CHAPTER VIII

OLD AND NEW ROMNEY AND DYMCHURCH

RETURNING from this excursion into the intimate things of the marsh, and making for New Romney, attention is arrested by the view of a group of a church and two houses at a little distance from the road. This the map proclaims to be Old Romney, that sometime seaport, busy and prosperous in Saxon times, before ever the Normans came to follow the retreating sea and to found New Romney, a mile and more away. Old Romney is so very old that it has forgotten its past, and antiquaries can tell little or nothing of it; but with our vision illumined by legitimate imagination, we can picture that old port in no uncertain way, perched upon its slight eminence and overlooking the mingling of salt water and fresh at this long-vanished mouth of the Rother; the Saxon ships beached on the shinglefalls, or stuck fast in the alluvial mud of still bayous. Where those keels came to anchor, the ploughman drives his furrow, and where the wooden houses of that old town stood, the broad fields of oats, beans, and turnips ripen in the sun. The population of the whole parish of Old Romney, with its outlying hamlets and cottages, numbers not more than a hundred and fifty, and of village there is but this

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lonely group of church, vicarage, and two farmhouses. The church itself, Norman and Early English though it be, is of the rural type, and thus tells us that already, when it was built, the place had sunk into insignificance. There it stands, on its scarcely perceptible knoll, its broad-based tower, constructed of flint and shingle grouting, eloquent of the Has Been, and still indifferent, as for seven hundred years past, to the To Be. Dynasties, social conditions, the whole polity of a nation, have

changed, time and again, since that old tower first arose beside this Rhee Wall road. All the little injustices, oppressions, and disasters, all the joys and sorrows of seven centuries, all those flouts of cynic Circumstance that in their time seem so great and poignant, have passed it by, and still, with its immemorial attendant yew-tree, it looks upon this ancient road, calmly contemptuous of the wayfarers that come and go. There is that in this merely rural church which impresses one much more deeply than-or in an altogether different way from-the

sight of a cathedral. The great minster means intellectual and religious exaltation; here a sense of the futility of men and things-of the evanescent nature of those who build and of the astounding permanency and indifference of the things they rear -clutches the heart with the grip of ice. Not here the sursum corda of the pilgrim, but the gloom of the pessimist and the tears of those who sorrow for the littleness of our little span are called forth by the solitude, the isolation and minatory prominence of this marshland church. For though it be neighboured by farmsteads, the brooding spirit of the place is communicated to them, rather than their domestic cheerfulness irradiating its aloofness. In fine, only the stolid and the unimaginative should live at Old Romney, whose minor key deepens into a sadder intensity when day draws to its close, as the shadows lengthen and the cattle come, lowing, home to byre.

I would do much to avoid Old Romney at such time o' day, coming to it by preference in early morning, when the summer sun is hot upon the earth, but not so hot nor so long risen that it has had time to dry the dew upon the fragrant wild thyme of the grass. Then there is hope in the atmosphere, and the Past does not lie with so dead a weight upon the Present and the Future.

But to continue to New Romney. There, on the way, across the level, seen dimly through the heat-haze, and scarce distinguishable from a ragged clump of trees, rises the shattered wall that is the sole relic of Hope Chapel, one of the ruined endeavours of the marsh. Hope All Saints is traditionally said to have been the first settlement in the

district, and named "Hope "-it is a simple, artless belief-as expressive at once of the anxieties and the trustfulness of those original settlers, who selected that comprehensive dedication of "All Saints" with the businesslike idea of enjoying as extended a patronage as possible among the bright and shining ones of the New Jerusalem. Alas! for the protection thus sought. Hope has been deserted time out of mind, and the walls of its chapel are a shapeless and solitary mass.

Such also is the condition of Mydley Chapel, in Dunge Marsh, on the right-hand side of the road, whose ruined gable-end is seen standing out prominently, like an inverted A.

Within sight, surrounded by that almost invariable circlet of trees which seems to lovingly enfold the churches, the villages, and the townlets of the marsh, and to shelter them from the cold blasts of change, as also from those of the weather, is New Romney, the four angle-tourelles or dwarf pinnacles of its church tower-not one quite the counterpart of any of its fellows-prominent above all else.

Rounding an acute bend in the road, and passing a few scattered nondescript sheds and outbuildings, we come with surprising suddenness into the old Cinque Port that is so surprisingly called "new." A dog dozing in the middle of the broad, empty street, a piano being somewhere injuriously practised upon, the sound of a laugh in the parlour of an old inn-these sights and sounds comprise the life and movement of New Romney on a mid-day of this midsummer in the early twentieth century.

The newness of New Romney is now only a

battered and outworn figure of speech, to be taken relatively and with reference to that Old Romney we have just left. What the streets of New Romney were like when it really was new-about the time of the Norman Conquest--we cannot conceive; how they looked when it had already grown to a respectable age, when the Late Norman church of St. Nicholas was built, we can form no idea. But it is certain that this was once a town of goodly size and great prosperity. At the time when the Cinque Ports were constituted, Romney was thought worthy to be of the company, and to be equal fellow with Hastings, Sandwich, Dover, and Hythe; but so early as 1351 it was so decayed by reason of its misfortunes at the hands of tempests and the contrary sea-currents that shoaled and silted-up its harbour, that the unfortunate port could not send out its quota of ships for the national defence, and was penalised accordingly, losing for a time many of its Cinque Port privileges. When Queen Elizabeth visited the town, and granted it the empty honour of a Mayor and Corporation, it was very much in the condition it occupies now. Of its five churches, only one-the one still standing-was left, the sea was two miles distant, and her " poor town of Romney" would have been sore put to it to do her honour, except for the liberality of certain substantial men whose purses were equal to the heavy calls such Royal visits made. But, it may be asked, if the town were in such sore case, whence came the wealth of those substantial burgesses? Ay, whence? Why, from that unchartered industry of smuggling of whose history we have already heard so much. The port and town might decay, but