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 the Devil 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.

At any rate, it is an appropriate legend for the Ingoldsby Country. Had Barham only known of it, to what excellent use could he not have turned the tale!

Five miles of picturesquely winding sandy lanes lead in a gradual descent past Iwade, through orchards, and now and again across rough patches of open pasture, with two field-gates across the route, proclaiming that wayfarers here are few. At length a view of Sheppey opens out, across that arm of the sea known as the Swale, crossed by a combined railway and road bridge on the site of the old "King's Ferry." The railway is that branch of the Chatham and Dover running from Sittingbourne to Queenborough and Sheerness. Here then, paying the penny toll for self and cycle, one enters the island by road, at the only place where the channel is bridged. The four other places from which it is possible to enter are all ferries.

The railway to Sheerness has never opened up the island, and Sheppey, before the opening of the light railway that has recently been made to traverse its length, remained to Londoners an unknown land. It may be readily supposed that it will largely so remain, in spite of the facilities for travel that the new line provides, and notwithstanding the frantic efforts of the strenuous land companies, whose extravagant advertisements might lead the untravelled to suppose that here was the Garden of Eden, and that in purchasing building-sites in this remote corner of the kingdom speculators or prospective residents would be laying the foundations of rude health or comfortable fortunes. There are, it is true, few places so interesting as Sheppey, but why, apart from its history? Just because its scenery is so weird, its surroundings so outlandish. That scenery is of two sorts—the marshes that border the sea-channel of the Swale, dividing it from the Kentish mainland; and the high ridge or backbone which runs in the direction of the island's greatest length, from Sheerness to Warden Point and Shellness. Trees are few, and grow only in the more sheltered parts, if it can truly be said that there is shelter at all on Sheppey, where the winds—particularly the east winds—blow great guns, and boom, howl, and shriek in successful competition with the cannon of the heavy defences at Sheerness, whose deep, hoarse voices are puny compared with those of the gales that blow on Sheppey. All these historic and physical peculiarities of this right little, tight little island are very well for the explorer, who goes forth to discover the unusual—and certainly finds it here—and who would be grievously disappointed at not finding it, but to live on Sheppey would be another matter. Those marshlands whose delicate tints and general air so appeal to the casual stranger in summer, that muddy sea which sullenly washes away the crumbling, slimy cliffs of dark clay along the coast-line from Sheerness to Warden, lose their interest in the long months of winter, become merely grim and dismal, and obsess the mind with doleful imaginings.

But these things have nothing to do with the literary pilgrim, who does not select the winter for his pilgrimage. He descends upon Sheppey in the summer, and here is the picture he sees, so soon as he has left the King's Ferry bridge behind. The road runs flatly and sandily ahead, in midst of a world of marshes, cloaked and successfully hidden for the most part by a luxuriant growth of grass. From a cloudless sky the song of the larks comes down in changeful trills, and if one dare gaze into the aching blue they can be seen, mounting higher and higher as though they sought to reach the sun itself. Everything else tells of noonday rest. The still heat that bathes the unduly energetic in undesirable perspiration sends one seeking for wayside shelter, but only on the distant hillside, where Minster crowns the ridge, do the trees begin, dotted singly, and looking in the distance like giant umbrellas. The myriad sheep of these flats have long since given up the quest for shade in this district where trees are only objects in the distance and hedgerows are unknown, and huddled together in an endeavour to find a cooling shade behind each other's backs. Even the lambs have ceased their clumsy gambols. The dykes stew in the sun, and a heat-haze makes distant objects in the landscape perform an optical St. Vitus's dance. Only the great brick-barges, beating up and down the creeks from Sittingbourne, go a slow and dignified pace, their rust-red sails, seen across country, looking as though they walked the fields. The colouring of this scene is in a beautiful harmony—the foreground grasses bleached to a more than straw-like pallor, toning off in the distance to a rich apricot yellow, meeting in one direction the irradiated pale blue sky, flecked with white clouds, and in another the green hillsides of Minster. Over all is a sense of vastness, and the pilgrim throws out his arms and draws deep breaths in sympathy. Space, elbow-room, isolation, those are the dominant notes of Sheppey.

