CHAPTER X THANET'S CORNFIELDS--MONKTON--MINSTER-IN-THANET--BIRCHINGTON--QUEX PARK--WESTGATE--DANDELION.

The enormous size of the cornfields of Thanet is immediately apparent, and is one of the most striking features of the Isle. The soil, too, is remarkably fertile; owing, according to the old monkish chronicles, to the Divine favour shown to the locality through the virtues of St. Augustine and his Christian mission. Nothing was too tough for the imaginations of those mediÆval monks to assimilate.

Three miles across these vast, hedgeless fields, whose waving, golden corn in August meets the blue zenith with a startling contrast, is Minster—“Minster-in-Thanet,” more particularly to distinguish it from Minster-in-Sheppey. It is reached through Monkton, a little wayside village, where the old stocks still stand by the grassy selvedge of the road, outside the church. Minster forms one of the most popular excursions for the summer tripper at Margate or Ramsgate. I think they do not come precisely for sake of its archÆological associations or its religious history, but rather because there are popular tea-gardens in the village and the beer at the several inns is supposed to be of super-excellence.

The founding of the original monastery, at Minster, for nuns, was accompanied, according to the legend, by miraculous interpositions, but these are so common in the story of early religious houses that we are not in the least surprised at them; nor is there any room for astonishment in learning that the Saxon King, who, very greatly against his instincts, gave the land for the monastery, did so give it as expiation for murder.

It all happened about A.D. 670, when marvels were still in the making. It was Egbert, eighth King of Kent, who instigated the crime. He had two cousins whose claims to the throne were better than his, but he secured the succession, and, to make the position doubly sure, consigned the unfortunate cousins to death by the agency of one Thunor, whose very name, meaning “thunder,” has something of a grandly awful quality. Thunor murdered those rightful heirs, and their bodies were buried under Egbert’s throne. It seems a strange choice. But a mysterious heavenly light shone upon the spot and threw the King into abject terror, so that he sent for Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, confessed his share in the crime, and asked what was to be done. On the advice given, he sent for Domneva, sister of the murdered princes, and compounded with her on the terms of giving her, for the purpose of building a monastery, as much land as a hind could run over at one course.

The hind was accordingly released in the presence of the King, and held a straight course over Thanet, running over forty-eight plough-lands, some ten thousand acres, in spite of the attempts made by Thunor to stop it. He had better have let the animal run, without any interference, for, as he attempted to ride across its path, the ground opened in an earthquake and swallowed him “in the infernal regions, in company with Dathan and Abiram,” as the old monkish chronicle has it.

Thunor is described by Simon of Durham as “a certain man of sin and son of perdition, a limb of Satan and of the house of the devil.” I don’t think much more to his discredit could be added; and altogether we may conclude that, if this genealogy be anywise correct, he simply went home to his relations when the earth opened and received him so dramatically.

The line taken by the hind was long known as “St. Mildred’s Lynch,” from St. Mildred, daughter of Domneva, who succeeded her mother as Abbess. It ran, a green bank, across Thanet, between the manor-house at the east end of Minster church and St. Mildred’s Bay, Westgate.

Most of it has been broken down and ploughed under in spite of the monkish legend that the cultivator who destroyed it would meet with the fate of Thunor.

Minster church is a worthy descendant of this monastery, its tower and lofty leaded spire forming a landmark for long distances. It is, in fact, by design and not chance that it stands thus, for near by was the Wantsum channel; and to this day we perceive, in the south-eastern angle-turret of this tower, the ancient beacon-tower, possibly of Saxon date, which guided the course of ships to and fro, and probably exhibited a light after nightfall. The general scale and style of the church is altogether superior to that of an ordinary parish church, and still markedly displays its monastic origin. Altogether, its Norman nave and Early English transepts and chancel, together with the carved oaken chancel-stalls, form by far the noblest ecclesiastical monument in Thanet. Some of the eighteen old miserere seats remain. One, with the name of “John Curteys,” is singular in being dated 1401. It is a rare thing to find a date on woodwork of such antiquity.

