Rural Rides Page 22

  Just before I got to this place (TENTERDEN), I crossed a bit of marsh land, which I found, upon inquiry, is a sort of little branch or spray running out of that immense and famous tract of country called Romney Marsh, which, I find, I have to cross to-morrow, in order to get to Dover, along by the sea-side, through HYTHE and FOLKESTONE.

  This TENTERDEN is a market town, and a singularly bright spot. It consists of one street, which is, in some places, more, perhaps, than two hundred feet wide. On one side of the street the houses have gardens before them, from 20 to 70 feet deep. The town is upon a hill; the afternoon was very fine, and, just as I rose the hill and entered the street, the people had come out of church and were moving along towards their houses. It was a very fine sight. Shabbily-dressed people do not go to church. I saw, in short, drawn out before me, the dress and beauty of the town; and a great many very, very pretty girls I saw; and saw them, too, in their best attire. I remember the girls in the Pays de Caux, and, really, I think those of TENTERDEN resemble them. I do not know why they should not; for, there is the Pays de Caux, only just over the water; just opposite this very place.

  The hops about here are not so very bad. They say, that one man, near this town, will have eight tons of hops upon ten acres of land! This is a great crop any year: a very great crop. This man may, perhaps, sell his hops for 1,600 pounds! What a gambling concern it is! However, such hop-growing always was and always must be. It is a thing of perfect hazard.

  The church at this place is a very large and fine old building. The tower stands upon a base thirty feet square. Like the church at GOUDHURST, it will hold three thousand people. And, let it be observed, that, when these churches were built, people had not yet thought of cramming them with pews, as a stable is filled with stalls. Those who built these churches, had no idea that worshipping God meant, going to sit to hear a man talk out what he called preaching. By worship, they meant very different things; and, above all things, when they had made a fine and noble building, they did not dream of disfiguring the inside of it by filling its floor with large and deep boxes made of deal boards. In short, the floor was the place for the worshippers to stand or to kneel; and there was no distinction; no high place and no low place; all were upon a level before God at any rate. Some were not stuck into pews lined with green or red cloth, while others were crammed into corners to stand erect, or sit on the floor. These odious distinctions are of Protestant origin and growth. This lazy lolling in pews we owe to what is called the Reformation. A place filled with benches and boxes looks like an eating or a drinking place; but certainly not like a place of WORSHIP. A Frenchman, who had been driven from St Domingo to Philadelphia by the Wilberforces of France, went to church along with me one Sunday. He had never been in a Protestant place of worship before. Upon looking round him, and seeing every body comfortably seated, while a couple of good stoves were keeping the place as warm as a slack oven, he exclaimed: ‘Pardi! On sen Dieu bien à son aise ici!’ That is: ‘Egad! they serve God very much at their ease here!’ I always think of this, when I see a church full of pews; as, indeed, is now always the case with our churches. Those who built these churches had no idea of this: they made their calculations as to the people to be contained in them, not making any allowance for deal boards. I often wonder how it is, that the present parsons are not ashamed to call the churches theirs! They must know the origin of them; and, how they can look at them, and, at the same time, revile the Catholics, is astonishing to me.

