“Rye Royal”
The Visit of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
August 11, 1573

 from Samuel Jeakes, Charters of the Cinque Ports  “wrote in 1678″

Queen Elizabeth, in 1573, who, from the noble entertainment she had, accompanied with the Testimonies of Love and Loyalty, Duty and Reverence she received from the People was pleased to call it “Rye Royal.”

from William Holloway, Rambles Through Rye  (1863)                                                                                        

. . . . . as we are close by let us turn our steps to that quiet sequestered hollow in which now lies the well known as Queen Elizabeth’s, overshadowed with those old oaks, the probable descendents of the primeval Forest of Anderida, a well, the existence of which has been recognised from A.D. 1247 to A.D. 1863, more than 600 years.

That Queen Elizabeth halted by this well* I will not dispute; but that she drank I do very much doubt as Her Majesty’s favourite morning beverage was the best ale she could procure.  Here probably she halted to receive the Mayor and Corporation, who came out to welcome Her Majesty. all clad in scarlet robes, from whence they conducted her to the town through the Postern Gate, then standing at the foot of Conduit Hill, on which occasion our good Queen Bess was so highly gratified with their loyal conduct, and their most royal appearance that she dubbed the old town “Rye Royal”.

The inscription on a stone at the head of the well is as follows:

1588
E.R.
M.Gaymer’Maior

But this is a mere ignis fatuus only calculated to lead the benighted traveller astray: for the Queen’s visit was on August 11, 1573, when John Donnyng was Mayor and the discrepancy we can onlybe  accounted  for by supposing that the Corporation conscience (if a Corporation has a conscience, which is doubtful, if it be true, as some affirm, that a Corporation has no body to be kicked, and no soul to be damned) after a slumber of 15 years, awoke to a sense of its error, when they thought they might as well kill two birds with one stone, and at one and same time, and so recorded the Queen’s visit to the well and the destruction of the Spanish Armada, A.D. 1588.
 

The quotations here have been culled from Iain Finlayson’s excellent book Writers in Romney Marsh (London: Severn House 1986). The book’s chapters include Henry James at Lamb House, EF Benson at Lamb House, Radclyffe Hall in Rye,  Conrad Aiken at Jeake’s House, as well as Joseph Conrad in Kent and Ford Madox Hueffer  in Kent  (both also lived briefly in Winchelsea)  Stephen Crane at Brede and HG Wells at Sandgate. The last chapter contains smaller pieces on writers such as John Fletcher, Richard Harris Barham, Edith Nesbitt, Russell Thorndike, Noel Coward, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Patric Dickinson.  An essential read for anyone interested in Rye and Romney Marsh in literature.    

From writers on Rye

E.F. Benson, who lived in Lamb House after Henry James, claimed that

I had not come to Rye for any reason except to be there  [but discovered] a stable and solidified sense of home. . .  A few months sufficed to convince me that I was not in Rye, but of it. . . . To be there made me content: its cobbled ways and its marsh with its huge sjky, as at sea, and in particular the house and the garden-room and the garden were making a ferment of their own in my veins, not because they were  associated with any cheristed and intimate experiences, but because they were themselves.

And once here it was not long before he had

outlined an elderly atrocious spinster and established her in Lamb House.  She should be the centre of social life, abhorred and dominant, and she should sit like a great spider behind the curtains in the garden room, spying on her friends, and I knew that her name must be Elizabeth Mapp.  Rye should furnish the topography, so that no one who knew Rye could possibly be in doubt where the scene was laid, and I would call it Tilling because Rye has its river the Tillingham . . .

For more on E.F. Benson and Rye click here. 

Radclyffe Hall’s novel about Rye, The  Sixth  Beatitude  is set in Hucksteps Row (it is Crofts Lane in the book) . The main character, Hannah Bullen, saw Rye as it

stood peacefully dreaming, sleeping and dreaming aove the Marsh. . . it would become something more than a town, especially on the warm July evenigns when the dusk lay folded along its streets, and the ships lighted port and starboarfd lanterns, and the past. . . came wandering craftily into the present . . . 

