FROM Lenham the Pilgrims’ Road threads its lonely way along the hill-side, past one or two decayed farmhouses still bearing the name of the great families who once owned these manors—the Selves and the Cobhams; and the view over the level country grows wider, and extends farther to the south and east, until we reach{168} Charing Hill, one of the highest points along this range of downs. The windmill, a few hundred yards above the track, commands a far-spreading view over the valley, stretching from the foot of the ridge to the Quarry Hills, where the towers of Egerton Church stand out on its steep mound above the hazy plains of the Weald. We look down upon Calehill, the home of the Darells for the last five centuries, and across the woods and park of Surrenden Dering, which has been held by the Dering family ever since the days of Earl Godwin, to the churches and villages of the Weald. Beyond a foreground of swelling hill and dale we see the flat expanse of Romney Marsh and Dungeness; and then for the first time we catch a glimpse of a pale blue line of sea—that sea across which Roman and Saxon and Norman all sailed in turn to land upon the Kentish shore. On clear days you can see the Sussex downs in the far horizon beyond the Weald, and near Hastings, the hill of Fairlight rising sharply from the sea. Down in the valley below, the tall tower of Charing Church lifts its head out of a confused mass of red roofs{169} and green trees, with the ivy-grown ruins of the old palace at its feet.

Many are the venerable traditions attached to the churches and villages which we have seen along our road through this pleasant land of Kent, but here is one older and more illustrious than them all. Here we have a record which goes back far beyond the days of Lanfranc and of Athelstan, and even that king of Mercia who gave Lenham to the Abbey of St. Augustine. For Charing, if not actually given, as the old legend says, by Vortigern to the ancient British Church, was at all events among the first lands bestowed on Augustine and his companions by Ethelbert, king of Kent. Saxon historians tell us how that this most ancient possession of the church of Canterbury was seized by Offa, king of Mercia, in 757, but restored again by his successor, Cenulph, in the year 788.

CHARING
CHARING

Long before the Conqueror’s time, the Archbishops had a house here. In Domesday Book, Charing is styled “proprium manorium archiepiscopi,” being reserved by those prelates for their private use, and from those days until{170} the manor was surrendered by Cranmer to Henry VIII. it remained a favourite residence of the Archbishops. In the thirteenth century the Franciscan Archbishop John Peckham dates many letters from his house at Charing, and Stratford, as Dean Hook tells us, was often there, and found consolation in this quiet retreat for the troubles of those stormy days. Chichele, Kemp, and Bourchier were also frequently here. Stratford first obtained the grant of a three days’ fair to be held at Charing twice a year, on the festivals of St. George and St. Luke. Leland tells us that Cardinal Morton made great buildings at Charing, and the red and black brickwork still to be seen under the ivy of the farmhouse walls may be ascribed to him, but the great gateway with the chamber and hooded fireplace above, belongs to an earlier period, and was probably the work of Stratford in the fourteenth century. Some of the older stonework is to be found in the stables and cottages now occupying the site of the offices on the west of the court. The chapel, with its pointed arches and large windows, which in Hasted’s time stood behind{171} the modern dwelling-house, was taken down eighty years ago, but the great dining-hall, with its massive walls and fine decorated window, still remains standing. This hall, where archbishops sat in state, and kingly guests were feasted; where Henry VII. was royally entertained by Archbishop Warham, on the 24th of March, 1507, and where Henry VIII. stayed with all his train on his way to the Field of Cloth of Gold, is now used as a barn. But in its decay, it must be owned, the old palace is singularly picturesque. The wallflowers grow in golden clusters high up the roofless gables and along the arches of the central gateway; masses of apple-blossom hang over the grey stone walls, and ring-necked doves bask in the sunshine on the richly coloured tiles of the old banqueting-hall.

