The Dover Road Part 16

The priest pouted, knitted his brows, and looked upon the two friends with Gorgonian eyes, and he would probably have turned them out of the building had it not been for the Archbishop's letter of introduction which they carried with them. Erasmus was alarmed at his friend's free speech. He was pacifying the priest when the Prior approached and conducted them to the Holy of holies, Becket's Shrine. A wooden canopy was raised, and the golden case enclosing the martyr's remains disclosed. The least valuable part of it was of gold: every part glistened, shone, and sparkled with rare and immense jewels, some of them exceeding the size of a goose's egg.

Monks stood round, and they all fell down and wors.h.i.+pped, after which they returned to the Crypt, to see the place where the Virgin Mother had her abode, a somewhat dark one, hedged in by more than one iron screen. "What was she afraid of, then?" asks his interlocutor, and he replies, "Of nothing, I imagine, except thieves," for the riches with which she was surrounded were a more than royal spectacle. Again they were conducted to the Sacristy; a box covered with black leather was brought out, and again all fell down and wors.h.i.+pped. Some torn fragments of linen were produced; most of them retaining marks of dirt. With these the holy man used to wipe the perspiration from his face and neck, the runnings from his nose, or such other superfluities from which the human frame is not free. The Prior graciously offered to present Colet with one of these dirty rags, and, indeed, to the devout such a gift would have been of a quite inestimable value. But Colet, handling the rags delicately as though they might possibly infect him, replaced them in the box with a contemptuous whistle.

The Prior was a man of politeness and good breeding. He appeared not to notice this rude, not to say heretical, rejection of his gift, and, offering them a cup of wine, courteously dismissed them.

x.x.xVIII

Soon after this came the downfall. With the struggles of the Reformation went the relics, the gold and jewels, and--worse than all--the decorations and painted windows of the Cathedral. With many abuses and with the disgusting humbug of the old order of things went also, it is sad to think, much of the living reality of religion; and Canterbury Cathedral is to-day an historical museum to the crowd of tourists, and an architectural model for students of that first of all the arts. Curiosity, and little else, draws the crowd. Byron has caught the spirit of the times happily enough (although "beadle" and "cathedral" are not among the elegancies of rhyme) when he says of Don Juan and his companion:--

They saw at Canterbury the Cathedral, Black Edward's helm, and Becket's b.l.o.o.d.y stone, Were pointed out as usual by the beadle, In the same quiet uninterested tone:-- There's glory for you, gentle reader! All Ends in a rusty casque and dubious bone.

And how very dubious are the bones that are said to be those of Becket is a question that may not be enlarged upon here.

For the rest, a holy calm reigns unbroken in the Cathedral Close. Hemmed in and surrounded[7] by ma.s.sive walls, modernity has no place here, and if the interior of the building is somewhat disappointing, the exterior and its surroundings, especially the north-east aspect, viewed from the Green Court, must be seen to be appreciated. To be sure, this part of the building is Norman and Early English, and no other periods produced such wildly irregular ma.s.ses. Added to the original irregularity of outline are the puzzling ruins--ivied wall and broken window--dating from the time when Henry the Eighth's Commissioners destroyed the monastery. Queer pa.s.sages, dark and tortuous, giving suddenly upon little cloisters and gra.s.sy quadrangles, are to be found everywhere; conspicuous among them the "Dark Entry," immortalized by Tom Ingoldsby in his _Legend of Nell Cook_.

[Sidenote: THE CITY SERGEANT]

By walking outside Canterbury, a mile distant to Saint Thomas's Hill, on the Whitstable Road, you shall see how thoroughly the Cathedral dominates the city; and arrive, by an exploration of the narrow lanes and the meads below, at an understanding of how this great Minster _was_ Canterbury, and how subservient to it was all else. Affairs are now very different. A vigorous and pulsing life belongs to the streets and lanes, while it is the Church that has pa.s.sed away from the intimate life of the people, and sunk back into retirement. Canterbury is far larger than ever before, and its modern pavements, that ring with soldiers' tread, or with the speedy walk of busy citizens, are raised many feet above the street level of old Durovernum. Where the old Roman Watling Street left the city by what is now called the Riding Gate, the original paving of that military way was discovered some few years ago at a depth of fourteen feet below the level of the present road. Everywhere, when foundations for new houses have been dug, are discovered Roman pavements and the walls of forgotten buildings, and thus does Canterbury progress through the ages, rearing itself upon itself until its beginnings are hidden deep below the light of day.

