HERMITS
As mediæval travellers approached Sittingbourne from the direction of London, the first objects they perceived were the chapel and hermitage of Schamel, dedicated to Saint Thomas à Becket, and standing on the south side of the road. They are gone now, and a wayside public-house—“The Volunteers”—stands on, or near their site; but the hermitage was, from the time of King John to the impious days of Henry the Eighth, a resting-place for those devout pilgrims who sought the shrine of the “holy blissful martyr” at Canterbury. In the reign, however, of that “Defender of the Faith”—when it suited him—the chapel and the hermitage were scattered to the winds, and the hermit thrust out into a world that had grown tired of making pilgrimages. But, while it lasted, the Hermitage of Schamel did a very thrivingbusiness; so thriving, indeed, as to excite the jealousy of the Sittingbourne people, who conceived themselves injured by the intercepting of pilgrims before they could reach and fertilize the town with streams of gold. Rich pilgrims were a source of wealth to many towns and villages on the Dover Road, and hermits, bishops, priors, and abbots contended for them like ’busmen for passengers before the introduction of the bell-punch and the ticket system.
We first hear of Schamel Hermitage in the time of a priest named Samuel, whose duties consisted in saying mass daily, in wearing a hair-shirt, refraining from soap and water, and in attending upon those pilgrims and travellers who did not mind the apostolic dirt in which he wallowed; and by whose alms he supported himself and the chapel. Samuel died and was gathered to his fathers, and the building presently fell into decay, to be rebuilt by an Augustinian monk, during whose lifetime the annals of the Hermitage are too placid for recounting in this place. His successor was one Walter de Hermestone, who was appointed by the Queen about 1271. Imagine his disgust, though, when he came here and found the place a wreck, the work of the Vicar and the townsfolk of Sittingbourne. This estimable clergyman, whose name was Simon de Shordich, and who seems to have brought the manners and customs of his native place with him, had carried off the Hermitage bell and altar as prizes to his own church, and the men of Sittingbourne had left both the Hermitage and the Chapel in the likeness of a Babylonic ruin. History does not record what became of Walter de Hermestone, but it seems likely that he departed for some more peaceful spot. Meanwhile, Simon de Shordich died, perhaps from the effects of the eremitical curses which the disappointed incumbent of the ruinated place doubtless showered on him; and he was followed, both in his Vicarage and his evil courses, by a certain Boniface, who carted away the ruins and sold them.
SCHAMEL
Sixteen years later an inquiry was held on these matters, at the instance of the Queen, who, holding the manor of Milton-next-Sittingbourne, was patron of the chapel. There seems to have been a hamlet of Schamel at this time, for a certain William the Weaver, and others who gave evidence before the commission, are located here. It must have been about this era that the chapel was rebuilt, but little is heard of it until June, 1358, when the Queen of Edward the Third passed by, and gave 20s. in alms. Friar Richard de Lexeden was then in possession. Two years later, King John of France passed, on his way home, and gave twenty nobles, a sum equal to no less than £120 of our money; and that is the last we hear of the Hermitage until it was for ever destroyed in 1542-43.
Meanwhile, the chapel of Swanstree, at the east end of the town, was as much upheld and cared for by the Sittingbourne people as the Schamel chapel was robbed and injured. Wealthy tradespeople left money in their wills to its altars and for the repair of the roads thither, and the Vicars of Sittingbourne approved of it, because it not only did not take away from them, but gleaned anything that the pilgrims had to spare after they left Sittingbourne, and before they came to the next town. But although so favoured, this chapel has gone the way of the other, and not a vestige of it remains. It stood on the grounds of the present Murston Rectory.
SITTINGBOURNE
Sittingbourne was not a large place in the days that ended with the advent of railway times, but it had an astonishing number of hotels, inns, and beer-houses. People had not at that time begun to see that the royal road to fortune lay in the making of bricks and tiles, and so they amassed riches by plundering the travellers whose evil stars sent them down the road to Canterbury and Dover; and in the lulls of business when no travellers were forthcoming, they probably “kept their hands in” by overcharging one another. I believe Sittingbourne must have been a town of inns,and but little else, and that the population lived in hotels and drank wines, beer, and spirits all day long and a great part of the night, just for the fun of the thing.
