CHAPTER XV

EAST LANGDON.

"MARSTON HALL."

The hamlet of Martin, three-quarters of a mile distant, is, possibly from its proximity to the railway station of Martin Mill, larger at this day than the parent village. Why the Chatham and Dover Railway authorities should choose to christen the station after the great wooden windmill that towers up, black and striking, beside the line, instead of simply by the name of the place, is not evident, for there is no other "Martin" on the railway from which it might otherwise be desirable to distinguish this. The hamlet itself overlooks the railway, from its superior ridge. You come steeply uphill into it, through an overarching bower of hedgerow greenery enclosing a hollow road, strikingly like a Devonshire lane, and the more remarkable and pleasing because set in midst of downs so generally treeless. Prominent in the street of Martin is the great farmhouse known as "Martin House," that "Marston Hall" of the story of Master Marsh's bewitchment, andonce the manor house. Portions of it may be as old as the early seventeenth century, but it has been remodelled in a particularly hideous manner, and the side of it towards the farmyard smeared over with "compo," or similar abomination.

THE "THREE HORSESHOES," GREAT MONGEHAM.

Regaining the high-road at Ringwould, Walmer is passed and Upper Deal, with the sea and the crowded shipping of the Downs and the white cliffs of France forming a striking picture on the right. It is worth while turning off, a quarter of a mile to the left, to see the little village called, magnificently, Great Mongeham, just beyond Deal, for its quaint "Three Horseshoes" inn still displays a curious wrought-iron sign originally made in 1735, a very striking object, overhanging the road.

The high bleak downs gradually sink down asSandwich is neared, and give place to flats. Away on the right, mile upon mile of blown sand and dunes, tussocky with coarse grass, border the sea, and inland stretch the vast unfenced fields of corn, beans, or oats that are so characteristic of this corner of Kent, and of the Isle of Thanet.

Sandwich is always described as a "dead port," but we have already seen that New Romney is more dead—if so Irish an expression may be allowed. By a flat, straight stretch of road that ancient member of the Cinque Ports is reached, past a row of tall poplars, the ancient Hospital of St. Bartholomew and—the railway station, which is absurdly brisk for a place supposed to have died and been buried about three hundred years ago. Past this unmistakable evidence of post-mortem activity, are the town walls, now, in passing, seen to be grassy ramparts, tree-shaded, with walks, and below them little dykes and runnels—a very beautiful scene which tells us that Sandwich has so far retired from business that it does not actually grow; although, as for being dead, why, there, at the other extremity of the town, where the navigable channel of the Stour flows and conveys those ships up and down that still trade here, you may see loading and unloading still going forward, and port-dues being collected and all manner of bustle.

But Sandwich is a very staid and grave old town. It knows—its ancient harbour being long centuries ago silted up—that it cannot compete with modern ports, and so folds its hands and accepts the minor part now assigned to it, and lives in the ancient ways; which is why we love "Sannidge"—to speak in the fashion of those who live there.

But it really was once a great port and its past lives in history. Many were its dramatic moments. Such an one was that when Becket, the banished Archbishop of Canterbury, returning after years of exile, landed from a boat in the haven. He had a premonition of his violent ending, for he embarked upon his return with the significant words, "Vado in Angliam mori," "I go into England to die." The people knew of his coming, and a cross erected in the bows of the boat that put him ashore made the identity of its occupants certain a great way off. He was popular with the masses, who crowded around him at the landing-stage, eager for a blessing from the "father of the orphans and protector of the widows." Thence he set forward, without delay, for Canterbury, by way of Ash.

Let us pluck another incident at hazard from the long roll of years. It is toward the close of 1415, and days grow chill and nights bitter. The war with France has ended with every circumstance of glory for England. Nine thousand Frenchmen lie dead at Agincourt, proving on their bodies the truth of the English arrow-flight and the prowess of the English men-at-arms. Harry V. has been received on his home-coming at Dover with the rapturous applause of an elated nation, and London has sealed that welcome. By detachments, the rank and file of the expedition slowly return home—some landing at Southampton, some at Dover, others here; each man laden with some article of loot; all wearied, hungry, and out of humour, because when they marched to our stronghold of Calais they were refused shelter and sustenance, the garrison of that town being afraid of running short of provisions.

