The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"

by Charles G. Harper

SALTWOOD CASTLE.

Saltwood Castle is a peculiarly interesting object in the Ingoldsby Country, for it was the place where the four knights who murdered Becket assembled, on the night before the tragedy, and FitzUrse, among them, was, as we have already seen, claimed by Barham as his ancestor. The massive circular stone entrance-towers of the Castle come into view as we turn inland and surmount the crest of the hill at the back of Hythe. From this hilltop it is seen how exquisitely beautiful was the situation of Saltwood in days of old, before Hythe and its neighbouring mushroom townlets had begun to throw out their villas and suburban residences upon the spurs of the downs, flouting the sylvan solitude and mediæval aloofness of that secluded fortress. It lies a mile inland, at the head of a green and moist valley, still thickly wooded, sloping to the sea. We do not fully realise, until we take thought, the due meaning of that beautiful name of Saltwood; but, dwelling upon its old history, and in imagination sweeping away the modern accretions of houses, it is possible to recover the look of that Saltwood of old, when the woodlands were even more dense than now, and extended to the very margin of the sea; when a little pebbly brook came prattling from the bosom of the downs beyond, and, overhung by forest trees, found its way to the beach. The high tides then oozed some little distance up the valley, and the trees dipped their branches in the mingled waters of sea and stream. No roads, save the merest bridle-paths, then led up to the Castle, whose towers rose from amid the encircling trees like some fortress of fairyland.

From very early times Saltwood Castle was held by the Archbishops of Canterbury. It was, indeed, the seizure of this archiepiscopal castle and demesne by the Crown, and the grant of them to Randulf de Broc, that formed one of Becket's bitter grievances against Henry II. De Broc and his relatives were not only seated on the Archbishop's property, but were given the custody of his palace at Canterbury during his long six years' banishment, and on his return in December 1170, strenuously set themselves to be as insolent and as injurious as possible. Randulf himself hunted down the Archbishop's deer with the Archbishop's own hounds, and seized a vessel off Hythe laden with wine, a present from the King to Becket, killing some of the crew and casting the survivors into the dungeons of Pevensey. It was ill business quarrelling with that heady family, unanimously bent upon spiting and spoiling his Grace, from bloody murder and the seizing and destroying of property down to acts of wanton and provocative petty buffoonery. While Randulf de Broc was committing murder and piracy upon the high seas, his kinsman Robert, a renegade monk, on Christmas Eve waylaid one of the Archbishop's sumpter-mules and one of his horses and cut off their tails. It was this minor indignity that made the greater impression upon Becket's mind. For it he cursed and excommunicated both Randulf and Robert on Christmas Day from the nave pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral.

Saltwood Castle, however, and the De Brocs bore a still further part in the tragedy of Becket, now fast drawing to its final act. When the four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Moreville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Bret, rushed forth from the King's presence at his court of Bur, in Normandy, on the night of December 24th, with murder in their hearts, they agreed to cross the Channel by two different routes, landing at Dover and at Winchelsea and meeting here, in this fortalice of Saltwood, where hatred sat embattled, already excommunicated and given over in any case to damnation, and so ready for any deed. Ghastly legends, theatrical in the rich gloom of their staging, tell how the four from over sea and Randulf de Broc met here, and plotted together on this night of December 28th the deed that was to be done on the morrow; arranging all the details of that act of blood in the dark, with extinguished candles, fearful of seeing each other's faces—so strong a hold did the event take of the popular imagination. The next morning, calling together a troop of soldiers in the King's name, they galloped off to Canterbury, along the Stone Street, to the commission of that crime whose echoes have come down to us, still hoarsely reverberant, despite the passing of more than seven centuries.

But it must not be supposed that here at Saltwood we see the veritable walls that sheltered those assassins. There is nothing remaining at Saltwood that can take us back to the days of Becket. The oldest, as well as the most imposing, part is the entrance, whose great drum-towers, built or restored by the cruel and haughty Archbishop Courtenay about 1350, give a very striking impression to one who stands beneath them of the almost impregnable strength of such mediæval strongholds before the days of heavy ordnance—the walls are so thick and smooth, the loophole windows so high up and small, the stout gate so strengthened with iron. If to force such a place seems almost impossible in cold blood, what of the time when it was defended by determined persons who heaved heavy stones from the battlements, so high up, upon the devoted heads of the equally determined persons, so far below; when the molten lead poured down in silvery cascades, to burn through the flesh to the very bone, and the winged missiles sped from the arbalasts into the liver of many a gallant warrior?—

The oak door is heavy and brown;
And with iron it is plated and machicollated,
To pour boiling oil and lead down;
How you'd frown
Should a ladle-full fall on your crown!

