Keeping a harsh, barbaric time
To Saga’s chant and Runic rhyme.
From the pharos on the Foreland in those strenuous times of long ago keen-sighted men of Kent kept look-out daily, scanning the horizon from sunrise to sunset; ever on the alert to start the alarm and pass it on to where the Roman coast defence galleys lay at their moorings off the mouth of the Wantsum Channel by Richborough Castle.
Alike on land and sea theirs was the post of honour. At Hastings, led by the stout Earl Leofwine, as we know—
A standard made of sylke and jewells rare
Was borne near Harold at the Kenters Head.
And centuries after that, whenever the King of England was in the field, they claimed the right to lead the van—“The Kentishe Menne in front!”
The Kentish contingent—the “Eastern Ports” contingent—formed the bulk and the backbone of the Cinque Ports fleets of the Middle Ages, both in ships and men. Four of the five “Head Ports” in the famous confederation were Kentish ports—Sandwich, Dover, Romney, and Hythe. The “Eastern Ports” counted twenty-one limbs, “Members”; the “Western Ports”—Hastings with the two “Ancient Towns” attached—ten “Members.” The old Cinque Ports Navy, in these times of ours it may be, is little more than a name, a faded memory of a dim and distant past, a perished institution of a dead old time; yet it was once an actual fact, a living hot-blooded reality, the chief guarantee of our national existence, a very real bulwark, the foremost defence of England from foreign invasion. “The courage of those sailors who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible on the seas.” For all that we have to thank, in the first place, the Men of Kent, that Kent of which old twelfth-century Fitz-Stephen, monk of Canterbury and historian of his own times, was thinking when he wrote, “Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.”
The Kentish ships of the Cinque Ports, “Ships of Kent” they are explicitly called, took a leading part with the Crusaders’ fleet which on its way to the Holy Land for the Second Crusade, in the year 1147, captured Lisbon from the Moors. Kentish men fought with that fine leader, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, “Warden of the Cinque,” when he fell on the French King’s fleet at Damme—just three years before King John put his mark to Magna Charta.
It was a squadron of the Kentish ships of the Ports’ federation that, in the year after Magna Charta, under one of England’s finest heroes and greatest men, that grand fellow, stout-hearted Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, Chief Justiciar of England and Constable of Dover Castle, Cœur de Lion’s favourite pupil in arms, saved England from invasion by rounding up the fleet with which the renegade leader Eustace the Monk—“pirata nequissimus” one old chronicler calls him—was making for the Thames, and dealing the French the first of the series of knock-down blows of which Nelson struck the last at Trafalgar. The story of the “Battle of Bartholomew’s Day,” the 24th of August, 1217, is one we ought not willingly to let die. There is hardly a finer tale in all our history than that which tells how De Burgh’s sixteen Cinque Port warships from Dover, with nineteen or twenty small craft, stood out to meet the Monk’s hundred and odd ships—eighty of them the largest vessels of the time—off the North Foreland; swept round them astern, weathered them and closed, grappled them fast, under cover of a stinging fire of archery and crossbow bolts, cut down their sails, and then, flinging up in the air handfuls of quicklime to blow into the faces of the Frenchmen, boarded and overpowered the enemy in hand-to-hand fight with falchion and pike and battle-axe. They fought it out from early morning until the afternoon was spent, when fifty-five ships of the Monk’s fleet had been taken, and the rest, except fifteen ships that ran away, all sent to the bottom.