They look, doubtless, for an enthusiastic welcome on their home-coming; banners waving, hand-shaking, tumultuous cheers. What do they find? Why, this: that the edge has been taken off the fame of their exploits by those who returned first, and that the townsfolk of Sandwich are cold—cold as the November wind, and their reception as forbidding as the lowering sky. Even so did Jacob obtain the blessing of Isaac, and Esau was deprived of his birthright. No blessing, no feasting, no drinking for them, save for money down, and money they have none; so that they are fain to sell their booty as best they may, to buy bread and lodging. Callous Sandwich? Nay, but history has repeated itself quite recently on the same lines; glory is as brilliant a thing as a soap-bubble, and as evanescent.

But one must be done with these mosaics from history. The town reached a great prosperity when Edward III. in 1377 removed the staple here, from Queenborough; but that was its high-water mark. The ebb did not at once begin, for still, in 1470, the annual customs revenue of the port amounted to £17,000 and ninety-five ships were registered as belonging to the place. There were then 1,500 sailors in the town.

But in the time of Henry VIII. the sand, long threatening, had closed the harbour to ships of any considerable burthen, and decay set in. The port declined, but, owing to the large settlement of Hollander and Huguenot weavers in Sandwich, the place did not shrink to nothing, and perhaps it is due to them that it exists at all.

ST. PETER'S, SANDWICH.

From the tall, Dutch-like tower of St. Peter's the curfew-bell is nightly tolled, as for seven hundredyears the custom has been. The sexton's annual stipend for performing this nightly service is £8; not a great sum for a corporate town to yearly disburse, but something of a consideration for a place like Sandwich, whose commercial greatness is now only a thing of history and ancient repute. Thus it was that in 1833 the unbroken continuity of the curfew from Norman times was seriously threatened, in a proposal of the Corporation to discontinue the practice, and the payment for it. Sentimental considerations, however, prevailed, and thus it is that the nightly bell continues to ring over the melancholy sand-flats, as of yore. But economical considerations again, in quite recent years, threatenedthe old custom on the same grounds, when, about 1895, it was proposed to discontinue the ringing and to save the money for more practical purposes. Again, however, sentiment prevailed, and what the old inhabitants call "the old charter" continues.

This church of St. Peter, one of the three possessed by the town, is its most notable landmark, and from all points of view stamps the town with a distinct alien appearance. It is by no means the principal church—that honour belongs to St. Clement's, whose massive and highly decorated Norman tower is second only to that of New Romney. But St. Clement's tower is only of medium height; that of St. Peter is tall and stark, and is, moreover, capped with an extraordinary turret of distinctly Dutch feeling. Sometimes you laugh at it and think it something bulbous and onion-like; at other times, and from some points of view, it is impressive, rather than absurd. If it were away, Sandwich would lose much of its individuality. It is not an old tower, as ages in churches go, and was built only in the years immediately following 1661, when the older tower fell, and not only involved itself in complete ruin, but demolished the whole length of the south aisle, and, with the bells, buried the whole interior of the church three feet deep in what a contemporary account calls "rubidge." When the inhabitants set to work to repair the damage, they did not restore the destroyed aisle, but just walled up the arches and inserted the quaint Dutch-like windows still remaining. The tower they rebuilt with bricks economically manufactured out of the harbour mud, which, judging from the number of houses built ofthe same material, seems to have been as plentiful a deposit then as now. The Hollander character of the tower and of the town in general owed its being to the existence at that time of a very large Flemish and Walloon colony, originally formed in Queen Elizabeth's reign, when the persecuted weavers and others from the Low Countries came here as refugees and were welcomed as settlers, not only in Kent, but in many other districts of England. The Sandwich colony numbered some four hundred at the beginning, but they gradually became absorbed in intermarriages, until, as a separate race, they ceased to exist. But in that period, while they retained their national manners and architectural style, these "gentile and profitable strangers" did, as we see, succeed in impressing the place with their personality to a remarkable degree.

Thus, then, St. Peter's tower dominates the view far and near. St. Mary's tower fell six years later, but was not rebuilt, save in a stumpy and inconspicuous way. St. Clement's tower suffered restoration in 1886; the churchwardens obtained the necessary funds by the expedient of selling the bells!

