W a y m a r k s ~: Revisiting the Past

An English Landscape, c.1635-1641 - Anthony van Dyck (Barber Institute)

Rye is a beautiful little town located on the Sussex coast of southeast England. It is now situated about two miles from the sea, but several centuries ago it was a port town, fortified during the time of King Henry VIII as one of his network of Cinque Ports, designed to protect the south coast from attack by the French – who, on occasion, did actually manage to raid the town. As Daniel Defoe describes in his travelogue, A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, which was published in several volumes between 1724-1727:

“From Rumney-Marsh the shoar extends it self a great way into the sea, and makes that point of land, call'd Dengey-Ness; between this point of land and Beachy, it was that the French in the height of their naval glory took the English and Dutch fleets at some disadvantage, offering them battle, when the French were so superior in number, that it was not consistent with humane prudence to venture an engagement, the French being ninety two ships of the line of battle, and the English and Dutch, put together, not sixty sail; the French ships also generally bigger: yet such was the eagerness of both the English and Dutch seamen, and commanders, that it was not without infinite murmurings, that Admiral Herbert stood away, and call'd off the Dutch, who had the van, from engaging; the English it seems believ'd themselves so superior to the French when they came to lye broad-side and broad-side, yard-arm and yard-arm, as the seamen call it in an engagement, that they would admit of no excuse for not fighting; tho' according to all the rules of war, no admiral could justify hazarding the royal navy on such terms; and especially the circumstances of the time then considered, for the king was in Ireland, and King James ready in France, if the English and Dutch fleets had received a blow, to have embark'd with an army for England, which perhaps would have hazarded the whole Revolution; so that wise men afterwards, and as I have been told the king himself upon a full hearing justify'd the conduct of Admiral Herbert, and afterwards created him Earl of Torrington.”

The Ypres Tower, Rye - Anthony van Dyck (Fitzwilliam Museum)

By Defoe’s time Rye’s maritime role was already receding as silt from the discharge of the three rivers which converge at Rye, as well as land reclamation works carried out by local landowners, extended the sandbanks in the bay, thereby cutting off entrance for large ships into Rye harbour. As Defoe laments:

“Here, or rather a little farther, we saw the bones of one of the Dutch men of war, which was burnt and stranded by the French in that action; the towns of Rye , Winchelsea, and Hastings, have little in them to deserve more than a bare mention; Rye would flourish again, if her harbour, which was once able to receive the royal navy, cou'd be restor'd; but as it is, the bar is so loaded with sand cast up by the sea, that ships of 200 tun chuse to ride it out under Dengey or Beachy, tho' with the greatest danger, rather than to run the hazard of going into Rye for shelter: It is true there is now an Act of Parliament pass'd for the restoring this port to its former state, when a man of war of 70 guns might have safely gone in; but 'tis very doubtful, whether it will be effectual to the main end or no, after so long a time.

Indeed our merchants ships are often put to great extremity hereabout, for there is not one safe place for them to run into, between Portsmouth and the Downs; whereas in former days, Rye-Bay was an asylum, a safe harbour, where they could go boldly in, and ride safe in all weathers, and then go to sea again at pleasure.”

Rye Citadel, 1633 - Anthony van Dyck (The Morgan Library & Museum)

This idea of Rye having once been a bustling port in which large galleons had moored really caught my imagination when I first visited the town as a child. That motif of the stranded Dutch ‘Man of War’ in particular lodged firmly in my mind as I recall seeing it depicted in the town model – a fantastic 1:100 scale diorama, rather like a model railway set, which shows Rye as it would have been around 1830. Still in operation today (see here), the model uses a ‘Son et Lumiere’ (Sound and Light) show to illustrate the history of Rye, as it is billed, “from its early days as a coastal Cinque Port to a smuggling base of the 18th century, via French raids, monastic intrigue, two royal visits and a notorious local crime.”

