to the dozen," and each with a personal 
 grievance to duly ventilate. For the note of the 
 rookery is a distinctly querulous one, always in 
 opposition. Occasionally, when the greater din dies 
 down, grave and reverend or, at least, deep and 
 self-satisfied individual voices are heard, like those 
 of well-fed and paunchy ministers rising to defend 
 their departments and themselves, with voices re- 
 monstrant, argumentative, or triumphant. 
 
 What the rooks find to talk about all day and 
 every day might puzzle anyone who did not read 
 the reports of Imperial Parliament ; but those 
 having once been read, there is no room for surprise. 
 
 It is only when evening approaches that the 
 rookery is stilled, and even then only after a 
 preliminary clamour from home-coming birds, in 
 conclave, that makes one's ears sing again. After 
 that deafening rally the voices are heard singly, 
 bubbling and gobbling, until at last, when the rim 
 of the sun sinks down below the horizon, the colony 
 is at rest. 
 
 Leaving lonely Acryse amid a hoarse parting
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 189 
 
 chorus from its rooks, we will turn our course 
 towards Swingfield Minnis, and thence to St. John's, 
 the scene of that lightest and brightest of the 
 Legends, the "Witches' Frolic." We need expect 
 to find no ruin, for Barham's description in the 
 verse is altogether beside the mark. Thus he, in 
 the character of Grandfather Ingoldsby, apostrophises 
 it : 
 
 I love thy tower, Grey Ruin, 
 
 I joy thy form to see, 
 
 Though reft of all, bell, cloister, and hall, 
 
 Nothing is left save a tottering wall. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Thou art dearer to me, thou Ruin Grey, 
 Than the Squire's verandah, over the wayj 
 
 And fairer, I ween, the ivy sheen 
 That thy mouldering turret binds, 
 Than the Alderman's house, about half a mile off, 
 With the green Venetian blinds. 
 
 There is no alderman's house in the neighbourhood, 
 with or without Venetian blinds, but that matters 
 little. 
 
 It is by a succession of steeply rising and falling, 
 winding and narrow country lanes that the 
 Preceptory of the Knights Templars of St. John 
 of Jerusalem, near Swingfield Minnis, is reached. 
 Like so many other ancient religious establishments, 
 it is now a farmstead. Not altogether picturesque, 
 and wearing very few outward signs of antiquity, 
 it might readily be passed by those not keenly in 
 quest of it, except for the existence of the three 
 tall Early English windows prominent in one of 
 the gables. An inspection of the farmhouse proves 
 that thrifty use has been made of the old buildings,
 
 190 
 
 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the hall, he principal ancient feature, with fine 
 old timber roof, being divided for domestic purposes 
 into two floors. Modern walls and fireplaces com- 
 bine to almost wholly alter the internal arrangements. 
 A long, buttressed, monastic barn of great antiquity 
 is pictured in Knight's Old England, published some 
 sixty years ago, but it has long since disappeared 
 
 THE PRECEPTOKY, SWINGFIELU MINNIS. 
 
 in the insensate rage for " improvement," and there 
 is very little of interest now to be seen outside the 
 farmhouse. But whatever it lacks in picturesque 
 aspect, the glamour of romance thrown over the 
 spot by the legend redeems it from the common- 
 place. 
 
 Rival explanations of the singular name of 
 Swingfield Minnis divide opinion as to whether
 
 THE BACK OF BEYOND 191 
 
 the first word means u Swinefield " or " Sweyn's 
 Field," but a striking confirmation of the theory 
 that it is named after that Danish king, and of 
 the vague records of his having achieved a victory 
 here, was afforded by the discovery of a quantity 
 of human bones in modern times, in the course 
 of which were described by a newspaper as " some 
 agricultural operations," when the ancient surrounding 
 heath or common-land was, for the first time in 
 its history, enclosed and broken into for cultivation. 
 If we, in our commonplace way, translate " agricul- 
 tural operations " into " ploughing," we shall pro- 
 bably be correct. The remains were at the time 
 pronounced to be the relics of some long-forgotten 
 fight. u Minnis " is a Cantise word for a piece of 
 rough stony common, such as long existed here. 
 
 Barham, as freeholder in the district, was interested 
 in this enclosure and was awarded his share of 
 the spoil. " St. John's," the name by which the 
 the farm is known, is, as he says, in his note to 
 the " Witches' Frolic," two miles from Tappington, 
 but it certainly cannot be seen, as he would have 
 us believe, over the intervening coppices, nor in 
 any other way, as we presently discover on coming 
 past Tappington into Denton, there joining on to 
 a route described in an earlier chapter.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD FOLKESTONE TO DOVER 
 AND SANDWICH 
 
 THAT is a toilsome road by which one leaves 
 Folkestone for Dover. The chalk " infinite " in- 
 deed, as Dickens said the blinding glare of the 
 sun upon it, the steep gradients, the rain-worn gullies, 
 the tortuous curves, and the persistent up and up 
 of Folkestone Hill, make the salt perspiration start 
 from the wayfarer's brow and run smartingly into 
 his eyes. But when the hilltop is reached, where 
 a once picturesque but now rebuilt inn, the " Valiant 
 Sailor," stands, grand is the view backwards upon 
 the town. That view is so sheer that the place 
 looks all roof, and seems a squalid huddle-together 
 of ill-arranged streets. No one, gazing down 
 upon Folkestone from this view-point, would sus- 
 pect the palatial and magnificent nature of its later 
 growth. 
 
 It was but yester-year that the five miles length 
 of cliff-top and chalky road on to Dover was solitary 
 and marked by infrequent houses, but no longer 
 do the crows and the seagulls hold undisturbed 
 possession. It has never been a pleasant road, 
 lying open and unfenced upon the roof of the 
 cliffs and along an inhospitable country. Those 
 whose way has lain along it have been grilled in 
 
 192
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 193 
 
 summer and in winter pierced through and through 
 by icy blasts that no hospitable hedgerows or kindly 
 shelter of any description have served to lessen. 
 Now these bleak and forbidding uplands are varied 
 with brickfields, sporadic new houses, and blatant 
 notice-boards offering building-land for sale, and 
 they are not improved by the change. Greatly to 
 be pitied is that cyclist who essays this road from 
 the direction of Dover, for in that terrible continuous 
 climb he affords the best comparison with the state 
 of a good man struggling with undeserved adversity. 
 " Surely," he thinks, " I shall soon come to the end 
 of this rise " ; but the white ribbon of the roadway 
 rises ever before him, until, exhausted, he crests 
 the hill at the " Valiant Sailor," where the stag- 
 gering descent into Folkestone forbids him to ride 
 down. 
 
 How different the case of the eastward-bound ! 
 No sooner is the climb from Folkestone completed 
 than the long descent into Dover begins. Five 
 miles away, down at the bottom of a cleft at the 
 end of this chute, Dover Castle is blotted against 
 the sky, and the cyclist has nothing to do but sit 
 still and let the miles reel comfortably away, until 
 the electric tramways at the outskirts of Dover 
 are reached. 
 
 There is a point on this road between Folkestone 
 and Dover that on moonlit nights makes a picture 
 after Barham's own heart. When the full moon 
 comes sailing up over the Castle Hill and floods 
 the chalky road with light, leaving the town of 
 Dover lost in the darkling valley of the Dour and 
 the downs behind etched in a profound blackness 
 upon the luminous heavens, then you recall those
 
 1 94 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 exquisite lines from the " Old Woman clothed in 
 Grey ": 
 
 Oh ! sweet and beautiful is Night, when the silver moon is 
 
 high, 
 And countless stars, like clustering gems, hang sparkling in 
 
 the sky. 
 
 Yes ; and night is more beautiful than day here, 
 for the aching whiteness, the parching dryness, the 
 arid bareness of the chalk highway and the folded 
 hills are touched to romance by the cold majesty 
 of the moon, whose light softens the austerities 
 of the road, just as the dews assuage the lingering 
 heats of day. 
 
 Tom Ingoldsby never, in the whole course of 
 his writings, had much to say of Dover, and the 
 legend of the " Old Woman clothed in Grey," tacked 
 on to this ancient port, is really a Cambridgeshire 
 story, hailing from Boxworth, near St. Ives. The 
 incidents, he says, " happened a long time ago, 1 
 can't say exactly how long," which is rather vague : 
 
 All that one knows is, 
 It must have preceded the Wars of the Roses 
 
 Here he takes occasion to have another fling at 
 Britton, in this footnote, where " Simpkinson of Bath " 
 (whom we have already seen to be intended for that 
 eminent antiquary) is made to confuse these historic 
 campaigns with some family contentions : " An ancient 
 and most pugnacious family," says our Bath friend. 
 " One of their descendants, George Rose, Esq., late 
 M.P. for Christchurch (an elderly gentleman now 
 defunct), was equally celebrated for his vocal abilities 
 and his wanton destruction of furniture when in a
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 195 
 
 state of excitement. * Sing, old Rose, and burn the 
 bellows ! ' has grown into a proverb." 
 
 And so, indeed, for many centuries past it has, 
 but no one has yet satisfactorily explained its origin. 
 Many amusingly conflicting derivations of it have 
 been given. One, as old as 1740, is found in the 
 British Apollo of that year : 
 
 In good King Stephen's days, the Ram, 
 
 An ancient inn at Nottingham, 
 
 Was kept, as our wise father knows, 
 
 By a brisk female called Old Rose. 
 
 Many like you, who hated thinking, 
 
 Or any other theme but drinking, 
 
 Met there, d'ye see, in sanguine hope, 
 
 To kiss their landlady and tope ; 
 
 But one cross night, 'mongst many other, 
 
 The fire burnt not without great pother, 
 
 Till Rose, at last, began to sing, 
 
 And the cold blades to dance and spring; 
 
 So by their exercise and kisses 
 
 They grew as warm as were their wishes : 
 
 When, scorning fire, the jolly fellows, 
 
 Cried, "Sing, Old Rose, and burn the bellows." 
 
 An even earlier reference is found in Izaak 
 Walton's Angler^ where, in the second chapter, 
 the Hunter proposes that they shall sing " Old 
 Rose." Ingenuity has been let loose upon this 
 subject, without much satisfaction obtained. " Let's 
 singe Old Rose and burn libellos," is a wild variant, 
 given as the cries of schoolboys on the eve of 
 holidays, and signifying, " Let's singe Old Rose's 
 wig and burn our books " ; but we are not en- 
 lightened as to that school of which this " Old 
 Rose " was principal. This " explanation " is, in 
 fact, so much sage stuffing for green goslings, and 
 we will not be so simple as to partake of it.
 
 196 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Ingoldsby advises the visitor to Dover to dine 
 at the f ' York " or the " Ship," and then to set out 
 for the Maison Dieu and there ask for the haunted 
 house, the scene of the Old Woman's post-mortem 
 visitations. Where are the " York " or the " Ship " 
 to-day ? You would as vainly seek them as the 
 haunted house ; but they did, at the time he wrote, 
 actually exist, which the house never did. The 
 Maison Dieu, however, was, and is, very real, but 
 is more intelligibly sought, to the Dover townsfolk's 
 ears, under the title of the town hall. 
 
 As for the Priory, whence the mercenary Father 
 Basil of the legend came, that vanished long ago 
 in disestablishment and ruin, only a few portions, 
 including the ancient gatehouse, being included in 
 the modern buildings of Dover College. The 
 " Priory " station of the Chatham and Dover line 
 takes its name from this ancient religious house. 
 Some records of the Prior and his Benedictine monks 
 who were housed here still remain. It would seem 
 that they were, at the last, when the Priory was 
 dissolved, a very bad lot indeed, and quite merited 
 disestablishment, if nothing more. They preferred 
 amorous intrigues to mortifying the flesh with the 
 scourgings, cold water, and stale crusts represented 
 by the orthodox as the staple fare and daily discipline 
 of such. They were veritable Friar Tucks, these 
 jolly monks of Dover, so far as provand was con- 
 cerned, while their morals left much to be desired, 
 as may be judged when we read the testimony of 
 the Royal commissioners who were sent hither to 
 report upon their conduct. Those emissaries gave 
 no notice of their advent ; in fact, the first intimation 
 the Prior had of their quite unceremonious visit
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 
 
 197 
 
 was when the noise of their bursting open the door 
 of his bedroom (not, if you please, his " cell ") woke 
 both him and the lady who shared his bed. The 
 commissioners turned her out, in that lay brother's 
 costume in which she had gained admittance to the 
 monastery. Such historical evidence refutes the 
 charges of flippant injustice towards the olden Roman 
 Catholic times of which Ingoldsby has often been 
 accused. 
 
 In quest of the " Marston Hall" of "The 
 
 THE " LONE TREE. 
 
 Leech of Folkestone," and of traces of Master 
 Marsh we must leave Dover, and, climbing the 
 steep and winding Castle Hill, come, under the 
 frowning keep and warder towers of that great 
 fortress, to the high, bare, chalky tableland that 
 stretches from this point to Deal and Sandwich. It 
 is an open, unfenced road at the beginning, and so 
 shadeless that a very striking elm solitary by the 
 wayside is known far and wide as the " Lone Tree." 
 This isolated object has a story, told with a thorough 
 belief in its truth. It seems that, a great many
 
 198 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 years ago, a soldier of the Castle garrison murdered 
 a comrade on this spot by felling him with a stick 
 he carried. No one saw the deed done, and he was 
 so convinced that the crime would never be traced 
 that he thrust the elm-stick in the ground, declaring 
 that he was safe so long as it did not take root. 
 
 His regiment was shortly afterwards ordered 
 abroad, and it was not until many years had passed 
 that he was again at Dover. Once there, a morbid 
 curiosity took him to the scene of his crime, where, 
 horror-stricken, he found that stick a flourishing 
 tree. He confessed, and was duly executed. 
 
 It is a legend exactly after Ingoldsby's own 
 heart, but perhaps he never heard of it, for it does 
 not appear in his writings. 
 
 From this point, two miles distant from Dover, 
 the way goes straight ; East Langdon, for which we 
 are making, lying in the hug of the downs, a mile 
 away to the left, lost to view between those swelling 
 contours and in midst of clustered trees. 
 