Queenborough, two miles off to the left from our entrance at King's Ferry, finds no mention in the Ingoldsby Legends, but now that we are here, a thorough exploration might as well be undertaken, and both it and Sheerness visited. Queenborough is a place with a past, and proclaims the fact in every nook and corner of its old streets, where the footfall of the stranger echoes loudly, and tufts of grass grow between the rough cobble-stones of the pavements. Queenborough owes its name to the chivalric courtesy of Edward III., who in 1366 changed it from Kingborough to its present title in honour of his Queen, Philippa. At that time it was an important point, and was fortified for the defence of the Medway by a castle designed by that master-architect and shrewd ecclesiastic, William of Wykeham. ArchÆologists tell how its ground-plan was in the shape of an heraldic rose, but nearly all traces of it are gone. Its history never included siege or stirring incident, and the buildings were ruinous even in the time of the Commonwealth, when they were sold and carted off in a commonplace and inglorious way. Now—the last note of humiliation—the railway station of Queenborough is built on the site.

The town dates the beginning of its decay from 1377, when Edward III. who had honoured it in the re-naming, eleven years before, ensured its ruin by removing the staple to Sandwich; but some life and enterprise would seem to have been left, even in the time of Queen Anne, for most of the houses in its one long street appear to have been built about the period of that deceased sovereign. Quaint red-brick houses they are, the brick seamed and pitted with age, the roofs high-pitched; the whole with that indefinite suggestion of a Dutch town which many of these old waterside ports possess, even though it be impossible to pick out one house and find anything particularly Dutch in its design.

It is not without a certain feeling of humiliation that one mentions anything Dutch along the Medway and in the neighbourhood of Sheerness, for Sheerness itself felt the brunt of the Dutch naval attack in June 1667, when seventy-two hostile ships reduced the little sandspit fort, landed a force, and occupied the town. Thence the Dutch Admiral at leisure proceeded up to Chatham, destroying the English ships and even working havoc in the Thames. Pepys at Gravesend remarked in his Diary, "We do plainly at this time hear the guns play,"—and in terror went off to Brampton, in Huntingdonshire, where he hid his wealth in an unlikely spot. It was not until the end of June that the fear of invasion was past, and no lapse of time has sufficed to wipe away the shame.

The dockyards and forts of Sheerness are to-day very efficient and formidable, but they do not succeed in rendering anything but an unfavourable opinion of the town, whose prevailing notes are meanness and squalor; few others than fishers or seafaring men of the Navy ever set foot here. It is the most considerable place on the island, and, the very Cinderella of dockyard towns, repels rather than invites the visitor.

Bluetown, an outlying residential part, overlooking the sea and possessed of a dwarf sea-wall and a parade of sorts, is better. Here the Government officials chiefly live, as it were, at the gates of the Unknown, for although there is nothing to hinder excursions into "the interior," few have ever been those to make the attempt. Looking at Sheppey with the eyes of Sheerness, one in fact regards that town largely in the light of a settlement on the coast of some impossible island in the most impossible of colonies. We shall, however, see that Sheppey contains more of interest in a day's tour than is readily to be found in the same time within the compass of the Home Counties.