Praise has not been universal, however.  The travel writer Paul Theroux wrote a rather grumpy book about his tour of the British coast and said of Rye that it was

the quaintest town in this corner of England, but so museum-like in its quaitness that I found myself walking along the cobblestone streets with my hands behind my back, treating the town in my monkish manner of subdued appreciation like a person in a gallery full of Do Not Touch signs.  Rye was not a restful place.  It had the atmosphere of a china shop. It urged you to remark on the pretty houses and the well-kept gardens and the self-conscious sign painting, a d then it demanded that you move on.

Even Henry James, who did love Rye, could occasionally  find some imperfections in its ‘whole pleasant little pathos’.  He had visited and stayed in Rye, at Point Hill and then at the Old Vicarage in Rye where he could gaze wistfully each day at Lamb House which he ‘secretly and hopelessly coveted’ .

The peace and prettiness of the whole land here . . . has been good to me, and I stay on with unabated relish . . .

and when it unexpectedly became possible for him to sigtn a lease on the coveted house,  ‘It is exactly what I want . . . ‘  , describing it to his sister-in-;aw, Mrs William james, as

the very calmest yet cheerfullest that I could have dreamed . . . in the little old, cobblestoned, grass-grown red-roofed town, on the summit of its mildly pyramidal hill and close to its noble old church — the chimes of which will sound sweetly in my goodly old red-walled garden.  The little place is so rural and tranquil and yet so discreetly animated, that its being within the town is, for convenience and immediatte accessibility, purely to the good . . . .

It is later that his delight in Rye is occasionally  tinged with nostalgia for Europe

The best hour is that at which the compact little pyramid of Rye, crowned with its big but stunted church and quite covered by the westering sun, gives out the full measure of its old browns that turn to red and its old reds that turn to purple.  These tones of evening are now pretty much all that Rye has left to give, but there are truely, sometimes, conditions of atmosphere in which I have seen the effect as fantastic.

I sigh when I think, however, what it might have been if, perfectly placed as it is, the church tower == which in its more perverse moods only resembles a big central button, a knob on a pin cushion — had had the grace of a few more feet of stature  [which, he says it would have had if the place were French or Italian!]

Yet most of the time it was well-nigh perfect, a dream fulfilled, as he tells his sister-in-law in another letter:

All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely  bloomed and flourished here.  It was really about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable famly, began more unmistakesably to come out . . .  But the great charm is simply being here, and in particular the beginning of day no longer with the London blackness and foulness . . . but with the pleasant, sunny garden outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the day. This indeed — with work and a few, a very few people –in the all.

The poet Patric Dickinson  lived much of his adult life on Church Square.   He called Rye a place ‘betwen past and future’,  a ‘beautifully jewelled brooch/Worn at South Enaldnd’s throat’.  Here are three  further poems of his from Poems from Rye (Martello Bookshop 1979) .  Click here for the two already on the site. 

But Time is different here
     The streets are full beggars
You cannot see, who speak
     The tongues of centuries
          To the deaf tourists

The town keeps whispering
     Its history — fishermen, merchants –
Lifetimes that have been built
     From unimportant scraps
          To construct a clement

Enclave and santuary.
     Once you have understood this,
You will feel Rye within,
     And be disposed to come back,
          If you ever leave it.

The second poem is a most  unflattering one of some tourists (just a few?); it is probably safe to say that none of them will be looking at this website:

Tourists of a Sort 

Through our streets the morons shamble
     Asking for Woolworths,
Waiting for the Quarter Boys
     To strike at the hour.

They pile our streets with little and fag-ends,
     Too-fat adults and kids
Slupring ice-cream as they lurch on the cobbles,
     Gawping and peering

Poor flatulent boobs, they’re only goind
     What the God Teev bids.
If they should see the date on the exquisite
    Queen Anne weathercock,

They might have heard she’s dead, but precious
     Little else.  I have been asked
About equally for the way to the Catholic
     Church and to Woolworths.

