CHAPTER XIV PEGWELL BAY--EBBSFLEET--THE LANDINGS OF HENGIST AND OF ST. AUGUSTINE--RICHBOROUGH

But to have done with Ramsgate. We may perhaps explore to the very end of the West Cliff, where rows of great ugly houses look out seaward from that height, and where the bastioned cliffs crumble and are cobbled horribly with brick and plaster. But one gets no joy of those grim grey buttresses that front the waves.

Passing, instead, up the main street, to the surviving Norman church of St. Lawrence, we note there the brasses to Nicholas Manston, wearing the Collar of SS.; and his daughter and wife. Then, down the lengthy Nethercourt Hill, we come to Pegwell Bay.

When the Tuggs family made holiday at Ramsgate they went, of course, to Pegwell Bay: famous then, as now, for its shrimps and for the various places where shrimp-teas, chiefly in little earwiggy arbours, might be obtained: “Mr. and Mrs. Tuggs and the Captain ordered lunch in the little garden—small saucers of large shrimps, dabs of butter, crusty loaves, and bottled ale.” That is the ritual to be observed by all who, coming to Pegwell Bay, want to do their duty by the place.

Pegwell Bay, as you will clearly perceive on maps, is a very considerable inlet. It marks, indeed, that nook in the coast-line where the old Wantsum Channel and the river Stour flowed along past Minster and Sarre, and emerged at Reculver, thus forming the Isle of Thanet. Tracking round from Pegwell and its shrimpy arbours, along the low shores, we come at Cliff’s End to the “Sportsman” inn and Ebbsfleet, and, turning to the right, will presently find St. Augustine’s Cross.

Ebbsfleet is a place of the greatest historic interest; a spot where many landings that contributed largely to the long story of England have taken place. Where these fruitful fields now spread there ebbed and flowed, until well within the period of established history, those waters of the Wantsum which received the Stour and other streams, as shown in old maps, and divided Thanet from the mainland by a navigable channel with numerous creeks, or “fleets.” An enormous mass of archÆological writing has been expended upon the discussion of the exact site of Ebbsfleet. It has been sought to place it at Stonar, nearer Sandwich, among other places; but popular tradition has always pointed to the site occupied by the modern memorial cross. The channel of the Wantsum, affording quiet anchorage from stormy seas and safe landing-places would obviously be the place to be made for by both friends and hostile visitors. Here, accordingly, tradition places the landing of the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa in A.D. 449, thirty-nine years after the departure of the Roman garrison, coming in reply to Vortigern’s appeal to them to help him against the Picts and Scots. Following that first coming of those fierce men of the sÆxe and the battleaxe were many other landings, few specifically mentioned in history. They came then, not as allies, but as enemies of the enfeebled Britons who had originally hired them to do their fighting. Thus we read that in A.D. 465 “Hengist and Æsc fought against the Welsh at Wippidsfleet, and there slew twelve Welsh Ealdormen, and one of their own Thanes was slain whose name was Wipped.”

For the original name of Ebbsfleet we have a fair choice. It was written “Wippidsfleet,” “Hypwine’s fleet,” and “Ippedeflete”; but the essential name has survived through all the centuries.

It was 148 years after the first landing of the pagan Saxons that Augustine came ashore here, A.D. 596.

“Augustine’s arrival was, it is more or less historically certain,” says Sir F.C. Burnand, who will have his joke, even if ill-timed and painfully hammering it out, “in the last of the summer months, since he is invariably alluded to in ancient records as ‘our august visitor.’” This is really lamentable.

Augustine was by merest chance the missioner to England. Gregory the Great, the Pope who sent him on the mission, had himself, when Deacon, intended to convert the heathen in our island. Gregory was not of the sour religious type, but something of a humorist, and a punster and torturer of words after Burnand’s own fancy, only he did it better. The story is well known, how, seeing slaves from England sold in Rome, he asked from what country they came.

“They are Angles,” replied the dealer.

