Well—there the "Twins" stand
On the verge of the land,
To warn mariners off from the Columbine Sand,
And many a poor man have Robert and Dick
By their vow caused to 'scape, like themselves, from Old Nick.
The mariners of old never failed as they passed to bare their heads and pray to Our Lady or Reculver. It is said that a good omen was argued by them if the towers were clearly seen in passing, and evil if they were hidden by fog; but, when we consider the dangers of the sea in fogs, there seems less superstition in those ideas than sheer common-sense.
The towers have for many years been maintained by the Trinity House, according to the tablet over the doorway: "These towers, the remains of the once venerable Church of Reculver, were purchased of the Parish by the Corporation of the Trinity House of Deptford Strond in the year 1810, and groynes laid down at their expense to protect the cliff on which the church had stood. When the ancient spires were afterwards blown down, the present substitutes were erected, to render the towers still sufficiently conspicuous to be useful to navigation.—Captain Joseph Cotton, Deputy Master, in the year 1819."
Returning to Chislett and the breathless route of Smuggler Bill and his companions, Up Street hamlet, and Westbere are passed; Westbere itself in a deep hollow on a slip road plunging down romantically from that dreary highway. Then comes the long, bricky, dusty, gritty village of Sturry, whose name is taken from the River Stour, on which it stands, or rather, in which it stood, for it was once encircled by that now shrunken stream, and its original style was "Esturei," or "Stour Island." In midst of the village a turning to the left will lead the explorer to a little jewel of a place, lying forgotten by the Stour banks. He leaves populous Sturry behind, and comes, over little brick bridges as hump-backed as Quilp or Quasimodo, and by rustling alders, into a spot long since retired from worldly activities—enters, in fact, that decayed port of Canterbury, Fordwich.
FORDWICH.
Canterbury was once a seaport! How incredible it seems, now that Whitstable, the nearest point on the coast, is seven miles away, and the Stour so small a stream that even for rowing-boats it is at the present time scarce navigable. Yet to this very village of "Fordige" as the local speech has it, the salt tide came up the estuary in days well within the historic period. Not merely vague Romans, but historical personages—palpable human beings who have personally left great flat-footed, heavy-handed marks on the pages of our national story—have landed at the still-existing quay, at which it is even yet possible for one to land from a skiff, and so to parallel experiences for one brief glorious moment of historic self-consciousness with no less a personage than the Black Prince himself, who stepped ashore here from no skiff, but directly from the caravel that brought him across the Channel, fresh from his cruelties in Guienne and Spain. Those who welcomed him home—the Mayor and burgesses of Fordwich—were as cruel and savage as he in their unchivalric municipal way; the times were sodden with cruelty, supersaturated with ferocity, and the rejoicings at the warrior's home-coming did but serve as an afternoon's respite for those petty malefactors who awaited their doom in the two dark and dismal cells even yet existing beneath the old town hall and court house standing so picturesquely by this self-same quay. Not the whole of that curious building can claim so great an age, for the general aspect of it is scarce earlier than Elizabethan times. Indeed, it has latterly been made to look quite smart and neat, its nodding roof carefully squared, the lichen and stonecrop removed, and some nice new brickwork here and there inserted. "Restoration" seeks out the veriest holes and corners and culs-de-sac of the land, and "makes up" old buildings into new, like old dowagers masquerading as girls again.
Fordwich town hall filled many functions. In it were transacted all the business affairs of the old port; in it, too, justice was dealt out in rough and ready fashion to the miscreants of yore, and executed swiftly, and still more roughly and readily, outside. The justice of the Cinque Ports, of which Fordwich was a member, was by no means tempered with mercy, and was as blood-thirsty as those early laws of the Israelites duly set forth with much horrifying circumstantiality in Leviticus. Theves Lane, in Fordwich, led in ancient times to "Thefeswelle," the well in which convicted thieves were judicially drowned. Thieves with a preference for the easiest death commonly selected Dover for their operations in those times, for when the inevitable happened, the Dover authorities flung them from the cliff-top, and so they ended swiftly and mercifully with broken necks, a better way than being dropped down a well and the lid then put on, as here at Fordwich, or being buried alive or smothered in the harbour mud, after the Sandwich style.
