• Cinque Ports
• Dumb Woman's Lane
• Lindow Man *
• Royal Crescent
• St Andrew's, Greensted-juxta-Ongar
• Sutton Hoo *

Cinque Ports

In Roman times there was a chain of forts called the Saxon Shore providing a similar defensive role. The present Cinque Ports might have been working together as a league in Anglo-Saxon times; their early history is unclear. Tributary to the five main ports are a number of others, which have varied through history, called their Limbs. These provided service in the way of ships, timber, or money.

Cinque means five, and is pronounced "sink", not the French cinq. Originally there were five main ports, head ports as they are called: starting from the east of Kent and proceeding south-westward they were Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney, and Hastings. The last is over the border in Sussex. The two Sussex ports of Rye and Winchelsea were originally Limbs of Hastings, but were early on elevated to head port status under the name of the Antient Towns (sic).

So there are seven Cinque Ports, plus all their dependents. Today, seven limbs are corporate members, that is they have a charter and a mayor of their own. These are Deal and Ramsgate limbs of Sandwich; Folkestone, Faversham, and Margate limbs of Dover; Tenterden a limb of Rye; and Lydd a limb of Romney. But Winchelsea is now so small that it has lost its corporation and is governed as a charity, so it can retain its privileges as a head port. Sandwich still receives ceremonial annual payments of minuscule amounts of Ship Money from its limbs.

Their past

The Cinque Ports were granted extensive powers of self-government, administration of justice, and freedom from tax and toll by a charter in the 1200s. The King appointed a representative called the Lord Warden, and combined this post with the military post of Constable of Dover Castle and the naval post of Admiral of the Cinque Ports. The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes anywhere, and much of it and the North Sea are technically under the jurisdiction of the Cinque Ports Court of Admiralty, though this no longer meets.

The ports each functioned as a borough in Parliament, each returning two burgesses, in this case called barons. The Barons of the Cinque Ports have the right to hold a canopy over the Sovereign at the Coronation, though the last time this happened was that of George IV in 1821. Today only Hastings is a borough in the ordinary self-government sense (see English counties and county borough).

The Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports has traditionally been some very senior government official, often after their retirement from public office, and appointed for life. They have included William Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, W.H. Smith (the creator of the bookshop chain became a cabinet minister), Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Robert Menzies, and most recently the late Queen Mother, from 1979. The Warden's office is at Walmer Castle near Deal.

Their powers

The 1260 charter to the Confederation consolidated individual ones. They already had a common court, called the Court of Shepway, dating from before 1150. The Lord Warden presided over this assembly of the free Portsmen. Since the sixteenth century the Shepway, named after its meeting-place of Shepway Cross at Lympne, near Hythe, has been largely ceremonial. Their role is to install new Lord Wardens with full pomp and pageantry.

It was eclipsed by the Court of Brodhull, from its meeting-place near Romney, which from 1572 was known as the Court of Brotherhood. It had representatives from the five head ports and two antient towns. The three Sussex towns of Hastings, Rye, and Winchelsea had their own court, that of Guestling.

From the early 1600s the Courts of Brotherhood and Guestling met combined, and still have a ceremonial existence today, with the mayors of all fourteen corporate members taking part. One of their number is Speaker in rotation for a year, starting on May 21. They all dress in scarlet except the mayors of Sandwich and Deal, who dress in black to commemorate Mayor John Drury of Sandwich, killed by French raiders in 1457.

Demeter reminds me of another odd ceremony: in Rye, on Bonfire Night, instead of the usual effigy of Guy Fawkes, they burn one of a ship, to commemorate the French raiding.

Many thanks to the official website of the Confederation at www.cinqueports.org, and a hundred thousand curses on the Sandwich tourism authority website I first used for all its misinformation.

Part of the JudyT Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.

Dumb Woman's Lane

Unless civilisation, which for present purposes includes enclosed shelter, the taming of fire, and the distilling of grain, could be reached in about one hour's walk from Dumb Woman's Lane, it would be time to go wild and mad-eyed.

