The town of New Romney, new nine hundred years ago, is located afar off, not by its houses, which are few indeed, but by the trees that encircle it, and give a very direct denial to its urban claims. Founded to replace Old Romney, deserted by the sea, as a seaport, the sea began again to retreat so long ago as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and is now a mile and a half to two miles distant, at the melancholy and hopeless-looking cluster of houses known as Littlestone-on-Sea, where there are golf-links on which Parliamentary matches are played. There the opposing champions in the House of Commons contend amicably, much to the surprise of the general public, who imagine—poor fools—that all the fury and tub-thumping at Westminster is honest emotion, and do not realise that it is all part of the great Game of Make-Believe for which, whether amused or not, we have all to pay.

There were once no fewer than five churches at New Romney. Now there is but one. “Here,” wrote Cobbett, in 1825, “there is a church (two miles only from the last, mind!) fit to contain one thousand five hundred people, and there are, for the people of this parish to live in, twenty-two or twenty-three houses! And yet the vagabonds have the impudence to tell us that the population of England has vastly increased.”

The “vagabonds” pilloried in this wrong-headed outburst were quite correct; the population had indeed greatly increased, but that of New Romney and Old Romney alike had, for the best of reasons, declined. Moreover, Cobbett did not know—nor do people generally stop to consider—that the numerous and roomy old churches throughout the country do not necessarily give the measure of the ancient population. As even now, the size or frequency of churches depended to a great extent upon the comparative piety and wealth of the neighbourhood.

The great church of St. Nicholas, the surviving one of New Romney, is a fine specimen of the late Norman style, with tombs of the old Mayors and jurats. The floor-level is so much below the level of the ground outside that one descends several steps into the building. The town itself is scarce less quiet and undisturbed than the interior of the church itself. It is still technically a Cinque Port, and a Mayor is annually elected. Also there is something in the nature of a town gaol; but it is a curiosity rather than a necessity.

I cull this interesting item from a newspaper of October 1913, to show something of the quiet that has now descended upon the place.

“Sinless Cinque Port.—During the last six months the fines and fees at the police court of New Romney, the ancient borough and Cinque Port, have amounted to 2s. In this time only one minor case was heard, although the borough, which includes Littlestone-on-Sea, has a Mayor and eight magistrates, as well as three policemen.”

A very different New Romney from that of centuries ago, which was a place such as Longfellow wrote of, with—

But the town, although reduced in size, experienced a gorgeous time centuries later; a time that ended only in the early years of the nineteenth century. The sea had gone out of sight, but the smuggling trade brought much wealth here.

This was indeed an ideal district for the smugglers who infested the coasts of Kent and Sussex. Every dyke—or “dick,” as the country people pronounce the word—was a temporary storehouse for tubs of contraband spirits, placed there on hurried occasions, until leisure could be found to convey them into more private hiding; and those enterprising revenue officers who on fine days wandered the marshes with iron rods, probing at a venture among the reeds and bulrushes, not infrequently made lucky discoveries.

But it was when night had shut down, thick and rimy, over these levels that in those old times they woke to business. Many a cargo of gin or cognac, successfully landed along the coast on the Kentish or the Sussex side of the Rother, was conveyed by the smugglers’ labourers across Guilford Level and Walling Marsh, and no one in the neighbourhood who observed how usually flush of money were the agricultural labourers of the surrounding villages was in the least mystified as to the source of their gains. Those men knew better than any others the obscure paths and short-cuts of the levels, and could in any weather pick their way with certainty in places where those less expert would presently find themselves at the best confronted by an impassable dyke; or, at the worst of it, floundering in profound depths of mud and water. History informs us very fully of the ferocious nature of the Kentish and Sussex smugglers, who were by no means afraid of blood-guiltiness; but there can be no doubt that most of the mysterious disappearances of revenue men from time to time from this neighbourhood were caused by mischances at the dykes in foggy weather, and not by violence.