Not that mine host of the “Red Lion” was at all extortionate when he entertained Henry the Fifth in 1415, on his return from Agincourt. On the contrary, the bill was decidedly reasonable, amounting only to nine-and-sixpence, including wine. You cannot, unhappily, dine conquering heroes of any sort—much less kings—so reasonably nowadays, and I suspect that, even a century or more ago, when the First and Second Georges were used to put up at the “George,” on their way to or from Hanover, prices must have ruled much higher. The “Red Lion” was undoubtedly the chief inn at Sittingbourne from a very early time, and it kept its good repute for centuries; for here it was that Henry the Eighth stayed when “progressing” along the Dover Road in 1541, and here he held what in those autocratic times answered to our present Cabinet Councils. If I were a licensed victualler I could wish those days back again. Beside the “Red Lion” and the “George,” there were at this time the scarcely less inferior hostelries of the “Horn,” the “Saracen’s Head,” the “Bull,” and the “White Hart”; and, what with Emperors, Kings, Archbishops, Cardinals, and other dignitaries, with trains of attendants numbering anything from two thousand down to fifty, they must all have been needed. In the sixteenth century, then, Emperors and Kings were the usual guests of the “Red Lion.” The landlord at that time sniffed at Princes and Archbishops, and turned away such riff-raff as Dukes and Earls. So soon, however, as 1610, we find a mere untitled traveller received at the “Red Lion”; one Justus Zinzerling, a German, who came posting up the road from Canterbury. We know from his own account that posting was not in those days very expensive.He paid three shillings for riding these fifteen miles, and alighting at the “Red Lion,” put up for the night, glad to get here, past the body of a robber who had been hanged from a roadside tree for murdering a messenger. The body was so surrounded with chains and rings that Herr Zinzerling was of the opinion it would last a long time for the due reading of a much-needed moral to others. He found the landlord of the “Red Lion” to be a Scotchman who knew Latin, and on this common ground of good-fellowship they drank to one another and quoted the classics until drink tied their tongues and deposited their bodies under the table.
I have already had occasion to mention six first-class inns that flourished here three hundred years ago; but in the middle of last century there were a great many more. The “George,” the “Rose,” and the “Red Lion” seem to have been the chiefest of them about this time; and, if we may believe Hasted (and there is no reason why we shouldn’t), the “Rose” was “the most superb of any throughout the kingdom, and the entertainment afforded in it equally so.” But where is the “Rose Hotel” now? Gone, alas! with the snows of yester-year. Where, also, the “George,” which at the time of Waterloo kept forty pairs of post-horses? and where the “Red Lion”? It would, I fancy, puzzle most folks to say, for although they still stand, the change that came over the spirit of their dream about 1840 has caused them to be cut up into separate houses and tenements.
We can, however, by intensive observation, identify the “Rose.” It is a handsome red brick building on the left-hand side, now occupied by a firm of grocers. The identification is from a beautifully-carved rose in a red brick panel on the first floor, with the initials “R. I.” and the date 1708. The building is large, and has eight windows in a row. But the “George” has nine, and the “Lion” twelve.
About this time, too, the people seem to have givenup living in hotels and inns, and to have taken to private houses. Also, they drank tea instead of beer; and so presently we find the inns disappearing that at one time stood next to one another, in a long line on both sides of the High Street, and even in the branch thoroughfares. Here was the “White Hart,” large enough in 1815 to have eighteen soldiers quartered in it daily. It is now divided between a Bank and a Brewery. Here, also, was the “Gun,” which, aptly enough, had as many vicissitudes as the fortunes of war, for it was turned into the Parish Workhouse, opened again in 1752 as the “Globe,” and presently became the workhouse again, with, probably, the landlord as its first inmate! But it was no greater a success as what our grandfathers with an ironical humour termed a “House of Industry” than as a hostelry, and so it was not long before the paupers were marched out and another phase of its strange eventful history commenced. This time it became a coachmaker’s workshop, and there we will leave it.
Sittingbourne innkeepers had an inordinate fancy for changing their signs, and some of their houses have borne as many aliases as an old and hardened swindler. Thus the “Seven Stars” became in turn the “Cherry Tree,” the “Union Flag,” and finally the “Volunteers”; while the present “Plough Inn” (only they may have changed its name again already) in East Street has been successively the “King Henry the Eighth,” and the “Royal Oak.” Other houses were the “Bull,” the “Adam and Eve,” the “Walnut Tree,” the “King’s Head,” “Six Bells,” “Black Boy,” “Boatswain’s Call,” “Ship,” “Chequer,” “Three Post Boys,” “Crown,” “Bird in Hand,” “Lamb,” “Three Kings,” “Angel,” “Portobello,” “Bell,” “Duke’s Head,” and “Cross Keys”; to name but a selection, but age has withered, and want of custom staled, the most of them, and, instead of entertaining travellers, the inhabitants of Sittingbournepoison them with the appalling smells that arise from the numberless brick-kilns round about.
BRICKS AND TILES
For the making of bricks and tiles is the chief industry of Sittingbourne nowadays, and a very large and flourishing industry it is; so much so, indeed, that there will be presently nothing of Sittingbourne left at all; because, like maggots that liveincheeses—andonthem—the Sittingbourne brickmakers find their sustenance in the ground on which they live, and have carted away nearly all the surrounding country. When they have worked down to the chalk and the bed-rock, I don’t know what theywilldo. Already all the hills have vanished and have been distributed over England in the shape of bricks, and when folks return who have known Sittingbourne in their youth, they don’t recognize the place, and go away wondering whether curses will fall upon it because its people have thus removed the old landmarks.