We had gone to Rye on a whim. To Winchelsea on a whim. Even, though we hadn't known it'd be there waiting for us, to Dumb Woman's Lane on a whim.

We were in a swamp. It was late, we had both walked more than enough, the grey sky was being whipped up and flattered by rain-loving winds, and we didn't know which direction Rye lay in. "Not lost in a swamp as such," M. insisted when I reviewed our position.

"Lost, and in a swamp, but the two are unconnected, you mean?"

"Yes," she said happily. She enjoyed teasing me, lord knows I deserve it sometimes. I was glad I had such a sensible partner to keep me steady in these little jaunts; but I have to ask, privately, if she's so sensible why does she follow me when I announce we don't need a local map because we're just walking straight from Rye to Winchelsea?

To be fair, I was expecting a quick tramp in a country lane once we got out of town, with the odd car whizzing by to distract us from the silence and beauty of fields. Hmm. It's a reclaimed swamp, the fields are very flat, broken up by channels filled with sedge, and grazed by an unattractive, muddy breed of sheep. The cars were incessant. I hated it by the time I was half way there, and we agreed we'd get a bus or train back.

Ah, Winchelsea! It was worth it -- it was worth the cars and the long walk, when we climbed the steep hill, passed laughing and wondering through the 13th-century Strand Gate, and found ourselves in a charming, serene, orderly little village commanding what is now farmland but was then an arm of the sea.

In its day Winchelsea was one of the most powerful ports of England, and constantly suffered from the depredations of our old enemy the French. But a far older and more potent enemy was laying plans. In 1250 the Sea sacked Winchelsea: in 1287 the Sea overwhelmed it in a mighty storm and changed the whole coastline between it and Rye. Old Winchelsea is under the waves now; no-one knows quite where. But already before its destruction a new town had been planned, a grid of squares on a defensible hill peninsula, blessed and furthered by King Edward I.

The French raided and sacked the New Winchelsea several times, but once again the Sea made the final disposition, this time by withdrawal. The harbour was silted up, the coast moved away, the merchants moved too when there was no more trade, and the great church of St Thomas the Martyr fell into ruin.

It was the church we had come for: I had told M. it had one of the finest collections of effigies in England. For some reason I had forgotten the truly magnificent modern stained glass, another reason to go out of our way to visit it. Two effigies of white stone are near contemporary with the founding of the church: one is Gervase Alard, first Admiral of the Fleet in the time of Edward I, in convincingly draped pleats of robe and finely carved chain mail. But in the opposite chantry, in the north chancel, are three smoother, more primitive figures, carved of dark Sussex marble, a crusader knight, a lady, and a lad, perhaps one family. Their identities have been lost under the sea and over the centuries, but their animatedly human stone forms lie here, rescued from the drowned ruins of the old church while there were still people who remembered them.

Well. We "did" the church, trying to take in how large and dominant it must have been when its nave existed and its transepts were more than arches flung out forlornly across the graveyard, we paid for guides and postcards, we added our names in the visitors' book. Then we walked the trim streets, hoping the thin biting rain wouldn't deepen, we saw where Ellen Terry had lived, and Malcolm Saville, and where Wesley as an old man preached his last outdoor sermon. Then we wandered companionably, arm in arm, down towards the railway station.

We'd seen a sign pointing towards it: it was Sunday, so we were resigned to sitting in a dingy waiting room for half an hour or more. Small inconvenience, as we had each other's company: who could count such hours dull? Alas, alack, our bliss was short. The sign pointed thataway, away from the main traffic, good, our last little walk would be amid peaceful farms, with only bleating and the seagulls' cry and the soughing of the wind. But it led to another sign: station 1 mile. That would take us half way to Rye, or worse, a mile further away.