“Not Angles, but angels, with faces so angel-like,” said Gregory; “but from what country come they?”

“From Deira,” was the answer. “Deira,” rejoined Gregory; “well said, indeed. De ira, plucked from God’s ire and called to Christ’s mercy. But what is the name of their King?”

“Ælla,” the slave-dealer told him; and the Deacon was again equal to the occasion. “Alleluia,” he said, “shall be sung in Ælla’s land.”

At once he sought permission of the Pope to travel to that country whence those engaging pagans had come, to reconvert their land; and, having obtained it, set forth with a small following. He had not been gone more than the third day’s journey when, as the company rested at noon, a locust sprang upon the book he was reading. He saw an omen in it. “Rightly is it called Locusta,” said Gregory, “because it seems to say to us ‘Loco sta’; that is, ‘stay in your place.’ I see we shall not be able to finish our journey. But,” he added, strangely disregarding the omen his fancy had created, “rise, load the mules, and let us get on as far as we can.”

Before they had set out again came messengers who had ridden hastily from Rome to recall him: the people having missed their kindly Deacon. He returned, and never visited Britain. Years afterwards, when elected Pope, he was mindful of his old project, but was then compelled to send another on the mission that had lain so near his heart. That other was Augustine, and a most unwilling missioner he proved. He had not at any time wished to go, and departed from Rome with his forty companions only in obedience to his Sovereign Pontiff’s commands. Arrived midway in France, the expedition heard tales so dreadful of the distant land to which they were bound that they sent Augustine back, by no means unwilling, to beg of Gregory that the project might be abandoned. Bede, in his “Ecclesiastical History,” tells us “they were seized with craven terror, and began to think of returning home, rather than proceed to a barbarous, fierce, and unbelieving nation, to whose very language they were strangers.” But it was precisely because they were unbelieving that Augustine was sent to them. Gregory would not hear of the mission being abandoned; and so Augustine was obliged, after all, to fulfil it.

Britain was not, however, so terrible a country, nor was Christianity unknown there. Ethelbert, the powerful King of Kent, was a pagan, but his French wife, Bertha, was a Christian, and her chaplain, Luidhard, who was a Bishop in France, officiated in a chapel identified with the early church of St. Martin at Canterbury. And, while the Saxon kingdoms were pagan, away in the westward recesses of Britain, in the land we now know as Wales, unconquered by the Saxon, the British remained true to the early Church of the fourth century.

Gregory sent Augustine back, reluctant still, upon that business himself would so joyfully have gone, had it been possible. The mission at length landed here, at Ebbsfleet, and advanced into the centre of Thanet, where Ethelbert, doubtful of them, but not unkindly, met them in the open air; some say under an oak-tree, while others deny that oaks ever grew in the island. Painters have selected the striking incident of this meeting of the Saxon King and his soldiers with Augustine and his monks; and that historic event lends itself admirably to the sense of drama, and to form and colour. A great silver cross was borne aloft before Augustine, and in company with it went an image of the Saviour done in paint and gilding on a board, much after the usage of the icons in the Greek Church to-day. Bringing the solemn chant that accompanied their march to an “Amen,” the monks sat down to the conference between their leader and the King; a conference conducted of necessity through interpreters, as neither understood the other’s language.

In conclusion, the King gave leave for the missioners to establish themselves at Canterbury. The words in which he is said to have done so are at once dignified and hospitable, even although we must make a good deal of allowance for the literary English in which the chroniclers have cast them: “Your words are fair, and your promises—but because they are new and doubtful, I cannot give my assent to them and leave the customs I have so long observed, with the whole Anglo-Saxon race. But because you have come hither as strangers from a long distance, and as I seem to myself to have seen clearly that what you yourselves believed to be true and good you wish to impart to us, we do not wish to molest you; nay, rather, we are anxious to receive you hospitably and give you all that is needed for your support; nor do we hinder you from joining all whom you can to the faith of your religion.”

