Shepway Court also was an open-air assembly, presided over by the Lord Warden. Here offenders were tried upon charges of high treason, failure of ship-service, false judgment, and treasure-trove. Process upon conviction was summary. Convicted disturbers of the King’s peace, debasers of coin, and plunderers of ships or ships’ gear to the value of twenty pence were at once drawn around Shepway on hurdles and afterwards hanged. An even more terrible fate awaited any jurat disclosing the King’s counsel, his fellows and his own. He was bound hand and foot to a stake set upon the seashore where the tide ebbed and flowed, his throat was cut, and his tongue drawn out through the slit.
The Lord Warden was always, from the earliest times, sworn in at the Court of Shepway upon his appointment. The first Lord Warden was Earl Godwin. This ceremony continued here until 1597, when Lord Cobham took the oath at Bekesbourn. Meanwhile the business of the ancient Court had been transferred to Dover. The composition of this open-air assembly was, the Lord Warden, with the Mayor of Sandwich on his right and the Mayor of Dover on his left; on the right of the Mayor of Sandwich, the Mayor of Hastings; and the Mayors of Romney, and Hythe, Winchelsea and Rye, Faversham, Folkestone, or Fordwich, Lydd, Pevensey or Seaford, and Tenterden, respectively in succession, right and left.
LYMPNE.
At Shepway Cross, on the hill-top, we turn left into Lympne, which was once pronounced locally as a two-syllabled word, “Limn-ey”; obviously derived from the old Roman Lemanis. How or why the intruding “p” came into the place-name is unknown, and cannot be traced back further than Morden’s map of Kent, about 1680.
The great Early English church adjoins the castle, originally one of the numerous seats of the Archbishops of Canterbury, and afterwards for centuries a farmhouse. This interesting building, with remains of fourteenth-century work, was sold about 1907 to Mr. F. J. Tennant, the millionaire brother-in-law of Mr. Asquith. Until that time the public had access to the place; but it has since been restored and huge additions made, wholly changing the aspect of the spot. Before these developments it was possible to wander anywhere at will about the ruins of the castrum on the undercliff; but now one is restricted, and goes between limits of barbed-wire, and hedged in with threatening prohibitions. It is to be observed that never before in all its history had the castle suffered siege or violence, until this transformation had been effected. And then its warlike history began, in the determined irruption of a band of those “bold, bad ones,” the silly suffragettes, who stormed the terraces and flung stones through the dining-room windows during one of Mr. Asquith’s visits. The great gods laugh at the exquisite irony of the situation!
From the ridge on which Lympne is placed one looks down over the whole extent of Romney Marsh, with the Military Canal down in the foreground, and out in middle distance the curving sweep of the shore, accented at intervals by the line of martello towers. It is beautiful by day, but touched to nobility at night, under the gleam of the harvest moon.
LYMPNE CASTLE AND CHURCH.
Half a mile out of Lympne, on the way to Aldington, a rough and obscure lane turns to the left, out of the road, between some new residences which have just been built. It is not at first a particularly inviting way, but it leads to a singular undercliff scene, where an ancient cottage, completely wrapped in creepers, even to roof and chimneys, stands on a plateau which has the appearance of having slid bodily half way down the cliff. This indeed is exactly what, in the words of Hasted, the historian of Kent, did happen one night in the year 1727. So evenly and silently did this take place that the farmer and his wife knew nothing of it until they awoke next morning to the new point of view presented from their windows. The cottage is known as the “French House,” from the fine view hence of the coast of France.