Approaching Sandwich, whose towers and roof-tops rise picturesquely ahead from the level marshes, mingled with the masts and spars of a few vessels lying at the town quays, a belt of spindly trees is passed, stretching away to the left. They are trees of a considerable height and size, but they wear an ill-nourished appearance, as they cannot fail to do when we consider how poor the soil on which they grow. It is, in fact, nothing but sand and pebbles. One solitary residence, Stonar House, stands amid these weird woods. The spot keeps an air of reticence and melancholy, appropriate enough, for it is the site of a vanished town: the empty space where once stood and flourished the town and port of Stonar, or Lundenwic, an old, and at one time a greater and more prosperous, rival of Sandwich. Rarely ever has a town vanished so utterly as this. We first hear of it in A.D. 456, when the Britons routed the invading Saxons at a spot fixed by the old annalist “in a field close to the Inscribed Stone [Lapis Tituli, in the original Latin] on the shores of the Gallic sea.” What was that stone? No one can say. Here again was fought a battle: when Edmund Ironside defeated the Danes, in 1019.

Stonar was situated on an island at the mouths of the Stour and Wantsum. Some archÆologists who are not satisfied with the generally received legend of Ebbsfleet believe it was here Augustine landed. The converted King Canute made a grant of it to St. Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury, and in the deeds accompanying the gift we find it named “Estonores.” The name should properly, no doubt, be spelled Stonor: the stone on the edge, or shore. Its alias, “Lundenwic,” derived from its position on the then navigable channel of the Wantsum, on the short-cut round to the Thames and London by Reculver; “wic,” like the “wich” of Sandwich, being the Norse vik, for bay or channel.

Sandwich was at last overtaking Stonar in the race for prosperity, and Stonar was already decaying when a great storm in 1365 overwhelmed the sandy island on which it was situated. This disaster had been to some extent retrieved when a French expedition landed in 1385 and burnt what had been rebuilt. Fate was too strong for that unfortunate port, and it then sank into utter oblivion. Antiquaries claim to have discovered the site of its church, but of buildings not the slightest traces remain above ground, and the sea that once destroyed it long ago rendered the site useless by retreating over a mile away.

Such is the history of Stonar, and almost to the same complexion have the vagaries of sea and sands brought its once successful rival, Sandwich.

The town of Sandwich is so comparatively little known that when its name arises it is first of sandwiches—ham or other—or of the Sandwich Islands, that one thinks; the ancient town taking the remote place of tertium quid and coming last. Yet, indirectly, Sandwich gave a name both to the eatables and the islands, by the intermediary of the fourth Earl of Sandwich, that bright particular star among the rabbit-warren of ennobled Montagues in the eighteenth century who was known familiarly as “Jemmy Twitcher,” and was great at the Admiralty, and greater perhaps as a gambler. In his honour Captain Cook named Hawaii and its archipelago the “Sandwich Islands”; and the gamester’s intentness upon the hazards of play and disinclination from breaking off for meals led him to keep hunger off at the card-table by eating meat between slices of bread; called, after him, “sandwiches.”

The ancient town and reverend Cinque Port of Sandwich is entered by a bridge across the Stour and thence by passing under the arch of the old Barbican, a curious outwork of the times when walls and gates were necessary for the town’s security. The only other remaining gate is the Fishergate, along the same quay, built in 1578. The road from Ramsgate and the bridge across the Stour to the Barbican are comparatively modern innovations, the only entrance from this side being formerly by ferry to Fishergate. The bridge was first built in 1755, and is in part an iron swing-bridge, permitting the passage of small vessels to the upper quays. Against its parapets lean the idle, the born tired, and the infirm of Sandwich the livelong day; some staring into the water, or vaguely across the sandy flats; others facing north, expending a fascinated stare upon the activities of the brewery, which is the busiest thing in the town. There are more imposing entrances than this to English towns; the bold gates and frowning towers of Canterbury and of York bring back mediÆvalism, a living thing; but no other approach is so truly quaint as that to Sandwich by the Barbican. Little, squatty round towers with their lower half chequered black and white in flint and stone, and their upper part finished with peaked roofs like witches’ hats, give an effect almost unreal in their completely picturesque setting, with the curious tower of St. Peter’s peering over the roof-tops. It is so rarely complete that you almost suspect it to be the lath-and-plaster and painted canvas building of the entrance, let us say, to a “Cinque Port Exhibition.” But it is undeniably real, unquestionably genuine, and is but the introduction to much else of an old-world character that Sandwich contains.