For Sheppey—it is a redundancy to talk of the "Isle of Sheppey," the ancient Saxon "Sceapige," the "Isle of Sheep," including the designation of "island"—besides containing some of the most notable of Ingoldsby landmarks, has witnessed historic events. The outskirts of Sheerness are, of course, peculiarly soulless and abnormally gritty and dirty. If, however, the explorer perseveres until these are left behind, he will see in the distance, some two-and-a-half miles ahead, an isolated hill rising abruptly from the levels and surmounted by a Church. A nearer approach discovers a pretty countryside and the fact that an interesting village clings round the topmost slopes of the hill. This is the village of Minster-in-Sheppey, thus particularised in order to distinguish it from the better-known Minster-in-Thanet. The church was once a dependency of the abbey founded here by St. Saxburga, or Sexburga, in A.D. 675; the abbey spoken of in ancient documents as "Monasterium ScapeiÆ," or "The Sheppey Monastery." It is this title that has given the village of Minster its name, as found in the changing forms of the word since the twelfth century, when it was "Moynstre." By degrees it became "Menstre," and thence assumed its present form. It is by no means proposed in these pages to follow the fortunes of Saxburga and her establishment of seventy-seven nuns, nor to tell the story of how the heathen Danes in after years desecrated the place. Sanctuaries existed in those times, it would seem (from the frequency and certainty of their being attacked) expressly for the purpose of being violated, and scarce a religious house, in the course of many centuries, escaped ruin at the hands of pagan piratical hordes, or of internal enemies who, although Christians, were hardly less savage. Even at a time so comparatively late as 1322, some tragical affair, whose details have never been disclosed, took place here, for at that time both the abbey and the church were said to have "suffered pollution from blood," and the Archbishop of Canterbury was entreated to send a faculty for holding a special service of reconciliation, to purge the place.

The abbey, of course, shared the common fate of such establishments, big and little, in the strenuous days of Henry VIII., and its buildings have been so diligently quarried for stone during more than three hundred years that nothing is left of them but the gatehouse, which neighbours the west end of the church. Even that has been ingeniously turned to account, and, with the great entrance archway bricked up, and modern sashed windows knocked into the walls, forms very comfortable quarters for the families of two farm-labourers.

But it is not to discuss abbesses, saintly or merely human, that we are here. Diligent readers of the Ingoldsby Legends will at once recognise Minsterin-Sheppey as the principal scene of one of the most interesting and humorous legends of the series, the prose story of "Grey Dolphin;" and not far distant is the site of Shurland Castle, where Sir Robert de Shurland, Lord of Shurland and Minster and Baron of Sheppey in comitatu Kent, dwelt, and, teste Tom Ingoldsby, "to the frame of a dwarf united the soul of a giant and the valour of a gamecock." There is, true enough, a great, clumsy altar-tomb in Minster church to the memory of that redoubtable Baron, who was a real person, and not one of Barham's "many inventions." And not only a real, but a very gallant and distinguished personage too, of whom it was perhaps rather too bad of Ingoldsby to draw so farcical a portrait. He took part in the Crusade of 1271, and was at a later period knighted by Prince Edward for gallantry at the siege of Caerlaverock. "If I were a young demoiselle," says an old romance, "I would give myself to that brave knight, Sir Robert de Shurland." Women ever loved brave men.

The effigy of the knight bespeaks a man rather tall and thin, than thick-set and of a dwarfish stature. The local tradition upon which Barham founded the legend of "Grey Dolphin" is that the Lord of Shurland, happening to pass by the churchyard of Minster, found a fat friar in the act of refusing, unless he were paid for his services, to say the last rites of the Church over the body of a drowned sailor brought to this spot for burial. No one felt inclined to pay for the unfortunate mariner's passport to Heaven, and the friar was obdurate, refusing to accede to even the Baron's request. The Baron promptly slew the friar, and kicked his[Pg 243]
[Pg 244] body into the open grave, to bear the sailor company on his journey to Hades. Mother Church was not particularly fond of the greasy friars who at that time infested the country, but she could not brook so flagrant an insult; and accordingly, made matters extremely unpleasant for the Baron, who, learning that the King lay aboard ship two miles off the coast of Sheppey, swam there and back on his horse, Grey Dolphin, and obtained a pardon. But, on returning to the shore, an old woman prophesied that the horse which had now saved his life should some day cause his death. To render this, as he thought, impossible, the Baron killed his horse on the spot, and went off rejoicing. The next year, however, chancing to ride over the sands again, his horse stumbled over the skull of Grey Dolphin and threw the Baron fatally.