SANDWICH TO THE VILLE OF SARRE

Sandwich ends at the Barbican, the foreign-looking watergate that spans the road on the hither side of the Stour. Down to the left, away from the road to Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, can be seen from this point the dark ruin of Richborough, and directly on that road, to the right, a belt of sparse woodland, a clump of thin, wiry trees, insufficiently nourished on the sandy and pebbly soil. In midst of this, solitary and surrounded with an atmosphere of melancholy, is an absolutely uninteresting modern house. These trees and this house form all that remains of the once important and flourishing port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an early rival of Sandwich itself. The spot and an adjoining one are now marked on the maps as "Great and Little Stonar." The history of that vanished town is vague and fragmentary, but enthralling, like some half-told tale of faëry. Its very incertitude renders it into the likeness of a city of dream, the product of a magician's wand, blighted by uncanny spell. What, then, do we know of Stonar? Just this: that in the long ago, inA.D.456, the Britons under Vortimer, after being deserted by the Roman legions, secured one of their few victories over the invading pagan Saxons onthis spot, a spot fixed by the Latin annalist in the phrase, "In campo juxta Lapidem Tituli." It was near here, therefore, in these flats, that the battle was fought, and the place seems to derive its name of Stonar from that same Latin "Lapidem." Now it is remarkable that the Kentish coast is rich in place-names including the word "stone." Littlestone near Old Romney, is an example—Folkestone another, and the most prominent—the ancient "Lapis Populi" of Latin records. But from what stones those original names proceeded who shall say?

THE BARBICAN, SANDWICH.

The British victory was but an interlude in an almost unbroken series of defeats inflicted upon that unhappy people by the ruthless Saxons, who presently bore down all opposition on the Kentishshores, and established themselves here. It was they who founded the original town of Stonar, on a sandspit even then forming at the mouth of the River Stour and the entrance to the channel of the Wantsume, dividing the Isle of Thanet from the mainland of Kent; and the Roman fortress of Rutupium, the vast shell of ruined Richborough that we see to-day, overlooking the surrounding marshes from its rising vantage-ground, was converted by them into a fortress-palace for their kings.

SANDWICH, FROM GREAT STONAR.

When, in the course of time, the Saxons had possessed themselves of the country and had at last become luxurious and less warlike, they were in turn attacked by the fiercer Danes. Prominent among the many bloody fights waged for the mastery was the second battle of Stonar, fought here between the forces of Torkill the Dane and the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside, in 1009. It was one of those exceptional victories for the Saxons that now and again cheered them in their long series of disasters.

Stonar's alternative name of Lundenwic seems to have derived from the extensive trade with London, but of the vanished town and its records we know next to nothing. Only this, indeed, that its rivalry with Sandwich was fierce, and that Sandwich was gaining the advantage and Stonar decaying when the ill-fated town was entirely destroyed and swept away by the sea in the great storm of 1365, when Sandwich not only took all its trade, but assumed its alias of "Lundenwic" as well. "It is an ill wind that blows no one any good," says the old saw, and this was worth much to Sandwich. If tempests—or "tompuses," as the Kentish folk, in their quaint speech, call them—were of such destructive powers to-day, insurance would cease to be the lucrative business it now is.

Richborough, that frowns so grim down upon the Stour meadows and the flat Sandwich and Ramsgate road, is a favourite haunt of archæologists. It rises, rugged walls and bulging bastions, from low, earthy cliffs, ivy-clad in places, and shrouded by dense thickets of brushwood, where the earth falls away to the levels. The secretive ivy, incredibly aged, clasps the hoary masonry with a tenacity that will not allow of severance. They will live and die together, those walls and that "rare old plant, the ivy green."

The view from Richborough is comprehensive and varied. Away to the right is Sandwich, a mass of clustered roofs and spars and rigging, dominated, of course, by that Dutch-like cupola of St. Peter's, resembling some gigantic onion of fairy-lore; and away again to the left goes the curving shore, to Pegwell Bay and Ramsgate, with the white cliffsstanding out to sea, as bolt upright as though they had been sliced out. The houses and some of the more prominent public buildings of Ramsgate peer over the edge of the down.

The railway that, taking advantage of the levels, runs between Sandwich and Ramsgate under these walls of the aged Roman castle is not an unromantic feature. Its living commercialism serves to contrast eloquently the methods of to-day and those of an Empire dead these fifteen hundred years. He must be a soulless signalman who does not, in his cabin placed under the shadow of that wall, sometimes let his imagination loose and, conjuring up the past, people those ramparts again with the helmeted sentries of old Rome.