Sandwich is a little town. For all its ancient importance—the Liverpool of olden times—it was never large, and the ancient, grassy ramparts that almost encircle it were at no time a hindrance to expansion. MediÆval Canterbury, in common with another walled city and town, threw out suburbs, which may be seen to this day outside the walls, looking almost the age of the original place; but Sandwich, however crowded it may have grown within the walls, had never any suburbs. A seaport at once so wealthy and prosperous, and so exposed to raids from over-sea as was this in the olden days of fire and sword, could not afford to give such hostages to fortune as unprotected suburbs would be. The history of Sandwich, a tale of repeated burnings and pillagings, sufficiently shows that even behind its defences it could not withstand the many furious attacks made from time to time. Apart from the many such disasters of early times, of which history speaks but vaguely, we hear of the town being laid waste in 1046 by vikings; of damage done in 1052 by the rebel Earl Godwin, and of constant forays in mediÆval times, including the burning by the French in 1216. It again suffered severely at the hands of the French in 1400, 1438, and 1457; and in 1470, in an attack by the rebel Earl of Warwick; and only when the power and prosperity of the port had decayed did the town know peace. “He who is low need fear no foe,” truly says the jingling proverb.

To-day the size and shape of the town are what they always were. The ramparts still look out upon the open, level meadows, and not only are there no suburban developments, but there is even room within the ancient ceinture for expansion. It is a strange fall from ancient eminence.

We hear nothing of Sandwich before A.D. 665, when Wilfrid, Bishop of Northumbria, is recorded to have landed in the haven that then had apparently begun to make the fortune of the place. He came ashore “happily and pleasantly.” Richborough was already dead as a port, and the twin ports of Stonar and Sandwich were thriving upon its decay. Very rare and fragmentary are these early notices of Sandwich, and it is not until A.D. 851 that we again hear of it, in a severe defeat of invading Danes, administered by Athelstan. That date marks the beginning of an era of troubles caused by those fierce piratical Northerners, ending for a time only in 1016, when the Danes under Canute made themselves masters of the country. In all that century and a half the viking ships, with the dreaded device of the Black Raven, became, as we are told by a recent writer, “a familiar but always unwelcome sight.” Unwelcome! Yes, indeed. A thought too mild, perhaps, that word; because we know those Danish pirates to have been so peculiarly unwelcome that when they were caught, their captors expressed their hatred by skinning them alive and nailing their hides upon the church-doors. Such treatment left no room for doubt.

In the defensive measures early undertaken against these marauding hosts some historians trace the first inception of that famous alliance of seashore towns known as the “Cinque Ports,” among which, although Dover has always been accounted chief, Sandwich certainly makes the better figure in olden story. Of all those seaports in that brotherhood whose privilege it was to bear the proud and strange dimidiated arms of the half-lions and half-boats, Sandwich suffered more severely at the hands of the foreigner, it was more honoured, it rose to loftier heights of prosperity, made greater sacrifices, and in the end its decay was the more marked. It will be convenient here to concisely tell the story of those ports.

The Cinque Ports, as a confederacy, arose from an early necessity for guarding the south coast against the sea-rovers and other piratical hordes out of the north of Europe, who began to harry these shores so early as the time of the Romans. In the later years of the Roman occupation of Britain, when the grip of that masterful people was growing enfeebled with luxurious habits, and when not even the twin great fortresses of Regulbium and RutupiÆ sufficed to overawe those fierce strangers, it had been found necessary to provide especially for the defence of these ports, and to appoint a commander whose particular charge the great stretch of coast from Yarmouth, down past the Thames and Medway, and so on to the Kentish and Sussex coasts, should be. This official was the Comes littoris Saxonici, that is to say, the “Count of the Saxon Shore.”