Changed, indeed, it is, not only from those days when the great ones of the earth sojourned here, but also from those comparatively recent times when the traveller’s only choice was the road. Then three parts of the population were engaged in hotel-keeping, licensed-victualling, or coach-building; innkeepers, job-masters, hostlers, post-boys, chamber-maids, and boots, were their styles and titles, and if you are curious enough to turn the pages of Sittingbourne registers you will find such entries as these to be the chiefest of their contents: “John Slater, innholder, of the White Hart, was buryed, 22nd Feby, 1708/9”; or “Joseph, ostler at the Crowne, buryed Oct. 23, 1708.”
When the railway came, ruin, swift and terrible, fell upon this busy community. Grass grew in the stable-yards; the old high-hung yellow chariots and the light post-chaises rotted to pieces that were used to be hired by travellers who did not care so much about the price as the pace they went; the price of horses fell; the vast interiors of the hotels with their numberless bedrooms, and one-time cosy coffee-rooms,echoed to the casual tread of some unfrequent guest, uncomfortable and half-frightened at the solitary state in which he sat; hostlers, grooms, and washers lounged miserably about the mouldy harness-rooms in company with dejected post-boys; chamber-maids departed to other scenes and occupations; and “boots” gradually lost the encyclopædic knowledge for which he was renowned, and forgot alike the number of miles to the next post-town and the proper way to clean a pair of Bluchers.
The last post-boy is dead now, and the chaises and the chariots are represented—like so many other obsolete things—at the South Kensington Museum; and the typical innkeeper of that day should be also, for his like is no more seen on earth. He was a burly man with a red, good-humoured, clean-shaven face. He wore, frequently, knee-breeches and sleeved yellow waistcoats with black stripes that made him look, to the youthful imagination, like a great wasp or bumble-bee. He wore short white aprons, too, and high collars encircling his thick red neck, so that one gazed upon him in constant dread of his falling down in an apoplectic fit; he wore—but enough! Let it be said, though, that he resembled a Blue-coat boy in one respect, for he was never known to wear a hat.
All this is changed. Sittingbourne had grown into importance because its situation was convenient for travellers to stay here to change horses at, and when the roads became deserted the place would have fallen back into its original obscurity had it not been for bricks, hops, and cherries. Bricks, and the surrounding fruit country have prospered it anew, and have made it what it is; a dusty, thickly populated, dirty town whose old aspect has been altered from a broad and roomy street to crowded lanes and a High Street filled with frowzy alleys, and many Dissenting conventicles of different degrees of ugliness.
PAPER
Of late years, paper has been added to the interests ofSittingbourne. Outside the town, on Milton Creek, leading muddily to the Swale, there you will find paper in its crude wood-pulp stage, as imported from the mills in Norway and Sweden. Closely viewed, it is not attractive. Slabs of wood-pulp, stacked forty or fifty feet high, with a narrow-gauge railway running between cliff-like accumulations of this merchandise, present a scene made squalid by the torn and bedraggled fragments of paper packing that the winds sport with. But, seen from the Swale, or indeed from a distance on land, these towering stocks of the raw material for newspapers have a peculiarly romantic appearance; looking indeed like a reminiscence of the temples of the East.
The village of Milton itself, properly “Milton Regis,” is full of queer old corners. The church stands aloof, dignified, on a remote country road. In its churchyard is a stone mentioning a woman who had six husbands:—
“Here lyeth interred the Body of Abraham Washiton (sic), late husband of Alise Washinton now liveing in Milton, whome had in all six Husbands: John Ailes, John Ricard, Thomas Gill, John Jeefrre, Alexander Flet. Anno 1601.”
It will be observed that this lady who collected husbands is described as “now liveing.” Possibly the sixth was not the last; but by that time the men of Milton must have grown rather timid.
In any case, the history of Mrs. Washinton was evidently considered remarkable, to be detailed on this stone, either by herself or by the admiring or astonished neighbourhood.
YARD OF THE “LION” INN. SITTINGBOURNE.