 It was to this parish that " Thomas Marsh of 
 Marston," the hero of that prose legend, "The 
 Leech of Folkestone," really belonged. He resided 
 at Martin, Marten, or Marton Hall, in the neigh- 
 bouring hamlet of Martin, whose name is thus 
 variously and impartially spelled by post-office, 
 finger-posts, county historians and other authorities, 
 who to this day have not been able to decide which 
 is the true and proper rendering. East Langdon, 
 on closer acquaintance, resolves itself into a remote, 
 huddled-up village of very small dimensions, situated 
 on a narrow lane that does duty for a road, and 
 consisting of a parish church, an inn, two or three 
 farms, a rectory, and some agricultural labourers'
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 
 
 199 
 
 cottages the whole knowing little of the outside 
 world, and apparently content with that knowledge. 
 It centres around the church and Church Farm, 
 pictured here, and by that sketch, much more 
 eloquently than by any mass of verbiage, shall you 
 see how grim and hard-featured a place it is. The 
 church has latterly been restored, and the monument 
 in its chancel to the veritable Thomas Marsh of the 
 
 EAST LANGDON. 
 
 legend again made whole. It had fallen, about 
 1850, from its place on the north wall of the chancel, 
 and was broken in many pieces, the fragments being 
 preserved in a cupboard in the vestry. Under such 
 circumstances, and fully cognisant of the atrocious 
 things that have elsewhere been wrought, all over 
 the country, in the name of " restoration," it is with 
 a shock of surprise that the pilgrim finds it at all. 
 But here it is, a black marble tablet surrounded by 
 an ornamental framing of white stone or marble, and 
 bearing a long Latin inscription to " Thomas Marsh, 
 of Marton." He is stated to have been born in 
 1583, and to have died in 1634.
 
 200 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 The hamlet of Martin, three-quarters of a mile 
 distant, is, possibly from its proximity to the railway 
 station of Martin Mill, larger at this day than 
 the parent village. Why the Chatham and Dover 
 Railway authorities should choose to christen the 
 station after the great wooden windmill that towers 
 up, black and striking, beside the line, instead of 
 simply by the name of the place, is not evident, for 
 
 " MARSTON HALL. 
 
 there is no other " Martin " on the railway from 
 which it might otherwise be desirable to distinguish 
 The hamlet itself overlooks the railway, from 
 
 this. 
 
 its superior ridge. You come steeply uphill into it, 
 through an overarching bower of hedgerow greenery 
 enclosing a hollow road, strikingly like a Devonshire 
 lane, and the more remarkable and pleasing because 
 set in midst of downs so generally treeless. Pro- 
 minent in the street of Martin is the great farmhouse 
 known as " Martin House," that " Marston Hall " 
 of the story of Master Marsh's bewitchment, and
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 
 
 20 1 
 
 once the manor house. Portions of it may be as 
 old as the early seventeenth century, but it has been 
 remodelled in a particularly hideous manner, and the 
 side of it towards the farmyard smeared over with 
 " compo," or similar abomination. 
 
 Regaining the high-road at Ringwould, Walmer 
 is passed and Upper Deal, with the sea and the 
 
 THE " THREE HORSESHOES," GREAT MONGEHAM. 
 
 crowded shipping of the Downs and the white cliffs 
 of France forming a striking picture on the right. 
 It is worth while turning off, a quarter of a mile to 
 the left, to see the little village called, magnificently, 
 Great Mongeham, just beyond Deal, for its quaint 
 u Three Horseshoes " inn still displays a curious 
 wrought-iron sign originally made in 1735, a Ver 7 
 striking object, overhanging the road. 
 
 The high bleak downs gradually sink down as
 
 202 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Sandwich is neared, and give place to flats. Away 
 on the right, mile upon mile of blown sand and 
 dunes, tussocky with coarse grass, border the sea, 
 and inland stretch the vast unfenced fields of corn, 
 beans, or oats that are so characteristic of this corner 
 of Kent, and of the Isle of Thanet. 
 
 Sandwich is always described as a a dead port," 
 but we have already seen that New Romney is more 
 dead if so Irish an expression may be allowed. By 
 a flat, straight stretch of road that ancient member 
 of the Cinque Ports is reached, past a row of tall 
 poplars, the ancient Hospital of St. Bartholomew 
 and the railway station, which is absurdly brisk 
 for a place supposed to have died and been buried 
 about three hundred years ago. Past this unmis- 
 takable evidence of post-mortem activity, are the 
 town walls, now, in passing, seen to be grassy 
 ramparts, tree-shaded, with walks, and below them 
 little dykes and runnels a very beautiful scene 
 which tells us that Sandwich has so far retired from 
 business that it does not actually grow ; although, 
 as for being dead, why, there, at the other extremity 
 of the town, where the navigable channel of the 
 Stour flows and conveys those ships up and down 
 that still trade here, you may see loading and un- 
 loading still going forward, and port-dues being 
 collected and all manner of bustle. 
 
 But Sandwich is a very staid and grave old town. 
 It knows its ancient harbour being long centuries 
 ago silted up that it cannot compete with modern 
 ports, and so folds its hands and accept the minor 
 part now assigned to it, and lives in the ancient 
 ways ; which is why we love " Sannidge" to speak 
 in the fashion of those who live there.
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 203 
 
 But it really was once a great port and its past 
 lives in history. Many were its dramatic moments. 
 Such an one was that when Becket, the banished 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, returning after years of 
 exile, landed from a boat in the haven. He had a 
 premonition of his violent ending, for he embarked 
 upon his return with the significant words, " Vado in 
 Angliam mori," " I go into England to die." The 
 people knew of his coming, and a cross erected in 
 the bows of the boat that put him ashore made 
 the identity of its occupants certain a great way off. 
 He was popular with the masses, who crowded 
 around him at the landing-stage, eager for a blessing 
 from the " father of the orphans and protector of 
 the widows." Thence he set forward, without 
 delay, for Canterbury, by way of Ash. 
 
 Let us pluck another incident at hazard from the 
 long roll of years. It is toward the close of 1415, 
 and days grow chill and nights bitter. The war with 
 France has ended with every circumstance of glory 
 for England. Nine thousand Frenchmen lie dead 
 at Agincourt, proving on their bodies the truth of the 
 English arrow-flight and the prowess of the English 
 men-at-arms. Harry V. has been received on his 
 home-coming at Dover with the rapturous applause 
 of an elated nation, and London has sealed that 
 welcome. By detachments, the rank and file of the 
 expedition slowly return home some landing at 
 Southampton, some at Dover, others here ; each 
 man laden with some article of loot ; all wearied, 
 hungry, and out of humour, because when they 
 marched to our stronghold of Calais they were 
 refused shelter and sustenance, the garrison of that 
 town being afraid of running short of provisions.
 
 204 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 They look, doubtless, for an enthusiastic welcome 
 on their home-coming ; banners waving, hand- 
 shaking, tumultuous cheers. What do they find ? 
 Why, this: that the edge has been taken off the 
 fame of their exploits by those who returned first, 
 and that the townsfolk of Sandwich are cold cold 
 as the November wind, and their reception as for- 
 bidding as the lowering sky. Even so did Jacob 
 obtain the blessing of Isaac, and Esau was deprived 
 of his birthright. No blessing, no feasting, no 
 drinking for them, save for money down, and money 
 they have none ; so that they are fain to sell their 
 booty as best they may, to buy bread and lodging. 
 Callous Sandwich ? Nay, but history has repeated 
 itself quite recently on the same lines ; glory is as 
 brilliant a thing as a soap-bubble, and as evanescent. 
 
 But one must be done with these mosaics from 
 history. The town reached a great prosperity when 
 Edward III. in 1377 removed the staple here, from 
 Queenborough ; but that was its high-water mark. 
 The ebb did not at once begin, for still, in 1470, 
 the annual customs revenue of the port amounted 
 to 17,000 and ninety-five ships were registered as 
 belonging to the place. There were then 1,500 
 sailors in the town. 
 
 But in the time of Henry VIII. the sand, long 
 threatening, had closed the harbour to ships of any 
 considerable burthen, and decay set in. The port 
 declined, but, owing to the large settlement of 
 Hollander and Huguenot weavers in Sandwich, the 
 place did not shrink to nothing, and perhaps it is 
 due to them that it exists at all. 
 
 From the tall, Dutch-like tower of St. Peter's 
 the curfew-bell is nightly tolled, as for seven hundred
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 
 
 205 
 
 years the custom has been. The sexton's annual 
 stipend for performing this nightly service is 8 ; 
 not a great sum for a corporate town to yearly 
 disburse, but something of a consideration for a 
 place like Sandwich, whose commercial greatness is 
 now only a thing of history and ancient repute. 
 
 ST. PJb.TER'8, SANDWICH. 
 
 Thus it was that in 1833 tne unbroken continuity 
 of the curfew from Norman times was seriously 
 threatened, in a proposal of the Corporation to 
 discontinue the practice, and the payment for it. 
 Sentimental considerations, however, prevailed, and 
 thus it is that the nightly bell continues to ring over 
 the melancholy sand-flats, as of yore. But economical 
 considerations again, in quite recent years, threatened
 
 206 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the old custom on the same grounds, when, about 
 1895, it was proposed to discontinue the ringing and 
 to save the money for more practical purposes. 
 Again, however, sentiment prevailed, and what the 
 old inhabitants call " the old charter " continues. 
 
 This church of St. Peter, one of the three 
 possessed by the town, is its most notable landmark, 
 and from all points of view stamps the town with 
 a distinct alien appearance. It is by no means the 
 principal church that honour belongs to St. 
 Clement's, whose massive and highly decorated 
 Norman tower is second only to that of New 
 Romney. But St. Clement's tower is only of 
 medium height ; that of St. Peter is tall and stark, 
 and is, moreover, capped with an extraordinary 
 turret of distinctly Dutch feeling. Sometimes you 
 laugh at it and think it something bulbous and 
 onion-like ; at other times, and from some points 
 of view, it is impressive, rather than absurd. If it 
 were away, Sandwich would lose much of its in- 
 dividuality. It is not an old tower, as ages in 
 churches go, and was built only in the years imme- 
 diately following 1 66 1, when the older tower fell, 
 and not only involved itself in complete ruin, but 
 demolished the whole length of the south aisle, 
 and, with the bells, buried the whole interior of 
 the church three feet deep in what a contemporary 
 account calls " rubidge." When the inhabitants 
 set to work to repair the damage, they did not 
 restore the destroyed aisle, but just walled up the 
 arches and inserted the quaint Dutch-like windows 
 still remaining. The tower they rebuilt with bricks 
 economically manufactured out of the harbour mud, 
 which, judging from the number of houses built of
 
 THE COASTWISE ROAD 207 
 
 the same material, seems to have been as plentiful 
 a deposit then as now. The Hollander character 
 of the tower and of the town in general owed its 
 being to the existence at that time of a very large 
 Flemish and Walloon colony, originally formed in 
 Queen Elizabeth's reign, when the persecuted weavers 
 and others from the Low Countries came here as 
 refugees and were welcomed as settlers, not only 
 in Kent, but in many other districts of England. 
 The Sandwich colony numbered some four hundred 
 at the beginning, but they gradually became ab- 
 sorbed in intermarriages, until, as a separate race, 
 they ceased to exist. But in that period, while 
 they retained their national manners and architec 
 tural style, these " gentile and profitable strangers ' 
 did, as we see, succeed in impressing the place with 
 their personality to a remarkable degree. 
 
 Thus, then, St. Peter's tower dominates the view 
 far and near. St. Mary's tower fell six years later, 
 but was not rebuilt, save in a stumpy and incon- 
 spicuous way. St. Clement's tower suffered restora- 
 tion in 1886; the churchwardens obtained the 
 necessary funds by the expedient of selling the 
 bells !
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 
 
 SANDWICH ends at the Barbican, the foreign- 
 looking watergate that spans the road on the hither 
 side of the Stour. Down to the left, away from 
 the road to Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, can be 
 seen from this point the dark ruin of Richborough, 
 and directly on that road, to the right, a belt of 
 sparse woodland, a clump of thin, wiry trees, 
 insufficiently nourished on the sandy and pebbly 
 soil. In midst of this, solitary and surrounded 
 with an atmosphere of melancholy, is an absolutely 
 uninteresting modern house. These trees and this 
 house form all that remains of the once important 
 and flourishing port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an 
 early rival of Sandwich itself. The spot and an 
 adjoining one are now marked on the maps as 
 " Great and Little Stonar." The history of that 
 vanished town is vague and fragmentary, but 
 enthralling, like some half-told tale of faery. Its 
 very incertitude renders it into the likeness of a 
 city of dream, the product of a magician's wand, 
 blighted by uncanny spell. What, then, do we 
 know of Stonar ? Just this : that in the long ago, 
 in A.D. 456, the Britons under Vortimer, after being 
 deserted by the Roman legions, secured one of their 
 few victories over the invading pagan Saxons on 
 
 208
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 209 
 
 this spot, a spot fixed by the Latin annalist in 
 the phrase, " In campo juxta Lapidem Tituli" It 
 was near here, therefore, in these flats, that the 
 battle was fought, and the place seems to derive 
 its name of Stonar from that same Latin "Lapidem" 
 Now it is remarkable that the Kentish coast is 
 rich in place-names including the word " stone." 
 
 THE BARBICAN, SANDWICH. 
 
 Littlestone near Old Romney, is an example 
 Folkestone another, and the most prominent the 
 ancient " Lapis Populi " of Latin records. But from 
 what stones those original names proceeded who 
 shall say ? 
 
 The British victory was but an interlude in an 
 almost unbroken series of defeats inflicted upon 
 that unhappy people by the ruthless Saxons, who 
 presently bore down all opposition on the Kentish
 
 no THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 shores, and established themselves here. It was 
 they who founded the original town of Stonar, 
 on a sandspit even then forming at the mouth of 
 the River Stour and the entrance to the channel 
 of the Wantsume, dividing the Isle of Thanet from 
 the mainland of Kent ; and the Roman fortress 
 of Rutupium, the vast shell of ruined Richborough 
 that we see to-day, overlooking the surrounding 
 marshes from its rising vantage-ground, was con- 
 verted by them into a fortress-palace for their kings. 
 
 SANDWICH, FROM GREAT STONAR. 
 
 When, in the course of time, the Saxons had 
 possessed themselves of the country and had at 
 last become luxurious and less warlike, they were 
 in turn attacked by the fiercer Danes. Prominent 
 among the many bloody fights waged for the 
 mastery was the second battle of Stonar, fought 
 here between the forces of Torkill the Dane and 
 the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside, in 1009. ^ 
 was one of those exceptional victories for the Saxons 
 that now and again cheered them in their long 
 series of disasters.
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 211 
 
 Stonar's alternative name of Lundenwic seems 
 to have derived from the extensive trade with 
 London, but of the vanished town and its records 
 we know next to nothing. Only this, indeed, that 
 its rivalry with Sandwich was fierce, and that 
 Sandwich was gaining the advantage and Stonar 
 decaying when the ill-fated town was entirely 
 destroyed and swept away by the sea in the great 
 storm of 1365, when Sandwich not only took all 
 its trade, but assumed its alias of " Lundenwic " 
 as well. " It is an ill wind that blows no one any 
 good," says the old saw, and this was worth much 
 to Sandwich. If tempests or " tompuses," as the 
 Kentish folk, in their quaint speech, call them were 
 of such destructive powers to-day, insurance would 
 cease to be the lucrative business it now is. 
 
