The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

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.