It was in the Swale that Augustine baptized King Ethelbert on Whit Sunday, June 2nd, A.D. 596, and thus made him a child of God. On Christmas Day the following year he similarly baptized 10,000 of the King’s subjects, but exactly where these chilly ceremonies took place is not recorded. In any case, if the Swale were as muddy then as it is now, the converts must have come out extremely dirty.

The one and only way into Sheppey without ferrying into it is across the Kingsferry Bridge, which here spans the Swale, and is an electrically worked swing-bridge of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway. It is also a road-bridge. Sometimes a week will pass before it is required to be opened to allow a sailing-vessel to pass. The charge for crossing varies from a modest penny for cyclist or pedestrian, up to one shilling and sixpence for a motor-car.

It has for such a long time past been the almost universal custom to speak or write of the “Isle of Sheppey” that it becomes a convenience to follow the popular way; but really the name “Sheppey” includes the designation “island”; being the modern form of the Saxon name for it, “Sceapige,” the “sheep island.” It is said that the Romans knew it as Insula Ovium, the Isle of Sheep; and certainly it has remained through all the succeeding ages a place where flocks have been kept and have flourished. In this connection William Camden gives us some interesting facts relating to Sheppey in his day:

“This Isle of Sheepe, whereof it feedeth mightie great flockes, was called by our auncestours Shepey—that is the Isle of Sheepe.” He then proceeds to speak of the “fatte-tailed sheepe, of exceeding great size, whose flesh is most delicate to taste. I have seen younge lads, taking women’s function, with stools fastened untoe their buttockes to milke, yea, and to make cheese of ewes milke.”

Centuries ago this industry disappeared, and although the Roquefort cheeses we nowadays import from France in great quantities are similar and popular products, nothing of the kind is now made in Sheppey, or anywhere in England.

The “fat-tailed sheep” will nowadays be sought in vain in Sheppey. There are many of the ordinary breeds, but, on the honour of a traveller, none of that type.

This intimate, yet in some ways remote, island off the Kentish mainland is but eleven miles in length by five broad, and would thus seem to afford little scope for variety; but within this small compass is found scenery of very varied description, ranging from the wide-spreading marshes beside the Swale to a high ridge or backbone, on whose highest point stands the village of Minster-in-Sheppey. A peculiar feature of the low, marshy part of the island is found in the ancient mounds known as “cotterels,” usually said to be burial-places of the Danes; they are large and irregular grassy hillocks, which may more probably be the spoil from olden drainage-trenches. Thus heaped up, they formed, either by accident or intention, refuges for sheep in time of floods. Two of these are seen on the way from Kingsferry.

The chief town of the island, the dockyard town and port of Sheerness, is six miles from Kingsferry. On the way to it you pass near Queenborough, originally “Kingborough,” but renamed by Edward the Third in honour of Queen Philippa, when a fortress was also built. Of that castle, in whose design that distinguished Bishop, William of Wykeham, had a hand, nothing now remains, and the railway station, which stands on the site of it, although no doubt a more useful institution nowadays, frankly makes no attempt at romance. Queenborough is now a rather plaintive-looking town of one broad street, devastated by the gruesome odour, resembling putrid meat, emanating from extensive and diabolically prosperous chemical-manure works. It will thus be judged that Queenborough is an excellent place not to visit. The church itself contains nothing of interest except a battered and illiterate brass on the wall, to one “Henry Knight, sometime maior of this Towne, who was Master of a ship to Greenland, and Harpined there 24 Veiages.

Nor is Sheerness precisely a joyous holiday resort. It is a place of strength, guarding the entrance to the Thames and Medway, and will have to stand in the forefront of any attack; but exactly wherein its strength resides is not at all apparent to the layman. No doubt booms and floating mines, although not spectacular defences, would play a foremost part. The history of this congeries of four towns—Blue Town, Marine Town, Banks Town, and Mile Town—that constitute Sheerness is not a glorious one. The site was a swamp until reclamation was begun under James the First. Continued in the next reign, and through the Commonwealth, the Admiralty in the time of Charles the Second selected this as the site for a dockyard and fortifications to protect Sheppey from invasion. Pepys tells us, under date of August 18th, 1665, how “we,” the King and others, “walked up and down, laying out the ground to be taken in for a yard to lay provisions for cleaning and repairing of ships, and a most proper place it is for the purpose.”

On February 27th, 1667, the King and the Duke of York were at Sheerness to lay out the design for the fortifications, which, four months later, were destroyed by the Dutch.

An odd survival, found where least expected, remains here. Few who walk the planks of the Cornwallis Jetty realise that they are laid over the forgotten hull of the old man-o’-war Cornwallis, seventy-four guns, which figured in the Navy a hundred years ago. Down beneath remains the dim interior of that wooden line-of-battle ship, with the original portholes.