 Richborough, that frowns so grim down upon the 
 Stour meadows and the flat Sandwich and Ramsgate 
 road, is a favourite haunt of archaeologists. It 
 rises, rugged walls and bulging bastions, from low, 
 earthy cliffs, ivy- clad in places, and shrouded by 
 dense thickets of brushwood, where the earth falls 
 away to the levels. The secretive ivy, incredibly 
 aged, clasps the hoary masonry with a tenacity that 
 will not allow of severance. They will live and 
 die together, those walls and that " rare old plant, 
 the ivy green." 
 
 The view from Richborough is comprehensive 
 and varied. Away to the right is Sandwich, a mass 
 of clustered roofs and spars and rigging, dominated, 
 of course, by that Dutch-like cupola of St. Peter's, 
 resembling some gigantic onion of fairy-lore ; and 
 away again to the left goes the curving shore, to 
 Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, with the white cliffs
 
 212 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 standing out to sea, as bolt upright as though they 
 had been sliced out. The houses and some of the 
 more prominent public buildings of Ramsgate peer 
 over the edge of the down. 
 
 The railway that, taking advantage of the levels, 
 runs between Sandwich and Ramsgate under these 
 walls of the aged Roman castle is not an unromantic 
 feature. Its living commercialism serves to contrast 
 eloquently the methods of to-day and those of an 
 Empire dead these fifteen hundred years. He 
 must be a soulless signalman who does not, in his 
 cabin placed under the shadow of that wall, some- 
 times let his imagination loose and, conjuring up 
 the past, people those ramparts again with the 
 helmeted sentries of old Rome. 
 
 More than 140,000 coins, Roman and Saxon, are 
 said to have been, at one time and another, picked 
 up within and around Richborough. That is why 
 the visitor to Sandwich hastens at the earliest 
 opportunity along those two miles that separate 
 the ruins from the town, and is explanatory of his 
 exploring zeal in turning over the clods with his 
 foot and probing the light earth with his walking- 
 stick. Alack ! the statement that so great a number 
 of coins have been found means perhaps that the 
 last are gone, rather than that a hundred thousand 
 or so remain. If the ploughman still finds anything, 
 he keeps the fact to himself; but certainly, if any 
 personal efforts of the present historian may count 
 for testimony, there is a plentiful lack of anything 
 but heavy clay in these fields. No precious fibula, 
 no golden coin, nay, not even a humble copper 
 denarius rewarded his anxious efforts, and the ware 
 of Samos was equally to seek.
 
 2i 4 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Here we are well within the Isle of Thanet, whose 
 name, as generally is the case, is of uncertain origin. 
 u Thanatos," the " Isle of Death," suggested some 
 commentator in the bygone years, but he did not 
 bolster up his derivation by telling us in what way 
 it was so deadly. Perhaps in the wrecks of its coast. 
 In other respects, Thanet is the Isle of Good Health, 
 of rude, hungry, boisterous health ; and in summer 
 the Isle of Cockneys. Does it not contain Ramsgate 
 " rollicking Ramsgate, and Margate the merry, 
 whose name I am sorry always reminds me of 
 margarine ? It was at Margate, upon Jarvis's Jetty, 
 that " Mr. Simpkinson " met the " little vulgar 
 boy " who did him so very brown, but I am not 
 going to Margate to see the Jetty ; which has been 
 greatly altered since Jarvis caused it to rise out of 
 the vasty deep. Margate is mentioned only that 
 once in the Ingoldsby Legends and Ramsgate not at 
 all, and so I shall cut them out of my journey, and 
 make across inland, over the high ridge at Acol, to 
 Reculver. 
 
 The road is flat, the surface good, and from 
 Sandwich to Ebbsfleet is an enjoyable run. At 
 Ebbsfleet there has been lately erected a tall granite 
 cross to mark where St. Augustine landed and re- 
 introduced Christianity in A.D. 597. Perhaps not 
 everyone knows that he was sent against his will on 
 this mission by the Pope, and that it was only 
 grumbling he came. Not altogether so saintly as 
 we might, not inquiring closely, suppose a morose 
 and masterful man. 
 
 Through Minster lies our way Minster-in-Thanet 
 reached by lanes of the charmingest, with over- 
 arching trees ; very beautiful, and filled in
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 215 
 
 with other things not so lovely : with such eye- 
 sorrows and ear-torments as dusty brake-parties 
 clamant with the latest comic songs and energetically 
 performing upon cornets and concertinas ; little vulgar 
 boys, descendants, possibly, of Mr. Simpkinson's 
 young friend, turning cart-wheels in the dust for 
 casual pence. The brake-proprietors of Margate 
 
 THE SMUGGLER'S LEAF. 
 
 and Ramsgate, conscious that such tree shaded spots 
 are rare in Thanet, have taken these under their 
 protection, and advertise " Twelve miles drives 
 through the pretty lanes, I/-." Minster is therefore 
 a paradise of beanfeasters and the inferno of pilgrims, 
 literary or other. 
 
 To find the " Smuggler's Leap " one must make 
 as for Acol. " Near this hamlet of Acol," says 
 Ingoldsby, in a fictitious quotation prefixed to the 
 fine legend of Smuggler Bill and Exciseman Gill
 
 216 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and their doings, " is a long-disused chalk-pit of for- 
 midable depth, known by the name of the 'Smuggler's 
 Leap.' The tradition of the parish runs that a 
 riding-officer from Sandwich, called Anthony Gill, 
 lost his life here in the early part of the eighteenth 
 century, while in pursuit of a smuggler. The 
 smuggler's horse only, it is said, was found crushed 
 beneath its rider. The spot has, of course, been 
 haunted ever since." For the original of this quota- 
 tion, the reader is referred to a " Supplement to 
 Lewis's History of Thanet, by the Reverend Samuel 
 Pegg, A.M., Vicar of Gomersham," supposed to 
 have been published by " W. Bristow, Canterbury, 
 1796"; but Ingoldsby, who composed the legend, 
 invented his quotation as well, and those who seek 
 the Reverend Samuel Pegg's " Supplement " will not 
 find it. 
 
 But if so much be imaginative, the smuggling 
 exploits common in the district a hundred and 
 thirty years ago, as recorded in the Kentish news- 
 papers, were in many respects like that celebrated 
 in the Ingoldsby legend. The Kentish Gazette of 
 Saturday, November 22nd, 1777, gives a case in 
 point : " On Monday last Mr. Harris, Officer of 
 Excise, and Mr. Wesbeach, Surveyor of the Customs 
 at Ramsgate, attended by six dragoons, met with 
 a body of smugglers at Birchington, consisting 
 of at least a hundred and fifty, armed with loaded 
 whips and bludgeons. After a sharp skirmish, in 
 which the smugglers had many of their horses shot, 
 they made a very regular retreat, losing 8 gallons 
 of brandy, 96 gallons of Geneva, 162 Ib. of Hyson 
 tea, and five horses." 
 
 The chalk-pit, too, is sufficiently real. Crossing
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 217 
 
 the open fields, spread starkly to the sky, between 
 Monkton and Cleve Court, it is found on the 
 Ramsgate road, opposite the " Prospect " inn, where 
 it still gapes as deep and wide as ever. Do not, 
 however, if you wish to be impressed with the truth 
 of Ingoldsby's romantic description, view it by the 
 brilliant sunlight of a summer's rlav, because at 
 
 such times the great cleft in the dull white of the 
 chalk does not properly proclaim its immensity. It 
 is only when the evening shadows fall obliquely 
 into the old chalk-pit that you applaud the spirit 
 of those lines : 
 
 It's enough to make one's flesh to creep 
 To stand on that fearful verge, and peep 
 Down the rugged sides so dreadfully steep, 
 Where the chalk-pit yawns full sixty feet deep. 
 
 When Ingoldsby wrote there were, according to
 
 2i 8 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 his testimony, " fifty intelligent fly-drivers " plying 
 upon Margate pier, who would convey the curious 
 to the spot for a guerdon which they term " three 
 bob." Cycles and electric tramways have nowadays 
 so sorely cut up the trade of the intelligent that few 
 of those depressed individuals remain. 
 
 Coming into Monkton, a scattered village on 
 the way to Sarre, the church, directly facing the 
 
 road, makes, with the old stocks on a grassy 
 bank, a pretty picture. The indications of arches, 
 seen in the sketch, show that there was once a north 
 aisle to this church. The parish owes its name 
 to the fact that the manor was anciently the property 
 of Christ Church Monastery, Canterbury. 
 
 The whole of this district is covered by the 
 legend of the " Smuggler's Leap." The " smuggling 
 crew " dispersed in all directions before the customs- 
 house officers. 
 
 Some gallop this way, and some gallop that, 
 Through Fordwich Level, o'er Sandwich Flat . . . 
 Those in a hurry Make for Sturry, 
 With Customs House officers close in their rear, 
 Down Rushbourne Lane, and so by Westbere. 
 
 None of them stopping But shooting and popping, 
 And many a Qustoms Hou.se bullet goes slap
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 219 
 
 Through many a three-gallon tub like a tap, 
 
 And the gin spurts out, And squirts all about j 
 And many a heart grew sad that day, 
 That so much good liquor was so thrown away. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Down Chislett Lane, so free and so fleet, 
 Rides Smuggler Bill, and away to Up Street j 
 
 Sarre Bridge is won Bill thinks it fun, 
 Ho ! ho ! the old tub-gauging son of a gun. 
 
 We, too, will ride into Sarre. 
 
 Sarre was, and is still technically, a ville of the 
 port of Sandwich, governed by a Deputy whose 
 functions are now merely decorative. He still, 
 however, as of old, swears fealty to King and port. 
 These historical facts explain those notices, " Town 
 of Sarre " and Ville de Sarre " prominently displayed 
 on the houses at the Canterbury and Thanet ends 
 of the village respectively. 
 
 The bridge gained by Smuggler Bill is that which 
 joins Kent and the Isle of Thanet, the successor of 
 that original pont built in 1485, on the site of 
 " the common ferry when Thanet was full iled." 
 It is not a romantic bridge nowadays, and has its 
 many thousands of counterparts. Beneath its 
 commonplace arch the sluggish waters of a branch 
 of the Stour go wandering away, right and left, 
 along the old narrowed channel of the once broad 
 and navigable Wantsume, where the sea once flowed, 
 and the Roman galleys and triremes, the Saxon and 
 Danish prows, and the Norman and early English 
 ships, came and went ; and only a shallow stream, 
 no wider than a horse could jump, choked with 
 reeds and snags, divides the former " Isle " and the
 
 220 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Sarre is picturesque in parts, and in other parts 
 quite distressingly ugly. It is, indeed, a peculiarity 
 of Kent, overrun from the earliest times by Cockneys, 
 that many of its buildings touch the deepest depth 
 of ugliness, vulgarity, and unsuitability. The 
 Cockney has come forth of his Cockaigne, and 
 builded, after his sort, great grey-brick houses in 
 the model of the houses in towns, where of necessity, 
 
 THE " VILLE OF SARRE." 
 
 being in streets and shouldered by neighbours, they 
 run to height and unrelieved squareness. Sarre 
 contains exactly such an example, in one of the two 
 i nns one never can recollect the name of a common- 
 place inn that minister not only to the wants of 
 Sarre, but were halting-places for the Margate and 
 Ramsgate coaches in the old days, just as they 
 are " pull-ups " for the brake-parties of the present 
 time. 
 
 The artist can dodge the hideous inn out of his
 
 SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE 221 
 
 sketch and can make a pretty view of Sarre, but 
 unless he adopts the tactics of a Turner, and takes 
 a piece here and another there, and so fits them 
 together in a composition of his own, he cannot get 
 into one view the quaint old barn-yards, with their 
 curious barns standing, for fear of the rats, 
 shouldered off the ground on stone staddles ; nor 
 can he include the bridge, the stream, and the long, 
 poplar-lined road into the village. In no case could 
 he bring in the time-worn tower of a village church, 
 that sanctifies a sketch, for Sarre is godless and 
 graceless and owns no church, its inhabitants find- 
 ing their nearest place of worship at St. Nicholas- 
 at-Wade, nearly two miles distant.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 SARRE AND RECULVER TO CANTERBURY 
 
 THE rows of feathery poplars lining the causeway 
 road out of Sarre towards Canterbury give it, for 
 a little distance, the look of a French road. But 
 they presently cease, and it becomes for some miles 
 a singularly dreary way. All the more excuse, 
 therefore, for adventuring away from it across 
 country to Reculver, celebrated by Ingoldsby in 
 the " Brothers of Birchington." 
 
 Chislett village, through which the route lies, 
 shows prominently from its ridge or, rather, its 
 church does. A church it is of singular outline, 
 viewed from a distance, and calculated to entice 
 the inquisitive away from the direct road, only to 
 find that the bizarre appearance is caused by the 
 spire having been almost wholly shorn off at some 
 time not specified, and the stump suffered to remain. 
 For the rest, Chislett is sufficiently interesting in 
 the wheat and swede and mangold way, but not 
 otherwise attractive, unless the stocks, still preserved 
 in the churchyard, may be mentioned. 
 
 The route from here to Reculver is a five miles 
 long stretch of scrubwoods, through the hamlet of 
 Marsh Row. These rabbity solitudes lead at last 
 to the low, broken, earthy coast presenting a weak 
 and dissolving barrier to an encroaching sea between
 
 SARRE TO CANTERBURY 
 
 223 
 
 Herne Bay and Birchington. Midway between 
 those two watering-places stands the gaunt ruin of 
 that ancient church built within the Roman castle 
 of Regulbium, to which its name in multilated form 
 has descended. Its skeleton towers rise over the 
 hillside, minatory, as we descend toward the sea. 
 
 Reculver is popularly and mistakenly spoken 
 and written of in the plural, "Reculvers." There 
 is no real warranty, in the derivation of the name, 
 for what our grandfathers would have called a " vulgar 
 
 CHISLETT. 
 
 error." We can clearly trace the place-name from 
 the Roman times, when it was " Regulbium," to 
 the days of the Saxon King, Ethelbert, when it 
 had been changed into " Raculf Ceastre," and 
 thence, by way of half a hundred grotesque spellings 
 in ancient historical documents, to the form it now 
 bears. Never, save by modern writers of guide- 
 books, has it been spoken of in the plural, and 
 the only possible reason for their doing so must 
 be a real ignorance of its history and a belief that 
 the twin towers of the ruined church are themselves 
 the " Reculvers." This is no attempt to right
 
 224 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the wrong : that would be a hopeless task, and a 
 thankless. A mistake set afoot so long ago and 
 so popular is not to be discredited, and " Reculvers " 
 this will remain, certainly so long as there are two 
 towers. 
 
