FROM HYTHE TO ASHFORD

From Hythe, where many roads meet, there goes a very picturesque way along the high ground overlooking Romney Marsh—a route intimately associated with "The Leech of Folkestone." It is uphill out of Hythe, of course: indeed, among all the roads out of the town, only the coast routes are flat.

Lympne is the first place on the way—that "Lymme Hill, or Lyme" which Leland says "was sumtyme a famose haven, and good for shyppes that myght cum to the foote of the hille. The place ys yet cawled Shypway and Old Haven."

That it is not now "good for ships" is quite evident to anyone who takes his stand on the cliff-top and views that fifth quarter of the globe, Romney Marsh, from this most eloquent of all view-points. Full three miles away, as the crow flies, the summer wavelets whisper on the beach, and between the margin of the sea and this crumbling cliff-edge, whose foot once dabbled in the waters of the haven, are pastures that have been the anchorage of ships.

Grey buildings of high antiquity rise from the cliff-top and command the mapped-out marshland. The stern tower of Lympne church, forming a beacon for mariners, is next door neighbour to Lympne Castle, once a residence of the Archdeacons of Canterbury. That "castelet embatayled," in the words of Leland is now a farmhouse. Like the church, it was largely built from the stone of the Roman castle down below the cliff; that ancient Portus Lemanis whose feet rested in the waters of the haven and to whose walls the crowding vessels ranged in the grand colonial days of Imperial Rome. Stutsfall Castle the countryfolk call those shattered walls that tell of Roman dominion, rendered "Studfall" on the map.

It is from these crumbling, earthy cliffs of Lympne that one obtains the best and most comprehensive view of Romney Marsh, spread out like an isometric drawing, below. From here the eye ranges over the grey-green levels, until lost in the dim haze of Dungeness, ten miles away. There curves the bay, like the arc of a bended bow, going in a magnificent semicircular sweep into the distance, its margin dotted at regular intervals with those pepper-boxes, the Martello towers, which it was hoped would have made it so hot for Napoleon had he ever descended upon these shores. Nearer at hand—almost, indeed, at our feet—goes the Royal Military Canal, its waters hid from this view-point, but its course defined by the double row of luxuriant trees that clothe its banks. Between foreground and far distance, in a welter of foreshortened fields and hedgerows, lie hid the many hamlets and villages of the marsh. From here it can be seen and felt how open this district is to every breeze that blows, but it needs for the traveller to descend into those levels for him to discover how fiercely the winds lurk behind the contorted hedges of the ridiculously-winding roads, leaping forth at the corners and seizing one with the rude grip of a strong man. Save for the direct road that leads from Hythe to Dymchurch and New Romney, and that other from thence to Snargate and Appledore, the marshland ways are mazy and deceptive, impassable ditches and drains rendering likely-looking short cuts impracticable. To approach a place coyly, and as though really going away from it, is the road method of Romney Marsh, and to strike boldly in the direction of any given spot is to make tolerably sure of never reaching it. Thus, when the stranger with dismay perceives the distant village for which he has been setting forth slipping by degrees behind him, he should know that he is on the right road, but when he observes its church tower towering straight ahead, then let him pause and anxiously inquire the way. When these facts are borne in mind there will be little wonder that Romney Marsh was among the last strongholds of superstition and smuggling.

The last smuggler has long since died, less in the odour of sanctity than of unexcised schnapps, and not since sixty years ago has a witch been credibly reported, sailing athwart the moon on a besom. Now, when cattle fall victims to the ills common to them, instead of "swimming" the nearest half-daft and wholly ill-favoured old woman, the farmers send to Hythe or Ashford for a veterinary surgeon.

It is a romantic view-point, this outlook from Lympne cliff, and quite unspoiled. You can have it wholly to yourself the livelong day, except for the occasional passage of a farm-hand, whose natural avocations take him past. It has not become a show-place and, by consequence, self-conscious. A steep and rough undercliff, a tangled mass of undergrowth clinging to the cliff itself, a cottage nestling beneath, and church and castle stark against the sky-line—that is Lympne from below. The purest of water spouts from the cliff-face, from a pipe—the shrunken representative of the river Limen—and landsprings give the fields a perennial verdure.

Lympne, despite its weird spelling, is merely "Lim"; how or why the "p" got into the place-name is unknown. The village—a small and drowsy one—describes a semicircle enclosing the church and its neighbour, and though pretty, is not in any way remarkable, save that it has an inn oddly named the "County Members," and a cottage bearing the quaintly pretty tablet pictured on the next page. The church is a grim stern church, exactly suited to its situation, with massive Early Norman and Early English interior, disdainful of ornament. The heavy door of the north porch is boldly patterned in nails, "A. G. C. W. 1708."

