This daily Maelstrom is sufficient to account for the formation of the mighty sandbank, for the water is laden with the detritus of cliff and beach which it has taken up in its course round England, and, just as if you give a circular motion to a basin of muddy water, you will soon find the earthy deposit centralised at the bottom of the basin, so the great Goodwins are the result of the daily deposit of revolving tides.
That the tides literally 'revolve' round the Goodwins is well known to the Deal men and to sailors in general, and this revolution is described in most of the tide tables and nautical almanacks used by mariners, e.g. 'The Gull Stream about one hour and ten minutes before high water runs N.E. 3/4 N., but the last hour changes to E.N.E. and even to E.S.E., and the last hour of the southern stream changes from S.W. 1/2 S. to W.S.W. and even to W.N.W[2].' Here the reader will distinctly see recorded the great causes in operation which are sufficient in the lapse of centuries to produce and maintain the Goodwin Sands. But how they came to be called the Goodwin Sands we know not, and can only conjecture. Those were the days of Siward and Duncan and Macbeth, and, like them, the imposing form of the great Earl of Kent is shrouded in the mists and the myths of eight centuries.
He was evidently placed, in the first instance by royal authority or that of the Saxon Witan, in some such position as Captain of the Naval forces of all Southern England, and it is certain that he gathered round himself the affections of the sailors of Sandwich, Hythe, Romney, Hastings, and Dover.
When he sailed from Bruges against Edward, 'the fort of Hastings opened to his coming with a shout from its armed men. All the boatmen, all the mariners far and near, thronged to him, with sail and shield, with sword and with oar.' And on his way to Pevensey and Hastings from Flanders he would seem to have run outside, and at the back of the Goodwins, while the admirals of Edward the Confessor, Rodolph and Odda, lay fast in the Downs.
He appears, by virtue of his semi-regal position—for Kent with Wessex and Sussex were under his government—to have been the Commander of a Naval agglomeration of those southern ports which was the germ, very probably, of the subsequent 'Cinque Ports' confederation, with their 'Warden' at their head; but at any rate he swept with him in this expedition against Edward all the 'Buscarles' (boat-carles or seamen) of those southern ports, Hythe, Hastings, Dover, and Sandwich. His progress towards London was a triumphant one with his sons. 'All Kent—the foster-mother of the Saxons,' we are told, on this occasion 'sent forth the cry, "Life or death with Earl Godwin!"'
Crimes may rest on the name of Earl Godwin, despite his oath to the contrary and his formal acquittal by the Witan-gemot, and dark deeds are still affixed to his memory, but 'there was an instinctive and prophetic feeling throughout the English nation that with the house of Godwin was identified the cause of the English people.' With all his faults he was a great Englishman, and was the popular embodiment of English or Saxon feeling against the Normanising sympathies of Edward.
In legend the Godwin family, even in death, seem to have been connected with the sea. There is the legend of Godwin's destruction with his fleet in the Goodwin Sands, and there is the much better authenticated legend of Harold's burial in the sea-sand at Hastings. The Norman William's chaplain records that the Conqueror said, 'Let his corpse guard the coasts which his life madly defended.'
Wrap them together[3] in a purple cloak,
And lay them both upon the waste sea-shore
At Hastings, there to guard the land for which
He did forswear himself.
Tenterden Steeple is certainly not the cause of the Goodwin Sands, and the connection supposed to exist between them seems to have first occurred to some 'aged peasant' of Kent examined before Sir Thomas More as to the origin of the Goodwin Sands. But, as Captain Montagu Burrows, R.N., mentions in his most interesting book on the Cinque Ports, Tenterden Steeple was not built till 1462, and 'was not in the popular adage connected with the Goodwin Sands, but with Sandwich Haven. It ran thus—
Of many people it hath been sayed
That Tenterden steeple Sandwich haven hath decayed.'