The marsh-men, the shepherds, and the agricultural labourers around Brookland took part in an exceptionally furious encounter between smugglers and a force of preventive men and naval blockaders that was fought one night in February 1821. The goods had been landed to the west of Rye, near Camber Castle, and a party of two hundred men had assembled on the beach, to carry the tubs inland, when the landing was rather belatedly discovered by the Naval Blockade look-out. An alarm was raised, and a force of sailors from the Blockade, led by officers, was sent in pursuit. The conduct of the smugglers sufficiently shows their effective organisation. They did not fling away their tubs and run. Not at all. Their march inland, past the solitary Great Cheyne Court, towards Brookland was carried out with all the precision of a well-ordered military retreat. They were not unprepared for attack, and, besides those who did the carrying, there were the “batsmen,” armed with the formidable weapons called “bats,” stout poles from six to eight feet long, and other men who carried firearms. These protectors fought a kind of rearguard action, covering the disposal of the contraband, and did it so well that although the naval officers frequently dashed forward, sword in hand, at the head of their men, they made little impression. The retreat, in good order, and the firing lasted until daybreak, when the tubs had all been hidden and it was only left for the fighting men to disperse. An officer named Mackenzie was killed in this affair, together with four smugglers, while the wounded comprised three officers, six sailors, and sixteen smugglers. Two smugglers, Cephas Quested and Richard Wraight, were captured, the first mistaking an officer in the dark for a comrade, the other losing touch with his fellows and walking into the arms of the enemy. Quested was hanged at Newgate.

Old Romney, two miles inland from Romney the new, is so immemorially old that the days when the sea flowed to it, and the ships came to its quays, are altogether forgotten. Sheep graze in fertile pastures, and never a sign of the sea is evident. Yet there was a time when the waters flowed inland to Appledore and Tenterden, a matter of eight miles, and it is an historical fact that the Danish fleet sailed to Appledore in A.D. 893. The very road by which the marsh is crossed between New Romney and Appledore is a Roman causeway, or embankment, still known as the Rhee Wall, along whose sides the waters lapped. Beyond Old Romney, in the midst of Walland Marsh, is Brookland, whose church is notable for its detached wooden tower, leaning to one side, painted or tarred black, and in the shape of three extinguishers, placed each upon the other. The windows are provided with wooden shutters as a protection against the winds that blow, unrestrained, across these levels. The ancient leaden font, one of the twenty-nine leaden fonts in England, is of the early part of the thirteenth century, and is decorated in relief with the signs of the zodiac, and with figures illustrating the labours of the months. It is a curious relic, and by far the most interesting of the twenty-nine. The inscriptions above each month are in Norman-French: “Janvier, Fevrier, Mars, Avril, Mai, Juin, Juillet, Avovt, Setenbre, Vitovvre, Novenbre, Desenbre.” January is represented by a two-faced Janus, seated at a table; February by a man sitting by a fire; March, a husbandman pruning a vine; April, a bare-headed figure, robed, and in either hand a blossoming branch; May, a sporting knight on horseback, carrying a hawk on his left wrist; June, a mower; July, hayraking; August, reaping; September, threshing; October, wine-pressing; November, a swineherd knocking down acorns, while a pig feeds on them; and December, a man with an axe, killing a pig.

Among the monuments in Brookland church is a table-tomb to John and Thomas Plomer, father and son, jurats of New Romney, and their family. One, we learn, was “Captain of ye selecte board, sometime burgis at ye parliament for ye same towne, who was one of the portes Barons in carrying ye canopie at the coronation of King James ye first of England.”

Among the curious churches of this region, that of Fairfield, two miles north-west from Brookland, is well worth visiting. It is not a large church, nor beautiful, being, indeed, one of that very numerous company popularly supposed to be the “smallest,” and of a quaint, rather barn-like, appearance. It is not, in fact, the “smallest church in England,” that distinction belonging to the little church of Culbone, in Somerset, which is thirty-three feet in length. The length of Fairfield church is about forty feet, and it is thus somewhere about the same size as Bonnington. But it is very much less ecclesiastical in appearance, being chiefly of seventeenth-century red brick.