 In Roman times the fortress of Regulbium stood 
 at some little distance from the sea, on the only 
 available firm ground, a gentle rounded hill rising 
 from the surrounding marshes. Now that the sea 
 has for centuries been advancing upon the spot, 
 this hill has been half washed away, and its re- 
 maining section shows as a low cliff, with the 
 gaunt towers of the mediaeval church rising from 
 it. This church is the successor of that built within 
 the walls of the Roman castle in Saxon times, as a 
 monument of the downfall of Paganism and the 
 triumph of Christianity. 
 
 So long ago as 1780 the sea had begun to 
 threaten it, and the great north wall of the castle 
 fell one night into the advancing tide, leaving the 
 monument to Christianity in a very exposed con- 
 dition, while the bones of the forgotten inhabitants 
 were washed away out of the churchyard, just as 
 those of Warden, in Sheppey, are at this day. Instead 
 of making any attempt to save the church, the 
 authorities began in 1809 to demolish it, only 
 halting when they reached the twin towers. The 
 surrounding farmers found the building-stones very 
 useful for pig-sties and cow-sheds, and cared not 
 a rap whether they were Norman or Early English. 
 There were, indeed, some Roman columns in the 
 church. They had come from the pagan basilica 
 within the castle, but that did not hinder their 
 being cast aside with the rest. In 1860 one was
 
 SARRE TO CANTERBURY 
 
 225 
 
 discovered, one of its stones doing duty as a garden- 
 roller. It was, with another column, rescued from 
 further desecration, and the two have been set up 
 in the Cathedral Close at Canterbury. 
 
 RECULVF.R. 
 
 The vicarage was also abandoned in 1809, but 
 not pulled down. It was converted into a public- 
 house, which long stood here under the sign 
 of the "Hoy." The existing inn is the "King 
 Ethelbert." 
 
 The twin towers of Reculver church form a portion 
 
 15
 
 226 THE IXGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 of the former west front. They are of Norman 
 and Early English date, and, constructed as they 
 were largely of the materials of the ruined Roman 
 buildings, are rich in fragments of tile. The towers 
 were erected to serve as a sea-mark, to warn vessels 
 beating up for the Swale and the Medway of the 
 dangerous Columbine Sand, and their origin has 
 from time immemorial been the subject of the 
 legend of the " Twin Sisters," which tells how the 
 Abbess of the Benedictine Priory of Davington 
 and her sister, voyaging to fulfil a vow made to 
 Our Lady of Broadstairs, were wrecked here for 
 lack of a sea-mark. The Abbess was saved, but 
 her sister was drowned, and, as a combined thank- 
 offering for her own escape and by way of memorial 
 to her sister, that holy woman erected the twin 
 towers, to serve all mariners sailing by. Barham 
 perverted the legend in his u Brothers of Birchington." 
 Perhaps the temptation to alliteration was too strong 
 to be resisted, and then the idea came to him of 
 rejecting the familiar story and using in its stead 
 an old monastic tale of how there were two brothers, 
 the one pious and the other given up to all manner 
 of evil courses, and how the Devil came for the 
 wrong one by mistake and was obliged to restore 
 him. In the Ingoldsby legend the brothers become 
 Robert and Richard de Birchington, and their vow 
 it was, he tells us, which produced the famous 
 sea-mark : 
 
 Well there the " Twins " stand 
 
 On the verge of the land, 
 
 To warn mariners off from the Columbine Sand, 
 And many a poor man have Robert and Dick 
 By their vow caused to 'scape, like themselves, from Old 
 Nick.
 
 SARRE TO CANTERBURY 227 
 
 The mariners of old never failed as they passed to 
 bare their heads and pray to Our Lady of Reculver. 
 It is said that a good omen was argued by them if 
 the towers were clearly seen in passing, and evil if 
 they were hidden by fog ; but, when we consider 
 the dangers of the sea in fogs, there seems less 
 superstition in those ideas than sheer common-sense. 
 
 The towers have for many years been maintained 
 by the Trinity House, according to the tablet over 
 the doorway : " These towers, the remains of the 
 once venerable Church of Reculver, were purchased 
 of the Parish by the Corporation of the Trinity 
 House of Deptford Strond in the year 1810, and 
 groynes laid down at their expense to protect the 
 cliff on which the church had stood. When the 
 ancient spires were afterwards blown down, the pre- 
 sent substitutes were erected, to render the towers 
 still sufficiently conspicuous to be useful to naviga- 
 tion. Captain Joseph Cotton, Deputy Master, in 
 the year 1819." 
 
 Returning to Chislett and the breathless route 
 of Smuggler Bill and his companions, Up Street 
 hamlet, and Westbere are passed ; Westbere itself 
 in a deep hollow on a slip road plunging down 
 romantically from that dreary highway. Then 
 comes the long, bricky, dusty, gritty village of 
 Sturry, whose name is taken from the River Stour, 
 on which it stands, or rather, in which it stood, 
 for it was once encircled by that now shrunken 
 stream, and its original style was " Esturei," or 
 " Stour Island." In midst of the village a turning 
 to the left will lead the explorer to a little jewel 
 of a place, lying forgotten by the Stour banks. He 
 leaves populous Sturry behind, and comes, over little
 
 228 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 brick bridges as hump-backed as Quilp or Quasimodo, 
 and by rustling alders, into a spot long since retired 
 from worldly activities enters, in fact, that de- 
 cayed port of Canterbury, Fordwich. 
 
 Canterbury was once a seaport ! How incredible 
 it seems, now that Whitstable, the nearest point on 
 the coast, is seven miles away, and the Stour so 
 small a stream that even for rowing-boats it is at 
 the present time scarce navigable. Yet to this very 
 village of " Fordige " as the local speech has it, the
 
 SARRE TO CANTERBURY 
 
 229 
 
 salt tide came up the estuary in days well within 
 the historic period. Not merely vague Romans, but 
 historical personages palpable human beings who 
 have personally left great flat-footed, heavy-handed 
 marks on the pages of our national story have 
 landed at the still-existing quay, at which it is even 
 yet possible for one to land from a skiff, and so to 
 parallel experiences for one brief glorious moment 
 of historic self-consciousness with no less a personage 
 than the Black Prince himself, who stepped ashore 
 here from no skiff, but directly from the caravel 
 that brought him across the Channel, fresh from 
 his cruelties in Guienne and Spain. Those who 
 welcomed him home the Mayor and burgesses of 
 Fordwich were as cruel and savage as he in their 
 unchivalric municipal way ; the times were sodden 
 with cruelty, supersaturated with ferocity, and the 
 rejoicings at the warrior's home-coming did but 
 serve as an afternoon's respite for those petty 
 malefactors who awaited their doom in the two dark 
 and dismal cells even yet existing beneath the old 
 town hall and court house standing so picturesquely 
 by this self-same quay. Not the whole of that 
 curious building can claim so great an age, for the 
 general aspect of it is scarce earlier than Elizabethan 
 times. Indeed, it has latterly been made to look 
 quite smart and neat, its nodding roof carefully 
 squared, the lichen and stonecrop removed, and 
 some nice new brickwork here and there inserted. 
 " Restoration " seeks out the veriest holes and 
 corners and culs-de-sac of the land, and " makes 
 up " old buildings into new, like old dowagers 
 masquerading as girls again. 
 
 Fordwich town hall filled many functions. In
 
 230 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 it were transacted all the business affairs of the old 
 port ; in it, too, justice was dealt out in rough and 
 ready fashion to the miscreants of yore, and executed 
 swiftly, and still more roughly and readily, outside. 
 The justice of the Cinque Ports, of which Fordwich 
 was a member, was by no means tempered with 
 
 FORUWICH TOWN HALL. 
 
 mercy, and was as blood-thirsty as those early laws 
 of the Israelites duly set forth with much horrifying 
 circumstantiality in Leviticus. Theves Lane, in 
 Fordwich, led in ancient times to " Thefeswelle," 
 the well in which convicted thieves were judicially 
 drowned. Thieves with a preference for the easiest 
 death commonly selected Dover for their operations 
 in those times, for when the inevitable happened, 
 the Dover authorities flung them from the cliff-top, 
 and so they ended swiftly and mercifully with 
 broken necks, a better way than being dropped 
 down a well and the lid then put on, as here 
 at Fordwich, or being buried alive or smothered in 
 the harbour mud, after the Sandwich style. 
 
 The dungeons beneath the town hall are provided 
 with only a narrow barred opening, shuttered from
 
 SARRE TO CANTERBURY 231 
 
 the outside and admitting the least possible rays of 
 light. On their walls may yet be seen the many 
 scrawls of old-time prisoners. In one cell were 
 secured those who had offended against the municipal 
 authority of Fordwich, and in the other the captives 
 of the Monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury 
 were laid by the heels ; for two jurisdictions, the 
 cause of many jealousies, ruled here. In none was 
 there more heat shown than in the sole right and 
 privilege of fishing for trout at Fordwich, claimed 
 by the monastery and bitterly disputed by the port. 
 
 The rough, whitewashed interior of the court-room 
 is simple but highly curious. The primitive bench 
 and bar where prisoners were arraigned and causes 
 heard are still here. Prosecutors had a difficult 
 task in those days. Sometimes the court would 
 decide that ordeal by battle was the best way of 
 settling a dispute a mean way, it will be acknow- 
 ledged, of shirking its judicial responsibilities and 
 would secure seats outside to witness the fray, which 
 suggests too engrossing a love of sport ; at other 
 times, when the court did patiently hear and 
 adjudicate upon plaints, it left the prosecutor with 
 the disagreeable task of executing the convicted 
 felon himself, both successful ways of discouraging 
 litigation. 
 
 A good deal more modern than those barbarous 
 practices, but still of a respectable antiquity, is the 
 ducking-stool, resting on a transverse beam of 
 the interior roofing. It is long since this engine 
 for punishing scolds was used ; not, perhaps, alto- 
 gether by reason of gentler modern methods, nor 
 that the feminine arts of scolding and nagging are 
 decayed, but doubtless because the punishment was
 
 232 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 not effectual, and the last state of the nagged and 
 henpecked, after the nagger and pecker had been 
 ducked, was worse than the first. The old clumsy 
 wooden crane at the angle of the town hall, still 
 overlooking the river, was the place whence the 
 scolding wives of Fordwich, first firmly bound, were 
 slung in the chair, swung out over the stream, and 
 ducked, deeply overhead. Raving with fear and 
 shrieking with fury they were ducked again and again, 
 
 STURRY. 
 
 while their good men, standing amid the delighted 
 crowd, miserably anticipated a worse time than ever 
 and, by all accounts, generally got it. 
 
 Leaving Fordwich and returning to Sturry, the 
 Canterbury road is regained. At its extremity, 
 where one crosses the Stour, Sturry retrieves its 
 reputation and exchanges its hard-featured street for 
 a pretty riverside grouping, where the church, an 
 ivy-covered ruined red-brick gateway of Sturry 
 Court, and a plentiful background of trees make a 
 gracious picture. It is the last picture of the kind 
 on this route, for Canterbury is less than two miles 
 ahead, entered past the barracks and by its least 
 attractive streets.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 
 
 SHEPPEY is an outlying district of the Ingoldsby 
 Country, somewhat difficult of access. It is from 
 Newington, a village on the Dover Road, some 
 seven miles from Chatham and eighteen from 
 Canterbury, that we will approach Sheppey, if 
 cycling, for that affords a pleasant and interesting 
 route. The ancient parish church of Newington 
 lifts its grey battlemented tower away from the 
 village prominently to one side of the old coach 
 road, but it is surprisingly long before one reaches 
 it, down the winding lane. Here it is abundantly 
 evident, to right and left, that we are in the 
 very heart of the famous fruit-growing district 
 of Kent ; for apple orchards, and more particularly 
 cherry and pear orchards, abound, and where they 
 cease the hop-gardens fill in the intervening space. 
 
 Coming sharply round to the church, incon- 
 gruously neighboured by a modern and matter- 
 of-fact postal letter-box, will be seen a great rough 
 boulder-stone, planted between roadway and footpath 
 the " Devil's Stone " as it is known locally. A 
 very large and prominent representation of a boot- 
 sole is seen on it, and is the outward and visible 
 sign of a hoary legend current at Newington ever 
 since Newington church existed. It seems that the 
 
 333
 
 234 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Devil objected to the church being built, but 
 deferred action until the tower was completed, when, 
 one night, he came along indignantly, and, placing 
 his back against the tower and a foot against the 
 stone, pushed to no purpose, for the tower was 
 not to be moved by his strongest efforts. The 
 legend asks us to believe that the boot-print on 
 
 THE DEVIL'S FOOTPRINT. 
 
 the stone is a relic of this impotent Satanic spite ; 
 but it is in relief, instead of being sunk ! and surely 
 the imprint, in any case, should have been that 
 of a hoof. It is a very well-preserved and sharply- 
 defined mark, and a suspicion that it is periodically 
 renewed will not be denied. 
 
 At any rate, it is an appropriate legend for the
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 235 
 
 Ingoldsby Country. Had Barham only known of 
 it, to what excellent use could he not have turned 
 the tale ! 
 
 Five miles of picturesquely winding sandy lanes 
 lead in a gradual descent past Iwade, through 
 orchards, and now and again across rough patches 
 of open pasture, with two field-gates across the route, 
 proclaiming that wayfarers here are few. At length 
 a view of Sheppey opens out, across that arm of 
 the sea known as the Swale, crossed by a combined 
 railway and road bridge on the site of the old 
 " King's Ferry." The railway is that branch of 
 the Chatham and Dover running from Sittingbourne 
 to Queenborough and Sheerness. Here then, paying 
 the penny toll for self and cycle, one enters the 
 island by road, at the only place where the channel 
 is bridged. The four other places from which it is 
 possible to enter are all ferries. 
 
 The railway to Sheerness has never opened up 
 the island, and Sheppey, before the opening of the 
 light railway that has recently been made to traverse 
 its length, remained to Londoners an unknown land. 
 It may be readily supposed that it will largely so 
 remain, in spite of the facilities for travel that the 
 new line provides, and notwithstanding the frantic 
 efforts of the strenuous land companies, whose 
 extravagant advertisements might lead the untravelled 
 to suppose that here was the Garden of Eden, and 
 that in purchasing building-sites in this remote 
 corner of the kingdom speculators or prospective 
 residents would be laying the foundations of rude 
 health or comfortable fortunes. There are, it is 
 true, few places so interesting as Sheppey, but why, 
 apart from its history ? Just because its scenery is
 
 236 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 so weird, its surroundings so outlandish. That 
 scenery is of two sorts the marshes that border the 
 sea-channel of the Swale, dividing it from the Kentish 
 mainland ; and the high ridge or backbone which 
 runs in the direction of the island's greatest length, 
 from Sheerness to Warden Point and Shellness. 
 Trees are few, and grow only in the more sheltered 
 parts, if it can truly be said that there is shelter at 
 all on Sheppey, where the winds particularly the 
 east winds blow great guns, and boom, howl, and 
 shriek in successful competition with the cannon of 
 the heavy defences at Sheerness, whose deep, hoarse 
 voices are puny compared with those of the gales 
 that blow on Sheppey. All these historic and 
 physical peculiarities of this right little, tight little 
 island are very well for the explorer, who goes 
 forth to discover the unusual and certainly finds it 
 here and who would be grievously disappointed 
 at not finding it, but to live on Sheppey would be 
 another matter. Those marshlands whose delicate 
 tints and general air so appeal to the casual stranger 
 in summer, that muddy sea which sullenly washes 
 away the crumbling, slimy cliffs of dark clay along 
 the coast-line from Sheerness to Warden, Jose their 
 interest in the long months of winter, become merely 
 grim and dismal, and obsess the mind with doleful 
 imaginings. 
 
