CHAPTER V

THE "MARTYRDOM," CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.

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,but a not unreasonable fury, somewhat obscuring the martyr spirit. Fury on both sides, for FitzUrse,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 murmured, "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 lustof 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 Canterbury, who reverenced Becket far more than did those within the Church who had immediately surrounded 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 ofthe 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 beenmore 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,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 martyred 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 pilgrimage 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 betaken 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 devoured 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 Malling, near Lewes, itself a property belonging 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 Yorkshire castle of Knaresborough, where they remainedfor 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 commission, 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,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 1174 was accordingly 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 directlyto 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 reparation. 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 miraculous 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. Butthe gross superstitions, and the grosser scandals, tricks, and miscellaneous knaveries that were encouraged by that martyr-worship had discredited him by the time of Henry VIII., that less superstitious 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 endowments 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.

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 Cæsar'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 courageously all that fatal day in the dense woodlands. Protected by mounds and trenches defended withpalisades of stakes cunningly interwoven with brushwood, they prolonged the hopeless contest until nightfall, and then fell back. Cæsar, describing these woodland forts asoppida, gives especial attention to one particularly troublesome stronghold. "Being repulsed," he writes, "they withdrew themselves 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, throwing up a mound against it, advanced, holding their shields over their heads in the military formation known as "the tortoise," and drove out the defenders 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—"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,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.

THE VALE OF BARHAM.

Barham Downs, stretching for three miles, windswept 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 theIngoldsby Legendsin 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 directlydown 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 theIngoldsby Legendsfirmly believed would have been his.

THE "EAGLE GATES," BROOME PARK.

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 theIngoldsby 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 theLegends. 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."

BROOME PARK: THE REAL ORIGINAL OF TAPPINGTON HALL.

The Oxenden family have long owned the beautiful old place, which still contains a "powderingcloset," as used in the bygone days of huge headdresses 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 theLegends. "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 Oxendenplantations 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 furlongs through the avenue, will ring at the Lodgegate—they cannot mistake the stone lion with the Ingoldsby escutcheon (Ermine, a saltire engrained Gules) in his paws—they will be received with a hearty old English welcome."

DENTON.

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 theLegends; but those who, relying too implicitly uponBarham's statements, seek the brass of the Lady Rohesia, with the inscription—

Praie for ye sowle of ye Lady Royse, And for alle Christen sowles

will be doomed to disappointment, for it is one of his picturesque embellishments upon fact.

Denton Church

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.

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 picturesque 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,full of all manner of old-fashioned flowers, extends on either side of the entrance.

TAPPINGTON HALL.

The interior is of more interest than might be supposed from a glance at the outside. A magnificent 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.

THE "MERCHANT'S-MARK" OF THOMAS MARSH OF MARSTON.

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, descendants 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 newelof 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.

TAPPINGTON HALL: NIGHT.

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 Westmoreland—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 unexpectedly at the mansion of the 'Bad Sir Giles.' They met in apparent friendship; but the ill-concealed scowl on their master's brow told the domestics that the visit was not a welcome one."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 purloined Lieutenant Seaforth's breeches, theIngoldsby Legendsthemselves must be consulted.

Tappington has again passed away from the Barhams. Ingoldsby's son, the Reverend Richard Harris Dalton Barham, Vicar of Lolworth, 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 scrubwood. An advertisement of 1890, 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 theIngoldsby 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.C.

ROMNEY MARSH

The scene now changes to Romney 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 Warehorne. 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 calledBaldwinwas the result. It was publishedanonymously, 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 ofMy 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.

WAREHORNE.

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—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 prevalent at the time of its building. "Commonplace" I have called it, and so indeed it is, and unimaginative to boot, but that is not to deny the impressiveness 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 residence 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 inthese 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 to be really on a height—surrounded by apple orchards.

A SUNDIAL, WAREHORNE CHURCH.

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 militaryengineers who designed and constructed, and the Government that authorised it.

The origin of the canal is found in the naturally open condition of this coast, and in the old fears of invasion, not so long since dead; for there are still those who vividly recollect such alarms even in the reign of Napoleon III.

WAREHORNE.

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 theneeds 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 promontories—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 Cæsar 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 ofHythe 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, 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 insignificant currents; but they never did, or could, pass Mr. Pitt's 'Military Canal.'"

THE ROYAL MILITARY CANAL, AT WAREHORNE.

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.

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 favourable,i.e.stormy, seasons, weathering Dungeness Point in an eggshell, or careering on her broomstick over Dymchurch Wall. A cow may yet be sometimes 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 theAnglo-SaxonRuimn-ea, the marshy water—the same root-word which gave Ramsgate its original name ofRuim's-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 ofRuckinge, 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 Portus 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 Durovernum: 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 setof the shingle; for it was the dense woods that gave the Rother and the Limen their once robust existence, 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"—therivi vallumof 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 engagedin 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 hisHistory 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(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 theArabian 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 unfortunate inhabitants had lost all; many lost their lives; the port of Romney was crippled. Traditioneven 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 enterprising, 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 situation." 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 muchinhabited, because it isHyeme 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 without 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 incomprehensible names that must have made the lot of mediæval taxpayers unhappy. "Toll and tare," "scot and lot," "fifteen and subsidy," were the particular extortions excused to these adventurous 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 population. As the waters subsided and grass grew again, so the flocks increased; and the ancient trade ofsmuggling, 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 boggyfastnesses. 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 Ishmaelsagainst 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 worship the Mayor of New Romney. Sworn information 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,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 intended 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.

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