This warden of the coasts was not ill provided with fortresses. There were, in all, nine. In addition to Regulbium and RutupiÆ, there was the like defence of Garianonum, now known as Burgh Castle, near Yarmouth; Branodunum, Brancaster in Norfolk; Othona, now known as St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, near Bradwell, Essex; the original castle at Dover, Portus Lemanis, now Lympne; Anderida, Pevensey; and Portus Adurni. The fortunes of the various Counts of the Saxon Shore are unknown. All records are lost in the final overthrow of civilisation after the departure of the Romans, and when the conquering Saxons had established themselves here, they were strong enough for a long time to hold what they had made their own, without the necessity for vigilant defence of the coast. It was only when the Saxons, in their turn, had begun to feel the effects of ease and luxury, and when they, too, had suffered from piratical rovers, that coast-defence again became urgent. And the protection of our shores has been, more or less, a matter of urgency ever since, and so remains.

But not until the time of Edward the Confessor did the actual confederation of the Cinque Ports come into existence, and not until after the Conquest do we hear with any certainty of it. It is not clear, amid the mists of antiquity from which this history emerges, whether the ports concerned took the initiative or whether the duty of providing ships and men for the King’s use (or for national defence, as we might nowadays express it) was laid upon them against their will. But the privileges and exemptions granted to these associated ports in return for their supply of ships, men, and munitions amply recouped the cost of the service imposed upon them. The original Cinque Ports were Dover, Sandwich, Hastings, Hythe, and Romney. At a later period Rye and Winchelsea were added, under the special designation of the “Ancient Towns.” Each port had its subsidiary “members.” Thus the “members” attached to Dover were Margate, Folkestone, Faversham, and St. Peter’s, Broadstairs. Those belonging to Sandwich were Deal, Walmer, Stonar, Ramsgate, Sarre, Reculver, Fordwich, and Brightlingsea, away in Essex; to which Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Dunwich in Suffolk may perhaps be added, although Dunwich was early swept away by encroachment of the sea, and Yarmouth, as a place of considerable size, fully conscious of its own dignity, always resented the authority assumed by Sandwich over its fishery, and eventually, in 1663, won its complete independence.

Romney comprised Lydd, Dungeness, Eastweston, and Promwell; Hythe took in merely West Hythe, and to Hastings belonged the remote and completely inland village of Bekesbourne.

The story of the Cinque Ports is, above all else, an object-lesson in the supreme, although generally unacknowledged, importance of the trading, or middle classes, without whose enterprising activities and courage and resource the nation long since would have ceased to exist. It has always been convenient to ignore the services to the community performed by traders, who on the one hand give employment and on the other pay the greater proportion of rates and taxes, and from whose enriched families the failing and impoverished aristocracy has throughout the centuries been recruited. Although, as already said, the idea of the Cinque Ports confederation goes back into dim antiquity, we have few early facts. The first Warden of whom we have any certain information is John de Fiennes, in the time of William the Conqueror, and the earliest charter extant is that of 1277, the sixth year of the reign of Edward the First. By that document we learn something of the status and scope of this remarkable association. Those ports were among the richest communities at that time within the kingdom. They no longer suffered, as of yore, from pirates, although they were the first to feel the vengeance of the foreigner when war broke out; and thus they were not so immediately concerned as of old in guarding their own shores. But the King in those times, before such a thing as a royal navy had come into existence, had need of ships wherewith to conduct his foreign wars, and the merchant-vessels of Sandwich, of Dover, and of these other maritime communities were the only craft then available. Not even in those high-handed feudal times was it possible to seize ships at will; some centuries earlier a compact had been made with the ports, which were then definitely associated. They undertook to supply vessels, according to their relative importance. Thus under Henry the Third, in 1229, the Cinque Ports, as a whole, were to furnish fifty-seven ships, each with a crew of twenty-one men and a boy (a “gromet,” or “garcion,” as he was called) for fifteen days, at their own cost; and as long afterwards as might be required, on pay. The varied importance of the contributory ports seems to be reflected in the ships each then contracted to supply towards the tally. Thus Dover is set down for twenty-one; Winchelsea ten; Hastings six; and Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, and Rye five each.