This memory of visiting Rye as a child in the 1980s was later reawakened for me by a wonderful exhibition held at the British Museum in 1999, which was curated by a former colleague of mine, Martin Royalton-Kisch. The exhibition and its beautiful accompanying book, titled The Light of Nature, commemorated the 400^th anniversary of the birth of the Dutch artist, Anthony van Dyck. It contained drawings and watercolour sketches done by the artist whilst he was living and working in England by special appointment to the Court of King Charles I. Several of these drawings are unmistakably views of Rye. It is thought that many of these works were done en plein air (i.e. – on the spot, from life) when Van Dyck was staying in the town whilst waiting for a favourable wind or tide to provide him with passage back to Europe. In this exhibition the work which most fascinated me was a view of the ‘citadel’ of Rye, showing the old walled town with the hill at its centre crowned by St. Mary’s Church, dated 1633. If you look closely at this view you will see the water’s edge at the left-hand side with a sailing vessel anchored out in the bay beyond.

Camber Castle, with boat aground - J.M.W. Turner (Tate Gallery)

Curiously enough, that motif of the stranded Dutch ship is similarly echoed in the work of a later artist too. A sketch by J. M. W. Turner, now part of the Tate Gallery’s collection in London, drawn in the nineteenth century, shows a tall-masted vessel careened on the foreshore with the ruins of Camber Castle clearly visible in the background. Camber Castle, which used to be known as Winchelsea Castle, like much of the town, dates back to Henry VIII’s time. Construction began around 1512 with a single fortified keep which was later rebuilt and surrounded by series of concentric circular bastions. It may well have seen action when the French raided the coast in 1545, but its defensive function was probably very short lived, due to the fact that the spit of land on which it was located slowly merged with the mainland over time as the channels around Rye and the bay itself began to accrete under a build-up of silt, sand and shingle. It remained operational, however, until the time of Charles I. It was then largely disabled by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War, in order to prevent it being used by the Royalist side. And it remained redundant thereafter until the Second World War, when it may have been briefly used as a military observation post. Today its ruins sit amidst a vast sheep pasture far from the seashore. In the nineteenth century, when Turner sketched it, it was a romantic ruin, often used as a picturesque spot for picnicking. Turner painted two views of the castle in both his early, conventional, and his later, more impressionistic, styles.

Rye, Sussex - J.M.W. Turner (National Museum of Wales)

Rye or the Coast near Dunstanbrough Castle - J.M.W. Turner (Tate Gallery)

Rye Land Gate - Verrall King, 1925

Looking at these sketches rekindled in me that sense of interest. I wanted to return to Rye and see how it matched my early memories of the old town, and, moreover, how I’d envisaged its forgotten past, when it was the haunt of sailors and smugglers. Rye is a perfect place for a day-trip from London. In the summertime, at weekends, the morning railway connection from Kings Cross-St. Pancras is often bustling with people who on arrival mostly head to the bus stop just down the road from Rye Station to catch a ride down to the long, wide beach of Camber Sands. But if you are more interested in history than sunbathing, a day spent wandering about the cobbled streets of the old town is a rewarding one. There are plenty of interesting old buildings to see alongside the town’s old fortifications – most notably the Land Gate and the Ypres Tower. There are several very venerable old pubs too. The Mermaid Inn, perhaps the most famous with its enormous inglenook fireplace, and the Olde Bell Inn were both notorious smuggler’s hang outs in the 1730s and 1740s. The two inns were connected by a secret tunnel used for shifting contraband. The formidable “Hawkhurst Gang” used to operate openly here with impunity, having such a strength in numbers and arms that no Customs and Excise Men dared to enter and interfere in their business.

The Mermaid Inn itself actually dates back to 1156, rebuilt in 1426 and renovated further in the 1500s; it is a beautiful Tudor half-timbered building, and retains its original medieval cellars. The Olde Bell Inn dates back to 1390, and has an 80 year old wisteria tree in its yard. In its heyday the Hawkhurst Gang terrorized the south coast from Kent in the east through four counties all the way to Dorset in the West. The reality was more complex though as most smugglers needed the acceptance and cooperation, if not the actual support of the local population in order to operate, and so in some ways the benefits were mutual – but over time this acceptance wore thin and a local militia was assembled to confront the gang. A battle therefore ensued in 1747. It marked a change in the gang’s fortunes. The following year the authorities decided it was time to put an end to the smugglers’ activities and offered substantial rewards and pardons for any information which led to the apprehension and arrest of any smugglers. The leaders of the gang were relentlessly pursued and eventually rounded up, many of them being sent to London for execution at the Tyburn, after which their dead bodies were exhibited, hung in gibbets set up in their hometowns along the south coast, as a warning to others. Gibbeting was a practice usually reserved for murderers, hence the severity of their posthumous public display showed how pressing and widespread the problem with these smugglers had become. It must have made for a gruesome sight to behold. In all 75 members of the gang were either hanged or transported overseas to penal colonies.

