United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For during the long decay of the empire, the corsairs of the flat banks and islets of Sleswick and Friesland made many a light-hearted plundering expedition upon the unlucky coasts of the maritime Roman provinces; and it was to repel their dreaded attacks that the Count of the Saxon Shore was appointed to the charge of the long exposed tract from the fenland of the Wash to the estuary of the Rother in Sussex.
Relics of the occupation are constantly turning up in the neighbourhood. Near the church is a mound, on which stood the "castellum." A glance at the map will show the commanding position the station held over the meeting of the Arun and Rother. There are traces of a Roman villa at Borough Hill north-east of the village.
Even in those greater distances which the horizon concealed they were burning and answering each other into Hampshire: perhaps on the beaten grass of the high forts above Portsmouth, and to the left away to the flat Rye level, and to the eastern Rother; for we saw the line of red angry upon that cloud which had come to receive it, an endless line which suddenly called up what one had heard old men say of the prairie fires.
We now leave the Rother, turn south by the Chichester road and passing over Cocking causeway reach, in three miles, that little village at the foot of the pass through the Downs to Singleton, or better still, by taking a rather longer route through West Lavington we may see the church in which Manning preached his last sermon as a member of the Anglican communion.
Hither so late as 1509 the Rother was navigable, and we find Archbishop Warham on the petition of the people licensing a small chapel there of St John Baptist still in existence, for the use of the inhabitants and as a sanctuary or a graveyard for the burial of those wrecked on the "sea-shore" infra predictum oppidum de Smallhyth. Now in this lies all the greatness of Tenterden.
It fell when, as we are told, in a great storm the course of the Rother was changed so that it went thereafter to serve Rye, and New Romney fell slowly down so that to-day but one of those five churches remains, that of St Nicholas. But what a glorious church it is, and if the rest were like it, what idea must we have of the splendour of New Romney in the thirteenth century?
All these things could I tell with growing fervour, and to all these would you listen with an increasing delight. But I must write of the River Rother under Petworth, the other Rother in the West. Why? Because I started out so to do, and no man should let himself be led away by a word, or by any such little thing.
It was Bardolph who drew him out from under the knee and belaboring fists of one Thomas Chettle, another grammar-school boy, who had him down, behind High Cross in the Rother Market. "In the devil's name," said Bardolph, setting him on his feet, "with your nose all gore an' never an eye you can open what do you mean, boy, to be letting the like of that come over you?"
The River Rother connects it with the sea, and the few barges and humble craft and a few small shipbuilding yards remind it of its palmy days when it was a member of the Cinque Ports, a rich and prosperous town that sent forth its ships to fight the naval battles of England and win honour for Rye and St. George.
Till, towards one, a little draught of air blew slantwise from the land, and under it I crept to the smooth water within the stone arm of the breakwater, and here I let the anchor go, and settling everything, I slept. It is pleasant to remember these things. It is the valley of the River Rother; the sacred and fruitful river between the downs and the weald.
Word Of The Day