His tomb, rubbed down in a cleanly and housewifely manner quite destructive of any appearance of antiquity, is in the south aisle of Minster Abbey church—the effigy of a "recumbent warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. His hands are clasped in prayer; his legs, crossed in that position so prized by Templars in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a Soldier of the Faith in Palestine. Close behind his dexter calf lies sculptured in bold relief a horse's head." This is represented in the midst of some curious carving, perhaps intended for waves. At the feet of the mutilated effigy crouches a battered little figure of a page, misericorde in hand; while "Tickletoby," the Baron's sword, is represented in stone carving by his side, with a spear the length of his tomb. It was, as Tom Ingoldsby explains, "the fashion in feudal times to give names to swords: King Arthur's was christened Excalibur; the Baron called his Tickletoby, and whenever he took it in hand it was no joke." The legend of "Grey Dolphin" has been explained away by antiquaries, who say that the horse's head means only that Sir Robert de Shurland had obtained a grant of the "Wreck of the Sea" where his manors extended towards the shore, and was entitled to all wreckage, waifs and strays, flotsam and jetsam, which he could reach with the point of his lance when riding at ebb tide as far into the sea as possible.

The weather-vane on the tower, fashioned to represent a horse's head, alludes to this story, and gives the local name of the "Horse Church."

The siege of Shurland Castle belongs more to fiction than to history, and it is only in Tom Ingoldsby's pages that you can read how Guy Pearson, one of the defenders, "had got a black eye from a brickbat." Most of the people—John de Northwode, William of Hever, and Roger of Leybourne—who led the assault are real persons, and, indeed, the brasses of Sir John de Northwode and his wife, Joan of Badlesmere, are there, in the church of Minster, to this day. Haines, the author of the first, and still the standard, work on Monumental Brasses, says the knight's effigy "has undergone a peculiar Procrustean process, several inches having been removed from the centre of the figure to make it equal in length to that of his wife. The legs have been restored and crossed at the ankles, an attitude apparently not contemplated by the original designer. From the style of engraving, these alterations seem to have been made at the close of the fifteenth century." Since Haines wrote, the brass of the knightly sheriff has been again restored, a piece of metal having been inserted, with the effect of lengthening the figure considerably. The effect of a modern slip of brass let into this fifteenth-century engraving is not a little incongruous.

The Baron who put John de Northwode and his posse comitatus to flight left a daughter, his sole heiress. If one could believe Ingoldsby (which one cannot do) it would be sufficient to read that "Margaret Shurland in due course became Margaret Ingoldsby; her portrait still hangs in the gallery at Tappington. Her features are handsome but shrewish; but we never could learn that she actually kicked her husband." Diligent delving into old records proves, however, that Margaret Shurland married one William Cheyney; and the altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of good Queen Bess, stands in Minster church even now.

That noble monument details how important a personage he was. Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle, Treasurer of the Household to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and Privy Councillor in the succeeding reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, he was obviously a man of affairs. Here the recumbent effigy of him lies, a surrounding galaxy of sixteen shields of arms setting forth the noble alliances of his house. He was a man of great wealth—probably he helped himself liberally out of the Treasury—and, razing Shurland Castle to the ground and leaving nothing to tell of the old stronghold, built in its stead the mansion now standing, but fallen from its old estate and become a farmhouse.

One marvels by what suavity of demeanour, what tact, double-dealing, and wholesale jettison of principles and personal convictions, political, social, and religious, this man of many dignities contrived to keep and augment his fortune and preserve his head upon his shoulders in the hurly-burly and general quick-change of those times in which he lived, when an incautious word meant Tower Hill and the executioner's axe, or, at the very least of it, the forfeiture of property. Surely he did not wear his heart upon his sleeve who moved thus freely in Courts, and who died, undisturbed and in the fulness of time, in his bed.

