The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

XXVIII

HERMITS

As mediæval travellers approached Sittingbourne from the direction of London, the first objects they perceived were the chapel and hermitage of Schamel, dedicated to Saint Thomas à Becket, and standing on the south side of the road. They are gone now, and a wayside public-house—“The Volunteers”—stands on, or near their site; but the hermitage was, from the time of King John to the impious days of Henry the Eighth, a resting-place for those devout pilgrims who sought the shrine of the “holy blissful martyr” at Canterbury. In the reign, however, of that “Defender of the Faith”—when it suited him—the chapel and the hermitage were scattered to the winds, and the hermit thrust out into a world that had grown tired of making pilgrimages. But, while it lasted, the Hermitage of Schamel did a very thriving business; so thriving, indeed, as to excite the jealousy of the Sittingbourne people, who conceived themselves injured by the intercepting of pilgrims before they could reach and fertilize the town with streams of gold. Rich pilgrims were a source of wealth to many towns and villages on the Dover Road, and hermits, bishops, priors, and abbots contended for them like ’busmen for passengers before the introduction of the bell-punch and the ticket system.

We first hear of Schamel Hermitage in the time of a priest named Samuel, whose duties consisted in saying mass daily, in wearing a hair-shirt, refraining from soap and water, and in attending upon those pilgrims and travellers who did not mind the apostolic dirt in which he wallowed; and by whose alms he supported himself and the chapel. Samuel died and was gathered to his fathers, and the building presently fell into decay, to be rebuilt by an Augustinian monk, during whose lifetime the annals of the Hermitage are too placid for recounting in this place. His successor was one Walter de Hermestone, who was appointed by the Queen about 1271. Imagine his disgust, though, when he came here and found the place a wreck, the work of the Vicar and the townsfolk of Sittingbourne. This estimable clergyman, whose name was Simon de Shordich, and who seems to have brought the manners and customs of his native place with him, had carried off the Hermitage bell and altar as prizes to his own church, and the men of Sittingbourne had left both the Hermitage and the Chapel in the likeness of a Babylonic ruin. History does not record what became of Walter de Hermestone, but it seems likely that he departed for some more peaceful spot. Meanwhile, Simon de Shordich died, perhaps from the effects of the eremitical curses which the disappointed incumbent of the ruinated place doubtless showered on him; and he was followed, both in his Vicarage and his evil courses, by a certain Boniface, who carted away the ruins and sold them.

SCHAMEL

Sixteen years later an inquiry was held on these matters, at the instance of the Queen, who, holding the manor of Milton-next-Sittingbourne, was patron of the chapel. There seems to have been a hamlet of Schamel at this time, for a certain William the Weaver, and others who gave evidence before the commission, are located here. It must have been about this era that the chapel was rebuilt, but little is heard of it until June, 1358, when the Queen of Edward the Third passed by, and gave 20s. in alms. Friar Richard de Lexeden was then in possession. Two years later, King John of France passed, on his way home, and gave twenty nobles, a sum equal to no less than £120 of our money; and that is the last we hear of the Hermitage until it was for ever destroyed in 1542-43.

Meanwhile, the chapel of Swanstree, at the east end of the town, was as much upheld and cared for by the Sittingbourne people as the Schamel chapel was robbed and injured. Wealthy tradespeople left money in their wills to its altars and for the repair of the roads thither, and the Vicars of Sittingbourne approved of it, because it not only did not take away from them, but gleaned anything that the pilgrims had to spare after they left Sittingbourne, and before they came to the next town. But although so favoured, this chapel has gone the way of the other, and not a vestige of it remains. It stood on the grounds of the present Murston Rectory.

SITTINGBOURNE

Sittingbourne was not a large place in the days that ended with the advent of railway times, but it had an astonishing number of hotels, inns, and beer-houses. People had not at that time begun to see that the royal road to fortune lay in the making of bricks and tiles, and so they amassed riches by plundering the travellers whose evil stars sent them down the road to Canterbury and Dover; and in the lulls of business when no travellers were forthcoming, they probably “kept their hands in” by overcharging one another. I believe Sittingbourne must have been a town of inns, and but little else, and that the population lived in hotels and drank wines, beer, and spirits all day long and a great part of the night, just for the fun of the thing.