Strangely do modern ways here jostle with the old. A newly fronted house, proclaiming nothing of its antiquity, will yet often be found to contain much of interest. The ugly fronted Guildhall is an instance. Without, it is of the plainest and most uninteresting type; within, it has panelling and portraits and old arms to show the curious. At its door, too, stands all day and every day, or walks about the streets, a gorgeous creature clad in black knee-breeches and silk stockings; with buckled shoes and c.o.c.ked-hat; with coat and waistcoat of a courtly type, trimmed and faced with gold lace. It is nothing less than startling to see such an uniform in daily use; and, still more amazing is it, when you ask the wearer of it who he is, to hear him reply, with a grave politeness, that he is the City Sergeant. Old inst.i.tutions live long here, and old people, too. At Canterbury died, in 1891, aged ninety-one, William Clements, one of the last, if not _the_ last, of the old stage-coach drivers, who had driven the "Tally-ho" coach between this and London long before the railway was thought of; and in July, 1901, aged 89, died Stephen Philpott, who was coachman of the Dover Mail, until the railway ran him off. He was transferred to a route between London and Herne Bay, and afterwards became proprietor of the "Royal Oak," Dover, since demolished for street improvements.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A GORGEOUS CREATURE."]

x.x.xIX

The Dover Road, after leaving Canterbury, loses very much of that religious character, picturesquely varied with robbery and murder, which is its chiefest feature between Southwark and the Shrine of Saint Thomas; for, although many foreign pilgrims landed at Dover to proceed to the place where the martyr lay, encased in gold and jewels, their number was nothing to be compared with that of the crowds who came into Canterbury from London, or along the Pilgrims' Road from the West Country; and consequently the wayside shrines and oratories were fewer. The greater part of the sixteen miles between Canterbury and Dover is bare and exposed downs, with here and there a little village nestling, sheltered from the bleak winds, in deep valleys; but the first two miles, between the city and the coast, are now becoming gay with the geranium-beds, the lawns and gardens of Canterbury villadom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM CLEMENTS.]

At the first milestone is Gutteridge Gate, where the old toll-house remains beside the "Gate" inn, and where baccha.n.a.lian countrymen gather on Sunday evenings in summer, drinking pots of ale as the sun goes down, and recalling to the artistic pa.s.ser-by Teniers' pictures of boors, as they shout and bang the wooden tables and benches with their pewter pots.

Looking back at such a time down the long, straight road ascending from Canterbury, there come many jingling sons of Mars, each man with his adoring young woman, and sometimes one on either arm, for there is great compet.i.tion for these gallant Hussars, Lancers, and Dragoons among the Canterbury fair ones; and "unappropriated blessings" of a rank in life that does not permit of "walking out" with mere troopers sit at windows commanding the road, sighing for that the conventions of the age do not permit them to "stoop to conquer" the conquerors of their fluttering hearts. "I could wors.h.i.+p that man," says the Fairy Queen in _Iolanthe_, gazing admiringly upon "Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards"; and how much more wors.h.i.+pful than a foot-soldier are the "cavalry chaps" of the Canterbury depot!

[Sidenote: GUTTERIDGE GATE]

It was a hundred yards or so along the road from Gutteridge Gate that two Dragoons figured in a highway robbery upon His Majesty's Mails in 1789.