 But these things have nothing to do with the 
 literary pilgrim, who does not select the winter for 
 his pilgrimage. He descends upon Sheppey in the 
 summer, and here is the picture he sees, so soon as 
 he has left the King's Ferry bridge behind. The 
 road runs flatly and sandiiy ahead, in midst of a 
 world of marshes, cloaked and successfully hidden
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 237 
 
 for the most part by a luxuriant growth of grass. 
 From a cloudless sky the song of the larks comes 
 down in changeful trills, and if one dare gaze into 
 the aching blue they can be seen, mounting higher 
 and higher as though they sought to reach the sun 
 itself. Everything else tells of noonday rest. The 
 still heat that bathes the unduly energetic in un- 
 desirable perspiration sends one seeking for wayside 
 shelter, but only on the distant hillside, where 
 Minster crowns the ridge, do the trees begin, dotted 
 singly, and looking in the distance like giant 
 umbrellas. The myriad sheep of these flats have 
 long since given up the quest for shade in this 
 district where trees are only objects in the distance 
 and hedgerows are unknown, and huddled together 
 in an endeavour to find a cooling shade behind each 
 other's backs. Even the lambs have ceased their 
 clumsy gambols. The dykes stew in the sun, and 
 a heat-haze makes distant objects in the landscape 
 perform an optical St. Vitus's dance. Only the 
 great brick-barges, beating up and down the creeks 
 from Sittingbourne, go a slow and dignified pace, 
 their rust-red sails, seen across country, looking as 
 though they walked the fields. The colouring of 
 this scene is in a beautiful harmony the foreground 
 grasses bleached to a more than straw-like pallor, 
 toning off in the distance to a rich apricot yellow, 
 meeting in one direction the irradiated pale blue sky, 
 flecked with white clouds, and in another the green 
 hillsides of Minster. Over all is a sense of vastness, 
 and the pilgrim throws out his arms and draws deep 
 breaths in sympathy. Space, elbow-room, isolation, 
 those are the dominant notes of Sheppey. 
 
 Queenborough, two miles off to the left from
 
 238 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 our entrance at King's Ferry, finds no mention in 
 the Ingoldsby Legends^ but now that we are here, 
 a thorough exploration might as well be undertaken, 
 and both it and Sheerness visited. Queenborough 
 is a place with a past, and proclaims the fact in 
 every nook and corner of its old streets, where the 
 footfall of the stranger echoes loudly, and tufts of 
 grass grow between the rough cobble-stones of the 
 pavements. Queenborough owes its name to the 
 chivalric courtesy of Edward III., who in 1366 
 changed it from Kingborough to its present title in 
 honour of his Queen, Philippa. At that time it 
 was an important point, and was fortified for the 
 defence of the Medway by a castle designed by that 
 master-architect and shrewd ecclesiastic, William of 
 Wykeham. Archaeologists tell how its ground-plan 
 was in the shape of an heraldic rose, but nearly 
 all traces of it are gone. Its history never included 
 siege or stirring incident, and the buildings were 
 ruinous even in the time of the Commonwealth, 
 when they were sold and carted off in a commonplace 
 and inglorious way. Now the last note of humilia- 
 tion the railway station of Queenborough is built 
 on the site. 
 
 The town dates the beginning of its decay from 
 1377, when Edward III. who had honoured it in 
 the re-naming, eleven years be/ore, ensured its ruin 
 by removing the staple to Sandwich ; but some life 
 and enterprise would seem to have been left, even 
 in the time of Queen Anne, for most of the houses 
 in its one long street appear to have been built about 
 the period of that deceased sovereign. Quaint red- 
 brick houses they are, the brick seamed and pitted 
 with age, the roofs high-pitched ; the whole with
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 239 
 
 that indefinite suggestion of a Dutch town which 
 many of these old waterside ports possess, even 
 though it be impossible to pick out one house and 
 find anything particularly Dutch in its design. 
 
 It is not without a certain feeling of humiliation 
 that one mentions anything Dutch along the Medway 
 and in the neighbourhood of Sheerness, for Sheerness 
 itself felt the brunt of the Dutch naval attack in 
 June 1667, when seventy-two hostile ships reduced 
 the little sandspit fort, landed a force, and occupied 
 the town. Thence the Dutch Admiral at leisure 
 proceeded up to Chatham, destroying the English 
 ships and even working havoc in the Thames. 
 Pepys at Gravesend remarked in his Diary, "We 
 do plainly at this time hear the guns play," and 
 in terror went off to Brampton, in Huntingdonshire, 
 where he hid his wealth in an unlikely spot. It 
 was not until the end of June that the fear of 
 invasion was past, and no lapse of time has sufficed 
 to wipe away the shame. 
 
 The dockyards and forts of Sheerness are to-day 
 very efficient and formidable, but they do not 
 succeed in rendering anything but an unfavourable 
 opinion of the town, whose prevailing notes are 
 meanness and squalor ; few others than fishers or 
 seafaring men of the Navy ever set foot here. It 
 is the most considerable place on the island, and, 
 the very Cinderella of dockyard towns, repels rather 
 than invites the visitor. 
 
 Bluetown, an outlying residential part, overlooking 
 the sea and possessed of a dwarf seawall and a 
 parade of sorts, is better. Here the Government 
 officials chiefly live, as it were, at the gates of the 
 Unknown, for although there is nothing to hinder
 
 240 
 
 excursions into " the interior," few have ever been 
 those to make the attempt. Looking at Sheppey 
 with the eyes of Sheerness, one in fact regards that 
 town largely in the light of a settlement on the 
 coast of some impossible island in the most im- 
 possible of colonies. We shall, however, see that 
 Sheppey contains more of interest in a day's tour 
 than is readily to be found in the same time within 
 the compass of the Home Counties. 
 
 For Sheppey it is a redundancy to talk of the 
 " Isle of Sheppey," the ancient Saxon " Sceapige," 
 the "Isle of Sheep," including the designation of 
 " island " besides containing some of the most 
 notable of Ingoldsby landmarks, has witnessed 
 historic events. The outskirts of Sheerness are, of 
 course, peculiarly soulless and abnormally gritty and 
 dirty. If, however, the explorer perseveres until 
 these are left behind, he will see in the distance, 
 some two-and-a-half miles ahead, an isolated hill 
 rising abruptly from the levels and surmounted by 
 a Church. A nearer approach discovers a pretty 
 countryside and the fact that an interesting village 
 clings round the topmost slopes of the hill. This 
 is the village of Minster-in-Sheppey, thus particu- 
 larised in order to distinguish it from the better- 
 known Minster-in-Thanet. The church was once 
 a dependency of the abbey founded here by St. 
 Saxburga, or Sexburga, in A.D. 675 ; the abbey 
 spoken of in ancient documents as " Monasterium 
 Scapeise," or "The Sheppey Monastery." It is 
 this title that has given the village of Minster its 
 name, as found in the changing forms of the word 
 since the twelfth century, when it was " Moynstre." 
 By degrees it became " Menstre," and thence
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY a 4 i 
 
 assumed its present form. It is by no means pro- 
 posed in these pages to follow the fortunes of 
 Saxburga and her establishment of seventy-seven 
 nuns, nor to tell the story of how the heathen Danes 
 in after years desecrated the place. Sanctuaries 
 existed in those times, it would seem (from the 
 frequency and certainty of their being attacked) 
 expressly for the purpose of being violated, and 
 scarce a religious house, in the course of many 
 centuries, escaped ruin at the hands of pagan 
 piratical hordes, or of internal enemies who, although 
 Christians, were hardly less savage. Even at a 
 time so comparatively late as 1322, some tragical 
 affair, whose details have never been disclosed, 
 took place here, for at that time both the abbey 
 and the church were said to have " suffered 
 pollution from blood," and the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury was entreated to send a faculty for 
 holding a special service of reconciliation, to purge 
 the place. 
 
 The abbey, of course, shared the common fate of 
 such establishments, big and little, in the strenuous 
 days of Henry VI II., and its buildings have been 
 so diligently quarried for stone during more than 
 three hundred years that nothing is left of them 
 but the gate-house, which neighbours the west end 
 of the church. Even that has been ingeniously 
 turned to account, and, with the great entrance 
 archway bricked up, and modern sashed windows 
 knocked into the walls, forms very comfortable 
 quarters for the families of two farm-labourers. 
 
 But it is not to discuss abbesses, saintly or merely 
 human, that we are here. Diligent readers of the 
 Ingoldsby Legends will at once recognise Minster- 
 
 16
 
 242 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 in-Sheppey as the principal scene of one of the 
 most interesting and humorous legends of the series, 
 the prose story of " Grey Dolphin ; " and not far 
 distant is the site of Shurland Castle, where Sir 
 Robert de Shurland, Lord of Shurland and Minster 
 and Baron of Sheppey in comitatu Kent, dwelt, and, 
 teste Tom Ingoldsby, " to the frame of a dwarf 
 united the soul of a giant and the valour of a 
 gamecock." There is, true enough, a great, clumsy 
 altar-tomb in Minster church to the memory of that 
 redoubtable Baron, who was a real person, and not 
 one of Barham's " many inventions." And not only 
 a real, but a very gallant and distinguished personage 
 too, of whom it was perhaps rather too bad of 
 Ingoldsby to draw so farcical a portrait. He took 
 part in the Crusade of 1271, and was at a later 
 period knighted by Prince Edward for gallantry at 
 the siege of Caerlaverock. " If I were a young 
 demoiselle," says an old romance, " I would give 
 myself to that brave knight, Sir Robert de Shur- 
 land." Women ever loved brave men. 
 
 The effigy of the knight bespeaks a man rather 
 tall and thin, than thick-set and of a dwarfish stature. 
 The local tradition upon which Barham founded 
 the legend of " Grey Dolphin" is that the Lord of 
 Shurland, happening to pass by the churchyard 
 of Minster, found a fat friar in the act of refusing, 
 unless he were paid for his services, to say the last 
 rites of the Church over the body of a drowned 
 sailor brought to this spot for burial. No one 
 felt inclined to pay for the unfortunate mariner's 
 passport to Heaven, and the friar was obdurate, 
 refusing to accede to even the Baron's request. 
 The Baron promptly slew the friar, and kicked his
 
 244 
 
 body into the open grave, to bear the sailor company 
 on his journey to Hades. Mother Church was not 
 particularly fond of the greasy friars who at that 
 time infested the country, but she could not brook 
 so flagrant an insult ; and accordingly, made 
 matters extremely unpleasant for the Baron, who, 
 learning that the King lay aboard ship two miles 
 off the coast of Sheppey, swam there and back 
 on his horse, Grey Dolphin, and obtained a 
 pardon. But, on returning to the shore, an old 
 woman prophesied that the horse which had now 
 saved his life should some day cause his death. 
 To render this, as he thought, impossible, the 
 Baron killed his horse on the spot, and went off 
 rejoicing. The next year, however, chancing to 
 ride over the sands again, his horse stumbled over 
 the skull of Grey Dolphin and threw the Baron 
 fatally. 
 
 His tomb, rubbed down in a cleanly and house- 
 wifely manner quite destructive of any appearance 
 of antiquity, is in the south aisle of Minster Abbey 
 church the effigy of a "recumbent warrior 
 clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. 
 His hands are clasped in prayer ; his legs, crossed 
 in that position so prized by Templars in ancient 
 and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier 
 of the Faith in Palestine. Close behind his dexter 
 calf lies sculptured in bold relief a horse's head." 
 This is represented in the midst of some curious 
 carving, perhaps intended for waves. At the feet 
 of the mutilated effigy crouches a battered little 
 figure of a page, misericorde in hand ; while 
 " Tickletoby," the Baron's sword, is represented 
 in stone carving by his side, with a spear the length
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 245 
 
 of his tomb. It was, as Tom Ingoldsby explains, 
 " the fashion in feudal times to give names to 
 
 TOMB OF SIR ROBERT DE SHURLAND. 
 
 swords : King Arthur's was christened Excalibur ; 
 the Baron called his Tickletoby, and whenever he
 
 246 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 took it in hand it was no joke." The legend of 
 "Grey Dolphin" has been explained away by anti- 
 quaries, who say that the horse's head means only that 
 Sir Robert de Shurland had obtained a grant of the 
 " Wreck of the Sea " where his manors extended 
 towards the shore, and was entitled to all wreckage, 
 
 waifs and strays, flotsam and 
 jetsam, which he could reach 
 with the point of his lance 
 when riding at ebb tide as 
 far into the sea as possible. 
 
 The weather-vane on the 
 tower, fashioned to represent 
 a horse's head, alludes to this 
 story, and gives the local 
 name of the " Horse Church." 
 The siege of Shurland 
 Castle belongs more to fiction 
 than to history, and it is only 
 in Tom Ingoldsby's pages 
 that you can read how Guy 
 Pearson, one of the defenders, 
 "had got a black eye from 
 a brickbat." Most of the 
 people John de Northwode, 
 William of Hever, and Roger 
 
 O 
 
 of Leybourne who led the assault are real persons, 
 and, indeed, the brasses of Sir John de Northwode 
 and his wife, Joan of Badlesmere, are there, in the 
 church of Minster, to this day. Haines, the author 
 of the first, and still the standard, work on 
 Monumental 'Brasses^ says the knight's effigy "has 
 undergone a peculiar Procrustean process, several 
 inches having been removed from the centre of 
 
 THE HORSE-VANE, MINSTER- 
 IN-SHEPPEY.
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 247 
 
 the figure to make it equal in length to that of his 
 wife. The legs have been restored and crossed at 
 the ankles, an attitude apparently not contemplated 
 by the original designer. From the style of en- 
 graving, these alterations seem to have been made 
 at the close of the fifteenth century." Since Haines 
 wrote, the brass of the knightly sheriff has been 
 again restored, a piece of metal having been inserted, 
 with the effect of lengthening the figure considerably. 
 The effect of a modern slip of brass let into this 
 fifteenth-century engraving is not a little incon- 
 gruous. 
 