Not that mine host of the “Red Lion” was at all extortionate when he entertained Henry the Fifth in 1415, on his return from Agincourt. On the contrary, the bill was decidedly reasonable, amounting only to nine-and-sixpence, including wine. You cannot, unhappily, dine conquering heroes of any sort—much less kings—so reasonably nowadays, and I suspect that, even a century or more ago, when the First and Second Georges were used to put up at the “George,” on their way to or from Hanover, prices must have ruled much higher. The “Red Lion” was undoubtedly the chief inn at Sittingbourne from a very early time, and it kept its good repute for centuries; for here it was that Henry the Eighth stayed when “progressing” along the Dover Road in 1541, and here he held what in those autocratic times answered to our present Cabinet Councils. If I were a licensed victualler I could wish those days back again. Beside the “Red Lion” and the “George,” there were at this time the scarcely less inferior hostelries of the “Horn,” the “Saracen’s Head,” the “Bull,” and the “White Hart”; and, what with Emperors, Kings, Archbishops, Cardinals, and other dignitaries, with trains of attendants numbering anything from two thousand down to fifty, they must all have been needed. In the sixteenth century, then, Emperors and Kings were the usual guests of the “Red Lion.” The landlord at that time sniffed at Princes and Archbishops, and turned away such riff-raff as Dukes and Earls. So soon, however, as 1610, we find a mere untitled traveller received at the “Red Lion”; one Justus Zinzerling, a German, who came posting up the road from Canterbury. We know from his own account that posting was not in those days very expensive. He paid three shillings for riding these fifteen miles, and alighting at the “Red Lion,” put up for the night, glad to get here, past the body of a robber who had been hanged from a roadside tree for murdering a messenger. The body was so surrounded with chains and rings that Herr Zinzerling was of the opinion it would last a long time for the due reading of a much-needed moral to others. He found the landlord of the “Red Lion” to be a Scotchman who knew Latin, and on this common ground of good-fellowship they drank to one another and quoted the classics until drink tied their tongues and deposited their bodies under the table.

I have already had occasion to mention six first-class inns that flourished here three hundred years ago; but in the middle of last century there were a great many more. The “George,” the “Rose,” and the “Red Lion” seem to have been the chiefest of them about this time; and, if we may believe Hasted (and there is no reason why we shouldn’t), the “Rose” was “the most superb of any throughout the kingdom, and the entertainment afforded in it equally so.” But where is the “Rose Hotel” now? Gone, alas! with the snows of yester-year. Where, also, the “George,” which at the time of Waterloo kept forty pairs of post-horses? and where the “Red Lion”? It would, I fancy, puzzle most folks to say, for although they still stand, the change that came over the spirit of their dream about 1840 has caused them to be cut up into separate houses and tenements.

We can, however, by intensive observation, identify the “Rose.” It is a handsome red brick building on the left-hand side, now occupied by a firm of grocers. The identification is from a beautifully-carved rose in a red brick panel on the first floor, with the initials “R. I.” and the date 1708. The building is large, and has eight windows in a row. But the “George” has nine, and the “Lion” twelve.

About this time, too, the people seem to have given up living in hotels and inns, and to have taken to private houses. Also, they drank tea instead of beer; and so presently we find the inns disappearing that at one time stood next to one another, in a long line on both sides of the High Street, and even in the branch thoroughfares. Here was the “White Hart,” large enough in 1815 to have eighteen soldiers quartered in it daily. It is now divided between a Bank and a Brewery. Here, also, was the “Gun,” which, aptly enough, had as many vicissitudes as the fortunes of war, for it was turned into the Parish Workhouse, opened again in 1752 as the “Globe,” and presently became the workhouse again, with, probably, the landlord as its first inmate! But it was no greater a success as what our grandfathers with an ironical humour termed a “House of Industry” than as a hostelry, and so it was not long before the paupers were marched out and another phase of its strange eventful history commenced. This time it became a coachmaker’s workshop, and there we will leave it.