More than 140,000 coins, Roman and Saxon, are said to have been, at one time and another, picked up within and around Richborough. That is why the visitor to Sandwich hastens at the earliest opportunity along those two miles that separate the ruins from the town, and is explanatory of his exploring zeal in turning over the clods with his foot and probing the light earth with his walking-stick. Alack! the statement that so great a number of coins have been found means perhaps that the last are gone, rather than that a hundred thousand or so remain. If the ploughman still finds anything, he keeps the fact to himself; but certainly, if any personal efforts of the present historian may count for testimony, there is a plentiful lack of anything but heavy clay in these fields. No precious fibula, no golden coin, nay, not even a humble copperdenariusrewarded his anxious efforts, and the ware of Samos was equally to seek.

RICHBOROUGH, AND THE KENTISH COASTLINE TOWARDS RAMSGATE.

Here we are well within the Isle of Thanet, whose name, as generally is the case, is of uncertain origin. "Thanatos," the "Isle of Death," suggested some commentator in the bygone years, but he did not bolster up his derivation by telling us in what way it was so deadly. Perhaps in the wrecks of its coast. In other respects, Thanet is the Isle of Good Health, of rude, hungry, boisterous health; and in summer the Isle of Cockneys. Does it not contain Ramsgate—"rollicking Ramsgate",—and Margate the merry, whose name—I am sorry—always reminds me of margarine? It was at Margate, upon Jarvis's Jetty, that "Mr. Simpkinson" met the "little vulgar boy" who did him so very brown, but I am not going to Margate to see the Jetty; which has been greatly altered since Jarvis caused it to rise out of the vasty deep. Margate is mentioned only that once in theIngoldsby Legendsand Ramsgate not at all, and so I shall cut them out of my journey, and make across inland, over the high ridge at Acol, to Reculver.

The road is flat, the surface good, and from Sandwich to Ebbsfleet is an enjoyable run. At Ebbsfleet there has been lately erected a tall granite cross to mark where St. Augustine landed and reintroduced Christianity inA.D.597. Perhaps not everyone knows that he was sent against his will on this mission by the Pope, and that it was only grumbling he came. Not altogether so saintly as we might, not inquiring closely, suppose—a morose and masterful man.

Through Minster lies our way—Minster-in-Thanet—reached by lanes of the charmingest, with overarching trees; very beautiful, and filled in summerwith other things not so lovely: with such eye-sorrows and ear-torments as dusty brake-parties clamant with the latest comic songs and energetically performing upon cornets and concertinas; little vulgar boys, descendants, possibly, of Mr. Simpkinson's young friend, turning cart-wheels in the dust for casual pence. The brake-proprietors of Margate and Ramsgate, conscious that such tree-shaded spots are rare in Thanet, have taken these under their protection, and advertise "Twelve miles drives through the pretty lanes, 1/-." Minster is therefore a paradise of beanfeasters and the inferno of pilgrims, literary or other.

THE SMUGGLER'S LEAP.

To find the "Smuggler's Leap" one must make as for Acol. "Near this hamlet of Acol," says Ingoldsby, in a fictitious quotation prefixed to the fine legend of Smuggler Bill and Exciseman Gilland their doings, "is a long-disused chalk-pit of formidable depth, known by the name of the 'Smuggler's Leap.' The tradition of the parish runs that a riding-officer from Sandwich, called Anthony Gill, lost his life here in the early part of the eighteenth century, while in pursuit of a smuggler. The smuggler's horseonly, it is said, was found crushed beneath its rider. The spot has, of course, been haunted ever since." For the original of this quotation, the reader is referred to a "Supplement to Lewis's History of Thanet, by the Reverend Samuel Pegg, A.M., Vicar of Gomersham," supposed to have been published by a "W. Bristow, Canterbury, 1796"; but Ingoldsby, who composed the legend, invented his quotation as well, and those who seek the Reverend Samuel Pegg's "Supplement" will not find it.

But if so much be imaginative, the smuggling exploits common in the district a hundred and thirty years ago, as recorded in the Kentish newspapers, were in many respects like that celebrated in the Ingoldsby legend. TheKentish Gazetteof Saturday, November 22nd, 1777, gives a case in point: "On Monday last Mr. Harris, Officer of Excise, and Mr. Wesbeach, Surveyor of the Customs at Ramsgate, attended by six dragoons, met with a body of smugglers at Birchington, consisting of at least a hundred and fifty, armed with loaded whips and bludgeons. After a sharp skirmish, in which the smugglers had many of their horses shot, they made a very regular retreat, losing 8 gallons of brandy, 96 gallons of Geneva, 162 lb. of Hyson tea, and five horses."