Close by is the church of Charing, famous in the eyes of mediÆval pilgrims for the possession of one hallowed relic, the block on which St. John the Baptist was beheaded, brought back, an old tradition says, by Richard Coeur de Lion from the Holy Land, and given by him to Archbishop{172} Baldwin, when the King paid his devotions at the shrine of St. Thomas. This precious relic went the way of all relics in the sixteenth century, and is not mentioned in the long list of costly vestments and frontals recorded in an inventory of Church property taken at Charing in 1552. But Charing Church is still, in the words of the old chronicler, “a goodly pile.” It is cruciform in shape, and contains some traces of Early English work, but it is mostly of later date. The windows are interesting on account of their great variety. There are three narrow lancets, several of Transitional and Perpendicular style, and one large and very remarkable square-headed Decorated window. The chapel of Our Lady, on the south side of the chancel, was built, towards the close of the fifteenth century, by Amy Brent, whose family owned the charming old manor-house of Wickens in this parish. The porch and fine tower, which forms so marked a feature in the landscape, was also chiefly built by the Brents, whose crest, a wyvern, is carved on the doorway, together with a rose encircled with sun-rays, the badge{173} of Edward IV., in whose reign the work was completed. Through this handsome doorway the Archbishop, attended by his cross-bearers and chaplains, would enter from the palace-gate hard by, and many must have been the stately processions which passed under the western arch and wound up the long nave in the days of Morton and of Warham. A hundred years later Charing Church narrowly escaped entire destruction. On the 4th of August, 1590, a farmer, one Mr. Dios, discharged a birding-piece at a pigeon roosting, as the pigeons do to this day, in the church tower, and “the day being extreme hot and the shingle very dry,” a fire broke out in the night, and by morning nothing was left but the bare walls of the church, even the bells being melted by the heat of the fire. Happily the parishioners applied themselves with patriotic zeal to the restoration, and within two years the fine timber roof of the nave was completed. The date 1592, E.R. 34, is inscribed on the rafter above the chancel arch, while that of the chancel roof Ann. Dom. 1622, Anno Regni Jacobi xviii., appears on the beam immediately over the altar.{174}

The Pilgrims’ Way winds on through Charing past the noble church tower and the ancient palace wall, with its thick clusters of ivy and trailing wreaths of travellers’ joy, through the lovely woods of Pett Place, the home of Honywoods and Sayers for some hundreds of years. The track crosses the long avenue of stately limes which leads up to its gates, and through the meeting boughs we see the red gables and tall chimneys of the old Tudor house. In the fourteenth century the owners of Pett had a chapel of their own, served by a priest whose name appears in the Lambeth Register and other records as holding the living of Pette-juxta-Charing; and Geoffery de Newcourt, who owned this manor, together with the adjoining one of Newcourt, paid the king an aid on his lands of Pett, when the Black Prince was knighted. A pleasant part of the track this is dear to botanists for the wealth of ferns, flowers, and rare orchises which grow along the shady path; pleasant alike in May, when cowslips and violets grow thick in the grass and the nightingales are in full song, and in June, when the ripe red fruit of the{175} wild strawberries peep out from under the moss and the hawthorns are in bloom, but perhaps best of all in autumn, when the beeches are crimson and the maples in the hedges are one fire of gold.

For the next three miles, the way lies through the lower part of the great woods of Long Beech, which stretch all over these hills, and which from very early times belonged to the see of Canterbury. It brings us out at Westwell, close to another extremely interesting church, dating from the middle of the thirteenth century, and almost entirely of one period. The graceful steeple, nave, chancel, and aisles, are all Early English, but the most striking feature is the high open colonnade which forms the rood-screen. The effect of the chancel, with its side arcade, its groined roof, and beautiful lancet window filled with richly-coloured old glass, seen through these three lofty arches, is very imposing. There is another curious fragment of stained glass, bearing the arms of Queen Anne of Bohemia and of Edward the Confessor and his wife, in the north aisle, and the chancel contains six stone walls{176} and a stone seat with a pointed arch, which were formerly used by the monks and prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. For the manor of Westwell, like so many others in this neighbourhood, belonged to the see of Canterbury before the Conquest, and at the division of property effected by Lanfranc was retained by the Priory. Its revenues were allotted to the supply of the monks’ refectory, ad cibum eorum, just as the tithes of Lenham were used to provide meals for St. Augustine’s Abbey.