I suppose Minster had never a more objectionable incumbent than the notorious Richard Culmer, widely known in his time as “Blue Dick,” who was appointed in 1644, in the place of Meric Casaubon, deprived and ejected by the Puritans. “Blue Dick’s” nickname derived from his affecting a blue gown, instead of the then customary black; and the notoriety he really seems to have enjoyed came from the extreme fanatical Puritanism that possessed him. His greatest exploit—or the one best known—was the breaking of the painted windows of Canterbury Cathedral, which he called “rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones.” It did not, apparently, commend him to the people of Minster, who resented his being thrust upon them and hid the key of the church when he came to read himself in.

Simple souls, and unimaginative! What difficulty did that present to one of his methods? None whatever. He simply smashed a window and crawled through the congenial havoc he had made!

The next move was with his new parishioners, who, after the reading-in, hauled him out, and, calling him “thief and robber,” and reproaching him with having broken into the sheepfold instead of entering by the door, whacked him long and heartily, till their sticks broke and their arms grew tired. One almost suspects they did not like him.

The only servant-girl he could get was one of illegitimate birth; but it is difficult to see how an accident of that sort should render a domestic servant less domestically efficient.

Relations continued strained at Minster, and Culmer did his best to ensure that they should remain so, smashing all the windows of the church, and removing the cross that finished off the spire. With his own hands, by moonlight, he reared the ladders by which the workmen were to ascend for the purpose. His flock assembled, with jibe and jeer, to tell him that he should carry the work to a logical conclusion by demolishing the church itself, seeing that it was built in the form of a cross; but demolition on that heroic scale was beyond him, as the continued existence of the ancient church to this day sufficiently proves.

For sixteen long years Richard Culmer remained at Minster, a purge for local pride and a constant source of offence. Then the Restoration relieved the people of his hateful presence, and effected what nothing else could do. Years before he had been offered a yearly pension, equal to the annual value of the living, if he would only go, and let Minster have a parson more acceptable to the place; but he had refused, preferring rather to be an annoyance and a stumbling-block. One of his eccentricities was to demolish part of the parsonage—an act as rabid as that of Goldsmith’s dog, who, “to gain some private ends, went mad and bit the man.”

After the Restoration had ejected him, Culmer resided in obscurity at Monkton, and is said to have died two years later.

It behoves us now, after having, as in duty bound, visited the ecclesiastical capital of Thanet, to return to the coast. This we will do by way of Acol, near which is found the huge chalk-pit called by Ingoldsby the “Smuggler’s Leap.” This way we skirt Quex Park, and come to Birchington.

“Birchington,” says Sir F.C. Burnand, “ought to be a town of schools in association with preparatory academies at Whippingham.” N.B.—This is intended to be funny; but we can, with very little thought, and a glance at the gazetteer, beat the humorist at his own game, and point out that he forgot, as other preparatory academies, Much Birch and Caynham, in Herefordshire, and Waxham in Norfolk.

Birchington, the place of the birchen trees, is an ancient village which has not yet become swamped and overwhelmed by seaside villas, although there are a good many to be found if you care to seek them. That, however, would be a sorry quest, even though “Rossetti Bungalow,” the house in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in 1882, in his fifty-fourth year, be among them. Hard by the south porch of the ancient church stands a memorial cross designed by Ford Madox Browne, inscribed:

“Here sleeps
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti
Honoured under the name of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Among painters as a painter
And among poets as a poet,
Born in London,
Of parentage mainly Italian, 12 May 1828
Died at Birchington, 9 April 1882.”

Here is also a stained-glass window to his memory, in the church.

There is discretion and reticence in that epitaph. If you would know how Rossetti conveyed (“convey the wise it call”) the methods of the Pre-Raphaelites, and how he was the author of many of the “bluest” Limericks of his era, you must read Holman Hunt’s autobiography, and dip into the various memoirs of their set.

Among the ancient brasses in the church are examples to John Quek and child, 1449; Richard Quek, 1459; Alys Crispe, 1518; John Henyns, vicar, 1523; Margaret Crispe, 1528; and another Margaret Crispe and chrisom child, 1533.

