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 called Baldwin was the result. It was published anonymously, 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 of My 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:

He was eager for London, and preferment.

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[Pg 79]
[Pg 80]—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 in these 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.

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 military engineers 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.

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 the needs 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 of Hythe 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.'"

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 the Anglo-Saxon Ruimn-ea, the marshy water—the same root-word which gave Ramsgate its original name of Ruim'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 of Ruckinge, 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 set of 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"—the rivi vallum of 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 engaged in 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 his History 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 the Arabian 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. Tradition even 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 much inhabited, because it is Hyeme 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 of smuggling, 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 boggy fastnesses. 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 Ishmaels against 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.