Sittingbourne parish church, and some remaining walls of the more ancient inns, are all that need detain the stranger. The massive square tower of the church, which is a prominent feature of the High Street, is the oldest part; the body of the building dates only from the Perpendicular period. To this time belongs a singular monumental effigy of a lady, placed in a niche of the north chancel wall; a mysterious figure, represented with an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes lying across its wasted breast. No inscription remains to tell its story. The church fronts on to the highway, and in days of pilgrimage (and even so lately as 1830) the bourne to which Sittingbourne owes its name, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Sæthingbourne,” the seething, or bubbling, brook, trickled and welled up in the likenessof a spring across the road. Through it splashed the mounted pilgrims, while the weary-footed palmers crossed by stepping-stones, or cooled their feet in the water. Many halted to cross themselves, to kneel and pray before the figure of Our Lady which filled the niche still remaining in the buttress of the Chilton Chapel, and was called thence “Saint Mary of the Butterasse.” This little shrine was defaced in 1540, and now the running stream is enclosed in pipes that discharge the water into Milton Creek.
MURSTON
The village of Murston, which at one time skirted the road at some distance from Sittingbourne, and was in receipt of the town’s leavings, is now quite undistinguishable by a stranger from the town itself, so greatly has the population grown of late years. It is quite uninteresting, save for the memory of the affray by which the rector, the Reverend Richard Tray, was ejected from his living in 1641. A stone let into the Rectory wall preserves the record of the affair:—
Si Natvra negat facit Indignatio Versvm.
Five miles and a half down the road from Sittingbourne, the pilgrims who had prayed so devoutly at the shrine of Our Lady of the Buttress (and it is to be hoped had not forgotten the claims of Swanstree Hermitage) came to Ospringe, where they usually found a profusehospitality waiting for them at the Maison Dieu. Not that there was any lack of religious houses on the way. Far from it, indeed. They had not proceeded much farther than a mile when they came in those times to the Hermitage of Bapchild, with the hermit standing on the doorstep, scratching himself with one hand, holding out a scollop shell for alms in the other, and conjuring them by the blessed Thomas and all the hierarchy of saints to spare something for his altar. The parish church of Bapchild, which was built in early Norman times, before any one dreamed of Canterbury becoming a place of pilgrimage, or the high-road crowded with a varied concourse of miserable sinners anxious to compound for their ill-deeds by visiting the scene of the martyrdom, is situated beside a lane at some distance from the road, and so was quite out of the track of that alms-giving crowd. It grieved the Vicar of Bapchild to see these free-handed folks going by, with never a mark or even a silver penny coming his way, and so he contrived to set up some sort of a cell and chapel with a few exceedingly dubious bones in it, supposed to be the reliques of saints; but probably grubbed up from his own churchyard. It did not matter much whose reliques they were called, for that was a credulous age, and so long as there were not two skulls of Saint Paulinus on view, or more than a gross of Saint Alphege’s teeth to be seen at the numberless shrines between London and Canterbury, the pilgrims were not generally disposed to be critical. It was only when Saint Frideswyde appeared, from the osseous evidence of these shrines, to have as many arms as Vishnu, or when Saint Antholin appeared, from equally untrustworthy evidence, to have been in this life a Double-headed Nightingale or a kind of Siamese Twins, that men on pilgrimage became sceptical. But, after all, if saints could perform one kind of a miracle, why not another, and why should not Saint Alphege cause his teeth to be increased, until a peck of them could be gathered from the monasteries of Europe, or SaintAntholin not have his skulls miraculously multiplied if they had a mind to it; and if Saint Frideswyde could be proved to have been possessed of half a dozen arms, was it not for the good, if not of the church, at least of the clergy, that it should be so? And so, it is to be hoped that the Vicar and the Hermit, between them, did well; and also it is to be hoped that the Hermit took more advantage, for washing purposes, of the little stream which here also flowed across the roadway than his brethren were wont to do.
The road between Ospringe and Sittingbourne was in those days very lonely, and lonely it still remains, for the settlements of Bapchild, Radfield, and Greenstreet are but dull and dishevelled collections of tiny shops and cottages, with here and there a slumberous old inn or whitewashed farmhouse. The railway to Dover runs on the left hand, within sight of the highway, through the beautiful cherry-orchards and the hop-gardens, and the land slopes gently down to the levels of Teynham and the fertile though ague-stricken marshes of the Swale; that part of Kent where, according to the old local saying, there is “wealth without health”; significantly alluded to in the rhyme—
He that would not live long,Let him live at Murston, Teynham, or Tong.
TONG
Tong Castle, where Rowena “drank hael” to King Vortigern and captivated that very susceptible but unpatriotic monarch; the scene also of the treacherous murder by Hengist and his men of three hundred British nobles, is represented now only by a grassy mound. Here we are in the centre of the hop-growing districts, and the road begins to be bordered with hop-gardens, bare in autumn and winter, except for the great stacks of poles; but beautiful in spring and summer with the climbing bine, planted in long alleys in which women and children work in the long summer days, weeding and tying up the hops, and hanging up the wind-screens called “lews.” For thehop-vine is a delicate plant that requires as much cossetting and constant attention as an invalid, and if it is not carefully tended and trained up in the way it should go, it presently droops and dies or becomes too weak to climb up the long twelve- and fifteen-feet poles which it is expected to surmount. And so it is jealously shielded from all draughts and boisterous breezes by long pieces of canvas or string netting, stretched from pole to pole at that side of the gardens whence come the prevailing winds; while every hop-pole is tied so scrupulously and elaborately to its fellow that a June hop-garden is a very maze of string.