It is a Roman road that runs along the cliff-top through Lympne to Aldington, passing the hamlet of Court-at-Street that was once the Roman "Belerica," and emerging upon the "open plain" of Aldington Frith. "Allington Fright" as the Kentish peasantry name it, is still an open expanse. The airs of romance blow freely about it to-day, as of old, and although from the high ground by Aldington Forehead distant glimpses of Hythe and its big neighbour, Folkestone, whether you desire it or not, are obtained, the place is solitary, and the country, still unspoiled, dips down southward to "The Mesh" and the sea, over crumbling earthy cliffs, tangled with impenetrable bracken, blackberry brambles, and hazel coppices. This is the especial district of that fine prose legend, "The Leech of Folkestone"—"Mrs. Botherby's Story," as Ingoldsby names it. The place has ever been the home of superstition and the miraculous. To quote Ingoldsby himself, "Here it was, in the neighbouring chapelry, the site of which may yet be traced by the curious antiquary, that Elizabeth Barton, the 'Holy Maid of Kent,' had commenced that series of supernatural pranks which eventually procured for her head an unenvied elevation upon London Bridge." Although that eminent pluralist and cautious though fiery reformer, Erasmus, was Rector of Aldington in 1511, and opposed, alike by policy and temperament, to shams and spiritual trickery, the old leaven of superstition worked freely in his time, and, indeed, survived until recent years. Nay, more than that, these solitudes still harbour beliefs in the uncanny. The district, as of old, has an ill name, and the warlocks and other unholy subjects of Satan, once reported to make its wild recesses their favourite rendezvous, are found even now, in confidential interludes, to be not wholly vanished from the rural imagination. The moralist, from his lofty pinnacle, of course condemns these darkling survivals, but there be those, not so committed to matter-of-fact, who, revolting from the obvious and the commonplace, welcome the surviving folklore, and, plunging into its haunts, forget awhile the fashion of Folkestone, Sandgate, and Hythe.

The allusion in "The Leech of Folkestone" to the "neighbouring chapelry" is a reference to an ancient chapel of Our Lady whose roofless walls are still to be found on the undercliff at the roadside hamlet of Court-at-Street, situated on a little unobtrusive plateau midway between the level of the road from Hythe to Aldington and the drop to Romney Marsh. This, in those old days, was one of those minor places of pilgrimage which, possessing only an inferior collection of relics and being situated in out-of-the-way nooks and corners, could not command the crowds and the rich offerings common at such shrines as those of St. Thomas Á Becket, and other saints of his calibre. It is, indeed, a shy and retiring place, and the stranger not in search of it and not careful to make minute inquiries would most certainly miss the spot. It is gained down a short steep trackway beside the Court Lodge Farm, and, when found, forms a pleasing and unconventional peep—the delight of the artist, and at the same time his despair, because he cannot hope to convey into his sketch that last accent of romance the place owns. Here, where the track dips down and becomes a hollow way, the great gnarled roots of the thickly-clustering trees are seen in their lifelong desperate clutch at the powdering soil, and the trunks, wreathed here and there with ivy, shouldering one another in their competition for light and sustenance, form a heavy and massive frame to the picture beyond—a picture of ruined chapel and sullen pool, fed by landsprings from the broken cliff, and level marsh beyond, bounded only by that insistent row of Martello towers, and by the dull silver of the sea.

The story of the "Holy Maid of Kent" is intimately connected with this chapel. It seems that in 1525 there was living at the cottage still standing at Aldington, and called "Cobb's Hall," one Thomas Cobb, bailiff to my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, who, among his many other fat manors, owned all this expanse of Aldington, then largely a hunting forest. We do not know much of Thomas Cobb, but of his servant-maid, Elizabeth Barton, we possess a fund of information, now humorous and then tragical. Like Joan of Arc, Elizabeth Barton was quite a humble and uneducated peasant-girl. Her very name is rustic, "barton" being a term even now in use to denote a barn or cattle-shed. In midst of her service at "Cobb's Hall" this poor Elizabeth is stricken down by an extraordinary complication of internal bodily disease and mental affliction.

Alas! poor Elizabeth—no longer shall you scour pots or cleanse plates; no more for you are the homely domestic duties of the bailiff's home!