 The Baron who put John de Northwode and his 
 posse comitatus to flight left a daughter, his sole 
 heiress. If one could believe Ingoldsby (which 
 one cannot do) it would be sufficient to read that 
 u Margaret Shurland in due course became Margaret 
 Ingoldsby ; her portrait still hangs in the gallery at 
 Tappington. Her features are handsome but 
 shrewish ; but we never could learn that she 
 actually kicked her husband." Diligent delving 
 into old records proves, however, that Margaret 
 Shurland married one William Cheyney ; and the 
 altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, 
 Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of good 
 Queen Bess, stands in Minster church even now. 
 
 That noble monument details how important a 
 personage he was. Knight of the Garter, Constable 
 of Dover Castle, Treasurer of the Household to 
 Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and Privy Councillor 
 in the succeeding reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, he 
 was obviously a man of affairs. Here the recumbent 
 effigy of him lies, a surrounding galaxy of sixteen 
 shields of arms setting forth the noble alliances of
 
 248 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 his house. He was a man of great wealth probably 
 he helped himself liberally out of the Treasury 
 and, razing Shurland Castle to the ground and 
 leaving nothing to tell of the old stronghold, built 
 in its stead the mansion now standing, but fallen 
 from its old estate and become a farmhouse. 
 
 One marvels by what suavity of demeanour, what 
 tact, double-dealing, and wholesale jettison of prin- 
 ciples and personal convictions, political, social, and 
 religious, this man of many dignities contrived to 
 keep and augment his fortune and preserve his head 
 upon his shoulders in the hurly-burly and general 
 quick-change of those times in which he lived, when 
 an incautious word meant Tower Hill and the 
 executioner's axe, or, at the very least of it, the 
 forfeiture of property. Surely he did not wear his 
 heart upon his sleeve who moved thus freely in 
 Courts, and who died, undisturbed and in the 
 fulness of time, in his bed. 
 
 Minster church is rich in other monuments. 
 Here in a recess of the wall can still be seen the 
 mutilated alabaster effigy of a knight in armour, 
 representing an unfortunate Spanish prisoner of 
 rank captured by Drake off Calais harbour at the 
 descent of the Armada in 1588. This poor Don 
 Jeronimo Magno, of Salamanca, was given into the 
 custody of Sir Edward Hoby, Constable of Queen- 
 borough and Commander at the Nore, who kept him 
 for three years a prisoner aboard ship at that rough 
 and boisterous anchorage. It is not surprising that 
 the unhappy Jeronimo died at the end of that time 
 unless we like to be surprised that he stood it so 
 long. He was buried here December 5th, 1591. 
 The hooligan instincts of fanatical religious reformers,
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 249 
 
 and still more those of the succeeding centuries 
 
 of village goths and visitant 'Arrys, have bashed 
 
 the nose of the effigy, shorn off at the elbow his 
 
 once devoutly clasped arms, and scored him about 
 
 with their quite uninteresting initials. Another 
 
 such effigy, not so ill-treated, 
 
 is that supposed to represent 
 
 Jordanus de Scapeia, whose 
 
 clasped hands still hold between 
 
 their fingers a mystic oval 
 
 sculptured with a little effigy 
 
 thought to symbolise the soul. 
 
 This monument was found 
 
 buried in the churchyard, in 
 
 ., _ / THE SOUL, FROM A MONU- 
 
 1833, five feet deep. MENT IN MINSTER-IN 
 
 T7 J.L- L'llx. 1 1 1 SHEPPEY CHURCH. 
 
 From this hilltop churchyard 
 
 one may glimpse a view whose like is not often seen. 
 Sheerness to one side, the narrow ribbon of the 
 Swale, the broad channels of the Medway and the 
 Thames, and the great expanse of slimy marshes, 
 gleam under the summer sun like burnished steel. 
 When evening comes and the sunbeams slant down- 
 wards from dun-coloured clouds, the scene is one 
 to make an artist despair of ever adequately render- 
 ing the beauty of it. 
 
 The dust of countless generations lies mingled 
 here, in this swelling God's Acre, raised so high 
 above the road. Abbesses and nuns and the good 
 folks of Minster for many hundreds of years have 
 all found rest at last, and most of their names are 
 forgotten, save by the casual antiquary who turns 
 over the yellow pages of the parish registers. Most 
 of the gravestones date from periods ranging from 
 a hundred to sixty years ago, and their inscriptions
 
 250 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 tell eloquently of a seafaring population near at hand 
 at Sheerness, of course ; for the ship's carpenters, 
 rope-makers, boatswains, master-mariners, and the 
 many others of the seafaring profession generally have 
 their occupation duly set forth on their memorials. 
 The rope-maker's is embellished with ropes, curiously 
 carved and fashioned, representing knots whose name 
 sailormen alone may know. Others bear terrific 
 attempts at picturing the Judgment Day, intended 
 to make the casual sinner quail. Unfortunately, the 
 pufry, overfed angels blowing the Last Trump on 
 trumpets many sizes too large for them make the 
 sinful smile, and they go away quite undisturbed 
 in their old iniquitous ways. 
 
 So greatly has the soil of the churchyard been 
 raised by the countless years of interments, that 
 the church itself lies, as it were, in a little hollow, 
 and the entrances to it by the south door, and from 
 the western portal in the tower, are flanked by walls 
 of grassy earth, the whole immediately overlooking 
 and abutting upon the houses of the homely village. 
 
 There are exquisitely beautiful glimpses on the 
 road from Minster to Warden, beginning immediately 
 on leaving the place. To the left, a lovely valley 
 that in Devonshire would be called a " coombe," 
 and in the Isle of Wight a " chine," shelves down 
 to the sea at the farm of Scrapsgate. There from 
 the road you see the valley, notched out like a V, 
 with myriads of wild-flowers, and in the distance 
 on the right hand the farm-buildings, nestling 
 among orchards and a dense clump of trees, and 
 in that wedge of the V the sparkling waters of 
 a sea that is always alive and companionable with 
 the great steamers coming in or put of the mouth of
 
 252 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 the Thames, with the brick-lighters and sailing- 
 barges creeping round the island, or with the 
 swallow-like flight of the graceful yachts of the 
 Royal Thames Yacht Squadron. Turning in the other 
 direction, the mazy creeks and many islands and 
 saltings of the Medway are stretched out, silver- 
 grey and opalescent, over beyond the shoulder of 
 the hill mystic, wonderful, sanctified by distance 
 to the likeness of a Promised Land. 
 
 In two miles from Minster we come to East- 
 church, a populous and pretty village whose beautiful 
 church warms the enthusiasm of the pilgrim. Across 
 the meadows rises the imposing frontage of Shurland 
 House, now, as we have said, a farmhouse, but a 
 Gothic battlemented structure built by Sir Thomas 
 Cheyney, when Warden of the Cinque Ports, 
 about 1550, and the not undignified successor of 
 the Shurland Castle inhabited by that Sir Robert 
 who was the hero of the legend of " Grey Dolphin." 
 
 Sir Thomas, the builder of this great place, was 
 succeeded by his son, " the extravagant Lord 
 Cheyney " of Toddington, Bedfordshire, after whose 
 fall Shurland House reverted to the Crown. 
 James I. granted it to Philip Herbert, a son of the 
 Earl of Pembroke, and now, after many vicissitudes, 
 it belongs to the Holfords. 
 
 By turning to the left in the village street of 
 Eastchurch, and bearing to the right at the next 
 turning, all that is left of Warden is reached in 
 two miles. The little that remains of the village 
 is known by the inelegant name of " Mud Row," 
 whose few decrepit houses lead direct to what would 
 be destruction for the speedy cyclist, were it not 
 fpr the rough bar thrown Across the rutty la.ne,
 
 254 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Dismounting here, the astonished stranger finds 
 that the road ends suddenly and without warning, 
 and with it the island as well. It is just a little 
 nerve-shaking. Here one looks down upon a scene 
 of wildest desolation, upon the sea, a hundred feet 
 below, at the bottom of a dark mass of clayey cliffs, 
 slipping and sliding into the water, and torn by 
 repeated landslips into yawning fissures and fantastic 
 pinnacles. The sullen sea is discoloured as far as 
 eye can reach with the dissolving clay, and, horrible 
 to tell, out of many fissures grin bleached skulls, 
 while strewn here and there are human bones. It 
 is a Golgotha. Here stood the church and church- 
 yard of Warden until 1877, and this tumbled land- 
 slip is all that remains of them. 
 
 For many years this encroachment or the sea at 
 Warden has been in progress, until, up to now, over 
 eighty acres have been washed away. The vanished 
 church has a curious history, having been rebuilt in 
 1836 with the stones from old London Bridge, 
 demolished four years earlier for the building of the 
 present structure. It was Delamark Banks, son of 
 Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, who 
 gave the stones and rebuilt the church of Warden, 
 as duly set forth on a sculptured stone tablet now 
 forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row. 
 
 By 1870 the sea had crept up to the church, and 
 it was closed, to be pulled down in 1877, when the 
 bodies of those who had been buried in the church- 
 yard during the previous thirty years were disin- 
 terred and removed to Minster. They are the more 
 ancient dead whose poor remains are exposed with 
 every fall of earth, to bleach in the sun. 
 
 From the desolation of Warden it is four miles to
 
 THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY 255 
 
 that hooked spit of shells and sand, Shellness, the 
 farthest extremity of the island. By tracks which 
 might, with every excuse, be described as hazardous, 
 the route begins, but soon descends to the low 
 sea-shore and the flat marshes the shore carefully 
 protected by a long series of dwarf timber groynes 
 and a curved " apron " of concrete, the marshes 
 defended by massive earthen dykes, continued along 
 the circuitous shore all the way round to King's 
 Ferry. 
 
 Shellness is well named, for it is a vast expanse of 
 small marine shells, mostly in a perfect condition. 
 Such a beach would be the paradise of holiday 
 children at a seaside resort, but here, at the edge of 
 an obscure island, where there is no life but that of 
 a coastguard station and the nearest village is almost 
 three miles away, it is clearly wasted. Among this 
 wilderness of shells grows the beautiful yellow sea- 
 poppy, finding its nutriment in some mysterious 
 manner where no soil can be seen. 
 
 Three miles across the sea-channel of the Swale 
 lies Whitstable, plain to see, and in the Swale rides 
 the oyster fleet of that celebrated fishery. 
 
 This channel of the Swale was the point of 
 departure selected by James II. when flying, terror- 
 stricken, before the Protestant deliverance of the 
 nation by William of Orange. It was in December 
 1688 that a hoy was chartered and the fugitive King 
 landed at Elmley, higher up the channel, intending 
 to put off from this point or hook of Shellness ; but 
 the unwonted spectacle of a humble boat containing 
 persons in the garb of great gentlemen landing in 
 that obscure place in those troubled times created a 
 sensation among the fishermen, who took them for
 
 256 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Jesuits, and, hating Popery and eager for plunder, 
 mobbed them. They thought the King was that 
 notorious Jesuit, Father Petre. " I know him by 
 his lean jaws," said one. " Search the hatchet-faced 
 old Jesuit ! " exclaimed another. They snatched 
 his money and watch ; his coronation ring and valu- 
 able trinkets even the diamond buckles of his 
 shoes they took for glass and did not touch. 
 
 Then tremendous discovery ! someone recog- 
 nised him as the King. A momentary awe seized 
 them, but they quickly recovered, and this poor 
 trembling James they took, incoherently protesting, 
 in custody across the Swale and into Faversham, 
 there to be placed under surveillance. 
 
 This is why this corner of Sheppcy is interesting. 
 It witnessed one of the final scenes in the tragedy of 
 the Stuarts.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 SOME OUTLYING INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 
 
 NETLEY ABBEY 
 
 THREE miles from Southampton, in the county of 
 Hampshire or, as official documents still have it, 
 the county of Southampton is Netley Abbey, one 
 of the scattered Ingoldsby landmarks outside Kent. 
 It is not evident from the context in the Legends 
 when or on what occasion the author visited Netley, 
 nor does it appear to be explained in the " Life " 
 by his son. The ruined abbey stands almost on 
 the shores of Southampton Water, divided from 
 that beautiful land and seascape only by a road and 
 the gardens of a narrow fringe of villas. The site 
 is naturally lovely, but has been spoiled and 
 vulgarised by the neighbourhood of the great 
 military hospital and the draggle-tailed, unkempt, and 
 sordid line of mean shops and public-houses which 
 that institution has conjured up. So surely as 
 Government buildings be they hospitals, offices, 
 barracks, or prisons are erected on any spot, that 
 spot is certain to be spoiled, and this is assuredly 
 no exception. Stucco-fronted public-houses of the 
 " Prince Albert " and " Hero of the Alma " type and 
 period jostle the struggling, compendious green- 
 grocer's shop that deals at one and the same time 
 
 257 17
 
 258 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 in greengrocery, half a hundred weight of coals, 
 firewood, and linen drapery, and the picnicker 
 comes in crowds to the spot on Southampton's early- 
 closing days. 
 
 How different this from Horace Walpole's 
 description of the place in 1755: "How shall 
 I describe Netley to you ? I can only by telling 
 you it is the spot in the world which I and 
 Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast, and 
 retain fragments of beautiful fretted roof pendent 
 in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns cf 
 windows wrapped round and round with ivy. Many 
 trees are sprouted up among the walls, and only 
 want to be increased with cypresses. A hill rises 
 above the abbey, encircled with wood. The fort, 
 in which we would build a tower for habitation, 
 remains, with two small platforms. This little 
 castle is buried from the abbey in a wood, in the 
 very centre, on the edge of the hill. On each side 
 breaks in the view of the Southampton sea, deep 
 blue, glistening with silver and vessels ; on one 
 side terminated by Southampton, on the other by 
 Calshot Castle, and the Isle of Wight rising above 
 the opposite hills. In short, they are not the ruins 
 of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh ! the purple 
 abbots ! what a spot had they chosen to slumber 
 in ! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so 
 lively, that they seem only to have retired into the 
 world." 
 