The bells were chiming three o'clock in the morning of July 31 in that year when Daniel Goldup, the mounted postman, came up the hill from Bridge with the French mails slung across his horse's back. As he eased his pace in ascending the hill, three men called upon him to stop. One of them he recognized as a villager from Elham named Hills, and the two others he perceived to be Dragoons disguised in smock-frocks. Telling Hills he had no letters for him, Goldup proceeded on his way. Hills fired but missed, and the three then ran after him; one laying hold of the horse's bridle while the other two seized the mail-bags and rifled them. They detained him an hour while they examined the letters, and then, tying up the mail-bags again, let him go.

The village of Bridge, down below, takes its name from the small bridge that carries the road over the Lesser Stour. It is a pretty and peaceful place to-day, with quaint boarded houses; a Norman and Early English church, containing some curious and grotesque carvings of Adam and Eve; and encircled by woods, the remote descendants of the almost impenetrable forests that once surrounded Canterbury, leaving only Barham Downs and their neighbouring chalk hills bare and islanded amid a sea of greenery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGE.]

Barham Downs commence immediately beyond Bridge. They have been the scene of many remarkable gatherings, from the time of Julius Caesar to the waning years of the last century, when the Downs were alive with soldiers camping here in readiness for that inglorious Armada that never left port--Napoleon's flotilla of Boulogne.

To go back to the year 55 B.C., when Caesar first landed at Deal, may seem to the readers of evening newspapers something of an effort in retrogression--and so indeed, it is--but when you once succeed in getting there, the history and details of that time are a great deal more interesting than perhaps the reader of special editions, hot and hot, would imagine. We _can_ succeed in picturing the detailed events of that remote time, because Caesar, who was as mighty with the pen as with the sword, has left full and singularly lucid accounts of his wars here and on the Continent--lucid, that is to say, when one penetrates the veil of Latin behind which his exploits and the doings of his legionaries are hid; but darkly understood by the stumbling schoolboy, to whom the _Bello Gallico_ is as full of linguistic ambushes as the Kentish valleys were of lurking Britons in Caesar's time.

It was in the year 55 B.C. that Caesar, having overrun, if not having entirely conquered, Gaul, came to its northern coast and gazed eagerly across that unknown sea, beyond which had come strange warriors, extraordinarily strong and equally fearless, to aid those troublesome Gaulish fighting-men who had already given him four years of campaigning, and were still to prove themselves unsubdued. He had already felt the prowess of these "Britons," as they were called, and fighting having slackened somewhat, he conceived the idea of voyaging across the Channel in quest of glory and adventure in the dim and semi-fabled land of these mysterious strangers. "Caesar," he says, speaking of himself always in the third person, "determined to proceed into Britain because he understood that in almost all the Gallic wars succour had been supplied thence to our enemies." So much for his written reasons, but other things must have weighed with him. The l.u.s.t of conquest would alone have impelled him forward beyond this very outer edge of the known world, even had he not desired to crush these allies of Gaul; but when wild tales reached him of the richness of the land that lay beyond this strait, whose cliffs he could dimly see, the impulse to invade it was irresistible. But Caesar was a cautious general, and rarely moved without having reconnoitred, and so he sent over a certain Volusenus to spy out that wonderful land whence came tin and skins, oysters, pearls, hunting dogs, gold, slaves, and terrible warriors. Volusenus sailed across the straits, and returned with quite as much information as could have been expected from one who had never left his s.h.i.+p. That sarcasm is Caesar's own, and no doubt he was in a peculiarly savage and sarcastic humour at the time, for although this Britain was so frequented by merchants, yet he could not find any one who would acknowledge having been there; and so his information as to the population, the sh.o.r.es and harbours of the country, remained vague and uncertain. And to add to the disappointments he had experienced from those crafty traders who wished to keep all knowledge of the island to themselves, this over-cautious Volusenus returned after four days with just such a hazy and indefinite story as he had been told before; the hearsay evidence of one who was too timorous to land!