Wasted by sufferings that all the arts of the purblind medical practitioners of that time could not assuage, those doctors declared that there was something more than ordinary in her affliction. Some merely thought their science not sufficient for a cure; others, anxious for the professional credit of themselves and the practice of medicine, darkly hinted that here was an instance of demoniacal possession; and others yet, listening to the half-conscious ravings of the unhappy girl, took another view, and, devoutly crossing themselves, averred that this was a visitation from God, and that she was becoming possessed of a divine knowledge of things to be. A perusal of the quaint and voluminous contemporary records of Elizabeth Barton's career disposes one to the belief that her ailments brought on a condition of temporary, but recurrent, religious mania. She had always been a devout girl, as the parish priest, Richard Masters, was ready to declare; but neither he, nor any of his time, knew anything of mania of the religious variety, and when, called to her bedside, he saw and heard her in trances and somnambulistic excursions, implicitly believed that the "very godly certain things concerning the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments" she was heard to narrate were inspired. Those who had believed her demoniacally possessed were refuted by these pious sayings. The Devil, it was obvious, had no part in these things, but the Holy Ghost was working, through the medium of this poor peasant girl, to great events.

That was a time when such manifestations were, from the point of view of the Church, eminently desirable. Reformation was knocking at the gates of Popery—thunderous knocks and not to be denied. The Roman Catholic clergy and their religion were fast becoming discredited, and it was necessary to bolster up it and them by any means. The story of Joan of Arc, although a hundred years old, was by no means forgotten, and it was thought that what the farm-maiden of DomrÉmy could do for the Crown of France, this native product of Kentish soil might achieve for the Catholic Church in England.

So Richard Masters, enthusiastic, took horse and rode all the way from Aldington to Lambeth Palace, where the old and doting Archbishop Warham, in fear and rage at the impious dealings of Henry VIII. with Holy Church, received the story of this Kentish miracle with a hope that something might come of it. A good deal actually did so come, but not greatly to the advantage of Roman Catholicism.

"Keep you," said he, "diligent accompt of all her utterances: they come surely of God, and tell her that she is not to refuse or hide His goodness and works."

As a result of this ghostly advice of the Archbishop, Masters returned and persuaded Bailiff Cobb that pot-scouring and scullery-work were occupations distinctly beneath the dignity of one clearly the elect of the Holy Spirit, and she was promoted immediately to the place of an honoured guest in his house. At the same time she experienced a recovery, and became again the clumsy, big-footed country wench of yore. Meanwhile, however, the fame of her "prophecies" was bruited about in all that countryside—the cunning Richard Masters saw to that—and Cobb's house became a place of pilgrimage. Some came for the merely vulgar purpose of having their fortunes told; others sought the laying on of hands, for one so gifted could surely cure the ailing; and all combined to make Cobb's life a misery.

None was more disappointed at her recovery and consequent descent from supernatural heights to her former commonplace level than Elizabeth herself, and she determined to simulate her former natural trances. This iniquity seems to have been suggested by the Church, in the persons of two monks sent by the Archbishop from Canterbury. Those worthies, the cellarer of the Priory of Christ Church, one Doctor Bocking, and Dan William Hadley—took her under instruction. They educated the previously ignorant girl in the marvellous legends of the old Catholic female saints, taught her to believe herself one of that company, and coached her in all the abstruse doctrines of their religion. In her recurring cataleptic states, sometimes real, but oftener feigned, she re-delivered all these doctrines, and naturally astonished those who had known her for ignorant and absolutely without education, into a belief in her divine mission.

At this juncture it was thought desirable to transfer her to the neighbouring Chapel of Our Lady, where she might not only work good to the Church in general, but attract pilgrims and their offerings to the shrine, which of late had been doing very bad business, and was scarcely self-supporting. No one in our own times understands the art of advertisement better than did the religious of those days, and the occasion of her transference from Cobb's Hall to the Chapel was made the occasion for a great ceremonial. She had given out that she "would never take health of her body till such time as she had visited the image of Our Lady" at that place, and, indeed, declared that the Virgin had appeared to her and promised recovery on her obedience.