  This evening I have been to the Mediodist Meeting-house. I was attracted, fairly drawn all down the street, by the singing. When I came to the place the parson was got into prayer. His hands were clenched together and held up, his face turned up and back so as to be nearly parallel widi the ceiling, and he was bawling away, widi his ‘do thou’, and ‘mayest thou’, and ‘may we’, enough to stun one. Noisy, however, as he was, he was unable to fix the attention of a parcel of girls in the gallery, whose eyes were all over the place, while his eyes were so devoutly shut up. After a.deal of this rigmarole called prayer, came the preachy, as the negroes call it; and a preachy it really was. Such a mixture of whining cant and of foppish affectation I scarcely ever heard in my life. The text was (I speak from memory) one of Saint Peter’s Epistles (if he have more than one) the 18th Chapter and 4th Verse.10 The words were to this amount: that, as the righteous would be saved with difficulty, what must become of the ungodly and the sinner! After as neat a dish of nonsense and of impertinences as one could wish to have served up, came the distinction between the ungodly and the sinner. The sinner was one who did moral wrong; the ungodly one, who did no moral wrong, but who was not regenerated. Both, he positively told us, were to be DAMNED. One was just as bad as the other. Moral rectitude was to do nothing in saving the man. He was to be damned, unless born again, and how was he to be born again, unless he came to the regeneration shop, and gave the fellows money? He distinctly told us, that a man perfectly moral, might be damned; and that ‘the vilest of the vile, and the basest of the base’ (I quote his very words) ‘would be saved if they became regenerate; and that Colliers, whose souls had been as black as their coals, had, by regeneration, become bright as the saints that sing before God and the Lamb.’ And will the Edinburgh Reviewers again find fault with me for cutting at this bawling, canting crew? Monstrous it is to think that the Clergy of the Church really encourage these roving fanatics. The Church seems aware of its loss of credit and of power. It seems willing to lean even upon these men; who, be it observed, seem, on their part, to have taken the Church under their protection. They always pray for the Ministry; I mean the ministry at {Whitehall. They are most ‘loyal’ souls. The THING protects them; and they lend their aid in upholding the THING. What silly; nay, what base creatures those must be, who really give their money, give their pennies, which ought to buy bread for their own children; who thus give their money to these lazy and impudent fellows, who call themselves ministers of God, who prowl about the country, living easy and jovial lives upon the fruit of the labour of other people. However, it is, in some measure, these people’s fault. If they did not give, the others could not receive. I wish to see every labouring man well fed and well clad; but, really, the man who gives any portion of his earnings to these fellows, DESERVES TO WANT: he deserves to be pinched with hunger: misery is the just reward of this worst species of prodigality.

  The singing makes a great part of what passes in these meeting-houses. A number of women and girls singing together make very sweet sounds. Few men there are who have not felt the power of sounds of this sort. Men are sometimes pretty nearly bewitched, without knowing how. Eyes do a good deal, but tongues do more. We may talk of sparkling eyes and snowy bosoms as long as we please; but, what are these with a croaking, masculine voice? The parson seemed to be fully aware of the importance of this part of the ‘service’. The subject of his hymn was something about love: Christian love; love of Jesus; but, still it was about love; and the parson read, or gave out, the verses, in a singularly soft and sighing voice, with his head on one side, and giving it rather a swing. I am satisfied, that the singing forms great part of the attraction. Young girls like to sing; and young men like to hear them. Nay, old ones too; and, as I have just said, it was the singing that drew me diree hundred yards down the street at TENTERDEN, to enter this meeting-house. By-the-by, I wrote some Hymns myself, and published them in ‘Twopenny Trash’. I will give any Methodist parson leave to put them into his hymn-book.

  Folkestone (Kent), Monday (Noon), 1 Sept.

  I have had a fine ride, and, I suppose, the Quakers have had a fine time of it at Mark Lane.

  From TENTERDEN I set off at five o’clock, and got to APPLEDORE after a most delightful ride, the high land upon my right, and the low land on my left. The fog was so thick and white along some of the low land, that I should have taken it for water, if little hills and trees had not risen up through it here and there. Indeed, the view was very much like those which are presented in the deep valleys,
near the great rivers in New Brunswick (North America) at the time when the snows melt in the spring, and when, in sailing over those valleys, you look down from the side of your canoe, and see the lofiy woods beneath you! I once went in a log-canoe across a sylvan sea of this description, the canoe being paddled by two Yankees. We started in a stream; the stream became a wide water, and that water got deeper and deeper, as I could see by the trees (all was woods), till we got to sail amongst the top branches of the trees. By-and-by we got into a large open space; a piece of water a mile or two, or three or four wide, with the woods under us! A fog, with the tops of trees rising through it, is very much like this; and such was the fog that I saw this morning in my ride to APPLEDORE. The church at Appledore is very large. Big enough to hold 3,000 people; and the place does not seem to contain half a thousand old enough to go to church.

  In coming along I saw a wheat-rick making, though I hardly think the wheat can be dry under the bonds. The corn is all good here; and I am told they give twelve shillings an acre for reaping wheat.