Sittingbourne innkeepers had an inordinate fancy for changing their signs, and some of their houses have borne as many aliases as an old and hardened swindler. Thus the “Seven Stars” became in turn the “Cherry Tree,” the “Union Flag,” and finally the “Volunteers”; while the present “Plough Inn” (only they may have changed its name again already) in East Street has been successively the “King Henry the Eighth,” and the “Royal Oak.” Other houses were the “Bull,” the “Adam and Eve,” the “Walnut Tree,” the “King’s Head,” “Six Bells,” “Black Boy,” “Boatswain’s Call,” “Ship,” “Chequer,” “Three Post Boys,” “Crown,” “Bird in Hand,” “Lamb,” “Three Kings,” “Angel,” “Portobello,” “Bell,” “Duke’s Head,” and “Cross Keys”; to name but a selection, but age has withered, and want of custom staled, the most of them, and, instead of entertaining travellers, the inhabitants of Sittingbourne poison them with the appalling smells that arise from the numberless brick-kilns round about.

BRICKS AND TILES

For the making of bricks and tiles is the chief industry of Sittingbourne nowadays, and a very large and flourishing industry it is; so much so, indeed, that there will be presently nothing of Sittingbourne left at all; because, like maggots that live in cheeses—and on them—the Sittingbourne brickmakers find their sustenance in the ground on which they live, and have carted away nearly all the surrounding country. When they have worked down to the chalk and the bed-rock, I don’t know what they will do. Already all the hills have vanished and have been distributed over England in the shape of bricks, and when folks return who have known Sittingbourne in their youth, they don’t recognize the place, and go away wondering whether curses will fall upon it because its people have thus removed the old landmarks.

Changed, indeed, it is, not only from those days when the great ones of the earth sojourned here, but also from those comparatively recent times when the traveller’s only choice was the road. Then three parts of the population were engaged in hotel-keeping, licensed-victualling, or coach-building; innkeepers, job-masters, hostlers, post-boys, chamber-maids, and boots, were their styles and titles, and if you are curious enough to turn the pages of Sittingbourne registers you will find such entries as these to be the chiefest of their contents: “John Slater, innholder, of the White Hart, was buryed, 22nd Feby, 1708/9”; or “Joseph, ostler at the Crowne, buryed Oct. 23, 1708.”

When the railway came, ruin, swift and terrible, fell upon this busy community. Grass grew in the stable-yards; the old high-hung yellow chariots and the light post-chaises rotted to pieces that were used to be hired by travellers who did not care so much about the price as the pace they went; the price of horses fell; the vast interiors of the hotels with their numberless bedrooms, and one-time cosy coffee-rooms, echoed to the casual tread of some unfrequent guest, uncomfortable and half-frightened at the solitary state in which he sat; hostlers, grooms, and washers lounged miserably about the mouldy harness-rooms in company with dejected post-boys; chamber-maids departed to other scenes and occupations; and “boots” gradually lost the encyclopædic knowledge for which he was renowned, and forgot alike the number of miles to the next post-town and the proper way to clean a pair of Bluchers.

The last post-boy is dead now, and the chaises and the chariots are represented—like so many other obsolete things—at the South Kensington Museum; and the typical innkeeper of that day should be also, for his like is no more seen on earth. He was a burly man with a red, good-humoured, clean-shaven face. He wore, frequently, knee-breeches and sleeved yellow waistcoats with black stripes that made him look, to the youthful imagination, like a great wasp or bumble-bee. He wore short white aprons, too, and high collars encircling his thick red neck, so that one gazed upon him in constant dread of his falling down in an apoplectic fit; he wore—but enough! Let it be said, though, that he resembled a Blue-coat boy in one respect, for he was never known to wear a hat.