OLD YEWS AND OAK IN EASTWELL PARK.
OLD YEWS AND OAK IN EASTWELL PARK.

Half a mile above Westwell Church the Pilgrims’ Way reaches the gates of Eastwell. Here the track disappears for a time, but old maps show the line which it took across the southern slopes of the park, which extends for many miles, and is famous for the wild beauty of its scenery. The hills we have followed so long run through the upper part of the park, and magnificent are the views of the sea and Sussex downs which meet us in these forest glades, where stately avenues of beech and oak and chestnut throw long shadows over the grass, and antlered deer start up from the bracken at{177} our feet. But the lower slopes are pleasant too, with the venerable yews and thorns and hornbeams dotted over the hill-side, and the heights above clad with a wealth of mingled foliage which is reflected in the bright waters of the still, clear lake. The old ivy-grown church stands close to the water’s edge, and contains some fine tombs of the Earls of Winchelsea, and of their ancestors, the Finches. But the traveller will look with more interest on the sepulchral arch which is said to cover the ashes of the last of the Plantagenets. The burial registers indeed record that Richard Plantagenet, the illegitimate son of Richard III., died at Eastwell on the 22nd of December, 1550, and a well, which goes by the name of Plantagenet’s Well, marks the site of the cottage where he lived in confinement after the defeat of his father on Bosworth Field. Eastwell House, for some years the residence of H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh, was originally built by Sir Thomas Moyle, Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Henry VIII., but has been completely altered and modernised since it passed into the Winchelsea family. Leaving it on our left, we{178} come out of the Park at Boughton Lees, a group of houses on a three-cornered green, and follow in the steps of the old track to Boughton Aluph church, a large cruciform building with a spacious north aisle and massive central tower, standing in a very lonely situation.

Boughton, called Bocton or Boltune in former times, belonged to Earl Godwin and his son Harold, before the Conquest, after which it was given to Eustace, Earl of Boulogne, and formed part of Juliana de Leybourne’s vast inheritance. It took the name of Aluph from a Norman knight, Aluphus de Bocton, who held the manor in the reign of King John, and became thus distinguished from the other parishes of Boughton in the neighbourhood. From the church a grassy lane, shaded by trees, ascends the hill to Challock on the borders of Eastwell Park, and is probably the old track of the Pilgrims’ Way which passed between these woods and the park of Godmersham. This was formerly the property of Jane Austen’s brother, who took the name of Knight on succeeding to the estate, but it has now passed into the hands of another family.{179} Until the Dissolution the manor and church of Godmersham belonged to Christ Church, and here, in mediÆval days, the priors of the convent had a fine manor-house, where they frequently resided during the summer months. The hall was pulled down in 1810, and nothing of the old house is now left except a gable and doorway, adorned with a figure of a Prior wearing his mitre and holding his crozier in his hand, probably intended for Henry de Estria, the Prior who rebuilt the manor-house in 1290. The church of Godmersham is remarkable for its early tower and curious semicircular apse with small Norman lights, which are evidently remains of an older building, and in the churchyard are some very ancient yews, one of which is said to have been planted before the Conquest.

Under the shadow of these venerable trees there sleeps a remarkable woman, Mary Sybilla Holland, whose father was at one time Vicar of Godmersham, and afterwards moved to Harbledown, a larger parish near Canterbury, a few miles further along the Pilgrims’ Way. Both Mrs.{180} Holland and her distinguished brother, the lamented Sir Alfred Lyall, retained a lifelong affection for this corner of East Kent. When Lyall was far away in India, ruling over millions of British subjects, in the north-west provinces, his verses tell us how passionately he yearned for his old Kentish home.

Sir Alfred died on the 10th of April, 1911, at Lord Tennyson’s house at Farringford, in the Isle of Wight, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Michael’s, Harbledown. Now brother and sister are both sleeping under the grassy sod of the Kentish land which they loved so well, “where the nightingales sing{181} heart-piercing notes in the silence of the early summer night.”

THE PLACE, WROTHAM.
THE PLACE, WROTHAM.

{182}

CHILHAM.
CHILHAM.