“ROGUES AND PROCTORS”
On the last day of her visit, the queen was entertained by “that charitable man but withal most determined enemy to Rogues and Proctors,” Master Richard Watts, whose almshouse for the lodgment of six poor travellers bears still upon its front the evidence of his aversions. Controversy has long raged around the term “proctor,” and the victory seems to rest with those who declare that the class thus excluded from the benefits of Master Watts’ charity was that of the “procurators” who were licensed by the Pope to go through the country collecting “Peter’s pence”; but I have my own idea on that point, and I believe that the “proctors” referred to were not papists, but either “proctors that go up and downe with counterfeit licences, cosiners, and suche as go about the countrey using unlawfull games”; or the “proctors” especially and particularly mentioned in the Statute Edw. VI. c. 3, s. 19, licensed to collect alms for the lepers who at thattime were still numerous in England. These privileged beggars were deprived of their immunity from arrest by the “Act for Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdie Beggars” (39 Eliz. c. 4), wherein “all persons that be, or utter themselves to beProctors, procurers, patent gatherers, or collectors for gaols, prisons, or hospitals”[5]are, together with “all Fencers, Bearewards, common players of Interludes, and Minstrels” to be adjudged Rogues and Vagabonds. Now it is sufficiently remarkable that this Act was passed (perhaps with the strenuous help of Master Watts, who was a Member of Parliament, and who we see hated proctors so ardently) at about the time when the “Six Poor Travellers” was built, and the reasons for refusing admission either to a true Proctor of a lazar-house, or to a pretended one, must be sufficiently obvious.
Master Watts entertained the Queen at his house on Boley (? Beaulieu) Hill on the last day of her visit, and when that courtly man apologised for the “poor cottage” (he didn’t mean it, but ’twas the custom so to do) Her Majesty is supposed to have graciously answered “Satis,” and so Satis House it remained, and the hideous building that now stands upon its site still bears, grotesquely enough, its name.
Quite a train of miscellaneous Royalties and celebrities came here after Elizabeth’s second visit in 1582; the Duke of Sully; James the First, who angered the seafaring population because he didn’t care for the ships, loved hunting, and was afraid of the cannon—James the First again, with Christian the Fourth of Denmark and Prince Henry; Prince Henry by himself in 1611; Frederick, Elector Palatine of Bohemia; Charles the First on two occasions, on the second of which “the trane-bands ... scarmished in warlike manner to His Majesties great content”; the French Ambassador, in 1641, who thoughtRochester was chiefly observable on account of its Bridge “furnished with high railings, that drunkards, not uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine”; and nineteen years later, Charles the Second, on his “glorious and never-to-be-forgotten Restoracion.”
How Charles was fêted here, and how he stayed at the beautiful old place that has taken the name of “Restoration House” from this visit, these pages cannot tell; the story is too long.
PEPYS
And here, in the name of all that’s lewd and scandal-mongering, comes old Pepys again. It is no use trying to keep him out of one’s pages: suppress him at one place, and he recurs unfailingly at another, with a worse record than before. I discreetly “sat on” him at Deptford, but here he is at Rochester, “goin’ on hawful,” to quote one of Dickens’ characters (I forget which, and the society of so many Kings and Queens on the Dover Road is so fatiguing that I have neither sufficient time nor energy to inquire).
Well then, it was in 1667[6]that Mr. Samuel Pepys came here, and, putting up at the “White Hart,” strolled into the Cathedral, more intent upon the architecture than the doctrine, it would seem; for when service began he walked out into the fields, and there “saw Sir F. Clark’s pretty seat.” And so “into the Cherry Garden, and here he met with a young, plain, silly shopkeeper and his wife, a pretty young woman, and I did kiss her!” And after this they dined, and walked in the fields together till dark, “and so to bed,” without the usual “God forgive me!” which, considering how he had shirked the Cathedral service, and how questionable had been his conduct in the Cherry Garden, was more needful than ever, one would think.
HIGH STREET, ROCHESTER: EASTGATE HOUSE.
Twenty-one years after this date came James the Second on two hurried visits to Rochester within a few days of one another. If he had had time, and had been in a sufficiently calm frame of mind, he might have reflected on the vicissitudes of Kings in general, and of his own Royal House in particular; but being shockingly upset, and in a mortal terror lest he should lose his head as thoroughly in a physical sense as he had already done in a figurative way of speaking, he lost that opportunity of coolly reviewing his position which, had it but been seized, would have led him to return to London and stay there. It is not a little sad to reflect that, had the gloomy and morose James not been a coward, the House of Stuart might still have ruled England. At any rate, men did not love the taciturn Prince of Orange and his Dutchmen so well but what they would have gladly done without him and have taken back their King, if that King had only shown a little more spirit and a little less of religious bigotry. William could not but perceive that his principles and not his person were acclaimed, and when he gave the King leave to retire to Rochester, he both knew that James desired an opportunity to escape from the kingdom, and hoped he would use it. And he did use the chance so gladly given him, secretly departing from Rochester in the small hours of a December morning, and making for Ambleteuse on the French coast in a fishing-smack.