All this is changed. Sittingbourne had grown into importance because its situation was convenient for travellers to stay here to change horses at, and when the roads became deserted the place would have fallen back into its original obscurity had it not been for bricks, hops, and cherries. Bricks, and the surrounding fruit country have prospered it anew, and have made it what it is; a dusty, thickly populated, dirty town whose old aspect has been altered from a broad and roomy street to crowded lanes and a High Street filled with frowzy alleys, and many Dissenting conventicles of different degrees of ugliness.

PAPER

Of late years, paper has been added to the interests of Sittingbourne. Outside the town, on Milton Creek, leading muddily to the Swale, there you will find paper in its crude wood-pulp stage, as imported from the mills in Norway and Sweden. Closely viewed, it is not attractive. Slabs of wood-pulp, stacked forty or fifty feet high, with a narrow-gauge railway running between cliff-like accumulations of this merchandise, present a scene made squalid by the torn and bedraggled fragments of paper packing that the winds sport with. But, seen from the Swale, or indeed from a distance on land, these towering stocks of the raw material for newspapers have a peculiarly romantic appearance; looking indeed like a reminiscence of the temples of the East.

The village of Milton itself, properly “Milton Regis,” is full of queer old corners. The church stands aloof, dignified, on a remote country road. In its churchyard is a stone mentioning a woman who had six husbands:—

“Here lyeth interred the Body of Abraham Washiton (sic), late husband of Alise Washinton now liveing in Milton, whome had in all six Husbands: John Ailes, John Ricard, Thomas Gill, John Jeefrre, Alexander Flet. Anno 1601.”

It will be observed that this lady who collected husbands is described as “now liveing.” Possibly the sixth was not the last; but by that time the men of Milton must have grown rather timid.

In any case, the history of Mrs. Washinton was evidently considered remarkable, to be detailed on this stone, either by herself or by the admiring or astonished neighbourhood.

YARD OF THE “LION” INN. SITTINGBOURNE.

Sittingbourne parish church, and some remaining walls of the more ancient inns, are all that need detain the stranger. The massive square tower of the church, which is a prominent feature of the High Street, is the oldest part; the body of the building dates only from the Perpendicular period. To this time belongs a singular monumental effigy of a lady, placed in a niche of the north chancel wall; a mysterious figure, represented with an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes lying across its wasted breast. No inscription remains to tell its story. The church fronts on to the highway, and in days of pilgrimage (and even so lately as 1830) the bourne to which Sittingbourne owes its name, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Sæthingbourne,” the seething, or bubbling, brook, trickled and welled up in the likeness of a spring across the road. Through it splashed the mounted pilgrims, while the weary-footed palmers crossed by stepping-stones, or cooled their feet in the water. Many halted to cross themselves, to kneel and pray before the figure of Our Lady which filled the niche still remaining in the buttress of the Chilton Chapel, and was called thence “Saint Mary of the Butterasse.” This little shrine was defaced in 1540, and now the running stream is enclosed in pipes that discharge the water into Milton Creek.

MURSTON

The village of Murston, which at one time skirted the road at some distance from Sittingbourne, and was in receipt of the town’s leavings, is now quite undistinguishable by a stranger from the town itself, so greatly has the population grown of late years. It is quite uninteresting, save for the memory of the affray by which the rector, the Reverend Richard Tray, was ejected from his living in 1641. A stone let into the Rectory wall preserves the record of the affair:—

Si Natvra negat facit Indignatio Versvm.

The Barne which stood where this now Stands was bvrnt down by the Rebel’s hands in December 1659 This Barne which stands where tother stood By Richard Tray is now made good, in July 1662 All things yov bvrn, Or overtvrn, Bvt bvild vp novght: pray tell Is this the Fire of Zeale or Hell? Yet yov doe all By the Spirits call As yov pretend: bvt pray What Spirit is’t? A bad one I dare say.

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