To these gardens come in August and September hundreds of men, women, and children from London slums; some by train, many more by road. Whole families of them, with their clothing, their pots and pans and sooty kettles, slung over their shoulders, come tramping down the weary miles, and fill the air with ribaldry, strange oaths, and horrible blasphemy. The villagers keep them at arm’s length, if not, indeed, at a greater distance than that, and keep their children at home; going round their gardens and orchards at night, to see that gates are locked; and, bolting doors and latching windows securely, go to bed and dream dreams in which evil-looking hoppers are stealing their fruit and making away with the occupants of their hen-roosts. Sometimes they wake up and find the crashing of branches, the screaming and clucking of cocks and hens, which have formed the subjects of their dreams, to have foundation in fact, and hurriedly dashing out of bed, arrive, barefooted and armed only with a poker, in their gardens just in time to see mysterious figures vanish over the wall and to hear the protests of their stolen fowls grow small by degrees and beautifully less in the distance. Next day the bereaved villager is heard to execute fruitless variations of “Tell me, shepherds, have you seen my Flora pass this way?” and some enterprising emigrants from Whitechapel feast royally on poultry.
OSPRINGE
Just where the hilltop rises and looks down in the direction of Ospringe, the wisdom of the Faversham authorities has planted a Hospital for infectious diseases. It fronts the road, and has a very large door with “Isolation Hospital” painted on it in very small letters. Tramps and beggars passing by see a large house where possibly something may be begged or stolen. They go up to the door, and, after reading the legend painted there, may be seen to proceed hurriedly on their way. Without standing on the order of their going, they go at once.Omne ignotum pro magnifico: they don’t know what “isolation” means, but they hurry off, lest they should catch isolation and die of it. And so they come, stricken with a mortal fear, into Ospringe, down a dusty hill. A Maison Dieu that stood here in olden times would perhaps have received them then, but to-day the few fragments of it that remain are part of the “Red Lion” inn, and tramps find no encouragement there.
The Knights Templar and the Brethren of the Holy Ghost held this Hospital for travellers for many years, from the time of Henry the Second, and they exercised a lavish hospitality, extended to all, from the King downwards. King John had a room here—acamera regis—and other monarchs frequently made this a halting-place on their way to or from Dover. Very few records are left of the feastings and jollifications that took place in this semi-religious, semi-secular retreat, and Ospringe has no longer any Royal visitors. The village consists of a long street beside the highway at the foot of Judd’s Hill, and of a shorter street, called Water Lane, that runs off at right angles where the remains of the Maison Dieu stand beside the stream to which Ospringe owes its rather pretty name. At one time this stream flowed openly across the roadway, but it is bridged now, and Water Lane, which had a raised footpath on either side, while the lane itself was occupied by the stream, through which horses and carts splashed, has now been drained dry.
The “Anchor Hotel” was once a posting-house and a stopping-place on the route of local coaches between Chatham and Herne Bay, but this traffic has of course been long discontinued. The modern pilgrim should not fail, before leaving Ospringe, to explore Water Lane and the country road for half a mile beyond. The place abounds in old cottages, picturesque windmills, and old timbered houses of some pretensions. Of these, Queen Hall is probably the most interesting. Beyond it is the parish church, a very large building with a tower of grand design and unusual type. The edifice has been thoroughly and unusually well restored, with an exquisite taste unfortunately too rare in country districts, and may be instanced as an example of what “restoration” should be. The approach to the church by the road is past hop-gardens which group beautifully, and form an excellent motive for a sketch.
Faversham town, lying a mile distant, between Faversham Creek and the turnpike road, will doubtless in the course of a few years adjoin Ospringe, and convert the village into a mere suburb. Preston, the old suburb of Faversham, is distant something over a mile, but in between there have lately been built very many new streets of cottages and villas, evidences of Faversham’s prosperity, doubtless, but not pleasing to the tourist. That prosperity is due to its situation upon a navigable creek, along which are pursued the trades of brick and tile making, and the manufacture of gunpowder; and the oyster fishery, which adds such a great proportion of wealth to this flourishing county of Kent, is largely centred here.
OSPRINGE: A JUNE HOP-GARDEN.
