GUTTERIDGE GATE
It was a hundred yards or so along the road from Gutteridge Gate that two Dragoons figured in a highway robbery upon His Majesty’s Mails in 1789. The bells were chiming three o’clock in the morning of July 31 in that year when Daniel Goldup, the mounted postman, came up the hill from Bridge with the French mails slung across his horse’s back. As he eased his pace in ascending the hill, three men called upon him to stop. One of them he recognized as a villager from Elham named Hills, and the two others he perceived to be Dragoons disguised in smock-frocks. Telling Hills he had no letters for him, Goldup proceeded on his way. Hills fired but missed, and the three then ran after him; one laying hold of the horse’s bridle while the other two seized the mail-bags and rifled them. They detained him an hour while they examined the letters, and then, tying up the mail-bags again, let him go.
The village of Bridge, down below, takes its name from the small bridge that carries the road over the Lesser Stour. It is a pretty and peaceful place to-day, with quaint boarded houses; a Norman and Early English church, containing some curious and grotesque carvings of Adam and Eve; and encircled by woods, the remote descendants of the almost impenetrable forests that once surrounded Canterbury, leaving only Barham Downs and their neighbouring chalk hills bare and islanded amid a sea of greenery.
BRIDGE.
Barham Downs commence immediately beyond Bridge. They have been the scene of many remarkable gatherings, from the time of Julius Cæsar to the waning years of the last century, when the Downs were alive with soldiers camping here in readiness for that inglorious Armada that never left port—Napoleon’s flotilla of Boulogne.
To go back to the year 55 B.C., when Cæsar first landed at Deal, may seem to the readers of evening newspapers something of an effort in retrogression—and so indeed, it is—but when you once succeed in getting there, the history and details of that time are a great deal more interesting than perhaps the reader of special editions, hot and hot, would imagine. We can succeed in picturing the detailed events of that remote time, because Cæsar, who was as mighty with the pen as with the sword, has left full and singularly lucid accounts of his wars here and on the Continent—lucid, that is to say, when one penetrates the veil of Latin behind which his exploits and the doings of his legionaries are hid; but darkly understood by the stumbling schoolboy, to whom the Bello Gallico is as full of linguistic ambushes as the Kentish valleys were of lurking Britons in Cæsar’s time.
It was in the year 55 B.C. that Cæsar, having overrun, if not having entirely conquered, Gaul, came to its northern coast and gazed eagerly across that unknown sea, beyond which had come strange warriors, extraordinarily strong and equally fearless, to aid those troublesome Gaulish fighting-men who had already given him four years of campaigning, and were still to prove themselves unsubdued. He had already felt the prowess of these “Britons,” as they were called, and fighting having slackened somewhat, he conceived the idea of voyaging across the Channel in quest of glory and adventure in the dim and semi-fabled land of these mysterious strangers. “Cæsar,” he says, speaking of himself always in the third person, “determined to proceed into Britain because he understood that in almost all the Gallic wars succour had been supplied thence to our enemies.” So much for his written reasons, but other things must have weighed with him. The lust of conquest would alone have impelled him forward beyond this very outer edge of the known world, even had he not desired to crush these allies of Gaul; but when wild tales reached him of the richness of the land that lay beyond this strait, whose cliffs he could dimly see, the impulse to invade it was irresistible. But Cæsar was a cautious general, and rarely moved without having reconnoitred, and so he sent over a certain Volusenus to spy out that wonderful land whence came tin and skins, oysters, pearls, hunting dogs, gold, slaves, and terrible warriors. Volusenus sailed across the straits, and returned with quite as much information as could have been expected from one who had never left his ship. That sarcasm is Cæsar’s own, and no doubt he was in a peculiarly savage and sarcastic humour at the time, for although this Britain was so frequented by merchants, yet he could not find any one who would acknowledge having been there; and so his information as to the population, the shores and harbours of the country, remained vague and uncertain. And to add to the disappointments he had experienced from those crafty traders who wished to keep all knowledge of the island to themselves, this over-cautious Volusenus returned after four days with just such a hazy and indefinite story as he had been told before; the hearsay evidence of one who was too timorous to land!
But Cæsar’s desire to see Britain was only whetted by the deceits which those artful traders had practised upon him, and by the vague reports of his envoy. He lay at Portus Itius, identified either as Boulogne or some place in the immediate vicinity, and, collecting a flotilla of over eighty vessels, with an additional eighteen for his cavalry, he sailed from under the shelter of Grey Nose Point at midnight, August 24, B.C. 55. The following morning about six o’clock, this armada arrived under Dover cliffs. The cavalry, however, which had sailed from a different harbour, had been driven back by adverse winds, and did not arrive until four days later. His force, then, consisted of two legions of foot soldiers, equal to about 10,000 men. No sooner had the transports anchored in Dover harbour than the cliff-tops became alive with Britons, armed, and determined to resist a landing. Seeing this, Cæsar decided to select some less dangerous landing-place, and, weighing anchor, sailed seven miles onward to Deal. The British, however, were ready for him when he reached the site of that town, and it was only after a stubborn fight on the beach, and half in the waves, that the Roman legionaries effected a landing. The decks of Cæsar’s triremes were crowded with men who slung stones, threw javelins, and worked great catapults against the Britons, in order to cover the advance of the heavily armoured soldiers as they waded through the shallow water. When once these men, led by the intrepid standard-bearer of Cæsar’s favourite Tenth Legion, had gained the beach, their discipline, their helmets, armour, shields, and short swords speedily prevailed against the ill-protected and undisciplined hordes of the brave islanders. The day was won, and the Romans, having put the Britons to flight, encamped by the shore. Three weeks of battles, ambushes, skirmishes, and negotiations for peace followed this landing, and then Cæsar left Britain. The equinox was at hand, and storms raged. Half his fleet was destroyed by a tempest, and he was anxious to be away. So, accepting any terms that he might with honour, he patched up his vessels and sailed for Gaul; and thus ended the first attempt of the Romans to conquer Britain.
The following year Cæsar determined to invade the island on a larger scale. His first expedition had been obliged to remain ingloriously within sight and sound of the waves; but this time the general resolved to push into the heart of the country. Sailing from his former harbour, his force numbered five legions and two thousand horse, roughly 27,000 men, and with this army, considerable as times went, he landed, unopposed, at Deal on the morning of July 22. Cæsar tells us that the Britons were frightened by the great number of his ships seen sailing across the Channel, but the truth seems to be that he had been sowing jealousies and dissensions among the petty chiefs and kinglets of Kent, and that a secret understanding was arrived at between himself and a discreditable son of King Lud by which his landing should not be contested. However that may be, Cæsar left a guard over his vessels, and started immediately on a twelve miles’ night march inland, in force.