Thus early were the merchants able to find a fleet for the King’s needs; and they obtained substantial return for the service. The Cinque Ports were given many valuable rights and privileges within and without their own boundaries. They were governed under a Lord Warden by a representative body of men freely chosen from each port, and were independent alike of the counties and of the King’s writ, and directly represented in Parliament and at the coronation of King and Queen. In place of the aldermen and councillors of municipal corporations, the freemen of the ports were styled “barons” and “jurats.” The right to govern one’s own affairs was not recognised in those times, and the concession granted to the freemen of the Cinque Ports was therefore of considerable value. They were, moreover, given a privilege that would be extremely valuable even now: that of trading free of toll everywhere throughout the kingdom. They were, in the words of Edward the First’s charter, “quit of all toll and custom, all lastage, tollage, passage, carriage, rivage, and pontage.” They had also the more abstruse rights of “Soc and sac, infangtheoff and utfangtheoff, wardship and marriage of heirs,” and were freed from the King’s right of prisage of imported wines.

The Cinque Ports navy, thus constituted, performed great services during several centuries. It not only conveyed the King’s troops in his wars with France, and Scotland, and in his subjugations of Ireland and Wales, but fought with, and generally vanquished, foreign fleets. It was only with the gradual growth of a royal navy, from the time of Henry the Seventh, that the importance of the Cinque Ports flotilla declined.

Its gradual declension was due rather to a rage for building big warships than to any decay in the ports. Much the same forces were at work then as those we see now. The Cinque Ports vessels were, in the first instance, merchantmen, and when they had performed their military service they resumed their trade. The great ships of war built by Henry the Eighth, the Mary Rose and the Harry Grace À Dieu, were the Dreadnoughts of their age, and led to competitive building on the part of foreign Powers. Among those leviathans the trading vessels of the ports seemed insignificant; although it was left for a much later age to prove that the fishing luggers of the Kentish coast could perform useful acts; as when they were armed during the scare of Napoleon’s projected invasion, and succeeded in capturing some French gunboats and putting privateers to flight.

With the decline of their especial usefulness, and with the growth everywhere of liberties, the peculiar privileges of the Cinque Ports either became anomalous or absolutely worthless, and so at length the office of Lord Warden grew more and more a mere ornamental distinction, generally conferred upon a statesman towards the close of his career. The honour is generally the coping-stone placed upon the achievements of public life. Together with the decline of this once great office, the various courts held for the conduct of Cinque Ports business have either ceased to exist or are brought into an effete and unwonted activity only on rare occasions, such as the Installation of a Lord Warden, or a coronation, when the “barons” claim their ancient rights of carrying a canopy over King and Queen. All these changes had come gradually about at the time when reform generally was in the air, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and most of these especial privileges were formally abolished by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835.

Sandwich was severely governed in mediÆval times by its authorities, the “jurats or barons,” but not one whit more severely than other members of the Cinque Ports. The “common ordinances” proclaimed by authority of these jurats included a curious variety of enactments. No burgess was permitted to lend any money to spinners of wool on security of their wool, nor to tailors on their cloth; no dealer in fish was allowed to buy any fish in the market from a foreign fisherman, and no poulterer might purchase any poultry from a foreigner “until the better sort of people of the town had supplied themselves with what they wanted for their own use.” “Foreigner” in these cases meant merely a person who was not an inhabitant of Sandwich, not an alien.