MONKTON.

The chalk-pit, too, is sufficiently real. Crossing the open fields, spread starkly to the sky, between Monkton and Cleve Court, it is found on the Ramsgate road, opposite the "Prospect" inn, where it still gapes as deep and wide as ever. Do not, however, if you wish to be impressed with the truth of Ingoldsby's romantic description, view it by the brilliant sunlight of a summer's day, because at such times the great cleft in the dull white of the chalk does not properly proclaim its immensity. It is only when the evening shadows fall obliquely into the old chalk-pit that you applaud the spirit of those lines:

It's enough to make one's flesh to creepTo stand on that fearful verge, and peepDown the rugged sides so dreadfully steep,Where the chalk-pit yawns full sixty feet deep.

When Ingoldsby wrote there were, according tohis testimony, "fifty intelligent fly-drivers" plying upon Margate pier, who would convey the curious to the spot for a guerdon which they term "three bob." Cycles and electric tramways have nowadays so sorely cut up the trade of the intelligent that few of those depressed individuals remain.

MONKTON.

Coming into Monkton, a scattered village on the way to Sarre, the church, directly facing the road, makes, with the old stocks on a grassy bank, a pretty picture. The indications of arches, seen in the sketch, show that there was once a north aisle to this church. The parish owes its name to the fact that the manor was anciently the property of Christ Church Monastery, Canterbury.

The whole of this district is covered by the legend of the "Smuggler's Leap." The "smuggling crew" dispersed in all directions before the customs-house officers.

Some gallop this way, and some gallop that,Through Fordwich Level, o'er Sandwich Flat ...Those in a hurry Make for Sturry,With Customs House officers close in their rear,Down Rushbourne Lane, and so by Westbere.None of them stopping But shooting and popping,And many a Customs House bullet goes slapThrough many a three-gallon tub like a tap,And the gin spurts out, And squirts all about;And many a heart grew sad that day,That so much good liquor was so thrown away.Down Chislett Lane, so free and so fleet,Rides Smuggler Bill, and away to Up Street;Sarre Bridge is won—Bill thinks it fun,Ho! ho! the old tub-gauging son of a gun.

Down Chislett Lane, so free and so fleet,Rides Smuggler Bill, and away to Up Street;Sarre Bridge is won—Bill thinks it fun,Ho! ho! the old tub-gauging son of a gun.

We, too, will ride into Sarre.

Sarre was, and is still technically, a ville of the port of Sandwich, governed by a Deputy whose functions are now merely decorative. He still, however, as of old, swears fealty to King and port. These historical facts explain those notices, "Town of Sarre" and "Ville de Sarre" prominently displayed on the houses at the Canterbury and Thanet ends of the village respectively.

The bridge gained by Smuggler Bill is that which joins Kent and the Isle of Thanet, the successor of that original pont built in 1485, on the site of "the common ferry when Thanet was full iled." It is not a romantic bridge nowadays, and has its many thousands of counterparts. Beneath its commonplace arch the sluggish waters of a branch of the Stour go wandering away, right and left, along the old narrowed channel of the once broad and navigable Wantsume, where the sea once flowed, and the Roman galleys and triremes, the Saxon and Danish prows, and the Norman and early English ships, came and went; and only a shallow stream, no wider than a horse could jump, choked with reeds and snags, divides the former "Isle" and the mainland.

Sarre is picturesque in parts, and in other parts quite distressingly ugly. It is, indeed, a peculiarity of Kent, overrun from the earliest times by Cockneys, that many of its buildings touch the deepest depth of ugliness, vulgarity, and unsuitability. The Cockney has come forth of his Cockaigne, and builded, after his sort, great grey-brick houses in the model of the houses in towns, where of necessity, being in streets and shouldered by neighbours, they run to height and unrelieved squareness. Sarre contains exactly such an example, in one of the two inns—one never can recollect the name of a commonplace inn—that minister not only to the wants of Sarre, but were halting-places for the Margate and Ramsgate coaches in the old days, just as they are "pull-ups" for the brake-parties of the present time.

THE "VILLE OF SARRE."