  In quitting this APPLEDORE I crossed a canal and entered on Romney Marsh. This was grass-land on both sides of me to a great distance. The flocks and herds immense. The sheep are of a breed that takes its name from the marsh. They are called Romney Marsh sheep. Very pretty and large. The wethers, when fat, weigh about twelve stone; or, one hundred pounds. The faces of these sheep are white; and, indeed, the whole sheep is as white as a piece of writing-paper. The wool does not look dirty and oily like that of other sheep. The cattle appear to be all of the Sussex breed. Red, loose-limbed, and, they say, a great deal better than the Devonshire. How curious is the natural economy of a country! The forests of Sussex; those miserable tracts of heath and fern and bushes and sand, called Ashdown Forest and Saint Leonard’s Forest, to which latter Lord Erskine’s estate belongs; these wretched tracts and the not much less wretched farms in their neighbourhood, breed the cattle, which we see fatting in Romney Marsh! They are calved in the spring; they are weaned in a little bit of grass-land; they are then put into stubbles and about in the fallows for the first summer; they are brought into the yard to winter on rough hay, peas-haulm, or barley-straw; the next two summers they spend in the rough woods or in the forest; the two winters they live on straw; they then pass another summer on the forest or at work; and then they come here or go elsewhere to be fatted. With cattle of this kind and with sheep such as I have spoken of before, this Marsh abounds in every part of it; and the sight is most beautiful.

  At three miles from APPLEDORE I came through SNARGATE, a village with five houses, and with a church capable of containing two thousand people! The vagabonds tell us, however, that we have a wonderful increase of population! These vagabonds will be hanged by-and-by, or else justice will have fled from the face of the earth.

  At BRENZETT (a mile further on) I with great difficulty got a rasher of bacon for breakfast. The few houses that there are, are miserable in the extreme. The church here (only a mile from the last) nearly as large; and nobody to go to it. What! will the vagabonds attempt to make us believe, that these churches were built for nothing! ‘Dark ages’ indeed those must have been, if these churches were erected without there being any more people than there are now. But, who built them? Where did the means, where did the hands, come from? This place presents another proof of the truth of my old observation: rich land and poor labourers. From the window of the house, in which I could scarcely get a rasher of bacon, and not an egg, I saw numberless flocks and herds fatting and the fields loaded with corn!

  The next village, which was two miles further on, was OLD ROMNEY, and along here I had, for great part of the way, corn-fields on one side of me and grass-land on the other. I asked what the amount of the crop of wheat would be. They told me better than five quarters to the acre. I thought so myself. I have a sample of the red wheat and another of the white. They are both very fine. They reap the wheat here nearly two feet from the ground; and even then they cut it three feet long! I never saw corn like this before. It very far exceeds the corn under Portsdown Hill, that at Gosport, and Titchfield. They have here about eight hundred large, very large, sheaves to an acre. I wonder how long it will be after the end of the world before Mr BIRKBECK will see the American ‘Prairies’ half so good as this Marsh. In a garden here I saw some very fine onions, and a prodigious crop; sure sign of most excellent land. At this OLD ROMNEY there is a church (two miles only from the last, mind!) fit to contain one thousand five hundred people, and there are, for the people of the parish to live in twenty-two, or twenty-three, houses! And yet the vagabonds have the impudence to tell us, that the population of England has vastly increased! Curious system that depopulates Romney Marsh and peoples Bagshot Heath! It is an unnatural system. It is the vagabond’s system. It is a system that must be destroyed, or that will destroy the country.

  The rotten borough of NEW ROMNEY came next in my way; and here, to my great surprise, I found myself upon the sea-beach; for I had not looked at a map of Kent for years, and, perhaps, never. I had got a list of places from a friend in Sussex, whom I asked to give me a route to Dover, and to send me through those parts of Kent which he thought would be most interesting to me. Never was I so much surprised as when I saw a sail. This place, now that the squanderings of the THING are over, is, they say, become miserably poor.

  From New Romney to DIMCHURCH is about four miles, all along I had the sea-beach on my right, and, on my left, sometimes grass-land, and sometimes corn-land. They told me here, and also further back in the Marsh, that they were to have 15s. an acre for reaping wheat.

  From DIMCHURCH to HYTHE you go on the sea beach, and nearly the same from Hythe to SANDGATE, from which last place you come over the hill to FOLKESTONE. But, let me look back. Here has been the squandering! Here has been the pauper-making work! Here we see some of these causes that are now sending some farmers to the workhouse and driving others to flee the country or to cut their throats!