Now we're young and fit, we can walk, if we know where to go. But between us and the hilltop of Rye was marsh criss-crossed with silently malign channels. No footpaths, no lanes, no guarantee of dry ground. An occasional gunshot booming across Romney Marsh. At this point we noticed it was getting late.

We did walk that mile. It was very pleasant: the way we'd wanted the first walk to be. Stillness, company, mild exertion, wind in our faces. We talked painting, and people we knew, past loves and what we'd eat back in Rye. Soon, we hoped. "Winchelsea" station is a platform in the wilds of south-eastern Sussex, with a bench and a timetable. Sunday. Not every hour, but every two hours, and one had just gone. And the sun calling back its light.

The prospect of retracing our steps before dusk caught us was not appealing, especially if it was dark on that last stretch of busy road with its thin, irregular pavement to walk on. Luckily there was another signpost: Rye 2 miles if we continued onward. I hadn't fancied taking risks with cross-country this close to dusk. From time to time we could see Ypres Tower, the high fortress dominating Rye, tantalisingly close if we could walk flat across to it, but our road wasn't going directly towards it. Sunset orange began to glare at us: the sun was visibly lower every time we looked.

Along this totally unfrequented path we went, and it came to a fork, and to the right, towards Rye, was Dumb Woman's Lane.

How we hugged each other in delight at the serendipity! It had not a dingy, crabbed, 18th-century sign, hidden from time, but no, this had a very modern, large, completely out-of-place council sign that named it. I was thankful it hadn't fallen victim to modernising correctness and become Differently Bright-Idea'd Bitch's Lane.

It quickly curled away in quite the wrong direction, and a jogger we asked said the bridlepath, full of grey mud and sheep droppings and deranged sheep, overhung by a beetling and goblin-haunted cliff on one side and an evil, still channel that made the Dead Marshes look like a koi pond -- said that this was our quicker route.

We got into Rye at twilight, drank at the Old Bell Inn (1420), and recounted to each other fondly and minutely over pasta how much pleasure we'd had from the day.

The geography is all true. The lane really exists. The events are mostly true; the people are absurd.

Lindow Man

He was about 25 years old. His stomach contents included one very unusual substance, mistletoe pollen. Mistletoe being sacred to the Druids, this suggested he was a sacrifice. His death was ugly. He was knocked on the head, garrotted*, and his throat was cut, before being thrown into the bog.

When he was first discovered he was called Bog Man. This soon changed to the more dignified Lindow Man. His body is preserved in the British Museum in London.

And I do mean preserved. This is half a human body. Not a skeleton, but a complete upper half of a well-preserved corpse of a 25-year-old man from the first century CE. He is cut off below the navel, except that there is also a leg. There is some shrinkage, some distortion, caused by the pressure of the layers above him, but not a lot. There are a lot of dead human bodies on display in the British Museum, mainly Egyptian. This one, somehow, is a little closer to home. He or his mates were my ancestors.

You can see all his hair and his beard, bleached from the action of the soil. You can see the big slit in his throat. His ear is small and delicate: you'd expect such a cartilaginous thing as an ear to be among the first casualties of centuries of peat deposition, but his is the same shape as when he walked and talked. One arm is flung out, crushed to bones, the other is hugged to his chest.

He had a name, he had a family, he was like us. We walk around his preserved dead body, brown with tanning, as if it's a pot-sherd or a belt-buckle.

There's a great big hologram of him if you want to see his wounds in three dimensions.

* Yes, it is spelt garrotte here, though other noders all write garotte and Webster says Garrote. I've checked my dictionary.

Part of the JudyT Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.

Royal Crescent

All the houses are joined and together they form half an ellipse 200 m long. Each has a facade dominate by Ionic columns, so the whole effect is of facing one side of a big Colosseum, but made of the warm honey-coloured Bath stone. Number One was given to the Bath Preservation Trust in 1968 and restored to be its headquarters and a museum.

At the feet of the Royal Crescent, some way down, is Royal Victoria Park. Between them is a stretch of private lawn belonging to the Crescent residents, divided from the public gardens by a haha.