Furthermore, any person who should wound another maliciously with knife, sword, or the like, had the choice either of paying the Mayor and commonalty sixty shillings, of going to prison for a year and a day, or of having his hand perforated by the weapon with which the wound was inflicted. Any woman convicted of scolding or quarrelling in the street, or any public place, was to carry “the mortar,” a kind of pillory, through the town, beginning and ending at the pillory gate, and preceded by a piper, to whom she was to pay a penny for his music. The jurats had also power of life and death for offences that would now be considered of only a minor kind. The women condemned to die were drowned in the Guestling Brook; the men buried alive in the Thieves Dunes, near by.

The treacherous receding of the sea, which, in leaving Richborough high and dry, had ruined that original port and created Sandwich, was in course of time to serve Sandwich in the like manner. Its period of greatest prosperity would appear to have been about 1470. It had then ninety-five vessels and 1,500 sailors, and the customs revenue of the port was £17,000, equal to about twenty times that sum in present values. But the drifting sands soon afterwards began to create difficulties in the haven; and when, about 1535, a large vessel belonging to Pope Paul the Fourth was sunk, by accident or design, in the harbour it caused so serious a shoal that not all the efforts of the townspeople could remove it. By 1640 the haven was a thing of the past, but for close upon two centuries and a half hopes were entertained of reopening it. At an early stage in these troubles foreigners were had over from Holland to deal with the sands, and petitions were from time to time presented to Queen Elizabeth and to Parliament. And still the sandbanks accumulated, and by that time, late in the eighteenth century, when the Government sent down engineers to plan and estimate and report, it was discovered that nothing less than a cut nearly two miles long, at a cost of about £360,000, would serve. That project never progressed beyond the report stage, and Sandwich has long been resigned to its fate. The distance to the sea, in a direct line, is now two miles, across sandy water, partly grown with grass; and ships coming up the Stour to Sandwich quays have to negotiate a winding course of nearly four miles from the sea.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Sandwich was immediately ruined by the closing of its haven. It so happened, about the time when the sands were first closing in, in the reign of Elizabeth, that religious persecution in the Netherlands was harassing the industrious Flemish and French peoples whose commercial and industrial genius had made the fortunes of that land. England’s textile and weaving trades were poor in comparison with those of the Continent, and it was a far-seeing statesmanship, as much as a fellow religious feeling, that induced Elizabeth to grant the petition of the oppressed weavers of bays and says, and other craftsmen in 1565, and afford them an asylum from the ferocious persecution carried on by the Spaniards in the Low Countries. Archbishop Parker well named the Dutch and French refugees who by command of that great Queen were permitted to settle in Sandwich, “gentle and profitable strangers.” Unlike the often diseased, verminous, and generally vicious, ignorant, and tradeless aliens whose free entry into the England of to-day is so rightly resented, those immigrants brought with them, in addition to cleanly and industrious and law-abiding habits, the mastery of trades and techniques that England lacked. They were indeed profitable to the State, and they largely saved Sandwich from such complete extinction as that which has befallen Romney and Winchelsea.

This community originally numbered some four hundred persons, and formed a class apart, with two chapels, a Flemish and a French, for their own use. Their textile trades thrived, and sent forth colonies to Colchester and other places; and, among other crafts, they introduced market-gardening. Incidentally, also, they taught the wasteful and the riotous English a new mode of life. I suppose those two chief races that mainly go towards the making of the English people—the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons—have wastefulness and a love of drink in common, however else they differ. But these strangers added sobriety and prudence to their industry, and brought much housekeeping cleverness with them. It is but one example of their methods, but characteristic, that they were the first to introduce oxtail soup. The English butchers had always disposed of the tails with the hides, but these newcomers had long known their value and bought them cheaply, in the way of their housekeeping, until the English aptitude to learn at other people’s expense sent up the price of those neglected appendages. It is quite in keeping with the contrary nature of people and affairs that it was after a time sought to discriminate unfavourably in taxation against these people who had brought such benefits into the land. How matters would eventually have shaped does not appear, for at that juncture the strangers had begun to mingle with the English. They intermarried and lost their foreign tongues, and, such is the English power of assimilation, their very names have suffered similar changes. Thus, although to this day many names in Sandwich are in their origin Dutch or French, they have been altered so greatly, following the original English inability to pronounce them, that they appear, on the face of them, sufficiently British. All the poetry in them has been obliterated in the process, and they have become quaint or grotesque. But those typical Sandwich names, “Gutterbock” and “Poisson,” are in their original form.