JACK IN HIS GLORY.From a painting by Julius Cæsar Ibbetson.
This was the last romantic event that befell at Rochester, and it fitly closed a stirring history.
But Chatham and Rochester, although outward romance had departed, did not cease to be interested in naval and military affairs. Indeed, they have grown continually greater on them.
HOGARTH’S SATIRES
It was in 1756 that the plates ofEnglandandFrancewere published by Hogarth. We were suffering then from one of those panic fears of invasion by the French to which this country has been periodically subject, and these efforts were consequently calculated to have a large sale. Hogarth, of course, after his arrest for sketching at Calais, was morbidly, vitriolically patriotic, and his work is earnest of his feelings. The English are seen drilling in the background of the first plate, while in front of the “Duke of Cumberland” inn a recruit is being measured, and smiles at the caricature of the King of France which a grenadier is painting on the wall. A long inscription proceeds from the mouth of His Most Christian Majesty, “You take a my fine ships, you be de Pirate, you be de Teef, me send you my grand Armies, and hang you all, Morbleu,” and he grasps a gibbet to emphasize the words. Meanwhile, a fifer plays “God Save the King”; a soldier in the group has placed his sword across a greatcheese; and a sailor has guarded his tankard of beer with a pistol.
But see how different are things across the Channel. Outside theSabot Royala party of French grenadiers, lean and hungry-looking after their poor fare ofsoupe maigre, are watching one of their number cook the sprats he has spitted on his sword. A monk with a grin of satisfaction feels the edge of an axe which he has taken from a cart full of racks and other engines of torture destined towards the furnishing of a monastery at Blackfriars in London, of which a plan is seen lying upon this heap of ironmongery; and a file of soldiers may be seen in the distance, reluctantly embarking for England, and spurred forward by the point of the sergeant’s halberd. Garrick wrote the patriotic verses that went with this picture, and you may see from them how constantly Englishmen have thought the French to be a nation of lean and hungry starvelings. That is, of course, as absurd as the unfailing practice of French caricaturists to whom the typical Englishman is a creature who has red hair and protruding teeth, and says “Goddam”—
With lanthorn jaws and croaking gut,See how the half-starv’d Frenchmen strut,And call us English dogs;But soon we’ll teach these bragging foes,That beef and beer give heavier blowsThan soup and roasted frogs.The priests, inflam’d with righteous hopes,Prepare their axes, wheels, and ropes,To bend the stiff-neck’d sinner:But, should they sink in coming over,Old Nick may fish ’twixt France and Dover,And catch a glorious dinner.
THE INVASION OF ENGLAND: ENGLAND.After Hogarth.
CHATHAM
Few people, as Dickens says, can tell where Rochester ends and Chatham begins, but even now you become conscious of a gradual alteration in the character of the street as you leave Rochester High Street and come imperceptibly into Chatham; and even though the place has grown so large, and holds so very varied a population that the military and naval sections nolonger bulk so largely as they used, they still make a brave show. An inhabitant of Chatham need never wish to visit London, because the triple towns of Chatham, Strood and Rochester—to leave out all count of Gillingham and New Brompton, which are to Chatham even as Hammersmith is to our own great metropolis—contain samples of nearly all that is to be seen in the Capital of the Empire, and much else besides. There is a Dockyard at Chatham two miles in length, from which there issues every day at the dinner-hour an army of artificers of every kind and degree—many thousands of them; and in this Dockyard are ironclads, making, repairing, and refitting together with vast military and naval stores, and all kinds of relics, foremost among which there is a shed, full of old and historic figure-heads; all that is left of the wooden walls that were such efficient bulwarks of England’s power.Agamemnons,Arethusas,Bellerophonsare here, and many more. And all around are forts and “lines,” barracks and military hospitals; and drilling, manœuvring, marchings and counter-marchings, and all kinds of military exercises are continually going forward. The names of streets, courts, and alleys, would furnish a very Walhalla of naval heroes, and from all quarters come the sounds of riveting, the blasts of bugles, and the shouting of the captains; and when midday comes the noontide gun resounds from the heights of Fort Pitt, and all the ragged urchins who live on the pavements fall down as if they were shot, much to the terror of old ladies, strangers in these parts, who pass by.
There is still a fine old-time nautical flavour hanging about Chatham. It does not lie on the surface, but requires much patient searching amid mean and disreputable streets, and it is only after passing through slums that would affright a resident of Drury Lane that one finds curiously respectable little terraces, giving upon the waterside, with masts and yards, rigging, derricks, and other strange seafaringtackle peeping over the roof-tops; amphibious corners where a smell of the sea, largely intermixed with odours of pitch, tar, and rope, clings about everything; where men with a nautical lurch come swinging along the pavements, and where, if you glance in at the doorways which are nearly always open in summer, you will see full-rigged models of ships standing on sideboards, supported perhaps by a huge Family Bible, and flanked, most certainly, with strange outlandish shells, branches of coral, and other spoils of far-off lands.
But these things are not patent to he who goes only along the main road, turning to neither right nor left; and it is only a little exploration of byways that will convince you of Mr. Pickwick’s summary remaining still substantially correct. “The principal productions” of the three towns of Rochester, Strood, and Chatham, according to Mr. Pickwick, “appear to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers, and dockyard-men. The commodities chiefly exposed for sale in the public streets are marine-stores, hardbake, apples, flat-fish, and oysters.” All of which might well have been written to-day, so closely does the description still apply; but when he goes on to remark that “the streets present a lively and animated appearance, occasioned chiefly by the conviviality of the military,” he clearly speaks of by-past times. “It is truly delightful,” he says, “to a philanthropic mind to see these gallant men staggering along under the influence of an overflow, both of animal and ardent spirits.” Delightful indeed! But since those days Tommy Atkins has been evolutionized into a very different creature.
OUR LADY OF CHATHAM
To plunge into mediæval legends at Chatham will seem the strangest of transitions, and Chatham Parish Church will appear to most people the last place likely to have a story. Yet in demolishing the old building to make way for a new, the workmen found some fragments of sculpture which had a history. Amongst these was a headless group of the Virgin and Child.
THE INVASION OF ENGLAND: FRANCE.After Hogarth.
This was, in all probability, the effigy of Our Lady of Chatham, who, in pre-Reformation times, was famous for her miracles; and of whom Lambarde gives the following amusing story in hisPerambulations: “It seems,” says he, “that the corps of a man (lost through shipwracke belike) was cast on land in the parishe of Chatham, and being there taken up, was by some charitable persones committed to honest burial within their church-yard; which thing was no sooner done, but Our Lady of Chatham, finding herselfe offended therewith, arose by night and went in person to the house of the parishe clearke, whiche then was in the streete, a good distance from the church, and making a noyse at his window, awaked him. The man, at the first, as commonly it fareth with men disturbed in their rest, demanded, somewhat roughly, ‘who was there?’ But when he understoode, by her owne answer, that it was the Lady of Chatham, he changed his note, and moste mildeley asked ye cause of her comming; she tolde him, that there was lately buryed (neere to the place where she was honoured) a sinful person, which so offended her eye with his gastly grinning, that, unless he were removed, she could not but (to the great griefe of good people) withdrawe herselfe from that place, and cease her wonted miraculous working amongst them: and therefore, she willed him to go with her, to the ende that, by his helpe, she might take him up, and caste him again into the river. The clearke obeyed, arose, and waited on her towarde the churche; but the goode ladie (not wonted to walk) waxed wearie of the labour, and therefore was enforced, for very want of breath, to sit downe in a bushe by the way, and there to rest her: and this place (forsooth) as also the whole track of their journey, remaining ever after a greene pathe, the towne dwellers were wont to shew. Now,after a while, they go forward againe, and coming to the churcheyarde, digged up the body, and conveyed it to the waterside, where it was first found. This done, Our Lady shrancke againe into her shryne; and the clearke peaked home, to patche up his broken sleepe; but the corps now eftsoones floted up and down the river, as it did before; which thing being espyed by them of Gillingham, it was once more taken up, and buryed in their churcheyarde. But see what followed upon it: not only the roode of Gillingham (say they), that a while before was busie in bestowing myracles, was now deprived of all that his former virtue; but also ye very earth and place where this carckase was laid, did continually, for ever after, settle and sinke downewarde.”
Barham has made good use of this story, you who have read the legend ofGrey Dolphinin theIngoldsby Legendswill remember. He narrates, with a joyous irreverence, how, in consequence of the miraculous interposition of the Lady of Chatham (Saint Bridget, forsooth! “who, after leading but a so-so-life, had died in the odour of sanctity”) masses were sung, tapers kindled, bells tolled, and how everything thenceforward was wonderment and devotion; the monks of Saint Romwold in solemn procession, the abbot at their head, the sacristan at their tail, and the holy breeches of Saint Thomas à Becket in the centre. “Father Fothergill brewed a XXX puncheon of holy water,” continues Tom Ingoldsby, clerk in holy orders and minor canon of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, indulging at once his exuberant humour and his contempt of the Church of Rome, with its relics, miracles, bone-chests, and sanctifiedaqua pura. Meanwhile, the grinning sailor, “grinning more than ever,” had drifted down the river, off Gillingham, and lay on the shore in all the majesty of mud, presently to be discovered by the minions of Sir Robert de Shurland, who bade them “turn out his pockets.” But it was ill gleaning after the double scrutiny of Father Fothergill and the parishclerk; and, as Ingoldsby observes, “there was not a single maravedi.”
PAID OFF AT CHATHAM.After a Painting by R. Deighton, R.A.
“JEZREEL”
From Saint Bridget to a weird, but yet not altogether unworldly, fanatic of recent years the transition would not be easy, were it not for the fact that the said fanatic’s hideous temple still crowns Chatham Hill for all men to see, as a monument of the unfathomed and unfathomable credulity of mankind. The stranger who walks or cycles his way to Dover is told that this barrack-like building is “Jezreel’s Temple,” and that is about the extent of the information forthcoming. The unredeemed ugliness of the unfinished temple is at once repellant and exciting to curiosity, and the name of “Jezreel” wears such an Old Testament air that most people who pass by want very much to know who and what he was.
He was, as a matter of fact, a private soldier of the 16th Regiment, named James White, who, having been bought out of the Army by the members of a fanatical sect before whom he posed as a prophet, took the extraordinary names of “James Jershom Jezreel,” and, with seventeen followers, founded a new sect, the New House of Israel, known by scoffers as the “Joannas.” They were, in fact, mad enthusiasts like those whom Joanna Southcott had fooled, years before, and it is supposed that White took the name of “Jezreel” from the Book of Hosea, adding the other names to make a trinity of initial “J’s,” allusive to the Prophetess Joanna and her minor prophet, John Wroe.
Not that “Jezreel” was mad. Not at all. To him as Prophet and Patriarch of these New Israelites was given up the whole property of those who entered the House, to be held in common; and he made a very good thing of the infatuation of the hundreds of wealthy middle-class converts who had a fancy for this singular kind of communistic religion. It was an article of his followers’ creed that they were the first portion of the 144,000, twice told, who will receive Christ when he comes again to reign a thousand years on earth.To support his character as leader of this House, “Jezreel” pretended to have received a communication from a messenger of God, who inspired him to write an extraordinary farrago of Biblical balderdash, without argument, beginning, or end, called the “Flying Roll.” The curious may obtain three volumes of this nonsense, but the only preternatural thing in these books ofExtracts from the Flying Rollis their gross and unapproachable stupidity which completely addles the brain of him who reads them, hoping thereby to discover the tenets of the sect or any single thread of argument that may be followed for more than a consecutive paragraph or two. The effect upon one reading those pages is the same as that which Mark Twain tells us was produced on him when Artemus Ward, having plied him with strong drink, began purposely to enter upon a preposterous conversation, having a specious air of a grave and lucid argument, but which was merely an idiotic string of meaningless sentences. Mark Twain thought himself had gone daft, and felt his few remaining senses going; and that is just what happens to any one who sits down and seriously tries to understand what “Jezreel’s”Extractsare all about.
In 1879, “Jezreel” married Clarissa Rogers, the daughter of a New Brompton sawyer; and, assuming the name of “Queen Esther,” she paid a visit, with the prophet, to America. This precious pair made an extraordinary number of converts in their preaching tours, and, returning to England, made Gillingham the headquarters of their New House of Israel. Schools and twenty acres of various buildings were built there at a cost of £100,000, and the “Temple,” intended to hold 20,000 people, was commenced on Chatham Hill. But “Jezreel” died in 1885, chiefly of drink and the effects of sunstroke, before this work could be completed and the zealots, who were wont to go about with long hair tucked under purple-velvet caps, began to wake up to a sense not only of their sumptuary folly, but alsoof the phenomenal simplicity which they had exhibited in giving up their property to the House. “Queen Esther” was incapable of fooling these simple folk as completely as “Jezreel” had done, and minor prophets sprang up to dispute her sovereignty over the elect. Perhaps they were jealous of the state in which this quondam sawyer’s daughter drove about in a carriage and pair, attended by liveried servants. Perhaps alsotheyhad visions and Divine inspirations. At any rate, “Queen Esther” presently drooped, and died in 1888, in her twenty-eighth year; whereupon the sect swiftly collapsed under the rival seers who followed. Lawsuits succeeded to the fine religious frenzy in which the “Temple” was raised, and it still stands unfinished, visible on its hilltop over a great part of Chatham. It would be a pity to pull it down, or to complete it; or, indeed, to do anything at all to it, for, as it is now, it furnishes perhaps as eloquent a sermon on human wickedness and folly as could well be delivered.