The surrounding country, too, is probably the very richest and most suitable district for the growing of cherries, gooseberries, currants, and strawberries; and the frequency and perfection of the market-gardens, orchards, and hop-gardens strike the pedestrian with admiration and amazement. A visit in early spring, when the orchards are in blossom, and others in the cherry- and hop-picking seasons, convince the sceptical that Kent is, in sober truth, the “garden of England.” The stranger needs but to spend a week between this and Canterbury; to tramp the high-road and the bye-lanes in the direction of Herne Hill and Whitstable, and he will see abundant evidences of how important is the fruit-growing industry, not only in the fields and gardens, where he may see the fruit growing, but also in the great barns and outhouses bursting with many thousands of bushel-baskets only awaiting the ripening of the cherries and currants to be filled and put upon the rails at Faversham Junction, whence numerous special trains are daily run during the season to London and the Borough Market. Somewhat earlier in the year—generally in mid-June—other evidences of the magnitude of the fruit interest are seen in the auctioneers’ sale bills posted on every available board and fence, announcing that the growing crops are presently to be sold by auction.
DISCONTENTED FARMERS
But, in spite of the fertility of Kentish orchards, the countryman will not forego his privilege of grumbling. Singularly enough, he never thinks of eating any of the fruit he grows, and the more plentiful the crops, the less pleased he professes himself to be. Not that, should you come upon him at a season when plenty is less marked, he will be any the more gratified. Hold the peasant proprietor of an orchard in conversation during the fruit season, and you will think him one of the most miserable and unfortunate men in the country.
“Good day to you,” you say.
(Hodge nods his head, and mumbles, “Mor’n’n.”)
“Splendid crops you have down here. I should think things must be going pretty well in these parts?”
“Ay, goin’ to the Devil fast enow, I’se warrand.”
“Oh! how d’you make that out?”
“Make it out, is it? Why, look a-here at them there turmuts; d’you iver see sich poor things; ay, an’allthe root crops is bad’s can be.”
“Yes; butyou’re all right with your fruit; cherries and apples.”
“M’yes, there’s a dale o’ fruit this year: darned sight too much ter please me.”
“But you can’t very well have too much of a good thing, can you?”
“Can’t you just, though; look at the price; down ter nothing, as you might say. Get it for the asking.”
“ButIdidn’t get cherries for the asking;Ihad to pay eightpence a pound for some I bought at Chatham.”
“Oh! I dessay. WishIc’d git a penny a pound. But that’s jist like them ’ere starv’em, rob’em, and cheat’em folks. Wouldn’t give ’ee so much’s the parings o’ their finger-nails if they c’d help it.”
“Then why don’t you make preserves of some of your fruit?”
“Preserves? what’s that, mister?”
“Why, jam, you know. Besides, surely you eat some of your own fruit, don’t you?”
“Fruit’s to sell, not to heat!”
“Well, then, if you can’t sell it, don’t preserve it, and won’t eat any of it,whatdo you do with it?”
“Give it ter the pigs, in coorse!”
“Yes, but why not eat some of it yourself?”
“Heat it! D’yer take me for a bloomin’ Nebuchadnezzar? Besides, it’s that there ondergestuble——!”
“But Nebuchadnezzar didn’t eat fruit. He hadn’t got the chance, poor fellow. He could only find grass to eat.”
“Grass ’ood’n’t be so ondergestuble as fruit, I reckon. Blame me if you town folks don’t think a man can live on nothink. Now, a pound or two o’ steak, a few rashers o’ fat bacon, an’ a few heggs for bre’kfuss—that’smore my line. Hexpeck a Christian man to heat fruit——!”
“But you expect people to buy yours, don’t you?”
“Naw, I don’t hexpeck nothin’.”
“Then why do you grow it?”
“Bekause I suppose I’m a fool; that’s about the size of it. Good day t’ye, mister.”
The history of Faversham town is extremely long and interesting, but as it does not lie on the direct road to Dover, it will not be necessary to go into a very detailed account of it. It is a curious, half-maritime borough whose Mayor wears a chain of office decorated with badges of oars and rudders; a town whose records include such events as the burial of King Stephen, his Queen, and his son Eustace; and at a very much later date, the attempted escape of James the Second. Faversham fishermen recognized the fugitive King as he crouched, shivering in the hoy at Shellness on that bitter December morning of 1688, and, robbing him of his watch and chain and his money, they brought him a prisoner to the Mayor’s house, where he was detained two days, guarded by a mob of countrymen, on whom his terror-stricken appeals to be allowed to escape had no effect.
FAVERSHAM
“He who is not with me is against me,” exclaimed the frantic bigot. “My blood will be upon your heads if I fall a martyr.” But the dignity of a martyr was not to be his. A troop of Life-guards was sent to effect his release from the ignorant mob, who only refrained from stealing his diamond shoe-buckles because they thought them to be pieces of glass. James’s terror of the Faversham fishers is reflected in his manifesto issued years afterwards, in which he offers an amnesty to his “rebel subjects,” but expresslyexcepts such arch-traitors as Churchill, Danby, and the poor oyster-dredgers of Faversham.