The textile trades in time deserted Sandwich, and at last left it to a gentle sleep; and so it has drowsed away the last centuries. It is not the “dead town” it is commonly reported to be, and by no means to be judged by Cobbett’s uncomplimentary reference in 1823: “Sandwich, which is a rotten borough. Rottenness, putridity, is excellent for land, but bad for boroughs.” It was political rottenness that aroused his indignation; but that was no especial attribute of Sandwich, and therefore he need not have continued with the remark, “as villainous a hole as one would wish to see.”

Wish not to see, he doubtless meant, for nobody desires to see villainous holes. But Sandwich was not of his political creed, hence this fury.

So much has been said of Sandwich as a “dead town” that strangers who first come to it full of the tales they have heard, of grass growing in its streets—and, for all I know, moss growing on its inhabitants—are likely to be surprised at its comparative vitality. Grass does not grow like a lawn in the streets of Sandwich, in spite of all the far-fetched stories of decay and desolation that it pleases eloquent descriptive writers to tell, and it is something of a shock to find a quite busy railway station just outside the ramparts and a very modern “Stores” in whose windows are all sorts of twentieth-century provisions, for which modern coin of the realm, and not the quaint moneys of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth, must be tendered. All these signs, including the occasional motor-cars that hurry through the narrow streets, are very reassuring, or very disastrous, according to your point of view.

At Sandwich, which is supposed (in the pages of those super-eloquent writers aforesaid) to have given up the ghost long ago, but has done nothing of the kind, there should certainly be no railway, and there should be no room in a “dead” town for the gasworks which may be seen—and smelt—on the quay, nor for the particularly large and busy brewery in Strand Street. At the mediÆval Sandwich, thus pictured, the few remaining shopkeepers should stand in their doorways and address passers-by with “What d’ye lack, my masters?” but they don’t; and the thirsty wayfarer will call in vain for a posset of sack, a beaker of canary or malvoisie at the “Red Lion” or “King’s Arms.” Beshrew me, sirs, but he will need to content himself with a whisky-and-soda, mineral-waters, or the product of the local brewery already mentioned. I have no doubt, could he sample the old-style drinks, he would greatly prefer the modern.

If one really wishes to see a dead town, Winchelsea, or New Romney, or, better still, Old Romney, may be recommended. They are much more dead—if it be in any way possible to institute degrees in these things—than Sandwich.

But the census returns of a hundred years ago, compared with those of 1911, prove an increase of population in the town. They at the same time disclose how small a place it is. The population in 1801 was 2,452; in 1901 it had risen to 3,170; but the 1911 census reveals a decline of 130.

There is no grand architecture, of the wonder-compelling kind, in Sandwich. It is all very quiet and modest and domestic, but at the same time old-world and reverend. Of the three parish churches, St. Clement’s, which stands hard by the place where the ancient sea-front of Sandwich once opened out, is the most notable, and has a fine Norman tower. The restoration it has experienced was paid for by the sale of its bells—a quaint touch—and a modern set of tube-chimes now replaces them. St. Peter’s is perhaps better known, because its tower is taller and is capped with a curious Dutch-like turret, and rising to a considerable height, viewed from a distance, across the flats, it is the most prominent feature of the town. The tower is frankly and unashamedly unarchitectural, and replaces the one that fell without warning on October 13th, 1661. It fell disastrously into the church and demolished the south aisle, making a mighty heap of wreckage. “The rubidge,” says the contemporary account, “was three fathoms deep in the middle of the church.” The roofless walls of that destroyed aisle remain in part to this day. The tower that replaces the fallen building is of a local grey brick made from the harbour mud, and would appear from its style to have been designed and built by a local journeyman bricklayer. But it is to be hoped that the modern passion for remodelling plain buildings and putting them into a conventional dress will pass this tower of St. Peter’s by; for Sandwich would scarce seem the same Sandwich without it, and people who write about the town would lose the cherished chance of being mildly funny at its expense.