Minster church is rich in other monuments. Here in a recess of the wall can still be seen the mutilated alabaster effigy of a knight in armour, representing an unfortunate Spanish prisoner of rank captured by Drake off Calais harbour at the descent of the Armada in 1588. This poor Don Jeronimo Magno, of Salamanca, was given into the custody of Sir Edward Hoby, Constable of Queenborough and Commander at the Nore, who kept him for three years a prisoner aboard ship at that rough and boisterous anchorage. It is not surprising that the unhappy Jeronimo died at the end of that time—unless we like to be surprised that he stood it so long. He was buried here December 5th, 1591. The hooligan instincts of fanatical religious reformers, and still more those of the succeeding centuries of village goths and visitant 'Arrys, have bashed the nose of the effigy, shorn off at the elbow his once devoutly clasped arms, and scored him about with their quite uninteresting initials. Another such effigy, not so ill-treated, is that supposed to represent Jordanus de Scapeia, whose clasped hands still hold between their fingers a mystic oval sculptured with a little effigy thought to symbolise the soul. This monument was found buried in the churchyard, in 1833, five feet deep.

From this hilltop churchyard one may glimpse a view whose like is not often seen. Sheerness to one side, the narrow ribbon of the Swale, the broad channels of the Medway and the Thames, and the great expanse of slimy marshes, gleam under the summer sun like burnished steel. When evening comes and the sunbeams slant downwards from dun-coloured clouds, the scene is one to make an artist despair of ever adequately rendering the beauty of it.

The dust of countless generations lies mingled here, in this swelling God's Acre, raised so high above the road. Abbesses and nuns and the good folks of Minster for many hundreds of years have all found rest at last, and most of their names are forgotten, save by the casual antiquary who turns over the yellow pages of the parish registers. Most of the gravestones date from periods ranging from a hundred to sixty years ago, and their inscriptions tell eloquently of a seafaring population near at hand—at Sheerness, of course; for the ship's carpenters, rope-makers, boatswains, master-mariners, and the many others of the seafaring profession generally have their occupation duly set forth on their memorials. The rope-maker's is embellished with ropes, curiously carved and fashioned, representing knots whose name sailormen alone may know. Others bear terrific attempts at picturing the Judgment Day, intended to make the casual sinner quail. Unfortunately, the puffy, overfed angels blowing the Last Trump on trumpets many sizes too large for them make the sinful smile, and they go away quite undisturbed in their old iniquitous ways.

So greatly has the soil of the churchyard been raised by the countless years of interments, that the church itself lies, as it were, in a little hollow, and the entrances to it by the south door, and from the western portal in the tower, are flanked by walls of grassy earth, the whole immediately overlooking and abutting upon the houses of the homely village.

There are exquisitely beautiful glimpses on the road from Minster to Warden, beginning immediately on leaving the place. To the left, a lovely valley that in Devonshire would be called a "coombe," and in the Isle of Wight a "chine," shelves down to the sea at the farm of Scrapsgate. There from the road you see the valley, notched out like a V, with myriads of wild-flowers, and in the distance on the right hand the farm-buildings, nestling among orchards and a dense clump of trees, and in that wedge of the V the sparkling waters of a sea that is always alive and companionable with the great steamers coming in or out of the mouth of[Pg 251]
[Pg 252] the Thames, with the brick-lighters and sailing-barges creeping round the island, or with the swallow-like flight of the graceful yachts of the Royal Thames Yacht Squadron. Turning in the other direction, the mazy creeks and many islands and saltings of the Medway are stretched out, silver-grey and opalescent, over beyond the shoulder of the hill—mystic, wonderful, sanctified by distance to the likeness of a Promised Land.

In two miles from Minster we come to Eastchurch, a populous and pretty village whose beautiful church warms the enthusiasm of the pilgrim. Across the meadows rises the imposing frontage of Shurland House, now, as we have said, a farmhouse, but a Gothic battlemented structure built by Sir Thomas Cheyney, when Warden of the Cinque Ports, about 1550, and the not undignified successor of the Shurland Castle inhabited by that Sir Robert who was the hero of the legend of "Grey Dolphin."