The Quex family were anciently seated at Quex Park, near Birchington. In the sixteenth century the last of their race, the daughter and heiress of John Quex, married John Crispe, whose descendants died out in 1680. Their reign at Quex Park was unremarkable, except for one very strange incident in the life of Henry Crispe, who was abducted in 1657. The story of it seems more like romance than reality, but the incident is historical. The unsuspecting Henry Crispe was aroused late one August night by a party of desperadoes who had landed at Gore End, Birchington, under the command of a filibustering Royalist, one Captain Golding. He was bundled into his own coach and driven to the shore, whence sail was made to Ostend. Crispe was eventually taken to Bruges, and kept a prisoner there. A curious part of the affair is that he had evidently been expecting an attack; and had had the walls of his house loop-holed for musketry. A ransom of £3,000 was demanded; and all he could do was to write to his nephew, Thomas Crispe, his son being ill at the time, to come and help him. Thomas and the son did what they could, in the face of difficulties, Cromwell having a suspicion that the whole affair was a plot to procure £3,000 for Charles the Second, at that time on the Continent, in very narrow circumstances. He therefore for a time forbade the payment of ransom, and it was eight months before the money was forthcoming and the captive set free.

Henry Crispe was no linguist, and was known until his death in 1663 as “Bon Jour Crispe,” the only foreign phrase he had learnt in his exile.

Quex Park is unquestionably the finest demesne in Thanet. It is a richly wooded estate nearly four miles in circuit, the seat at the present time of Major Powell Cotton, whose park of assorted artillery just within the lodge-gates consists of some thirty ancient guns, some of them dating back to the sixteenth century: all very curious and interesting. The gilded vane and odd-looking spire seen above the massed woodlands in the distance are in the centre of the park, and are most difficult to find when once within the lodge gates. One might, in fact, easily lose one’s way at Quex. They crest a lofty red-brick structure called the “Waterloo Tower,” built in 1820, and hung with a peal of twelve bells. The spire is a cast-iron one, of a design fondly thought to be Gothic, but very weird and gruesome. The tower itself is used as a mausoleum, and was restored in 1896.

Resuming the way into Margate, the road approaches close to the shore at Westgate, that bungalow town which first arose somewhere about 1878, on the enthusiastic recommendation of the air of Thanet by Sir Erasmus Wilson, at that time one of the most influential of medical men and health-experts. The now much worn and woefully misused word “bungalow,” an Anglo-Indian importation, also about that time made its first public appearance here.

At Westgate begin the electric tramways. Away to right of the road, at Garlinge, is an old-world survival: the fifteenth-century gatehouse of the Dandelion manor-house. The old manorial residence has vanished, but the gatehouse remains, a fine, imposing sight. Here were seated the Daundelyon family, who became extinct with John Daundelyon, last of his race, in 1445. A brass to his memory is seen in the old parish church of Margate. The inscription describes him as “gentleman”: the earliest use of that word, it is said, on any existing monument. The family name is a corruption of “Dent-de-Lion,” i.e. “Lion’s tooth,” which probably derived from the tooth-like part of the family arms, which are thus expressed, in the queer language of heralds: “Sable, a fesse indented; voided argent; three lions rampant of the same.” A sculptured shield bearing these charges is still visible on the gatehouse; and on the springing of the small archway will be found a demi-lion rampant, with a label issuing from his mouth. This was formerly inscribed “Daun-de-lyon,” but the words have now quite weathered away. It was the John Daundelyon whose monumental brass is to be found in Margate church who gave the church one of its eight bells. According to an old rhyme once current in Margate—

The bell is of foreign make. The “dog” in question, it has been explained, was a ship. It will, in this connection, be remembered that antiquaries have sought to explain away Dick Whittington’s famous cat which brought him good fortune, and suppose it to have been the name of a vessel.

We now come again to close quarters with the seashore, which here begins to assume the aspect of what excursionists style the “real seaside.” That is to say, here are cliffs; and there, ahead, is an illimitable horizon; also indubitable sands. It is true they are not cliffs on the heroic scale, these chalky bastions. They begin at Birchington and are continued round to Westgate, Margate, and Ramsgate, with a toylike, artificial effect; rather, you know, as if some enterprising Earl’s Court exhibition syndicate had erected them. They are strangely unconvincing to those who have been used to the great red cliffs of Devon, or the mighty granite heights of Cornwall. Being of no great height, and of such unpicturesque outline, and having been so railed in and scraped and tunnelled and mended with brick, and in all manner of ways impertinently interfered with, they look like the products of art, and very poor art too.

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