The great tower, framed in steel and built of yellow brick with ornamental lines of blue Staffordshire brick, has stone panels carved with a trumpet with a scroll, “The Flying Roll,” suspended from it; with the Prince of Wales feathers and the motto “I serve,” and other devices. The unfinished tower itself cost £44,000. The foundation-stone was laid, as an inscription says, 19th September, 1885, “by Mrs. Emma Cave, on behalf of the 144,000. Revelations (sic) 7th, 4.”
It was understood that Mrs. Cave, who at that time owned a large part of Tufnell Park, found the money for the tower, selling her property for the cause. The unfinished tower was seized by the building contractors for debt, and offered for sale by auctioneers, who stated it “would do for a lunatic asylum, prison, infirmary, etc.” This suggestion failed, and the contractors, unable to sell the incomplete carcase, let it to the sect under a lease, which terminated in 1905. There were at that time Jezreelite workrooms and printing-officesin the basement. An American Jezreelite then appeared, one Michael Keyfor Mills, calling himself “Prince Michael,” and proposing to complete. The founder’s father-in-law, Edward Rogers, who had rented the place as a wholesale grocery warehouse, opposed him and secured an injunction against members of the sect who had supported the idea. Mills died at Gillingham in January, 1922, aged sixty-five.
In 1908 a company was formed to demolish the building and sell the materials; but when the upper floors had been taken down the concern became insolvent. In 1913 it was proposed to convert the building into a “Picture Palace,” but the idea came to nothing; and later, the property was offered at auction and withdrawn at £3,900.
If there be any surviving Jezreelites of the “New and Latter House of Israel,” who believe that the souls of only those who have lived since Moses can be saved, they will be able to look with satisfaction on the remains of their tower, which was built largely with the idea that five thousand of the elect would gather here at the destruction of the world.
But in its present condition a good many of that number would be left outside; and there might be expected an unseemly crush to get within, only that by this time the elect of this particular brand must be a very small coterie.
Little else is to be seen or noted in leaving Chatham for Rainham. The shop in which that singular old gentleman lived, with whom little David Copperfield made acquaintance, is not pointed out to the curious, and the identity of that apostrophizer of his lungs and liver, who exclaimed “Goroo, goroo,” and tearfully asked David if he would go for fourpence, has been much disputed. “The House on the Brook,” to whichthe Dickens family removed when Mr. John Dickens’ fortunes were low, is still to be seen, but “the Brook” has changed for the worse, and the visitor to Chatham who takes up the local papers will discover that it is pre-eminently the place where the Order of the Black Eye is conferred, on Saturday nights in especial, but more or less impartially throughout the week.
UPCHRUCH WARE
It is not before Rainham is reached that the road becomes once more the open highway. Moor Street is passed, and here the Rainham orchards and the cherry orchards of Gillingham begin to stretch away to the levels of the Upchurch marshes. “Wealth without health” begins to be the characteristic of the country, for the marsh mists hang over the levels from early evening, through the night, to almost midday; and agues, asthma, and bronchial complaints are the common lot. Many miles’ length of submerged Roman pottery-works lie down in those Swale and Cooling marshes, and many have been, and are still, the “finds” of broken black “Upchurch ware” in the mud and ooze. Perfect specimens are discovered at rarer intervals. The proper method of searching for these vestiges of the Roman occupation is to equip one’s self with a stout pair of sea-boots, and a “sou’wester,” and to wade at low tide in the creeks, probing the slimy mud with iron rods. If the explorer is fortunate in his “pitch” he will discover pottery, broken or whole, by feeling his iron rod strike something harder than the surrounding half-liquid clay. The joy of such exquisite moments is unfortunately sometimes marred by the “find” being but a lump of half-baked clay; Roman, indeed, but not worthy of preservation. Still, when fragments of patterned ware are found, the discovery repays in interest for the time spent in mudlarking.
Rainham Church heralds the village, raising up its white and four-square battlemented walls from beside the road. A large building, with a few late brasses; a vault full of Tuftons, Earls of Thanet, of whom thelast died in 1863, unmarried; and two life-sized marble statues of Tuftons, father and son, in that curious classic convention of the late seventeenth century which found such a delight in representing distinguished folk as Roman warriors. Nicholas Tufton, the earl, and his son, who died from wounds received in battle, are those thus represented here; and the statue of the son, scupltured in a sitting position, is a really fine work of art. Beyond this, Rainham has not much to detain the explorer, and being a summer rendezvous for Chatham pleasure-parties and bean-feasters, it is apt to become dusty and riotous when the season of annual outings is at hand.