For the rest, Sheerness to-day is sheerly and frankly ugly, and Cockney, and quite unashamed. The look of it is as though long lengths of the Old Kent Road and the dullest, dreariest purlieus of Camberwell had come down to the sea and forgotten to return. Let us, then, leaving it behind, hasten along the shore, past the obsolete Barton’s Fort and the hideous brick-and-iron railed Admiralty range-finders that form abominable eyesores on the beach, and make for Minster. To reach that hill-top village, the woebegone attempted developments of a building-estate styled “Minster-on-Sea,” a place without shape or form, are passed; but, these things left behind, the unspoiled country of Sheppey is entered. The “monasterium,” whence Minster derives its name, was the ancient Priory of St. Saxburga, founded in early Saxon times. The square gatehouse of the nunnery, standing by the church, is all that remains of that religious house, and even this building, fashioned of the most amazing admixture of brick, stone, and flint has been wholly secularised and converted into a dwelling-house.

The church is intrinsically interesting for its architecture, its monuments, and its brasses, including the very fine and early brasses of Sir John de Northwode—that knight who, according to the irreverent Ingoldsby, received a black eye from a brickbat at the siege of Shurland Castle—and his wife, Joan, about 1320; but it is far more so as a literary landmark. It is, of course, closely associated with that most engaging among the “Ingoldsby Legends,” the story of “Grey Dolphin,” one of the most genuinely humorous things in literature, which bears reading over and over again, and will remain fresh when the marks of many a later funny fellow have been forgotten. Sir Robert de Shurland, the hero of that story, was a real flesh-and-blood person, who flourished in the thirteenth century and was a very earnest, strenuous, and warlike knight—not at all a farcical person. He went out in the Crusade of 1271, and at a later date was knighted for gallantry at the siege of Caerlaverock. The ladies, it would seem, liked this doughty character. “If I were a young demoiselle,” says an old metrical romance, “I would give myself to that brave knight, Sir Robert de Shurland.”

In the church is the singular tomb of this warrior, with a recumbent effigy not in the least resembling the portrait drawn of him by Ingoldsby, for he is shown to be tall and thin, not short and stockish. Otherwise, the description is exact; and it is indeed the effigy of a “warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century. His hands are clasped in prayer”—or they would be, had not the arms been shorn off at the elbows—“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 beside his dexter calf lies sculptured in bold relief a horse’s head.” Ingoldsby, you see, together with the antiquaries of his time, thought the cross-legged effigies on ancient tombs invariably indicated that the person represented had been a Crusader. It has since been proved to demonstration that this was not the case, and that this curious pose was only a convention of the age. The horse’s head is shown rising from some strange carving intended to represent waves, and is an allusion to the grant of “wreck of the sea” which the knight had obtained where his manors extended to the shore. This was ordinarily a privilege of the Crown. It gave him property in all wreckage, waifs and strays, and flotsam and jetsam which he could reach with the point of his lance when riding as far as possible into the sea at ebb-tide.

Margaret Shurland, daughter and heiress of this personage, married one William Cheyney. The altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of Queen Elizabeth, stands in the church and is a noble monument. He was a remarkable man, for he filled important offices of State in the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, and in all the tragic changes of those changeful times lost neither head, fortune, nor repute. He was Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle, a Privy Councillor, and Treasurer of the Household. A man of wealth, he demolished the old castle of Shurland and built in its stead the mansion yet standing, long used as a farmhouse.

Among the other monuments in Minster church is an alabaster effigy sometimes considered to be that of one Jeronimo Magno, a Spanish prisoner of war captured by Drake off Calais Harbour in Armada time. For three years this unhappy hidalgo was kept prisoner aboard ship at the Nore, and then death ended his trials, in 1591. Later criticism, however, identifies the chain worn by the effigy as that of the Yorkist faction: the chain of Suns and Roses, worn by adherents of Edward the Fourth and the House of York; which would date back the monument by some seventy years and thus dispose of the Spanish prisoner theory.

Another very interesting effigy is that of one Jordanus de Scapeia, found in 1833 in the churchyard, buried five feet deep. The clasped mailed hands hold a little mystic oval at the tips of the fingers, bearing a tiny effigy intended to typify the soul.

Out in Minster churchyard on sunny days of wandering breezes the guns of the distant forts and battleships that guard the coast are heard to roar and mutter and rumble, according to their distance, and above the peaked roof of the church tower twirls the odd horse-head weather-vane which gives the local name, the “Horse Church.” Here are many stones to the memory of Sheerness dockyard men; among them one with quaint and weatherworn sculpture and curious verses to one Henry Worth, a gunner, who died in 1770, aged fifty-seven: