JOE GARGERY’S FORGE.
CHALK
Chalk is the next place on the road, and Chalk is quite the smallest and most scattered of villages, beginning at the summit of the hill leading out of Milton and ending at Chalk church, which stands on a hillock retired behind a clump of trees nearly a mile down the road, and far away from any house. All the way the road commands long reaches of the Thames and the Essex marshes, and on summer days the singing of the larks high in air above the open fields can be heard.
At Chalk, in 1836, Charles Dickens rented a honeymoon cottage, on his marriage with Catherine Hogarth. Great controversies arose some years ago, following upon what is said to be a wrong identification of the place with a residence called the “Manor House”; and it was stated that the real dwelling in question was the weather-boarded and much humbler cottage at the fork of the old and new roads between Gravesend and Northfleet, still standing, and with a commemorative tablet on it. Opposite is “Joe Gargery’s Forge.”
ANCIENT CARVING—CHALK.
Chalk church is a very much unrestored building of flint and rubble, dating from the thirteenth century. Its south aisle was pulled down at some remote period. There still remains, and in very good preservation, too, a singular Early English carving over the western door representing a grinning countryman holding an immense flagon in his two hands and gazing upward towards a whimsically-contorted figure that seems to be nearly all head and teeth. Between the two is an empty tabernacle which at one time before the destruction of “idolatrous statues” would have held a figure of the Virgin. The two remaining figures probably illustrate the celebration of “Church ales,” a yearly festival formerly common to all English villages, and held on the day sacred to the particular saint to whom the church was dedicated. On these occasions there was used to be general jollity; feasting and drinking; manly sports, such as boxing, wrestling, and games at quarter-staff, would be indulged in, and the day was held as a fair, to which came jugglers and players of interludes and itinerant vendors from far and near. The Church, of course, being the original occasion of the merry-making, looked benignly upon it, and provided the funds for the malt from which the so-called “Church ales” were brewed.