The church seen some distance to the left of the road is that of Newington. In the vestry is displayed a copy of the last will and testament of Simon Tomlin, dated November 13, 1689. In this disposition of his worldly effects are gifts to relatives and to the poor; and to his brother-in-law, William Plawe of Stockbury, he leaves “my best beaver hatt and the sum of £15, lawful money of England.” It is to be hoped that the legatee got his hat, but, as many provisions of the will do not appear to have been complied with, it seems doubtful.
There was a priory of nuns established at Newington in early Norman times, but all that is now left of it is a striking legend which proves that when these pious ladies retired from the world they brought some of the world’s worst characteristics with them. What they quarrelled about one night will never now be known, but when the morning dawned the Prioress was found strangled in her bed; which goes to prove that the veil no more goes to make the nun than orders black, white, or grey furnish a monk fully forth in true monastic attributes. A chalk pit, about a mile south of the church, called significantly “Nun-pit,” is shown as the place where those less holy than homicidal sisters were afterwards buried alive. Other accounts say that these nuns were removed to Minster, in Sheppey.However that may be, Henry the Second would have no more nuns here. He placed seven priests in the Priory as secular canons, and gave them the manor, hoping that this religious house would in future have a less lurid career. But things, instead of improving, grew worse. One of the canons was found murdered in his bed, and four of the brethren were convicted of the crime.
NEWINGTON
From these queer stories we come, appropriately enough, to a tale in which the Enemy bears a brave part. When Newington Church was being built, “ever so long ago,” as the tale of gramarye has it, and the time came for the bells to be hung, the Devil, who, it is well known, hates the sound of church bells, conceived the grand plan of pushing the tower over, so that the builders would give up the idea. Accordingly, he ventured down the lane one night, and, standing in the churchyard—as he could well do, because the place was not yet consecrated—placed his back against the tower, and, putting his feet against a wall on the other side of the road, pushed. No one knows what was the result, but as there is a tower here to this day—and a very fine one it is, too—it may be presumed that either Satan had altogether overrated his strength, or that the builders had built better than they knew. But if the Enemy failed in this, he at least succeeded in leaving his mark. Accordingly, here is the wall, and in it is a stone, and in that stone is a hole made by his toes; while on another stone is the print of a very fine and large boot-sole—valuable evidence, because it not only proves the truth of the story but also shows us that the Devil wore a Blucher boot on one foot and let the other go unshod. If you ask me how it came about that the Devil could come here in the fourteenth century wearing a nineteenth-century boot, I must quote the showman who exhibited a wax model of Daniel in the lions’ den. Daniel was seen to be reading theTimes, and some one in the crowd pointed out the incongruous circumstance, to which theshowman replied that Daniel, being a prophet, read theTimesby anticipation! And if a saint could anticipate the nineteenth century in newspapers, why should not the Fiend do the same in boots?
Peaceful cherry orchards stretch along the narrow valley, and the railway runs through them, giving glimpses to passengers of long rows of cherry trees with emerald grass flecked with sunlight and flocks of sheep feeding under the boughs; and picturesque farmsteads standing in midst of fertile meads.
ROMAN STATIONS
The village of Newington stands on either side of the old Dover Road, which is here identical with the famous Roman militaryviâof Watling Street. It is situated in the centre of a district covered thickly with Roman remains, and the village itself dates from Saxon times, when it reallywasa “new town” as distinguished from the adjacent ruins of the ancient Roman station of Durolevum. All the ingenuity of archæologists has been insufficient to determine at what particular spot this military post was established. Judde Hill, Sittingbourne, and Bapchild have been selected as probable sites of Durolevum, and certainly Bapchild and Sittingbourne are likely places for the original military post mentioned in theItineraryof Antoninus. Both are situated within an easy distance of the measurements given by the itinerist, and at either place there was anciently a stream of water crossing the road, sufficient, perhaps, to warrant the prefix of “Duro,” which, almost without exception, distinguishes the Roman military place-names on the Dover Road. That prefix was the Latinized form of the Celtic “dour,” signifying a stream, and it is met with at:—
Dubris == Dover.Durovernum == Canterbury.Durolevum == ? Bapchild, Sittingbourne, or Ospringe.Durobrivæ == Rochester.