But Caesar's desire to see Britain was only whetted by the deceits which those artful traders had practised upon him, and by the vague reports of his envoy. He lay at Portus Itius, identified either as Boulogne or some place in the immediate vicinity, and, collecting a flotilla of over eighty vessels, with an additional eighteen for his cavalry, he sailed from under the shelter of Grey Nose Point at midnight, August 24, B.C. 55. The following morning about six o'clock, this armada arrived under Dover cliffs. The cavalry, however, which had sailed from a different harbour, had been driven back by adverse winds, and did not arrive until four days later. His force, then, consisted of two legions of foot soldiers, equal to about 10,000 men. No sooner had the transports anch.o.r.ed in Dover harbour than the cliff-tops became alive with Britons, armed, and determined to resist a landing. Seeing this, Caesar decided to select some less dangerous landing-place, and, weighing anchor, sailed seven miles onward to Deal. The British, however, were ready for him when he reached the site of that town, and it was only after a stubborn fight on the beach, and half in the waves, that the Roman legionaries effected a landing. The decks of Caesar's triremes were crowded with men who slung stones, threw javelins, and worked great catapults against the Britons, in order to cover the advance of the heavily armoured soldiers as they waded through the shallow water. When once these men, led by the intrepid standard-bearer of Caesar's favourite Tenth Legion, had gained the beach, their discipline, their helmets, armour, s.h.i.+elds, and short swords speedily prevailed against the ill-protected and undisciplined hordes of the brave islanders. The day was won, and the Romans, having put the Britons to flight, encamped by the sh.o.r.e. Three weeks of battles, ambushes, skirmishes, and negotiations for peace followed this landing, and then Caesar left Britain. The equinox was at hand, and storms raged.

Half his fleet was destroyed by a tempest, and he was anxious to be away.

So, accepting any terms that he might with honour, he patched up his vessels and sailed for Gaul; and thus ended the first attempt of the Romans to conquer Britain.

The following year Caesar determined to invade the island on a larger scale. His first expedition had been obliged to remain ingloriously within sight and sound of the waves; but this time the general resolved to push into the heart of the country. Sailing from his former harbour, his force numbered five legions and two thousand horse, roughly 27,000 men, and with this army, considerable as times went, he landed, unopposed, at Deal on the morning of July 22. Caesar tells us that the Britons were frightened by the great number of his s.h.i.+ps seen sailing across the Channel, but the truth seems to be that he had been sowing jealousies and dissensions among the petty chiefs and kinglets of Kent, and that a secret understanding was arrived at between himself and a discreditable son of King Lud by which his landing should not be contested. However that may be, Caesar left a guard over his vessels, and started immediately on a twelve miles' night march inland, in force.

When morning dawned, he found himself on a high table-land with a river flowing along a valley below him, and here he first descried the Britons.

The place at which Caesar had arrived was Barham Downs, and the river he saw was the Lesser Stour, that even now, although a much smaller stream than then, flows through the valley to the right of the Dover Road. A road of some sort existed even at that time, although it perhaps might be more correctly described as a "track." Down it went the exports of that far distant age; the undressed skins of wild animals; the dogs and the gold; and up this way from the primitive Dover came the beads and the trinkets; the manufactures of pottery and gla.s.s, which our very remote fathers loved as much as the uncivilized races of to-day delight in the selfsame kind of thing.

Caesar deployed his forces along the ridge of the Downs facing the road, the river, and the enemy, who had entrenchments on the further side of the river immediately fronting him and others advancing diagonally toward the road which they crossed on the northern hill-top at Bridge, ending at a point slightly to the north-east of the place where Bekesbourne Station stands now. Caesar's first object was to reach the water in the valley, there to refresh his horses, and a forward cavalry movement was made with this object.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "OLD ENGLAND'S HOLE."]

[Sidenote: "OLD ENGLAND'S HOLE."]

But this advance precipitated the battle that was imminent, for the Britons, who held the opposite ridge in force, rushed down the slope to the waterside, and furiously attacked the Roman horse. Exhausted though they were by a waterless night march, the Roman cavalry met the a.s.sault, and, repelling it, drove the enemy back into the woods. This cavalry charge was followed by a general advance into the dense thickets, into which, excellently suited, both by nature and by art, for defence, the Britons had retired. Here they fought in small bands, protected by mounds and trenches and by felled trees cunningly interlaced. One of these _oppida_ remains in Bourne Park, on the summit of Bridge Hill and beside the Watling Street which, until 1829, was identical with the Dover Road.