 There are various derivations of the name of 
 Netley, but the true one is doubtless from the 
 Anglo-Saxon " Natanleage," a wooded district. Other 
 " Netleys " occur in the New Forest, and the name 
 compares curiously with that of the little hamlet of
 
 SOME INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 
 
 " Nately Scures," near Basingstoke, where the suffix 
 derives from the Anglo-Saxon " scora," a shaw or 
 coppice. The abbey was a Cistercian house founded 
 in the reign of, and perhaps by, Henry III., who 
 dedicated it not only to the Virgin Mary, to whom 
 Cistercian houses were always inscribed, but also 
 to his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. The 
 beautiful abbey church escaped the usual fate 
 which befell religious houses at the Dissolution, 
 and remained practically uninjured until so late as 
 the year 1700. Up to that period it had passed 
 through several hands, and although converted into 
 a private residence, with the nave as a kitchen and 
 the other hitherto sacred precincts turned into 
 account for more or less domestic use, the successive 
 owners had allowed no spoliation of its architectural 
 features. But when in 1700 it became the property 
 of Sir Berkeley Lucy, its doom was sealed. He 
 sold the materials of the church to a certain Taylor, 
 a Southampton builder, and Taylor made arrange- 
 ments to pull the great building down. But Taylor, 
 like Joseph, had a dream. He dreamt that, while 
 engaged in taking down the church roof, the 
 keystone of the vaulting near the great east window 
 fell from its place and killed him. The dream 
 probably had its origin in the warnings that had been 
 given him by superstitious friends some days before, 
 not to touch the abbey with the hands of a spoiler. 
 They would not, they said, for riches untold " be 
 concerned in the demolition of holy and consecrated 
 places." Taylor was equally superstitious and the 
 warning preyed upon his mind, and the dream was 
 the result. The next day he hurried off to another 
 friend, a Mr. Watts, schoolmaster in Southampton
 
 260 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 and the father of that celebrated divine Dr. Isaac 
 Watts, author of " How doth the little busy bee " 
 and other improving verse. Mr. Watts, school- 
 master, seems to have been an unworthy progenitor 
 of that highly moral cleric, and gave the troubled 
 Taylor the cynical advice " to have no personal 
 concern in pulling down the building." This ad- 
 mirable, if somewhat forbiddingly rationalistic, counsel 
 was, however, disregarded by the unhappy contractor, 
 who, when actively engaged among his workmen 
 was felled to the ground exactly in the manner he 
 had dreamt. The falling keystone crushed his skull 
 in, and the genius of the place was thus avenged. 
 The workmen, who had heard the story of the 
 dream and had laughed at it, then left off work 
 in terror, and no one else was found bold enough 
 to proceed with it. To this we owe the fact that 
 the ruins are still in existence, but it seems a pity 
 that the vengeful spirit could have found no method 
 of getting his blow in before the abbey was almost 
 wholly unroofed. Had Taylor been slain by the 
 first stone wrenched from the groining the swift- 
 ness of the retribution would have rendered it even 
 more dramatic, and would have resulted in the 
 beautiful building being roofed to this day. 
 
 As it is, the ruins are now open to the sky, and 
 time and the seasons have wrought more havoc in 
 the two centuries that have passed than was inflicted 
 by Taylor or his men. Time, weather, and vandal 
 visitors, that is to say these last we must by no 
 means forget. Not that they are likely to be for- 
 gotten by the pilgrim to this shrine, for the walls 
 are hacked and inscribed with the pocket-knives and 
 pencils of two centuries of holiday-makers, pricked
 
 262 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 on to it by a noble rage for immortality manifesting 
 itself in this ignoble way. The earlier scrawls of 
 John Jones or William Robinson have themselves, 
 almost by lapse of time, come within the range of 
 archaeology. From 1700 to about 1860 these, 
 almost as destructive as the tooth of time, had their 
 wicked will of the place, and it was under such 
 circumstances and the added desecrations of bottled 
 beer, drunken fiddling, and rowdy picnicking, that 
 Barham saw it : 
 
 In a rush-bottom'd chair 
 A hag surrounded by crockery-ware, 
 Vending in cups to the credulous throng, 
 A nasty decoction miscall'd Souchong, 
 And a squeaking fiddle and wry-neck'd fife 
 Are screeching away, for the life ! for the life ! 
 Danced to by "All the World and his Wife." 
 Tag, Rag, and Bobtail are capering there, 
 Worse scene, I ween, than Bartlemy Fair ! 
 Two or three Chimney-sweeps, two or three Clowns, 
 Playing at "pitch and toss," sport their "Browns"; 
 Two or three damsels, frank and free, 
 Are ogling and smiling, and sipping Bohea. 
 Parties below, and parties above, 
 Some making tea, and some making love. 
 
 Then the "toot-toot-toot" 
 
 Of that vile demi-flute, 
 
 The detestable din Of that crack'd violin, 
 And the odours of " Stout," and tobacco, and gin. 
 " Dear me ! " I exclaimed, " what a place to be in ! " 
 
 Since the dawning of the 'sixties, a better taste has 
 prevailed, and promiscuous jollification has been 
 checked alike by the levying of an entrance fee 
 and by an improvement in manners ; but the pro- 
 viding of teas within the ruins is objectionable, and 
 the Duality of the " Souchong " and its accompanying
 
 SOME INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 263 
 
 sawdusty cake might easily be better it could not 
 possibly be worse. 
 
 It is best to visit Netley when the crowd may 
 reasonably be expected to have left. At such a 
 time, shortly before sunset, the spot is most im- 
 pressive. The jackdaws, who seem to have the 
 right of domicile in all ruinated buildings, have gone, 
 clamorous, to bed in the chinks of wall and airy 
 gable, and one shares the smooth lawns only with 
 the robins, whose pretty confidence in the harmless- 
 ness of human beings is the most touching thing 
 in so-called " wild " nature. The first stanza of 
 Barham's poem is excellently descriptive of the time 
 and place, save that " roofless tower " is a poetic 
 figure unwarranted by facts Netley Abbey has no 
 towers : 
 
 I saw thee, Netley, as the sun 
 
 Across the western wave 
 Was sinking slow, And a golden glow 
 
 To thy roofless tower he gave; 
 And the ivy sheen, With its mantle of green 
 
 That wrapt thy walls around, 
 Shone lovelily bright, In that glorious light, 
 
 And I felt 'twas holy ground. 
 
 He then goes on to enlarge upon the legend of a 
 refractory nun having been walled up alive in the 
 abbey, and to meditate upon the justice of Heaven 
 fallen upon Netley in the time of Henry VIII. : 
 
 Ruthless Tudor's bloated form 
 
 Rides on the blast and guides the storm.* 
 
 The context gives the date of the ruin of the fabric 
 as at that period ; but we have already seen that 
 
 * Cf. " Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm."
 
 264 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 this took place quite a hundred and sixty years later. 
 The curious, too, might ask what the nun was 
 doing in a Cistercian monastery. It is not a little 
 singular to note that Barham has made no use, and 
 indeed no mention, of the picturesque legend of 
 Taylor's death. 
 
 THE DEAD DRUMMER 
 
 A LEGEND OF SALISBURY PLAIN 
 
 OH, Salisbury Plain is bleak and bare, 
 At least so I've heard many people declare, 
 For I fairly confess I never was there : 
 Not a shrub, nor a tree, Nor a bush can you see, 
 No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles, 
 Much less a house or a cottage for miles ; 
 It's a very sad thing to be caught in the rain 
 When night's coming on upon Salisbury Plain. 
 
 Salisbury Plain is, as Ingoldsby rightly assures 
 us, bleak and barren. It is remarkable to note that, 
 although as he truly says in the legend itself he 
 was never there, he catches exactly the spirit of 
 that dreary Wiltshire table-land, and describes it 
 with such insight, picturesqueness, and economy of 
 words and space as never at any other time have 
 been used to give a proper mental picture of that 
 vast solitude. It is far removed from the Ingoldsby 
 Country proper, and might easily have been more 
 loosely described in those opening lines ; but they 
 are perfect, alike topographically and for the pro- 
 duction of that mental picture required to start the 
 tale of horror. 
 
 The exact spot on the plain described in the 
 legend where the two sailors, overtaken by the 
 storm, vainly seek shelter, apd where the vision of
 
 SOME INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 265 
 
 the dead drummer appears, can, thanks to the pre- 
 cision of the verse, be readily found. It is in the 
 central and wildest spot of the wilderness, two miles 
 almost due east of the small village of Tilshead. 
 Let us here refer to the legend : 
 
 But the deuce of a screen, Could be anywhere seen 
 Or an object except that, on one of the rises, 
 An old way-post show'd Where the Lavington road 
 Branch'd off to the left from the one to Devizes. 
 
 Black Down the surrounding expanse is named. 
 Bare and bleak, the close grass a wan sage-green, 
 the white road divides across the treeless undula- 
 tions, with a sign-post directing right and left to 
 Devizes and Lavington, exactly as described. But 
 alterations are now in the making, and when com- 
 pleted will thoroughly alter and abolish the solitude 
 of the place. " They have spoiled my battlefield," 
 exclaimed the Duke of Wellington when he revisited 
 Waterloo and found it stuck full of monuments ; 
 and the " East Camp " on the right of this spot, 
 and the " West Camp " on the left, with all the 
 permanent buildings and the great masses of troops 
 now established on the plain, are changing it beyond 
 recognition. Where the bustard lingered longest and 
 the infrequent traveller came timorously, the bugles 
 blow and crowded battalions manoeuvre every day. 
 
 But the true story of the dead drummer is very 
 different from Ingoldsby's version. He has taken 
 many liberties, both as regards scene and names, 
 with the real facts of a remarkable case for the 
 legend is founded upon facts. 
 
 It seems that on Thursday, June I5th, 1786, 
 two sailors paid off from H.M.S, Sampson a.t
 
 266 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Plymouth came tramping up to London along the 
 old Exeter Road. Their names were Gervase (or 
 Jarvis) Matcham and John Shepherd. They came 
 nowhere near Salisbury Plain, but pursued their 
 course direct along the old coach road from Bland- 
 ford towards Salisbury. Near the "Woodyates Inn" 
 
 SALISBURY PLAIN : WHERE THE LAV1NGTON KOAIJ BRANCHES OFF TO 
 THE LEFT FROM THE ONE TO DEVIZES. 
 
 they were overtaken by a thunderstorm, when 
 Matcham startled his messmate by showing extra- 
 ordinary signs of horror and distracted faculties, 
 running to and fro, falling on his knees, and 
 imploring mercy of some invisible enemy. To his 
 companion's questions he p.nswered that he saw 
 several strange and dismal spectres, particularly one 
 in the shape of a woman, towards which he advanced,
 
 SOME INGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 267 
 
 when it instantly sank into the earth and a large 
 stone rose up in its place. Other large stones 
 also rolled upon the ground before him, and came 
 dashing against his feet. There can be no doubt 
 that both Matcham and Shepherd were unnerved 
 by the violence of the thunder and lightning, and 
 that the terror of Matcham, who had very special 
 reasons for fright, communicated itself to his friend 
 to such a degree that when Matcham's diseased 
 imagination saw moving shapes which had no 
 existence, Shepherd readily saw them also. Thus, 
 when the terrified Matcham fancied he saw numbers 
 of stones with glaring eyes turn over and keep 
 pace with them along the road, Shepherd very 
 soon became afflicted with what specialists in mental 
 phenomena term " collective hallucination." 
 
 They then agreed to walk on either side of the 
 road, and so perceive, by the behaviour of the 
 stones, which of them it was who had so affronted 
 God. The stones then exclusively accompanied 
 Matcham all the way to the inn, where he beheld 
 the Saviour and the drummer-boy, very terrible 
 and accusing. To the roll of a drum, and in 
 a terrific flash of lightning, they dissolved into 
 dust. 
 
 Thereupon, overcome by these terrors, Matcham 
 made confession there and then to Shepherd of a 
 murder he had committed six years earlier, on the 
 Great North Road, and begged his companion to 
 hand him over to the nearest magistrate, in order 
 that the avenging spectres and justice might be 
 satisfied. He was accordingly committed at Salisbury 
 pending inquiries as to the truth of his confession. 
 
 Those inquiries disclosed a. remarkable story.
 
 268 THE 1NGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 Matcham, it appeared, was the son of a farmer of 
 Frodingham, Yorkshire. When in his twelfth year 
 he had run away from home and became a jockey. 
 In the course of this employment he was despatched 
 to Russia, in charge of some horses sent by the 
 Duke of Northumberland to the Empress, and, 
 returning to London well supplied with money, 
 dissipated it all in evil courses. He then shipped 
 as a sailor on board the Medway man-o'-war, but 
 after a short experience of fighting managed to 
 desert. He had no sooner landed in England after 
 this escapade than he was seized by one of the 
 pressgangs then scouring the seaports, and shipped 
 aboard the Ariadne. Succeeding, when off Yarmouth, 
 in an attempt to escape, he enlisted in the I3th 
 Regiment of Foot, but, deserting again near 
 Chatham, set out to tramp home, through London, 
 to Yorkshire, passing Huntingdon on the way. 
 The 49th Regiment was then recruiting in that 
 district, and this extraordinary Matcham promptly 
 enlisted in it. 
 
 Shortly after having joined, he was sent on the 
 morning of August I9th, 1780, from Huntingdon 
 to Diddington, five miles dis:ant, to draw some sub- 
 sistence-money, between six and seven pounds, from 
 a Major Reynolds. With him went a drummer- 
 boy, Benjamin Jones, aged about sixteen, son of the 
 recruiting sergeant. Having drawn the money, 
 they returned along the high-road. Instead of 
 turning off to Huntingdon, Matcham induced the 
 boy to go on with him in the direction of Alconbury, 
 and picking a quarrel with him because he refused 
 to stop and drink at a wayside public-house, knocked 
 him down at a lonely spot still known as "Matcham's
 
 SOME 1NGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 269 
 
 Bridge " and cut his throat there. He then made 
 off with the money to London, leaving the body by 
 the roadside. Shipping again in the Navy, he saw 
 six years of hard fighting under Rodney and Hood, 
 being finally paid off, as at first described. 
 
 In the contemporary account of this remarkable 
 affair, taken down from Matcham's own statements 
 .by the chaplain of the gaol at Huntingdon, whither 
 he was conveyed for trial from Salisbury, he stated 
 that he was drunk at the time when the crime was 
 committed, and did it, being suddenly instigated 
 by the Devil, without any premeditated design. 
 Further, that he had never afterwards had a single 
 day's peace of mind. He was duly found guilty, 
 and executed on August 2nd, 1786, his body being 
 afterwards gibbeted on Alconbury Hill. 
 
 DENTON 
 
 We have now traced many an Ingoldsby land- 
 mark ; but where, it may be asked, is " Ingoldsby 
 Abbey," founded by Sir Ingoldsby Bray, as narrated 
 in " The Ingoldsby Penance " ? 
 
 " Ingoldsby Abbey " has not disappeared under 
 the hands of vandals, or by lapse of time. It could 
 not well do so, because, as a sheer, bald matter of 
 fact, there was never such a place. But the ancient 
 chapel that suggested to Barham the idea of such 
 an abbey is still in existence, and, from a roofless 
 ruin, has recently been restored and brought into 
 use again. 
 