One is altogether indisposed to quarrel with the very thoroughgoing restoration that has given these great entrance-towers so striking an air of newness, for one instinctively feels that these towers must have looked so in times when the garrison was still kept up. While the place remained a fortress-residence it would have been simply suicidal not to maintain the entrance in the utmost state of repair.

The arms of Courtenay—the three-pointed label and the three bezants—supported by an angel, still remain over the entrance, but Courtenay himself, before whose frown his unfortunate tenants trembled, and in whose rare and uncertain smiles they dared to breathe in deprecating fashion, is forgotten locally. In Cornwall, in Wales, or in any Celtic part of Great Britain he would have survived in wild diabolic legend, but in Kent, which has been phlegmatic and matter-of-fact ever since Hengist and Horsa and the rest of the Teutons landed, he has long been consigned to dryasdust records, where his memory lingers, inanimate. When a little of the dust has been banged out of him, he can be made to strut the stage again and lord it once more, like the very full-blooded tyrant he was, zealous in upholding the spiritualities and the temporalities of the Church, and fanatic in the exaction of deference and manorial dues to himself. Did any poor hind or woodsman offend, ever so unconsciously, in failing of that deference, why, let him be seized and flung into some Little Ease or earthly purgatory, damply underground, there to reflect, with stripes, upon the majesty of Archbishops in general, and of Courtenays in particular, and to wonder when it shall please my lord to release him. Meanwhile, his Grace has forgotten all about his victim, and is thundering in his manorial court against the trembling bailiffs and townsfolk of his manor of Hythe, who have not done him, as he imagines, that yeoman service which is his due, and have now come to compound for that dereliction with fines in good coin and propitiatory offerings for his table, such as porpoises (the old records call them "porpusses") and others of the beastly dishes that mediæval times delighted in. All these folk had cause to rejoice when his exacting Grace died in 1396, and made way for a milder occupant of the seat of St. Augustine, but they were not happy until the Reformation came and the Church and the manor parted company. The property now belongs to the Deedes family, but it needs no very prophetic eye to discern the ultimate fate of Saltwood's ownership. It lies too near the gates of the consorted towns of Hythe and Folkestone and their satellites to be much longer suffered to maintain its present semi-solitude, and the day will come when it and its romantic setting of woods will be offered to and purchased by those towns as a public park. The landscape-gardener will be let loose upon it; winding gravel paths of the kind that takes a league of path to go a mile of distance will be made, and the public will be requested to "keep off the grass" and to "place all refuse in the receptacle provided for the purpose": all very parlourmaidenly, and the essence of neatness and order, but—well, there! one can imagine the choleric ghosts of De Broc and Courtenay and those of many a gross man-at-arms or warlike seneschal walking on the grass in derision, or with ineffective kicks of impalpable mailed feet seeking to demolish the receptacles.

Magnificently-wooded hills stretch from Saltwood inland to Westenhanger, and the delightful road goes full in view of the gorgeous sylvan beauties of Sandling Park, presently to come to a broad highway running due north and south, beside whose straight course the ruined, ivy-clad outworks and towers of an ancient mansion are seen, in whose midst is planted an eighteenth-century mansion. This is Westenhanger House, erected by Squire Champneys in place of that older manor house which was built on the site of a still more ancient fortified place by Henry VIII. Like many another manor of ancient descent, Westenhanger has been many times in and out of Royal possession. Its odd name, inviting inquiry, really means no more than, in modern parlance, "Westwood," and is derived from the Saxon angra. It is mentioned in a deed of St. Augustine's monastery as "Le Hangre," and was early divided into two portions, Westen and Osten (or eastern) Hanger. Remains of the moat that once surrounded the old fortified mansion are still to be seen, together with the defensible towers.