On that great day—the thing had been made so public—there were over two thousand persons present to witness the promised miracle, the whole concourse singing the Litany and repeating psalms and orations while Elizabeth was borne to the spot on a litter, acting to perfection the part of one possessed, "her face wondrously disfigured, her tongue hanging out, and her eyes being in a manner plucked out and lying upon her cheeks. There was then heard a voice speaking within her belly, as it had been in a tunne, her lips not greatly moving; she all that while continuing by the space of three hours or more in a trance. The which voice, when it told anything of the joys of Heaven, spake so sweetly and so heavenly that every man was ravished with the hearing thereof; and contrarywise, when it told anything of Hell, it spake so horribly and terribly that it put the hearers in a great fear. It spake also many things for the confirmation of pilgrimages and trentals, hearing of masses and confession, and many other such things. And after she had lyen there a long time, she came to herself again, and was perfectly whole"; and no wonder, for she was shamming all the while, with the aid of a cunning ventriloquist, who thus spoke so sweetly of Heaven and so horribly of Hell.

But this "miracle" so successfully imposed upon the people that she was, without exception, regarded as a saint. The Virgin, on second thoughts, personally desired her not to take up her residence in the Chapel, but to take Dr. Bocking for her spiritual father, to assume the name of Sister Elizabeth, and to proceed to the Priory of St. Sepulchre, in Canterbury. The blasphemies easy to the Catholics of that time could not possibly be better shown than by this narration.

Her progress of impudent imposture at Canterbury is more than surprising—it astounds the inquirer. She delivered oracles, which were printed and commanded a large sale, and to her, for advice on the religious questions then agitating the realm, resorted many of the noblest and best in the land. Of course, with the tuition and under the protection of the Church, her opinions and advice were distinctly against the King, whom she grew so rash as to threaten, on the question of his divorce and re-marriage. Nay, more, she found it possible to admonish the Pope. Sir Thomas More believed in her holy mission; Catherine of Aragon, the divorced Queen, supported her; Henry alone cared not a rap for her prophecies of disaster. She actually forced a way into his presence at Canterbury, on his return from France. He should not, she declared, reign a month after he married Anne Boleyn, and "should die a villain's death"; but he married her—and nothing happened. Strange to say—strange, after all we have heard of Henry's ferocity—nothing either happened at that time to the "Holy Maid" herself. She postponed the date of the coming disaster—put it forward a month—and still nothing happened. Greatly to the surprise of many, the King still reigned and seemed happy enough.

Meanwhile the most extravagant claims were made for the "Holy Maid." Once every fortnight, from the chapel in the Priory, she was, amidst celestial melodies, taken up to Heaven, to God and the saints. Her passage to the chapel lay through the monks' dormitory, and, according to the acts of accusation levelled against her, her pilgrimages to that chapel were not altogether so innocent of carnal things as could have been desired. Angels constantly visited her in her cell, and when they had departed came the Devil himself, horned, hoofed, and breathing sulphureous fumes, in manner appropriate. Accounts the monks gave of this last visitor were, however, not always received with that respectful belief anticipated, and so the Maid submitted to a hole being burnt in her hand, to convince the incredulous that Old Nick had come and attempted her virtue. It is impossible to quote the grossly indecent monkish stories; but they are ingenious, as also was their practice of escorting pilgrims to the outside of her cell when the Evil One was supposed to be present. The visitors observed with their own physical eyes, and smelt, with their own nostrils, the "great stinking smokes, savouring grievously," that then issued from the crevices of the door; and went away, fearing greatly. Later, when she was arrested, a stock of brimstone and assafoetida was discovered in her apartment, and these diabolical stinks found ready explanation.

She ran a course of three years' blasphemous deception before the Act of Attainder was prepared, under which she and several of her accomplices were arrested, found guilty of high treason, and executed at Tyburn. That same Richard Masters who discovered her existence to the religious world, Dr. Bocking and four others suffered with her, on April 21st, 1534. Her last words have their own interest. "Hither," said she, addressing the people, "I am come to die. I have been not only the cause of mine own death, which most justly I have deserved, but am also the cause of the death of all these persons which at this time here suffer. And yet I am not so much to be blamed, considering that it was well known unto these learned men that I was a poor wench without learning; and therefore they might have easily perceived that the things which were done by me could not proceed in no such sort; but their capacities and learning could right well judge that they were altogether feigned. But because the things which I feigned were profitable unto them, therefore they much praised me, and bare me in hand that it was the Holy Ghost, and not I that did them. And I, being puffed up with their praises, fell into a proud and foolish fantasye with myself, and thought I might feign what I would, which thing hath brought me to this case, and for the which I now cry to God and the King's Highness most heartily mercy, and desire all you good people to pray to God to have mercy on me, and all them that here suffer with me."

"If," says Lambarde, who was amused by the Maid's impudent career—"if these companions could have let the King of the land alone, they might have plaied their pageants as freely as others have been permitted, howsoever it tended to the dishonour of the King of Heaven."