A military expedition would naturally be encamped beside a stream, where the cavalry could water their horses, in preference to a waterless district; and therefore, Newington and Judde Hill, which both stand beyond an easy reach of flowing water, cannot have such good claims to have been the site of Durolevum as either Sittingbourne, or Bapchild, whose name, indeed, is a corruption of the Saxon Beccanceld, “the pool of the springs.” The flow of water throughout the country must in those remote times have been much greater than now, for dense forests then covered a great part of the island, and induced rains and moisture. In fact, the Dover Road was until recent years remarkable for the number of considerable streams and trickling rills that flowed across it, either under bridges or across fords, and it is not so long since those that crossed the highway at Sittingbourne and Bapchild were diverted or dried up. They must have been broad streams when Cæsar led his legionaries up the rough British trackway in pursuit of the Cantii, and the still very considerable brook that crosses the road at Ospringe would have then attained the dimensions of a river. It might be well to look to Ospringe for the original Durolevum, for the situation must have been admirable from a military point of view; and, moreover, it was near, if not then actually on, the head of a navigable creek leading directly to the sea, where Faversham now stands.
But when archæologists leave the consideration of Cæsar’s and his successors’ military station and seek the site of Durolevum town or city, they unaccountably lose sight of the fact that this Roman province of Britannia Prima was obviously very populous, and that Durolevum, instead of being a small isolated town, must needs have been the centre of a thickly populated district of smaller towns, hamlets, and outlying villas, stretching for miles along the now solitary reaches of the Dover Road, and reaching down to the Upchurch marshes.
The era of the Roman colonization of Britain is so remote that few antiquaries even ever stop awhile to consider how long those hardy aliens occupied this island, or how effective that occupation was, either in a military or social sense. Four hundred years just measure the length of time the Romans were with us; and what can not be done in so lengthy a period! Four hundred years would suffice to create a high state of civilization from mere savagery, and that is what the Romans accomplished here in that space of time. They not only conquered, but they eventually pacified, the fierce and fearless Britons; and they established export and import trades that rendered Britain the most prosperous colony of the Roman Empire, and the Romano-British merchants and people the wealthiest colonists of those times. Stately villas beyond the towns, but sufficiently near them to invoke, if needs were, the protection of the cohorts, rose up on all sides, where the rich traders in British produce took their ease or engaged themselves in cultivating the cherry and sweet-chestnut trees which they had introduced from the sunny hillsides of Italy. There is to this day a manor at Milton-next-Sittingbourne called “Northwood Chasteners,” so called from an ancient grove of chestnuts (castaneas), the descendants of the first chestnut trees introduced by the Romans. Vast Roman potteries had their being in the lowlands beside the Medway; Upchurch, Faversham, and Richborough furnished the tables of Roman Emperors and epicures with the “native” oysters that were even then famous and the cause of an immense trade; while manufactures poured in from Rome to suit the British taste.
Durolevum must, then, be sought amid the potsherds of a hundred settlements, any one of which might have been a suburb of that forgotten station; but the site where the present village of Newington stands was probably fresh ground when the Saxons came and drove out with ruthless slaughter the luxurious and enervatedRomanized British, who speedily fell a prey to barbarians when once the Roman garrison was withdrawn. Archæologists have remarked that the Saxons generally occupied the Roman towns that were left after the Romano-British fled from them; but although they sometimes did so, there are many instances where they established towns on new sites closely adjoining the old, but carefully separated from them. Such was the case at Wroxeter, where the Saxons built an entirely new town, adjoining, but not actually on, the ruined and deserted city of Uriconium. Probably the Saxons found Durolevum wrecked in the internal struggles that rent Britain asunder after the legionaries were withdrawn; and, being a Pagan and superstitious people, they shunned the almost deserted heap of ruins as being the abode of evil spirits. The stagnant and fetid wreck of a great city, whose fallen houses covered the bodies of many slaughtered citizens, and whose site was very likely overflowed with choked drains and freshets from the swollen streams, was not exactly the place to appeal to strangers, even though uncivilized, as a suitable site for dwelling upon; and, indeed, it may readily be imagined that these rotting remains of a dead civilization would be infinitely more awe-inspiring to a barbaric race than to the few remaining Britons who had seen the place in all the pride and circumstance of better days. And, indeed, the black, polluted earth of a long-inhabited town, and the will-o’-wisps and phosphorescent bubbles bred from the corruption below, that would float at night upon the surface of the water, would have frighted most people of those superstitious times.
Newington stands on elevated ground, away from such chances, but in its immediate neighbourhood have been found many Roman relics, and all around, the fields, the meadows, and the hillsides are rich in legends and broken pottery. Standard Hill is so called from a tradition that the Roman eagle was there displayed, and a field adjoining is known as Crockfield, from thegreat number of Roman pots and fragments of pottery turned up there by the plough. The name of Keycol Hill, too, is said to have had a Roman origin, and Hasted derives it from Caii Collis, or Caius Julius Cæsar’s Hill. Finally, the modern roadside hamlet of Key Street, between Newington and Sittingbourne, is said to owe its name toCaii Stratum, or Caius Street.
