The interior of Faversham church should be seen to be believed. It is a curious example of the eighteenth-century way with ancient Gothic architecture, and discloses an attempt to convert a Gothic nave into an Ionic interior. The effort was a half-hearted one, for while the columns are in the Ionic style, the Perpendicular clerestory windows remain; with, however, a fillet of classic ornament around them. The fine large Early English transepts have not been interfered with. On a pillar of the north transept is a twelfth-century fresco representing the Nativity, and in the chancel remains the brass to one William Thornbury, rector and anchorite, 1481.
In the churchyard will be seen this curious epitaph:
William Lepine
of facetious Memory,
Ob. the 11th of March 1778
Æt. 30 Years
Alas
Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? your flashes
of Merriment that were wont
to set the Table in a roar?
This is, of course, a quotation from Hamlet. Lepine, who ended so untimely, was a dissolute and convivial lawyer of Faversham.
CHAPTER VII
MILTON-NEXT-SITTINGBOURNE—SITTINGBOURNE OLD INNS—MURSTON—LUDDENHAM
A curious and but-little-visited part of the Kentish littoral is that which stretches, some eight miles or so, between Iwade, Milton, Sittingbourne, Tonge, and Faversham. It is that part of the country, going down to the low-lying shores of the Swale, which was in olden times spoken of as being possessed of “wealth without health.” The land was, and is still, wonderfully fertile, but in remote days was full of malaria. To-day, as the traveller by the leisurely South-Eastern Railway passes from Sittingbourne, past Teynham to Faversham, he sees orchards and farmsteads, grazing sheep, and many evidences of prosperity and beauty. It seems to him like a Land of Promise. And truly, once past the squalid papermaking and brickmaking purlieus of Sittingbourne, this is a district of exceptional beauty; by no means flat; and rich in orchards of cherry, apple, and pear.
If we retrace our route from Sheppey, and, coming again across the bridge at King’s Ferry, turn off to the left beyond Iwade, we shall presently come into Milton Regis, otherwise Milton-next-Sittingbourne, past the fine and very striking church, of Norman and Early English periods. It is, in this age of silly “suffies,” generally locked, and therefore the tourist finds considerable difficulties in the way of seeing the beautiful interior and the three Northwode brasses: a knight in heraldic tabard; another about 1480; and John Northwode and wife, 1496. But the odd, and much more humble, tombstone in the churchyard to one “Abraham Washiton late Hvsband of Alise Washinton, now living at Milton, whome had in all six hvsbands,” 1601, is easily found. Alice, you will observe, was at that date “now living,” and so, for all we know, may have married again; but possibly she may by that time have struck the surviving men of Milton as rather lethal.