The Kentish Coast

by Charles G. Harper

Furthermore, any person who should wound another maliciously with knife, sword, or the like, had the choice either of paying the Mayor and commonalty sixty shillings, of going to prison for a year and a day, or of having his hand perforated by the weapon with which the wound was inflicted. Any woman convicted of scolding or quarrelling in the street, or any public place, was to carry “the mortar,” a kind of pillory, through the town, beginning and ending at the pillory gate, and preceded by a piper, to whom she was to pay a penny for his music. The jurats had also power of life and death for offences that would now be considered of only a minor kind. The women condemned to die were drowned in the Guestling Brook; the men buried alive in the Thieves Dunes, near by.

The treacherous receding of the sea, which, in leaving Richborough high and dry, had ruined that original port and created Sandwich, was in course of time to serve Sandwich in the like manner. Its period of greatest prosperity would appear to have been about 1470. It had then ninety-five vessels and 1,500 sailors, and the customs revenue of the port was £17,000, equal to about twenty times that sum in present values. But the drifting sands soon afterwards began to create difficulties in the haven; and when, about 1535, a large vessel belonging to Pope Paul the Fourth was sunk, by accident or design, in the harbour it caused so serious a shoal that not all the efforts of the townspeople could remove it. By 1640 the haven was a thing of the past, but for close upon two centuries and a half hopes were entertained of reopening it. At an early stage in these troubles foreigners were had over from Holland to deal with the sands, and petitions were from time to time presented to Queen Elizabeth and to Parliament. And still the sandbanks accumulated, and by that time, late in the eighteenth century, when the Government sent down engineers to plan and estimate and report, it was discovered that nothing less than a cut nearly two miles long, at a cost of about £360,000, would serve. That project never progressed beyond the report stage, and Sandwich has long been resigned to its fate. The distance to the sea, in a direct line, is now two miles, across sandy water, partly grown with grass; and ships coming up the Stour to Sandwich quays have to negotiate a winding course of nearly four miles from the sea.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Sandwich was immediately ruined by the closing of its haven. It so happened, about the time when the sands were first closing in, in the reign of Elizabeth, that religious persecution in the Netherlands was harassing the industrious Flemish and French peoples whose commercial and industrial genius had made the fortunes of that land. England’s textile and weaving trades were poor in comparison with those of the Continent, and it was a far-seeing statesmanship, as much as a fellow religious feeling, that induced Elizabeth to grant the petition of the oppressed weavers of bays and says, and other craftsmen in 1565, and afford them an asylum from the ferocious persecution carried on by the Spaniards in the Low Countries. Archbishop Parker well named the Dutch and French refugees who by command of that great Queen were permitted to settle in Sandwich, “gentle and profitable strangers.” Unlike the often diseased, verminous, and generally vicious, ignorant, and tradeless aliens whose free entry into the England of to-day is so rightly resented, those immigrants brought with them, in addition to cleanly and industrious and law-abiding habits, the mastery of trades and techniques that England lacked. They were indeed profitable to the State, and they largely saved Sandwich from such complete extinction as that which has befallen Romney and Winchelsea.

This community originally numbered some four hundred persons, and formed a class apart, with two chapels, a Flemish and a French, for their own use. Their textile trades thrived, and sent forth colonies to Colchester and other places; and, among other crafts, they introduced market-gardening. Incidentally, also, they taught the wasteful and the riotous English a new mode of life. I suppose those two chief races that mainly go towards the making of the English people—the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons—have wastefulness and a love of drink in common, however else they differ. But these strangers added sobriety and prudence to their industry, and brought much housekeeping cleverness with them. It is but one example of their methods, but characteristic, that they were the first to introduce oxtail soup. The English butchers had always disposed of the tails with the hides, but these newcomers had long known their value and bought them cheaply, in the way of their housekeeping, until the English aptitude to learn at other people’s expense sent up the price of those neglected appendages. It is quite in keeping with the contrary nature of people and affairs that it was after a time sought to discriminate unfavourably in taxation against these people who had brought such benefits into the land. How matters would eventually have shaped does not appear, for at that juncture the strangers had begun to mingle with the English. They intermarried and lost their foreign tongues, and, such is the English power of assimilation, their very names have suffered similar changes. Thus, although to this day many names in Sandwich are in their origin Dutch or French, they have been altered so greatly, following the original English inability to pronounce them, that they appear, on the face of them, sufficiently British. All the poetry in them has been obliterated in the process, and they have become quaint or grotesque. But those typical Sandwich names, “Gutterbock” and “Poisson,” are in their original form.

The textile trades in time deserted Sandwich, and at last left it to a gentle sleep; and so it has drowsed away the last centuries. It is not the “dead town” it is commonly reported to be, and by no means to be judged by Cobbett’s uncomplimentary reference in 1823: “Sandwich, which is a rotten borough. Rottenness, putridity, is excellent for land, but bad for boroughs.” It was political rottenness that aroused his indignation; but that was no especial attribute of Sandwich, and therefore he need not have continued with the remark, “as villainous a hole as one would wish to see.”

Wish not to see, he doubtless meant, for nobody desires to see villainous holes. But Sandwich was not of his political creed, hence this fury.

So much has been said of Sandwich as a “dead town” that strangers who first come to it full of the tales they have heard, of grass growing in its streets—and, for all I know, moss growing on its inhabitants—are likely to be surprised at its comparative vitality. Grass does not grow like a lawn in the streets of Sandwich, in spite of all the far-fetched stories of decay and desolation that it pleases eloquent descriptive writers to tell, and it is something of a shock to find a quite busy railway station just outside the ramparts and a very modern “Stores” in whose windows are all sorts of twentieth-century provisions, for which modern coin of the realm, and not the quaint moneys of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth, must be tendered. All these signs, including the occasional motor-cars that hurry through the narrow streets, are very reassuring, or very disastrous, according to your point of view.

At Sandwich, which is supposed (in the pages of those super-eloquent writers aforesaid) to have given up the ghost long ago, but has done nothing of the kind, there should certainly be no railway, and there should be no room in a “dead” town for the gasworks which may be seen—and smelt—on the quay, nor for the particularly large and busy brewery in Strand Street. At the mediæval Sandwich, thus pictured, the few remaining shopkeepers should stand in their doorways and address passers-by with “What d’ye lack, my masters?” but they don’t; and the thirsty wayfarer will call in vain for a posset of sack, a beaker of canary or malvoisie at the “Red Lion” or “King’s Arms.” Beshrew me, sirs, but he will need to content himself with a whisky-and-soda, mineral-waters, or the product of the local brewery already mentioned. I have no doubt, could he sample the old-style drinks, he would greatly prefer the modern.

If one really wishes to see a dead town, Winchelsea, or New Romney, or, better still, Old Romney, may be recommended. They are much more dead—if it be in any way possible to institute degrees in these things—than Sandwich.

But the census returns of a hundred years ago, compared with those of 1911, prove an increase of population in the town. They at the same time disclose how small a place it is. The population in 1801 was 2,452; in 1901 it had risen to 3,170; but the 1911 census reveals a decline of 130.