 Close by the broad reaches of the lower Thames, 
 far below Greenwich, and adjoining the village of 
 Milton-next-Gravesend, is the old parish of Denton,
 
 2 70 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 whose chapel is the real original of Ingoldsby Abbey. 
 Denton is a separate ecclesiastical parish no longer. 
 Its independence was snuffed out in 1879, and it has 
 ever been so insignificant a place that ordinary maps 
 refuse to mark its very existence ; a gross omission, 
 indeed, when we consider that Denton is not only 
 old enough to find a mention in Domesday Book, 
 where it is entered as "Danitone," but is actually 
 referred to, considerably over a century earlier, in 
 A.D. 950, when, as " Denetune," it appears in the 
 will of an Anglo-Saxon, one Byrhtric, who, with his 
 wife, gave the manor to the Priory of St. Andrew at 
 Rochester. 
 
 We may pause awhile at this point to consider the 
 singularity of two Dentons (the one by Gravesend, 
 and the other by Tappington) being associated with 
 Ingoldsby ; and the association of the two names 
 may perhaps serve to clinch the argument that the 
 name of Denton by Gravesend need not necessarily 
 derive from any Danish settlement here. The 
 neighbourhood was certainly one of the Thames- 
 side districts frequently ravaged by the Danes in the 
 ninth century and later ; but although the place- 
 name has generally been held to derive from that 
 fact, it probably comes from the situation, and 
 means as the name of the other Denton certainly 
 does merely the settlement in the "dene," i.e. in 
 the vale. 
 
 The manor of Denton continued to be held by the 
 Bishops of Rochester until quite recent times ; when 
 it was left to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to do 
 more than even Henry the Eighth did. They sold 
 it into private hands, and thus broke an ownership 
 of nearly nine hundred years.
 
 SOME 1NGOLDSBY LANDMARKS 271 
 
 On their manor the Priors of Rochester early 
 built a chapel dedicated to St. Mary, which on the 
 dissolution of the monastery fell into ruin, and so 
 remained, a roofless, ivy-covered wreck standing in 
 the grounds of Denton Court, until 1901, when it 
 was restored by Mr. George M. Arnold, of Milton 
 Hall, brother of Sir Edwin Arnold. 
 
 It was the ruined gable of this ancient chapel that 
 attracted the attention of travellers along the Dover 
 Road early in the nineteenth century, before the 
 trees that now thoroughly screen it from the highway 
 had grown up. It then appeared the more noticeable 
 from a new stretch of road having been actually cut 
 through its little churchyard in 1787, to ease the 
 pull-up for the coaches, when travellers for the first 
 time saw the ruin standing up, silhouetted against 
 the sky, in a most impressive way, and looking, in 
 that situation, of much more importance than in- 
 trinsically it was. 
 
 Less than twenty years after the making of this 
 new stretch of road, Barham began to travel it, 
 between London and Canterbury, and, the enclosing 
 trees not having by that time grown large enough to 
 obscure the ruin, it would naturally attract his atten- 
 tion. He, therefore, when writing the Ingoldsby 
 Legends, selected it for the site of his " Ingoldsby 
 Abbey," a religious house whose geographical position 
 is clearly set forth in " The Ingoldsby Penance," but 
 whose existence in actual (though slender) fact, and 
 then not as a full-fledged Abbey, but only as a 
 humble chapel ruin, has escaped commentators, even 
 of Barham's own family, who opine that " the remains 
 of Ingoldsby Abbey will be found if found at all 
 among the Chateaux en Espagne" Yet Barham
 
 272 THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY 
 
 himself, in a note to that Legend, remarks that the 
 ruins are " still to be seen by the side of the high 
 Dover road, about a mile and a half below the town 
 of Gravesend." But he describes the spot much 
 more eloquently in the Legend itself: 
 
 " Ingoldsby Abbey is fair to see, 
 It hath manors a dozen, and royalties three, 
 With right of free-warren (whatever that be) ; 
 Rich pastures in front, and green woods in the rear, 
 All in full leaf at the right time of year ; 
 About Christmas, or so, they fall into the sere, 
 And the prospect, of course, becomes rather more drear : 
 But it's really delightful in spring-time and near 
 The great gate Father Thames rolls sun-bright and clear. 
 Cobham woods to the right on the opposite shore, 
 Laindon Hills in the distance, ten miles off or more ; 
 Then you've Milton and Gravesend behind and before 
 You can see almost all the way down to the Nore." 
 
 And so you could to-day, but for the trees that will 
 not permit it.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ACOL, 214, 215 
 Acryse, 186-188 
 
 Aldington, 146, 147, 149, 150, 
 152, 159, 1 60 
 
 Forehead, 147 
 
 Frith, 147 
 
 Knoll, 105, 160-162 
 
 Amen Corner, 22 
 Appledore, 85, 89, 99, 164 
 Ashford, 6, 16, 18, 108, 145 
 Augustine, St., 214 
 
 BABES in the Wood, the, 6 
 
 Barham, 10, 66 
 
 Court, 68 
 
 Downs, 10, 63, 66 
 
 families of, 10-12, 18 
 
 Frances, Lady Bond, 22, 25 
 
 John, II, 12 
 
 Richard, 12, 14 
 
 Richard Harris (father of 
 
 "Tom Ingoldsby"), 12-14 
 
 Rev. Richard Harris, author 
 
 of the Ingoldsby Legends^ 5 ; 
 born at Canterbury, 9, 12, 14; 
 claims descent from the Fitz- 
 Urses, 9, 42 ; first curacy at 
 Ashford, 16; second curacy at 
 Westwell, 1 6 ; Rector of Snar- 
 gate and Curate of Warehorne, 
 17 ; Minor Canon of St. Paul's 
 and Rector of St. Mary Mag- 
 dalene, 17 ; Rector of St. Faith, 
 17; assumes pseudonym of 
 
 "Ingoldsby," 18; residence in 
 London, 21; illness, 23-26; 
 death, 27 ; a Governor of the 
 Harris Charity, 30; at Ware- 
 horne, 77 ; first literary work, 
 77 ; removes to London, 78 
 
 Rev. Richard Harris Dalton, 
 
 16, 25, 76 
 
 Barhamstead, or Farmstead, 1 1 
 Barton, Elizabeth, the "Holy 
 Maid of Kent," 147, 150-158, 
 
 '59 
 
 Becket, Thomas, Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, 9, 29, 34, 41; 
 career and murder of, 42-62, 
 168-170, 203 
 
 Belerica, Court-at-Street, 147 
 
 Bilsington, 85, 105, 162 
 
 Blackmanstone, 98, 107 
 
 Bonnington, 85, 88 
 
 Bourne Park, 64 
 
 Brenzett, 101, 102 
 
 Bridge, 63 
 
 Britton, John, 19-21, 194 
 
 Brookland, 101-103 
 
 Broome Park, 68 
 
 Brothers of Birchington, the, 236 
 
 Burgate Street, No. 61, Canter- 
 bury, birthplace of "Tom In- 
 goldsby," 12, 14 
 
 CANTERBURY, 5, 28-40; birth- 
 place of " Tom Ingoldsby," 
 12, 14; Wincheap, where the 
 
 273
 
 274 
 
 INDEX 
 
 martyrs suffered, 30; the 
 Castle, 31-33 ; Dane John, 33 ; 
 Christ Church Gate, 35 ; But- 
 ter Market, 35; Marlowe 
 Memorial, 35 ; Burgate Street, 
 36; the "Dark Entry," 37- 
 40 
 
 Cathedral, 29, 41-62 
 
 Chapel of Our Lady, Court-at- 
 Street, 148-150, 155 
 
 Cheriton, 136, 165, 168 
 
 Chislett, 219, 222, 227 
 
 Cinque Ports, the, 114, 124, 131, 
 202, 230 
 
 Cobb's Hall, 150, 153, 159 
 
 Court-at-Street, 147, 148-150 
 
 Dead Drummer, the, 6, 264-269 
 
 Deal, 197 
 
 Denton, near Barham, 6, 70-72, 
 
 191 
 
 Denton, near Gravesend, 269-272 
 " Devil's Stone," the, 233 
 Dover, 114, 124, 138, 171, 192- 
 
 197, 203, 230 
 Dunge Marsh, 113 
 Dungeness, 86, 88, 101, 120, 144 
 Dymchurch, 119, 120-123 
 Wall, 86, 89, 120-123 
 
 " EAGLE GATES," the, Broome 
 
 Park, 68 
 
 Eastbridge Chapel, 98 
 Eastchurch, 252 
 East Langdon, 198 
 Ebbsfleet, 214 
 Elham, 184-186 
 
 Valley, 181, 184 
 
 Elmley, 255 
 Erasmus, 147 
 
 FAIR ROSAMOND, 176 
 
 FitzUrses, the, 9-12 
 
 FitzUrse, Reginald, 9, 42, 48, 
 
 49, 51, 52, 168, 171 
 Folkestone, 124, 131-142, 147, 
 
 148, 165-167, 192 
 Fordwich, 218, 228-232 
 
 Fox, Elizabeth, mother of "Tom 
 Ingoldsby," 14, 15 
 
 GREAT MONGEHAM, 201 
 
 Great Queen Street, No. 51, 
 
 Holborn, 22 
 Great Stonar, 208 
 Grey Dolphin, 242-246 
 
 HAM STREET, 163 
 
 Harbledown, 29, 60 
 
 Harris Almshouses, Canterbury, 
 
 29 
 
 Harris, Thomas, 10, 30 
 Hope Chapel, Hope All Saints, 
 
 98, 112 
 Hurst, 85, 88 
 Hythe, 6, 15, 85, 86, 87, 108, 114, 
 
 119, 124-126, 143, 145, 147, 
 
 148, 149, 1 66, 1 68, 169, 173 
 
 " INGOLDSBY COUNTRY " de- 
 limited, 5 
 
 Ingoldsby family wholly ficti- 
 tious, 74 
 
 Ivychurch, 98, 103 
 
 Ivvade, 235 
 
 KING'S FERRY, 236, 255 
 
 Lapidem Tituli, Great Stonar, 
 
 209 
 
 Lapis Populi, Folkestone, 209 
 Leech of Folkestone, the, 131, 
 
 147, 148, 160, 163, 186, 197, 
 
 198 
 
 Limen, River, 87, 89, 91, 146, 183 
 Little Stonar, 208 
 Littlestone, 108, 118, 209 
 " Lone Tree," the, 197 
 "Lundenwic," Stonar, 208, 211 
 Lyminge, 181-184 
 Lympne, 15, 85, 105, 143-146, 
 
 176, 183 
 
 MARGATE, 214, 215, 218, 220 
 
 Marsh, Col. Thomas, 10 
 
 Thomas, of Marston, 74,
 
 INDEX 
 
 275 
 
 107, 133, 160, 186, 197, 198- 
 
 200 
 
 " Marston Hall," 197, 198, 200 
 Martello Towers, the, 83, 119- 
 
 121, 127, 139, 144, 150 
 
 Martin, 198, 200 
 Matcham, Gervase, 266-269 
 Minster-in-Sheppey, 237, 240- 
 
 252 
 
 Minster-in-Thanet, 214, 240 
 Monkton, 217, 218 
 Mud Row, 252, 254 
 Mydley Chapel, 113 
 
 NETLEY ABBEY, 6, 257-264 
 Newchurch, 105 
 Newington, 233 
 
 New Romney, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 
 99, 101, no, 112-118, 124 
 
 " OLD England's Hole," 64-66 
 
 Romney, 87, 110-112, 209 
 
 Orgarswick, 98 
 Orlestone Hill, 163 
 
 FARMSTEAD, or Barhamstead, 1 1 
 
 Pegwell Bay, 208, 21 1 
 
 Portus Lemanis, Lympne, 88, 89, 
 
 144 
 Postling, 179 
 
 QUEENBOROUGH, 235, 237-239, 
 248 
 
 RAMSGATE, 208, 211, 212, 215, 
 
 216, 220 
 
 Reculver, 88, 214, 222-227 
 Regulbium, Reculver, 88, 214, 
 
 222-227 
 
 Rhee Wall, the, 89, 99, no 
 Richborough, 88, 208, 210-212 
 Ringwould, 201 
 Rokeby, Baron, 179 
 Romney Marsh, 6, 77-113, 143, 
 
 144, 149 
 
 Kother, River, 86, 89, 91,99, IIO 
 Royal Military Canal, the, 81-86, 
 
 125, 126, 144 
 
 Ruckinge, 85, 88, 163 
 Rutupium, Richborough, 88, 208, 
 210-212 
 
 ST. MARY MAGDALENE, London, 
 where " Ingoklsby " was bur- 
 ied, 14, 17, 22, 27 ; destroyed 
 by fire, 1886, 27 
 
 Canterbury, 14, 30 
 
 St. Mary the Virgin, Romney 
 
 Marsh, 107 
 
 St. Nicholas-at-Wade, 221 
 St. Paul's Churchyard, No. 4, 22 
 Salisbury Plain, 6, 264-266 
 Saltwood Castle, 48, 58, 168-174 
 Sandgate, 128-131, 148, 165 
 Sandwich, 114, 118, 124, 197, 
 202-208, 211, 212, 216, 218, 
 230, 238 
 Sarre, 219-222 
 Scrapsgate, 250 
 
 Seabrook, 126, 128, 129, 166, 168 
 Sheerness, 235, 239, 250 
 Shellness, 236, 239, 255 
 Sheppey, Isle of, 6, 233-256 
 Shorncliffe Camp, 165 
 Shurland Castle, 246, 248, 252 
 
 Sir Robert de, 242-247 
 
 Smuggler's Leap, 215-218 
 Smuggling, 80, 82, 94-97, 114, 
 
 117, 133, 145, 180, 215-219 
 Snargate, 77, 78, 80, 86, 98, 99 
 Stonar, 208-211 
 Stone Street, the, 15, 88, 171, 
 
 175, 177. 181, 182 
 Studfall Castle, 88, 144 
 Stour, River, 208, 210, 219, 227, 
 
 228, 232 
 
 Sturry, 218, 227, 232 
 Swale, the, 6, 235, 255, 256 
 Swingfield Minnis, 21, 189-191 
 
 TAPPINGTON Hall and Manor, 
 (sometimes styled "Tapping- 
 ton Everard" or "Tapton 
 Wood"), 9, 1 8, 21, 63, 68, 
 69-76, 191 
 
 Gerrard de, 10
 
 276 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Thanet, Isle of, 202, 210, 214, 
 215, 219 
 
 UPPER Deal, 201 
 Upper Hardres, 15 
 Up Street, 219, 227 
 
 WANTSUME, the, 210, 219 
 
 Warden, 224, 236, 250, 252, 
 254 
 
 Point, 236 
 
 Warehorne, 77-81, 85, 87, 98, 100 
 Wayland Wood, 6 
 Westbere, 218, 227 
 Westenhanger, 168, 174-177 
 Wincheap, Canterbury, 30 
 
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