In that year a slight deviation was made to the left over the hilltop for about two hundred yards' length of roadway, and in the course of cutting through the hill a number of Roman urns and skulls were discovered at a depth of five feet. The circular earthwork of the redoubt still remains in very good preservation, surrounded with trees, the successors of those which covered the hill when the Britons and Romans contended together here. The place is known locally as "Old England's Hole," and tradition has it that here the Britons made their last stand. Tradition is not lightly to be put aside at any time, but when it is supported by Caesar's own words it deserves all respect. "Being repulsed," he writes, "they withdrew themselves into the woods, and reached a place which they had prepared before, having closed all approaches to it by felled timber." The soldiers of the Seventh Legion, however, soon captured this stronghold.

Throwing up a mound against it, they advanced, holding their s.h.i.+elds over their heads in the formation known as "the tortoise," and drove out the defenders at the sword's point. This was the last place to hold out that day. Everywhere the Britons were dislodged, and numbers of them slain. The survivors withdrew further into the woodlands that surrounded Caer Caint, and Caesar, suspecting ambuscades in those unknown forests, forbade pursuit.

[Sidenote: BATTLE OF BARHAM DOWNS]

It was evening before the last fighting was done. The battle had raged on a front extending for three miles, from Bekesbourne to Kingston, and it now remained to camp for the night, and to fortify against a possible surprise the ridge which Caesar held. And so, before the exhausted soldiery could lie down to rest after the incessant labours of two days and nights, they threw up the lines of entrenchments that still, after a lapse of more than nineteen hundred years, remain distinct upon Barham Downs.

The next day the Romans buried their dead, and Caesar had just despatched three columns in a forward movement towards Caer Caint, when hasty news arrived from Deal that a storm had shattered his fleet. The rear-guard of the hindmost column was just disappearing from his gaze as he stood on Patrixbourne Hill, and hurriedly sending messengers to bring the expedition back, he at once prepared to return to the coast, taking with him artificers for the repair of his vessels, and an escort sufficient to secure his own safety. Caesar had no certain means of knowing how long a time his absence would extend, but, bidding his legions to remain in camp until his return, and meanwhile to increase the strength of their defences, he set out. He was absent ten days. In the meanwhile the courage of the Britons had revived. They perceived from their woody lairs the Roman soldiery busily throwing up mounds and long lines of earthworks on the level summit of the downs, and they judged that the invaders were compelled, either by fear, or from lack of numbers, to remain on the defensive. Their numbers increased as the days went by and the Romans made no advance, and they were now commanded by a general of great ability, none less than the celebrated Ca.s.sivelaunus. Caesar, on his return, was hara.s.sed by them, and found his camp seriously threatened when he arrived.

Leaving 10,000 men in camp, he advanced with the remainder, and made a determined stand on a spot that may be identified on the hills half a mile to the north-west of Bridge. Here a desperate and b.l.o.o.d.y day's fighting took place, the Britons returning again and again after repeated repulses.