Pictures (it seems to be rather hard to fit it all in):
BathWeb
Royal Crescent

And as it's rather hard to see the grandeur squashed into a flat picture, here's what you really need: moving panoramas of this, and the other similar though not quite as beautiful crescents in Bath, foremost of which is Camden Crescent, and indeed of other cities.

St Andrew's, Greensted-juxta-Ongar

The construction is a unique survival of a technique of building with split logs. The oak logs were split in half and the rounded side used for the outside. It "is of stave construction, not timber-framed, and relies solely upon grooves, lap joints and pegs to hold it together. There are no mortise and tenons or dovetail joints." This work forms the nave of the present church; the rest of it, with a white timber tower contrasting with the black oak, dates mainly from a restoration in 1848.

The dating is uncertain. Recent dendrochronology has reassigned it. It was once thought to be an old Saxon church, possibly around 850, but this apparently came from a faulty tree ring dating in 1960. In 1996 scientists at Sheffield University revised it to 1053 +10 -55 years, so that it could be at the very end of the Saxon period, or early Norman. As its construction is unique, stylistic details are less help. This does not mean that there was not earlier building there, only that the trees now forming the main fabric were cut down in those years. If it was Norman, it was presumably built for Homo Dapifer, the lord of the manor recorded in the Domesday Book.

In any case it is still certainly the oldest timber building in Britain, of any kind, and the reevaluation of the dating hasn't necessarily dethroned it from wider claims. And it's in lovely countryside.

photo
construction details in my quotation
dendro date
Domesday holder

Sutton Hoo

The most striking of the treasures are the gold clasps, buckles, and purse, very ornately worked and covered in garnets and enamel. Other grave goods, like the helmet and shield, were also ornamented with gold and garnet. The clasps are perfectly preserved, looking like they were made in 1900.

Next are the great silver bowls, almost all perfectly preserved too. The biggest two came from Byzantium and Alexandria. Then there are Celtic bowls richly ornamented in enamel. The 40 gold coins in the purse were Frankish, from every mint in France.

There is war equipment: a heavily ornamented helmet, with cheek guards, and a gold nose bridge and moustache and eyebrows; spears, swords, chain mail. There is a huge cauldron, and a long iron chain to suspend it from a high ceiling. There are big wooden buckets ringed with iron, there are ivory gaming pieces, a whetstone topped with a bronze stag on a ring ...

The ship was 30 m long, a real warship, clinker-built, though the acidic sandy soil had eaten all the wood and its position was shown by its rivets. Signs of repair indicate that it had been a real ship in use for some time. For the same reason no body was found, no leather on the purse, and textiles only in scraps where they were wrapped on metal.

The coins date it to between 610 and 630. Almost certainly the burial is of a king, and almost certainly that is Raedwald, bretwalda or High King of England, and the last pagan king of East Anglia. Bede records that the kings were Christian, and Raedwald apparently made some political conversion because of the growing power of Christian Kent to the south, but the Sutton Hoo ship burial is the mother of all pagan burials. Other ship burials are known, but this is the richest burial of any kind in Europe from that period, and probably the greatest archaeological treasure ever found in England.

And it was a miracle it survived. Grave-robbers had been through the mounds of Sutton Hoo in the sixteenth century. There is evidence that some accident scared them away just as they were about to reach the burial chamber in Mound 1. Instead, there was sporadic excavation of the twenty mounds in later years, but it was not until May 1939 that archaeologists entered the largest of them, Mound 1.

A hoo is a small hill or promontory, and Sutton Hoo is farmland on the River Deben in Suffolk, between the towns of Ipswich and Aldeburgh. There is nothing there but the mounds, and now, a National Trust visitor centre with replicas of everything, and a few originals lent by the British Museum, where the bulk of the treasure resides.

aneurin tells me that details of the burial indicate that these people were actually of Swedish origin.

Part of JudyT's Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.