The artist can dodge the hideous inn out of hissketch and can make a pretty view of Sarre, but unless he adopts the tactics of a Turner, and takes a piece here and another there, and so fits them together in a composition of his own, he cannot get into one view the quaint old barn-yards, with their curious barns standing, for fear of the rats, shouldered off the ground on stone staddles; nor can he include the bridge, the stream, and the long, poplar-lined road into the village. In no case could he bring in the time-worn tower of a village church, that sanctifies a sketch, for Sarre is godless and graceless and owns no church, its inhabitants finding their nearest place of worship at St. Nicholas-at-Wade, nearly two miles distant.

SARRE AND RECULVER TO CANTERBURY

The rows of feathery poplars lining the causeway road out of Sarre towards Canterbury give it, for a little distance, the look of a French road. But they presently cease, and it becomes for some miles a singularly dreary way. All the more excuse, therefore, for adventuring away from it across country to Reculver, celebrated by Ingoldsby in the "Brothers of Birchington."

Chislett village, through which the route lies, shows prominently from its ridge—or, rather, its church does. A church it is of singular outline, viewed from a distance, and calculated to entice the inquisitive away from the direct road, only to find that the bizarre appearance is caused by the spire having been almost wholly shorn off at some time not specified, and the stump suffered to remain. For the rest, Chislett is sufficiently interesting in the wheat and swede and mangold way, but not otherwise attractive, unless the stocks, still preserved in the churchyard, may be mentioned.

The route from here to Reculver is a five miles long stretch of scrubwoods, through the hamlet of Marsh Row. These rabbity solitudes lead at last to the low, broken, earthy coast presenting a weak and dissolving barrier to an encroaching sea betweenHerne Bay and Birchington. Midway between those two watering-places stands the gaunt ruin of that ancient church built within the Roman castle of Regulbium, to which its name in mutilated form has descended. Its skeleton towers rise over the hillside, minatory, as we descend toward the sea.

CHISLETT.

Reculver is popularly—and mistakenly—spoken and written of in the plural, "Reculvers." There is no real warranty, in the derivation of the name, for what our grandfathers would have called a "vulgar error." We can clearly trace the place-name from the Roman times, when it was "Regulbium," to the days of the Saxon King, Ethelbert, when it had been changed into "Raculf Ceastre," and thence, by way of half a hundred grotesque spellings in ancient historical documents, to the form it now bears. Never, save by modern writers of guide-books, has it been spoken of in the plural, and the only possible reason for their doing so must be a real ignorance of its history and a belief that the twin towers of the ruined church are themselves the "Reculvers." This is no attempt to rightthe wrong: that would be a hopeless task, and a thankless. A mistake set afoot so long ago and so popular is not to be discredited, and "Reculvers" this will remain, certainly so long as there aretwotowers.

In Roman times the fortress of Regulbium stood at some little distance from the sea, on the only available firm ground, a gentle rounded hill rising from the surrounding marshes. Now that the sea has for centuries been advancing upon the spot, this hill has been half washed away, and its remaining section shows as a low cliff, with the gaunt towers of the mediæval church rising from it. This church is the successor of that built within the walls of the Roman castle in Saxon times, as a monument of the downfall of Paganism and the triumph of Christianity.

So long ago as 1780 the sea had begun to threaten it, and the great north wall of the castle fell one night into the advancing tide, leaving the monument to Christianity in a very exposed condition, while the bones of the forgotten inhabitants were washed away out of the churchyard, just as those of Warden, in Sheppey, are at this day. Instead of making any attempt to save the church, the authorities began in 1809 to demolish it, only halting when they reached the twin towers. The surrounding farmers found the building-stones very useful for pig-sties and cow-sheds, and cared not a rap whether they were Norman or Early English. There were, indeed, some Roman columns in the church. They had come from the pagan basilica within the castle, but that did not hinder their being cast aside with the rest. In 1860 one wasdiscovered, one of its stones doing duty as a garden-roller. It was, with another column, rescued from further desecration, and the two have been set up in the Cathedral Close at Canterbury.

RECULVER.

The vicarage was also abandoned in 1809, but not pulled down. It was converted into a public-house, which long stood here under the sign of the "Hoy." The existing inn is the "King Ethelbert."