  I had baited my horse at NEW ROMNEY, and was coming jogging along very soberly, now looking at the sea, then looking at the cattle, then the corn, when, my eye, in swinging round, lighted upon a great round building, standing upon the beach. I had scarcely had time to think about what it could be, when twenty or thirty odiers, standing along the coast, caught my eye; and, if any one had been behind me, he might have heard me exclaim, in a voice that made my horse bound, ‘The11MARTELLO TOWERS’ by ——!’ Oh, Lord! To think that I should be destined to behold these monuments of the wisdom of Pitt and Dundas and Perceval! Good God! Here they are, piles of bricks in a circular form, about three hundred feet (guess) circumference at the base, about forty feet high, and about one hundred and fifty feet circumference at the top. There is a door-way, about midway up, in each, and each has two windows. Cannons were to be fired from the top of these things, in order to defend the country against the French Jacobins!

  I think I have counted along here upwards of thirty of these ridiculous things, which, I dare say, cost five, perhaps ten, thousand pounds each; and one of which was, I am told, sold on the coast of Sussex, the other day, for TWO HUNDRED POUNDS! There is, they say, a chain of these things all the way to HASTINGS! I dare say they cost MILLIONS. But, far indeed are these from being all, or half, or a quarter of the squanderings along here. Hythe is half barracks; the hills are covered with barracks; and barracks most expensive, most squandering, fill up the side of the hill. Here is a CANAL (I crossed it at Appledore) made for the length of diirty miles (from Hythe, in Kent, to RYE, in Sussex) to keep out the French; for, those armies who had so often crossed the Rhine and the Danube, were to be kept back by a canal, made by PITT, thirty feet wide at the most! All along the coast diere are works of some sort or odier; incessant sinks of money; walls of immense dimensions; masses of stone brought and put into piles. Then you see some of the walls and buildings falling down; some that have never been finished. The whole thing, all taken together, looks as if a spell had been, all of a sudden, set upon the workmen; or
, in the words of the Scripture, here is the ‘desolation of abomination, standing in high places’.12 However, all is right. These dungs were made widi the hearty good will of diose who are now coming to ruin in consequence of the Debt, contracted for the purpose of making these things! This is all just. The load will come, at last, upon the right shoulders.

  Between Hythe and SANDGATE (a village at about two miles from Hythe) I first saw the French coast. The chalk cliffs at Calais are as plain to the view as possible, and also the land, which they tell me is near BOULOGNE.

  FOLKESTONE lies under a Hill here, as REIGATE does in SURREY, only here the sea is open to your right as you come along. The corn is very early here, and very fine. All cut, even the beans; and they will be ready to cart in a day or two. FOLKESTONE is now a little place; probably a quarter part as big as it was formerly. Here is a church one hundred and twenty feet long and fifty feet wide. It is a sort of little Cathedral. The church-yard has evidently been three times as large as it is now.

  Before I got into FOLKESTONE I saw no less than eighty-four men, women, and boys and girls gleaning, or leasing, in a field of about ten acres! The people all along here complain most bitterly of the change of times. The truth is, that the squandered millions are gone! The nation has now to suffer for this squandering. The money served to silence some; to make others bawl; to cause the good to be oppressed; to cause the bad to be exalted; to ‘crush the Jacobins’: and what is the result? What is the end? The end is not yet come; but as to the result thus far, go, ask the families of those farmers, who, after having, for so many years, threatened to shoot Jacobins, have, in instances not a few, shot themselves! Go, ask the ghosts of Pitt and of Castlereagh what has, thus far, been the result! Go, ask the Hampshire farmer, who, not many months since, actually blowed out his own brains with one of those very pistols, which he had long carried in his Yeomanry Cavalry holsters, to be ready ‘to keep down the Jacobins and Radicals!’; Oh, God! inscrutable are thy ways; but thou art just, and of thy justice what a complete proof have we in the case of these very Martello Towers! They were erected to keep out the Jacobin French, lest they should come and assist the Jacobin English. The loyal people of this coast were fattened by the building of them. Pitt and his loyal Cinque Ports waged interminable war against Jacobins. These very towers are now used to keep these loyal Cinque Ports themselves in order! These towers are now used to lodge men, whose business it is to sally forth, not upon Jacobins, but upon smugglers! Thus, after having sucked up millions of the nation’s money, these loyal Cinque Ports are squeezed again: kept in order, kept down, by the very towers, which they rejoiced to see rise to keep down the Jacobins.