Saints Crispin and Crispianus, who have a public-house dedicated to them at Strood, had an altar here in the Abbey Church, and were supposed to have lived a while at Preston, earning their living as cobblers in a cottage that stood where the “Swan” inn is now. Long after the Reformation had done sway with the shrine of Saint Thomas, pious bootmakers made pilgrimages to the place; and St. Crispin’s Day was for centuries the principal holiday in Faversham. I would rather make pilgrimage to the place where they earned their living than to the shrines of all the sanctified humbugs who contended for pride of place in this world, and becoming worsted in the struggle for supremacy, received their Canonization as a matter of course.
Faversham in the fifteenth century was not less well-furnished with religious cranks than the holy road to Canterbury. There was an anchorite in one corner of Faversham churchyard, and an anchoress in another, and in their cells they sat and sulked their lives away, and never did any work. William Thornbury was rector here for twenty-two years, when he resigned his living especially to become aninclusus; and for eight years he occupied a damp and most uncomfortable cell amid the tombs, until he died, most likely of rheumatic fever, in 1481. There is a most beautiful brass to him in the church, with a long Latin verse, recounting how he was one of the elect, and how for long years he sat lonely in his cell. Why he should have lived such a life is a question which we, who are so far removed from that age, both by lapse of time and in change of thought, cannot readily answer. That he was a man of good birth, good position, and considerable wealth, would appear from his will, and these circumstances make his reclusion only the more extraordinary. He probably suffered either from religious mania, or else from a guilty conscience whichled him thus to compound with Heaven for some undiscovered crime that made his life a misery.
But the traveller who keeps strictly to his Dover Road only passes through Faversham suburbs. Preston is the oldest of them, and lies directly on the road. To the left rises Faversham’s fantastic spire, conspicuous above the flats; immediately in front goes the railway in a cutting underneath the road; and straight ahead, in the far distance, rises up a long thin white line amid hillsides clothed heavily with forests. It is long before the stranger discovers what is that singular white streak upon the dark trees, but it reveals itself, as he goes, as the famous Boughton Hill, and the woodlands as the extensive remains of Blean Forest.
It was at “Boughton-under-the-Blee” that Chaucer’s Canon and Yeoman overtook the pilgrims. The Canon’s hat hung down his back by a lace, for he had ridden as though he were mad. Under his hood he had placed a burdock-leaf to cool his head, but yet his forehead dropped like a still that was full of plantain and wallflower. The Canon’s Yeoman tells the pilgrims how pleased his master would be of their company as far as Canterbury; and the Host makes him welcome, asking if his master can please the party with a merry story. “A story?” asks the Yeoman; “that is nothing to what the Canon can do. He is an Alchemist, and so clever that—
“all this ground on which we be riding,Till that we come to Canterbury town,He could all cleanè turnen up so down,And pave it all of silver and of gold.”
“Ah!” says Harry Bailly, the Host, “that’s all very well, you know, but how is it that this wonderful master of yours wears such a threadbare coat?” To this query, the Yeoman is bound to answer that his master is too clever by half, or not clever enough, and that he has, for all his alchemy, only wasted his substance and that of many more. The Canon hears something of this, and bidding his servant hold histongue, makes off for very shame, while the Yeoman tells the story that brings the party to Harbledown.
BOUGHTON
Boughton-under-Blean is perhaps the neatest, quietest, longest, and most cheerfully picturesque village on the Dover Road. It lies near the foot of the hill. Half-way up is the church.
In the churchyard of Boughton there is a great yew-tree whose girth at three feet from the ground was taken by the vicar in 1894. It was then 9 ft. 9 in. The age of this tree is exactly known, for a seventeenth century vicar, the Reverend John Johnson, recorded, “the little yew-tree by the south doer was sett in 1695.” The yew, therefore, expands one foot in sixty-one years.
One or two country houses with large gardens and trimly cut hedges occupy the crest of the hill; and just beyond, on the level plateau of Dunkirk, is the church, built in 1840, as some means toward civilizing the untutored savages the villagers of this beautiful county had become under the neglect of that Christian Church whose Metropolitan Cathedral rises proudly beyond the hillside village of Harbledown, less than three miles away. God in His goodness has blessed with a boundless fertility the fair land of Kent, so that old Michael Drayton merely expressed facts when he wrote that rapturous eulogy—
O famous Kent!What county hath this isle that can compare with thee?That hath within thyself as much as thou canst wish;Thy rabbits, venison, fruits, thy sorts of fowl and fish;As what with strength compares, thy hay, thy corn,Nor anything doth want that anywhere is good.