Many of the foremost legionaries who had pursued them into the woods were surrounded and slain there; many more of the Britons fell in that glorious fight. One of the Roman tribunes, Quintus Laberius Durus, was killed that day, and Nennius, one of the foremost British leaders, was slain in the last onset, when he burst at the head of a chosen few on the Roman soldiery engaged in the formation of a camp. Both sides claimed the victory, and, indeed, Caesar had, so far, little reason to boast, for when night came he had only advanced three miles beyond the stream upon which his first camp on Barham Downs had looked, and, even then, he had only been enabled to hold his own by the aid of reinforcements drawn from his camp-guard. The next day, however, put a different aspect upon his campaign. He had probably intended to rest his troops, and sent out a strong force only in order to perform the necessary foraging; but the Britons attacked them with such fierceness that another battle was fought, resulting in a decisive victory for the Romans, who pursued the vanquished and cut them down for miles. The Britons were now thoroughly disheartened, and retreated towards London along their track-way, followed by Caesar. Desultory fighting occurred on the way, and one ineffectual stand was made at some unidentified place, conjectured to have been at Key Coll Hill, near Newington. But, thenceforward, the accounts left by Caesar and by early British writers grow confused. Whether the victorious general, in pursuit of Ca.s.sivelaunus, crossed the Thames at London, or whether "Coway Stakes," near Weybridge, mark the scene, will never be known. But when he had penetrated into Hertfords.h.i.+re, and had humbled the British king to the point of asking for peace, Caesar found it was time to return to Gaul. Exacting hostages, he commenced his retreat. Hara.s.sed by flying bands of natives, who cut off stragglers and placed obstacles in his line of march, he reached Deal in September, sailing thence on the 26th of that month. Thus ended Caesar's second and last invasion of Britain. He had been six weeks in the island; had marched a hundred miles into its dense forests, and had humbled the native princes. But winter was approaching, and it was dangerous to delay. He returned to the Continent, a victor, with hostages, prisoners, and promises of tribute; but he left many of his expedition, dead, behind him. And it is significant of how hazardous these invasions were, that not until another ninety-six years had pa.s.sed did another Roman so much as land on these sh.o.r.es.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BARHAM DOWNS.]

The camp which Caesar constructed along Barham Downs is still to be seen.

On this wild and worthless tract of land which has never known cultivation, the marks of the spade will exist for many centuries if left undisturbed by new-comers. And although many historic gatherings have taken place here, no entrenchments have been made since the defeat of the Britons in B.C. 54. King John's army of sixty thousand men encamped here in 1213, to withstand the French invasion, and Simon de Montfort, somewhat later, at the head of disaffected Barons; Henrietta Maria held her first Drawing Room here in a tent, while on her way to be married to Charles the First at Canterbury; and, centuries afterwards, a great army encamped on Barham Downs in readiness for Napoleon's projected invasion. But on none of these occasions were any earthworks thrown up, and the fosses and ditches that still remain to be explored are of undoubted Roman construction.

[Sidenote: COLDHARBOURS]

Here, amid these long lines of Roman entrenchments, occurs again the mysterious name of "Coldharbour," a perplexing place-name that is found no less than 170 times in England, in situations the most diverse and in districts widely scattered. At least twenty-six of these Coldharbours are to be found on the ordnance maps of Kent, and six of them on, or closely adjoining, the Dover Road. Their situation, scattered thus along the old military _via_ of Watling Street, adds greatly to the force of the argument that this singular name has some connection with Roman times, but what connection, and what is the real meaning of the name, not all the ac.u.men and ingenuity of archaeologists has ever been able to satisfactorily explain. The fact of the great majority of Coldharbours lying by the site of Roman roads or camps has led to the ingenious theory that they first acquired their name in Saxon times when, the country being wasted with ruthless and decimating wars, the Roman villas still remaining were destroyed, and great desolate tracts of country created. Travellers (this theory goes on to say) could find no other shelter on their journeys save the ruined walls of the once magnificent palaces that the Romans had left; and as they crouched, s.h.i.+vering, to leeward of these ruinated and roofless remains of a decayed civilization, and tried to warm themselves at fires painfully and laboriously made of leaves and sticks, they called them "cold harbours." Unhappily for this theory, the places called "Coldharbour" are by no means always situated in exposed situations, and no remains of buildings have been discovered on their actual site, although their neighbourhood is frequently found to be rich in Roman remains. A suggestion has been made that "cold" is a variant of "cool,"

and that, far from being the miserable refugees of forlorn travellers, the Coldharbours were really the "Mount Pleasants" and "Belle Vues" of ancient times, to which our remote forbears resorted for "a breath of air." We should probably be within our rights in deriding this suggestion as a theory made to fit a fertile imagination, but it is not safe, in the presence of such an apparently insoluble problem, to do more than present a few of the derivations advanced. It would be equally rash to a.s.sume that the stations of the "colubris arbor," the Roman serpent-standard, gave their name to these places, although the idea is plausible enough.