KEY STREET.
The inn at Key Street, now called the “Key,” was previously to 1733 known as the “Ship.” It stands near the hill-top where Key Street commences, and commands a long, straight dip of the road towards Sittingbourne, whose outlying houses are just beyond the farthest clump of trees.
PLACE-NAMES
The chance wayfarer little thinks how abundant are the vestiges of antiquity here, both in fragments of pottery, and in the time-honoured names of manors, fields, and meadows. Such things are only to be brought to light by the painstaking local historian who has access to Court Rolls and ancient estate maps. It is little known or considered by the dwellers in populous towns that almost every meadow, field, croft, pasture, down, or woodland has its name, as distinctand as well-known locally as that of any London street included in the Directory. More than this, these names are often the survivals of a state of things existing a thousand years ago. They are frequently rendered obscure by the corruption and evolution of languages, and by the physical changes that have come over the face of the country during so long a period; but with research, and linguistic scholarship, and a knowledge both of local history and the ancient history of the country in general, much that seems at first obscure, or even utterly inexplicable, may be finally resolved into meaning. The study of these place-names has all the attraction of original exploration, and leads on inexhaustibly. But while the tracking of apparently meaningless names to their origin has all the fascination of sport, it gives rise to many hazardous conjectures and lame conclusions, and names that do not yield their secrets to patient inquiry are too often thrust into some ill-fitting category from which they are rescued, to the shame and derision of those who placed them there. In fine, “cock-sureness” is nowhere more out of place than in these inquiries, and in nothing else is the mental effort of “jumping to conclusions” met with such ludicrous accidents. It has, for instance, long been a commonplace in these inquiries to refer the names of towns, villages, or hamlets ending in “ing” to the settlements of Saxon patriarchal tribes; and the Hallings, Coolings, Bobbings, Detlings, and Wellings are set down as having been originally the homes of Teutonic clans taking their names from chieftains named Halla, Coela, Bobba, and so forth.
But while this rule may generally hold good, it must not be applied automatically, and the “learning” that has given this origin to the names of Sittingbourne, Newington, and Ospringe must be regarded as a grotesque exercise of imagination, creating previously unheard-of clans, the Sœdingas, the Newingas, and the Osprings, who are not only new to archæology, butprobably have never existed. Of course, in the utter absence of all evidence, save that of the places themselves so named, no statement can beprovedcorrect; but these mystic Sœdingas may almost certainly be dismissed to the realm of fairy-tales, and if there ever was a tribe of Newingas, theytooktheir namefromthe village which they built and where they lived, instead ofgivingittothe place. Where others have come to grief, it would be rash to seek new derivations; but it seems evident that Ospringe derives its name from the stream flowing through the village, and that the name of Sittingbourne is nothing other than “seething burn,” or “the bubbling brook,” a poetic name which the place no longer merits. Place-names of Roman origin may be sought in the severalVigosthat exist, some now the names of fields, marshes, roadsides, and commons where there is not a house to be seen, but which were originally the sites of Roman villages, the name of “Vigo”—the Latinvicus—having been traditionally handed down to the present day many centuries after the last traces of those settlements have disappeared.
Many fields, too, here and in different parts of the country, are named “Whitehall.” How did they get that name? The answer is sought in the Roman word “aula,” the residence of a magistrate or a chief man in authority. When the Saxons came, they found these grandaulas, built of stone, dotted about the country, some ruined, others tolerably perfect; and they must have made a strong impression upon these barbaric Pagans, used at that early period of their history only to wooden dwellings of the rudest construction. They would have demanded the names of these places from the Romano-British, who would tell them they wereaulas; and they would have called them “hwit aulas,” from the stone of which they were built. It was thus that the many villages called “Whitchurch” got their name, from the stone (or “white”) churches that were so remarkable ascompared with the dark-hued temples and churches of wood to which the Saxons were accustomed.
But if this origin of the “Whitehalls” does not satisfy, there is another which may be even more likely. They were, possibly, at one time the sites of village Witan-halls, where the wise men of the Saxon villages assembled their local Parliaments, the “witans” or “witenagemots,” those remote forerunners of the village- and parish-councils which statesmen of the late nineteenth century have established, as items in a more or less admirable scheme for restoring the Heptarchy. There are “Whitehalls” in the immediate outlying fields of Sittingbourne, and there is one within the Roman encampment overhanging the railway cutting at Harbledown; but at none of these places are there any traces of buildings above ground. Excavation might reveal ancient foundations.