The twin towers of Reculver church form a portionof the former west front. They are of Norman and Early English date, and, constructed as they were largely of the materials of the ruined Roman buildings, are rich in fragments of tile. The towers were erected to serve as a sea-mark, to warn vessels beating up for the Swale and the Medway of the dangerous Columbine Sand, and their origin has from time immemorial been the subject of the legend of the "Twin Sisters," which tells how the Abbess of the Benedictine Priory of Davington and her sister, voyaging to fulfil a vow made to Our Lady of Broadstairs, were wrecked here for lack of a sea-mark. The Abbess was saved, but her sister was drowned, and, as a combined thank-offering for her own escape and by way of memorial to her sister, that holy woman erected the twin towers, to serve all mariners sailing by. Barham perverted the legend in his "Brothers of Birchington." Perhaps the temptation to alliteration was too strong to be resisted, and then the idea came to him of rejecting the familiar story and using in its stead an old monastic tale of how there were two brothers, the one pious and the other given up to all manner of evil courses, and how the Devil came for the wrong one by mistake and was obliged to restore him. In the Ingoldsby legend the brothers become Robert and Richard de Birchington, and their vow it was, he tells us, which produced the famous sea-mark:

Well—there the "Twins" standOn the verge of the land,To warn mariners off from the Columbine Sand,And many a poor man have Robert and DickBy their vow caused to 'scape, like themselves, from Old Nick.

The mariners of old never failed as they passed to bare their heads and pray to Our Lady or Reculver. It is said that a good omen was argued by them if the towers were clearly seen in passing, and evil if they were hidden by fog; but, when we consider the dangers of the sea in fogs, there seems less superstition in those ideas than sheer common-sense.

The towers have for many years been maintained by the Trinity House, according to the tablet over the doorway: "These towers, the remains of the once venerable Church of Reculver, were purchased of the Parish by the Corporation of the Trinity House of Deptford Strond in the year 1810, and groynes laid down at their expense to protect the cliff on which the church had stood. When the ancient spires were afterwards blown down, the present substitutes were erected, to render the towers still sufficiently conspicuous to be useful to navigation.—Captain Joseph Cotton, Deputy Master, in the year 1819."

Returning to Chislett and the breathless route of Smuggler Bill and his companions, Up Street hamlet, and Westbere are passed; Westbere itself in a deep hollow on a slip road plunging down romantically from that dreary highway. Then comes the long, bricky, dusty, gritty village of Sturry, whose name is taken from the River Stour, on which it stands, or rather, in which it stood, for it was once encircled by that now shrunken stream, and its original style was "Esturei," or "Stour Island." In midst of the village a turning to the left will lead the explorer to a little jewel of a place, lying forgotten by the Stour banks. He leaves populous Sturry behind, and comes, over littlebrick bridges as hump-backed as Quilp or Quasimodo, and by rustling alders, into a spot long since retired from worldly activities—enters, in fact, that decayed port of Canterbury, Fordwich.

FORDWICH.

Canterbury was once a seaport! How incredible it seems, now that Whitstable, the nearest point on the coast, is seven miles away, and the Stour so small a stream that even for rowing-boats it is at the present time scarce navigable. Yet to this very village of "Fordige" as the local speech has it, thesalt tide came up the estuary in days well within the historic period. Not merely vague Romans, but historical personages—palpable human beings who have personally left great flat-footed, heavy-handed marks on the pages of our national story—have landed at the still-existing quay, at which it is even yet possible for one to land from a skiff, and so to parallel experiences for one brief glorious moment of historic self-consciousness with no less a personage than the Black Prince himself, who stepped ashore here from no skiff, but directly from the caravel that brought him across the Channel, fresh from his cruelties in Guienne and Spain. Those who welcomed him home—the Mayor and burgesses of Fordwich—were as cruel and savage as he in their unchivalric municipal way; the times were sodden with cruelty, supersaturated with ferocity, and the rejoicings at the warrior's home-coming did but serve as an afternoon's respite for those petty malefactors who awaited their doom in the two dark and dismal cells even yet existing beneath the old town hall and court house standing so picturesquely by this self-same quay. Not the whole of that curious building can claim so great an age, for the general aspect of it is scarce earlier than Elizabethan times. Indeed, it has latterly been made to look quite smart and neat, its nodding roof carefully squared, the lichen and stonecrop removed, and some nice new brickwork here and there inserted. "Restoration" seeks out the veriest holes and corners and culs-de-sac of the land, and "makes up" old buildings into new, like old dowagers masquerading as girls again.