Camber Castle, 2017

Reading such stories, as well as studying the drawings of artists such as Van Dyck and Turner, is an evocative way to conjure up a vision of Rye and its maritime past, now seemingly so distant from its quaint and picturesque present. Wandering around the old town today, with its restaurants and tea shops, its pubs and ice cream vans, with beautiful flowers growing in its many gardens it is hard to imagine Rye as a bustling port full of merchants, sailors and menacing cut-throats. Harder yet to picture large sailing boats drifting through the space between the town and Camber Castle where now only sheep drift in windblown woolly-fleeced fleets, the long grass they graze upon rippling like a ghost tide undulating in the breeze. One of the ways to best appreciate the vast changes in hydrography and landscape which have taken place over those intervening centuries is to visit St. Mary’s Church at the centre of the old town and climb its tower. From the top you can get a clear view of the town itself and the old harbour, looking out over the fields and the marshland to the now distant sea. The sun-baked lichen covered roof tiles and crenellated stonework weathered with age were a witness to such times gone by. The lead-flashing scored with the initials of those who once trod where your feet have now followed. Having studied Van Dyck’s sketches you can more easily conjure a glimpse in your mind’s eye of what he and those who went before you might have seen centuries ago, whilst waiting for passage on the traffic of ships coming into and going out of that bay and its busy little harbour.

St. Mary's Church, Rye, 1634 - Anthony van Dyck

In many ways I found it connected me to my own home town, located far from the sea in Middlesex, the heart of which is similarly old. Climbing St. Mary’s Church tower in Rye you have to pass through the ringing chamber and the church bells above to get to the top, which reminded me of the church tower in my hometown of Pinner, where I used to be a bell ringer when I was young. One of the things I used to like doing was climbing to the top and looking down on the old Tudor and Georgian rooftops of our High Street, picturing the scene as it might have been in the days of mail coaches, press-gangs, and highway men. I doubt though that my hometown ever saw anything quite so dramatic as Rye did, certainly the bells of our church had a much more sedentary life than those of St. Mary’s, as the church’s own pamphlet relates: “The worst disaster in the church's history occurred in 1377 when the town was looted and set on fire by French invaders and the church was extensively damaged. The roof fell in and the church bells were carried off to France. They were recovered the next year when men from Rye and Winchelsea sailed to Normandy, set fire to two towns and recovered much of the loot, including the church bells – one of which was subsequently hung in Watchbell Street, to give warning of any future attack. It was not returned to the church until early in the 16th century.” The bells that are there now were recast in 1775 by the same foundry that around the same time in 1771 cast the bells still in use in Pinner Parish Church. At the time, being young and spry, it used to be my job to climb under the bells in the freezing cold of winter to fit the muffles for Remembrance Sunday. Climbing the tower of St. Mary’s in Rye brought back a lot of kindred memories for me.

Reflecting on distant time and present place, I realised that whilst the view from the top of St. Mary’s may have changed, there is a continuity of time between Van Dyck’s sketches and our own digital photos. Taking snaps of the same views in a sense links us directly back to him, waiting for his ship to sail, returning him temporarily to his home. Looking out across the old rooftops of Rye today, the smugglers are long gone and so too are the gibbets that did away with them. The ships are gone too, and so is the sea which once brought them up to moor beside the town’s wharves. But what remains, embodied in both the built and natural landscapes, can still be viewed through the eyes of those who have gone before – through the eyes of people like Van Dyck and Turner. It’s good to remind ourselves from time to time, that if we close our eyes to the past, we are only seeing half the picture. Looking through different eyes can help to ring some familiar but long forgotten bells. The sea may have receded, but an informed imagination can inundate the space and lost time in between. And in an unexpected way, like Mnemosyne’s ark sailing across the ages, for a moment at least, Rye returned me back to my own hometown – a place from which I have sailed far and wide since I grew up and left it behind. My memories of it might have long receded, but in an instant, the similarities of touch and smell in the parallels of well-worn wood, rope and stone in a musty old church bell tower, like an old wooden ship careened on the shore, brought a personal remembrance of things past flooding back. It was a welcome return.