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.”
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.”
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 400th 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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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| The Land Gate, Rye |
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| The Ypres Tower, Rye |
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| St. Mary's Church, Rye |
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| The Mermaid Inn, Rye |
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| Olde Bell Inn, Rye |
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| Camber Castle, Rye |
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| Camber Castle Keep, 2017 |
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| Rye Railway Station |