There is no village of Fairfield, and there are but two houses in sight in the flat marsh-land. Away in the distance you see the church of Stone in Oxney, cresting the uplands; the skylarks are singing madly in the May skies, and sheep are grazing; but it is a solitary spot. Dykes with tall rushes encircle the church, which for some years before 1913 had been closed, and was fallen into a ruinous condition. In the roof of this little building, dedicated to St. Thomas À Becket, there were holes; the small timber bellcote was all on one side, and, of its three bells, one of them was cracked. The windows were broken, the wind-shutters hanging down from them, forlorn. Through the broken casements one might see the whitewashed interior, with the tiny chancel, scarcely lofty enough for a man of average height to stand in, upright, and the tall wooden pews: the whole a roosting-place for birds. The deserted building was at last restored, chiefly from funds granted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Fairfield is in summer a prime curiosity; in winter, the church is generally inaccessible, through being entirely cut off by flood-water. “A dark place,” said a contemplative, solitary man, met in these wilds. Spiritually dark, he meant. In other ways, Fairfield, standing amid clear, wide horizons, with not a tree near it, is a place of exceptional light and sunshine. The colour of the marshes is vivid and lovely; and not less lovely is the golden hue of the lichened, red-tiled old roof of Fairfield church itself, seen from a little distance.

There was a time when even Tenterden, now more than ten miles from the sea, was by way of being in touch with it, through the little port of Smallhythe, whose name is sometimes seen spelled on maps “Small Hithe.” This remote little place, some two miles south of Tenterden, on a by-road, stands strangely at a passage into the so-called “Isle of Oxney,” which nowadays presents the appearance of an inland island, so to speak. Looking at a map, no one would at the first glance suspect Oxney of being an isle, but close inspection discovers the fact that it is indeed surrounded by the Rother and its tributaries, and a canal. In olden times, when the Rother was a broad estuary, Oxney was an isle in very sooth, and it was possible for the not very large vessels of those ages to be navigated to Smallhythe. In the reign of Edward the Third, according to tradition, the harbour dues were greater than those of Liverpool at the same time; and the sea is recorded to have flowed to its quays certainly so late as 1508.

“Smallhead,” as the country people call it, is nowadays little like a port. Its street is blocked by a toll-gate leading to a ferry across the narrow stream. Here the pedestrian is mulcted of one farthing. If he have a cycle, his total expenditure is one halfpenny. Toll for a horse and cart is 6d.; for a traction-engine with one truck attached, 10d.; for a horse, mule, or ass, 1d.; bullock, cow, calf, or pig, ½d.; and sheep, 4d. per score. “We make everything pay,” says the gatekeeper, “’cept a dog.” The gate is private property, and was purchased some years ago for £600. The tolls then yielded over £1 a week; but the income has greatly fallen since the other ferries into the isle were freed.

Smallhythe has the unusual privilege of electing its own vicar, instead of running the risk—sometimes the very real risk—of having to receive a persona non grata foisted upon the parish by a patron not in touch with the needs of the place. The electors are the householders and occupiers of land in the parish. This privilege arose out of the establishment of the church in 1509. Until then, the nearest was Tenterden church, but Warham, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, was induced to license one here because of the complaints made by the inhabitants of the bad state of the roads.

The election takes place always on a Sunday, and the voting is given in the church-vestry. Should an election not be held within six months of the living becoming vacant, the privilege lapses and the presentation becomes the property of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The last election was held May 7th, 1899, when the Rev. C.E. Pizey was chosen, by a majority of one, to succeed his father, deceased. He afterwards resigned, and the unsuccessful candidate, Mr. Raven, was appointed in his stead.

The church is a small building of red brick, with red-brick mullions to its windows—a curious example of early sixteenth-century work. Of the charming old black-and-white half-timbered houses adjoining, that next the toll-gate is the residence of Miss Ellen Terry.