Sir Thomas, the builder of this great place, was succeeded by his son, "the extravagant Lord Cheyney" of Toddington, Bedfordshire, after whose fall Shurland House reverted to the Crown. James I. granted it to Philip Herbert, a son of the Earl of Pembroke, and now, after many vicissitudes, it belongs to the Holfords.

By turning to the left in the village street of Eastchurch, and bearing to the right at the next turning, all that is left of Warden is reached in two miles. The little that remains of the village is known by the inelegant name of "Mud Row," whose few decrepit houses lead direct to what would be destruction for the speedy cyclist, were it not for the rough bar thrown across the rutty lane.[Pg 253]
[Pg 254] Dismounting here, the astonished stranger finds that the road ends suddenly and without warning, and with it the island as well. It is just a little nerve-shaking. Here one looks down upon a scene of wildest desolation, upon the sea, a hundred feet below, at the bottom of a dark mass of clayey cliffs, slipping and sliding into the water, and torn by repeated landslips into yawning fissures and fantastic pinnacles. The sullen sea is discoloured as far as eye can reach with the dissolving clay, and, horrible to tell, out of many fissures grin bleached skulls, while strewn here and there are human bones. It is a Golgotha. Here stood the church and churchyard of Warden until 1877, and this tumbled landslip is all that remains of them.

For many years this encroachment of the sea at Warden has been in progress, until, up to now, over eighty acres have been washed away. The vanished church has a curious history, having been rebuilt in 1836 with the stones from old London Bridge, demolished four years earlier for the building of the present structure. It was Delamark Banks, son of Sir Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, who gave the stones and rebuilt the church of Warden, as duly set forth on a sculptured stone tablet now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row.

By 1870 the sea had crept up to the church, and it was closed, to be pulled down in 1877, when the bodies of those who had been buried in the churchyard during the previous thirty years were disinterred and removed to Minster. They are the more ancient dead whose poor remains are exposed with every fall of earth, to bleach in the sun.

From the desolation of Warden it is four miles to that hooked spit of shells and sand, Shellness, the farthest extremity of the island. By tracks which might, with every excuse, be described as hazardous, the route begins, but soon descends to the low sea-shore and the flat marshes—the shore carefully protected by a long series of dwarf timber groynes and a curved "apron" of concrete, the marshes defended by massive earthen dykes, continued along the circuitous shore all the way round to King's Ferry.

Shellness is well named, for it is a vast expanse of small marine shells, mostly in a perfect condition. Such a beach would be the paradise of holiday children at a seaside resort, but here, at the edge of an obscure island, where there is no life but that of a coastguard station and the nearest village is almost three miles away, it is clearly wasted. Among this wilderness of shells grows the beautiful yellow sea-poppy, finding its nutriment in some mysterious manner where no soil can be seen.

Three miles across the sea-channel of the Swale lies Whitstable, plain to see, and in the Swale rides the oyster fleet of that celebrated fishery.

This channel of the Swale was the point of departure selected by James II. when flying, terror-stricken, before the Protestant deliverance of the nation by William of Orange. It was in December 1688 that a hoy was chartered and the fugitive King landed at Elmley, higher up the channel, intending to put off from this point or hook of Shellness; but the unwonted spectacle of a humble boat containing persons in the garb of great gentlemen landing in that obscure place in those troubled times created a sensation among the fishermen, who took them for Jesuits, and, hating Popery and eager for plunder, mobbed them. They thought the King was that notorious Jesuit, Father Petre. "I know him by his lean jaws," said one. "Search the hatchet-faced old Jesuit!" exclaimed another. They snatched his money and watch; his coronation ring and valuable trinkets—even the diamond buckles of his shoes—they took for glass and did not touch.

Then—tremendous discovery!—someone recognised him as the King. A momentary awe seized them, but they quickly recovered, and this poor trembling James they took, incoherently protesting, in custody across the Swale and into Faversham, there to be placed under surveillance.

This is why this corner of Sheppey is interesting. It witnessed one of the final scenes in the tragedy of the Stuarts.