Fordwich town hall filled many functions. Init were transacted all the business affairs of the old port; in it, too, justice was dealt out in rough and ready fashion to the miscreants of yore, and executed swiftly, and still more roughly and readily, outside. The justice of the Cinque Ports, of which Fordwich was a member, was by no means tempered with mercy, and was as blood-thirsty as those early laws of the Israelites duly set forth with much horrifying circumstantiality in Leviticus. Theves Lane, in Fordwich, led in ancient times to "Thefeswelle," the well in which convicted thieves were judicially drowned. Thieves with a preference for the easiest death commonly selected Dover for their operations in those times, for when the inevitable happened, the Dover authorities flung them from the cliff-top, and so they ended swiftly and mercifully with broken necks, a better way than being dropped down a well and the lid then put on, as here at Fordwich, or being buried alive or smothered in the harbour mud, after the Sandwich style.

FORDWICH TOWN HALL.

The dungeons beneath the town hall are provided with only a narrow barred opening, shuttered fromthe outside and admitting the least possible rays of light. On their walls may yet be seen the many scrawls of old-time prisoners. In one cell were secured those who had offended against the municipal authority of Fordwich, and in the other the captives of the Monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury were laid by the heels; for two jurisdictions, the cause of many jealousies, ruled here. In none was there more heat shown than in the sole right and privilege of fishing for trout at Fordwich, claimed by the monastery and bitterly disputed by the port.

The rough, whitewashed interior of the court-room is simple but highly curious. The primitive bench and bar where prisoners were arraigned and causes heard are still here. Prosecutors had a difficult task in those days. Sometimes the court would decide that ordeal by battle was the best way of settling a dispute—a mean way, it will be acknowledged, of shirking its judicial responsibilities—and would secure seats outside to witness the fray, which suggests too engrossing a love of sport; at other times, when the court did patiently hear and adjudicate upon plaints, it left the prosecutor with the disagreeable task of executing the convicted felon himself,—both successful ways of discouraging litigation.

A good deal more modern than those barbarous practices, but still of a respectable antiquity, is the ducking-stool, resting on a transverse beam of the interior roofing. It is long since this engine for punishing scolds was used; not, perhaps, altogether by reason of gentler modern methods, nor that the feminine arts of scolding and nagging are decayed, but doubtless because the punishment wasnot effectual, and the last state of the nagged and henpecked, after the nagger and pecker had been ducked, was worse than the first. The old clumsy wooden crane at the angle of the town hall, still overlooking the river, was the place whence the scolding wives of Fordwich, first firmly bound, were slung in the chair, swung out over the stream, and ducked, deeply overhead. Raving with fear and shrieking with fury they were ducked again and again, while their good men, standing amid the delighted crowd, miserably anticipated a worse time than ever—and, by all accounts, generally got it.

STURRY.

Leaving Fordwich and returning to Sturry, the Canterbury road is regained. At its extremity, where one crosses the Stour, Sturry retrieves its reputation and exchanges its hard-featured street for a pretty riverside grouping, where the church, an ivy-covered ruined red-brick gateway of Sturry Court, and a plentiful background of trees make a gracious picture. It is the last picture of the kind on this route, for Canterbury is less than two miles ahead, entered past the barracks and by its least attractive streets.

THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY

Sheppey is an outlying district of the Ingoldsby Country, somewhat difficult of access. It is from Newington, a village on the Dover Road, some seven miles from Chatham and eighteen from Canterbury, that we will approach Sheppey, if cycling, for that affords a pleasant and interesting route. The ancient parish church of Newington lifts its grey battlemented tower away from the village prominently to one side of the old coach road, but it is surprisingly long before one reaches it, down the winding lane. Here it is abundantly evident, to right and left, that we are in the very heart of the famous fruit-growing district of Kent; for apple orchards, and more particularly cherry and pear orchards, abound, and where they cease the hop-gardens fill in the intervening space.

Coming sharply round to the church, incongruously neighboured by a modern and matter-of-fact postal letter-box, will be seen a great rough boulder-stone, planted between roadway and footpath—the "Devil's Stone" as it is known locally. A very large and prominent representation of a boot-sole is seen on it, and is the outward and visible sign of a hoary legend current at Newington ever since Newington church existed. It seems that theDevil objected to the church being built, but deferred action until the tower was completed, when, one night, he came along indignantly, and, placing his back against the tower and a foot against the stone, pushed—to no purpose, for the tower was not to be moved by his strongest efforts. The legend asks us to believe that the boot-print on the stone is a relic of this impotent Satanic spite; but it is in relief, instead of being sunk!—and surely the imprint, in any case, should have been that of a hoof. It is a very well-preserved and sharply-defined mark, and a suspicion that it is periodically renewed will not be denied.

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