I do not think any stranger has ever been known to find his way through Sandwich without making one or two false turns, for its streets are winding and deceptive. The houses of the middle ages are not represented in them at all, and it is a sixteenth and seventeenth-century Sandwich you see, not the mediÆval port. It is, in general, a Dutch effect, as if those settlers under Elizabeth had imported their views upon domestic architecture and had successfully imposed them upon the town.

The native of Sandwich who has left his mark most visibly upon the place is Sir Roger Manwood, who founded the Grammar School in 1563. Manwood was born 1525, son of a local draper, and, entering the law, became eventually Chief Baron of the Exchequer. An elaborate new school-building, built 1895, stands in a solitary position outside the town, at the very opposite end from the original school, now occupied as a private residence and named Manwood Court. It stands at the very extremity of Sandwich, as you go towards Canterbury, and is a very striking building, with five gables and a high-pitched roof, and the date, 1564, in great figures, sprawling in genuine sixteenth-century ironwork along the frontage. Queen Elizabeth, on her visit to Sandwich in 1572, when she was elaborately entertained by the town, honoured Sir Roger by staying at his house.

For the rest, there are dim, odd corners, where queer old timber angle-posts, carved with grinning and demoniacal figures, start out of the houses. Such an one is that which forms the chief adornment of the “King’s Arms” inn and is dated 1592.

The Town Hall is a curious old building within, although refaced and rendered commonplace without. In it are held the Quarter Sessions for Sandwich and the Liberties of Ramsgate, Walmer, and Sarre. Brightlingsea’s law-cases were also formerly held here; and the Mayor of that Essex seaport still has his chain of office placed on him here by his overlord, the Mayor of Sandwich. Another mayoral peculiarity is the black wand, instead of the usual white one, presented by the clerk to his Worship on his assuming office. The town traditionally thus went into mourning after the battle of Bloody Point. As this took place in the year 851, it is quite evident that the men of Sandwich are people with long memories, whom it would be an ill business to offend. The Sessions Hall and police-court is a fine old room, the court being entered past two weird old sculptured heraldic figures, a lion and a dragon sitting up on their rumps and holding shields. These are survivals of the town’s decorations when Queen Elizabeth visited it, the dragon being, of course, the ancient Dragon of Wales. A number of pictures of curious interest seen in the Mayor’s Parlour were found in 1839, during some alterations to a house in Harnet Street. They represent the battle of Sole (Southwold) Bay, the reception of Queen Elizabeth, etc. The jury-box in the Sessions Court is worth notice. It is one which used formerly to be set up at the opening of the Court, and taken down at the conclusion of business, when its parts were fitted into the panelling which lines the walls. Thus arose the expression of “empanelling” a jury.

There is now a stir in the old streets of Sandwich. Somewhere about 1887 some enthusiastic golfers discovered in the wide-spreading sands an ideal site for links on which to play that “royal and ancient” game, at that time scarce known, even by name, to the generality of Englishmen; and speedily the St. George’s Golf Club, since granted the prefix of “Royal,” was established, on land—or rather sand—leased and eventually purchased, from the Earl of Guilford, to whom the sea, in closing the career of Sandwich as a port, has gracefully presented this truly “unearned increment.” The present club-house was formerly Great Downs Farm. Recently the trustees of the Earl of Guilford have constructed a “private” road from Sandwich, across the sandy wastes, to the sea, where they have erected a smart hotel, chiefly for golfers, on what was the solitary shore. Sometimes, when the golfers have bored each other almost to extinction with bragging of their remarkable feats on the course, they lounge into Sandwich and patronise it. To those who do not play golf all these developments are hateful and infuriating, and the players seem to be persons who pretend at exercise, rather than putting themselves to any real exertion; and on that score very inferior to cricketers. Meanwhile the boys and growing lads of Sandwich employed as “caddies” are being bred up to be idle, vicious, and unemployable men.