But, long after the first quarter of the nineteenth century had passed, this part of Kent was peopled with a peasantry compared with whom the Hindoosand the Chinese, who were even then receiving the warm attention of missionary zealots, were highly civilized and enlightened. The very county in which Augustine had landed and reintroduced Christianity thirteen hundred years before was neglected and ignored by the port-drinking parsons and prebendal wine-butts who drew fat incomes from the Church and starved the souls of dwellers under its very shadow; and the kindly fruits of this fertile land, with its furred and feathered game, brought no prosperity to the people. “The earth is the Squire’s and the fulness thereof” was an emendation of Holy Writ scored deeply in every yokel’s brain; and here, whither a fervent piety had brought uncounted thousands of pilgrims in the by-past centuries, the country-folk lived from youth to age, Godless and unlettered. The Era of Reform had dawned on England, sweeping away much, both good and evil, but these dark districts of Kent remained the same, save for a slowly growing feeling of discontent. The New Poor Law naturally fostered this feeling in a country where every other peasant lived in old age upon Outdoor Relief—and thought it the most reasonable way of ending a life of toil. By this new dispensation it became necessary for a poor man to break up his home and go into the “Union” before relief could be afforded him; and thus the Poors’ Rates were raised and the feelings of ratepayers and peasantry embittered simultaneously. A man who felt no shame in receiving his half-crown or five shillings a week from the parish, experienced bitter degradation in becoming an inmate of what is now generally known as “the House,” then hateful under the current name of “the Bastille,” or “Bastyle,” as the English peasant pronounced the word.
“COURTENAY”
To this neglected corner of England came a romantic and mysterious stranger in 1832. No one knew whence or how had come to Canterbury the picturesquely dressed man of commanding height and handsome face who, staying at the “Rose Hotel” in the HighStreet, soon attracted attention by his manner and the Eastern style of dress he affected. That he was fabulously rich, and that his name was Baron Rothschild were the common reports of the then somewhat dull Cathedral city, eager to dwell upon any subject that made for gossip; but it presently appeared, by his own accounts, that he was “Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay,” Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem. This extraordinary man, besides possessing the advantages of a handsome face and a fine presence, was gifted with a singularly persuasive eloquence; and professing himself to be the friend of the people, oppressed by a selfish aristocracy and a stupid Government, he aroused the wildest enthusiasm in a political campaign upon which he presently embarked, with the object of standing as Parliamentary candidate for the City of Canterbury. His charm of manner; the affability with which he would converse with the meanest peasant; and the really clever political discourses he wrote for a periodical leaflet called theLionwhich he had printed and published, created a number of partisans who flocked round him as he rode through Canterbury and the surrounding villages; or crowded the High Street in a state of the wildest enthusiasm when he harangued them from the balcony of the “Rose.” He polled over nine hundred votes in the Conservative interest at the election, and thus came within an easy distance of becoming a member of Parliament. His indiscreet championship of some fishermen, who were being prosecuted by the Revenue officials for smuggling, gave political and social enemies the looked-for opportunity to injure a man who was so dangerous to the squires of Kent. He was prosecuted in turn, on a charge of perjury, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. From the County Gaol he was transferred to a lunatic asylum, and only liberated in the spring of 1838, on the assurances of friends in the vicinity of Canterbury that they would take charge of him.
Religious mania seems to have attacked the weak brain of this excitable enthusiast while in confinement, and his conduct presently became more eccentric than before. Roaming in the country villages, preaching religious and political salvation to the small farmers, the cottagers, and poor agricultural labourers of Kent, he aroused greater enthusiasm and personal love than before. He had always represented himself to be a member of the Courtenay family, whose head, the Earl of Devon, claims descent from Palæologus, King of Jerusalem in early Crusading times; and, in addition, he announced himself as the rightful heir to a number of important estates in Kent and neighbouring counties. He let it be known that he, the noble Sir William Courtenay, Knight of Malta, and rightful King of Jerusalem, was not too proud to partake of food and shelter at the board and under the roof of the poorest. When he came in power, and claimed his rights, the oppressed should live freely on the land; the cruel New Poor Law that shut unfortunate men and women out from the world in “Bastilles,” as though Poverty were a crime, and separated man and wife, whom God had declared by his handmaid, the Church, man should not put asunder, should be abrogated; and the workers should have a share in the products of their toil. The people largely responded to these advances; and poor folk, together with a number of the class who had earned themselves a small competency, and a few moneyed people, believed thoroughly in Courtenay. He was now a man whom many held to have been persecuted and imprisoned for his championship of the people, and they loved him for it, many of them with a whole-souled devotion that culminated in worship. Courtenay’s extraordinary facial resemblance to the traditional appearance of the Saviour, and, finally, his ultimate assumption of the character of the Messiah, led many people to believe that Christ was actually come on earth to commence His promised reign; and entertainment, encouragement, and monetary contributions attended on their belief.