Thus favourably began the work Augustine was sent to do. The place at Ebbsfleet where he set foot ashore was long held sacred and a myth speedily grew about it; no less wild a story than that his foot had miraculously impressed itself upon the rock. If for “rock” we read “mud,” which is much more likely to have been a feature of this shore, we shall have less difficulty in believing the story. A chapel was built over that wonderful footprint—which no doubt the monks in after-years had provided; but, more wonderful still, it afterwards became known as the footprint of St. Mildred, who had landed at Ebbsfleet about a century later. I do not pretend to be able to reconcile the footprint of a man well over six feet high, as Augustine was represented to be, with that of a woman; but who would seriously criticise the statements in fairy tales? Not I, for one. The chapel disappeared at some unspecified time, and the marvellous footprint is said to have been broken up by roadmenders for road-metal in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This seems, for many reasons, a sad pity. One would joyfully barter the modern St. Augustine’s Cross that stands hereby for such. This memorial, a very fine one, was set up in 1884, on the supposed site of the landing, where an ancient oak formerly stood. It rises eighteen feet and is elaborately sculptured on the model of the famous crosses at Sandbach, Cheshire. Close at hand (a very modern touch this) is “Ebbsfleet, Cliff’s End, and St. Augustine’s Cross” railway station: which rather discounts the romance of the spot.

The four miles onward to Sandwich are a dead level. In the dawn of history, when Thanet was still an island, and when ships bound to and from London sailed round the Wantsum channel, by Minster and Sarre, the sea rolled where now this road runs. It is an impressive thought, and renders this scenery more than a little romantic. As you proceed, with the reedy dykes on the right, towards the red, clustered roofs of Sandwich, ahead, there rise away across the marshes to the right the grey, solitary walls of Richborough, the place that was once the Roman port and fortress of RutupiÆ, guarding this entrance of that ancient channel, just as Regulbium kept watch and ward at the other. The river Stour, which here flows in an extraordinary looped course, prevents access to Richborough this way, and one must come to it through Sandwich. No one, once arrived on that spot, can be insensible to its peculiar charm; the hoary walls, still in places some thirty feet high and ten feet eighteen inches thick, displaying the Roman construction of rubble and stone, alternating with courses of red brick. The walls form three sides of a square, the fourth side originally giving upon the water in those days when the Roman vessels anchored here at the quays. The area enclosed by these walls is ten acres, now under corn. A singular puzzle for archÆologists, who have not yet explained the meaning of it, is the extraordinary subterranean passage, discovered in 1866, which runs beneath this enclosed area and is, in effect, a tunnel some five feet high, made of flints embedded in concrete. It has a right-hand elbow and ends abruptly. There is usually some one at hand with candle and matches, who is prepared, for a modest consideration, to conduct the visitor along this passage. Above this, in the centre of the station, is a concrete platform in the form of a cross. This, also, is a prime enigma to the inquiring mind. Some archÆologists consider it to have been the base on which was built a pharos, or lighthouse.

The mind of the contemplative visitor to this solitary spot dwells upon the contrast between the busy Roman port of sixteen hundred years ago and the remoteness of life from it now. Ivy of great age mantles the walls, and wheat grows ripe to harvest in the great field that was once a populous camp. All is changed, except the cliffs of Thanet, shining whitely in the distance; and they, too, bear the burden of Ramsgate’s sprawling streets, dimly made out against the skyline.

Hundreds of thousands of Roman coins have been dug up here, turned up by the plough, or just picked up from the wet earth, after rain. They were for the most part common copper denarii, but a great many silver coins, and some gold, have been found, not a few among them of great rarity. I have been fired by the story of these finds to seek for myself. Even a denarius would be something to have retrieved by one’s own personal efforts from this site of an ancient civilisation. But nothing rewarded half a day’s grubbing among the clods. ’Twas ever thus—yesterday, to-morrow, some one else, not to-day—not to ourselves. Oh the hard luck of it!

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