But once, an ace-moron, a master-shambler,
     Stopped me and angrily
Snarled ‘Where’s the town?’  And one’s overhead,
     Crossing the churchyard,

‘We;ve half an hour to spare, whatever shall we
      Do?  We had better
Go back to Woolworths, dear.’  Oh indeed yes
     They better had.

The weathercock glints in the moonlight
     The winds blow through its date,
And in the moonlight river and sea
     Perpetually meet.

But it is only fair to show that Dickinson was not against all visitors and newcomers

Telegrams boought it:  this somewhat impecunious
Cosmopolitcan genius from fashionable London
Saw veritable home, and came and put his roots in
          This exquisite backwater.

And what came up was exotic and yet naive,
An American — almost Ryer, a curious
Equation, but he was.  The first tourist to settle,
          Also the greatest.

From writers on Romney Marsh

Richard Harris Barham:

In Mrs Botherby’s Story: The Leech of Folkstone, a tale in The Ingoldsby Legends, Barham remarks::

The World, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Romney Marsh.’

Rudyard Kipling  echoes this in the character of Tom Shoesmith in The Dymchurch Flit from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill): 

Won’erful odd-gates place — Romney Marsh . . . I’ve heard say the world’s divided like into Europe, Asahy, Afriky, Ameriky,, Australy, an’ Romney Marsh.  Tom goes on to say: The Marsh is justabout riddled with diks an’sluices, an’tide -gates an’water-lets.  You can hear ‘em bubblin’ and grummelin’when the tide works in ‘em, an’ then you hear the sea rangin’ left and right-handed all up along the Wall.  You’ve seen how flat she is — the Marsh?  You’d think nothin’easier than to walk eend-on acrost her?  Ah, but the diks an’the water-lets;, they twists the roads about as revelly as witch-yarn on the spindles. So ye get all turned round in broad daylight.

Ford Madox Hueffner (later known as  Ford Madox Ford) thought Romney Marsh

 an infectious and holding neighbourhood. Once you go there you are apt to stay.  

He refers to inducements to come to Rye and Winchelsea:

An historic patina covers their buildings more deeply than any others, in England at least.  Indeed, I know of no place save for Paris, where memories seem to think on every stone.  The climate, too, is very mild.  There is practically no day  throughout the year on which a proper man cannot eat his meals under a south wall out of doors.

H.G. Wells, in Kipps, has the eponymous character remember joys of the Marsh:

. . . glorious days of ‘mucking about’,along the beach, the siege of unresisting Martello towers, the incessant interest of the mystery and motion of windmills, the windy excursions with boarded feet over the yielding shingle to Dungeness lighthouse . . . wanderings in the hedgeless, reedy marsh, long excursions reaching even to Hythe, where the machine guns of the Empire are forever whirring and tapping, and old Rye and Winchelsea perched like dream-cities on their little hills.  The sky in these memories was the blazing hemisphere of the marsh heaven in summer, or its wintry tumult of sky and sea, and there were wrecks, real wrecks, in it (near Dymchurch pitched high and blackened and rotting were were ribs of a fishing smack, flung aside like an empty basket when the sea had devoured its crew) and there was bathing all naked in the sea, bathing to one’s armpits, and even trying to swim in the warm sea=water (spite  aunt’s prohibition) and (with her indulgence) the rare eating of dinner from a paper parcel miles away from home.

Coventry Patmore, who disliked mountains, claimed that year after year he looked upon the Marsh from the walls of Rye ‘always with new delight’,  discovering there 

. . . the peaceful  and touching charms which render the plain more than a rival to the mountain in the eyes of all who find in human associations, more or less remote, the ground of the truest beauty in landscape.

He declared it ‘very Dutch in its peculiar beautires’ but  that it surpasses

in truly artistic beauty, the scenery alike of Holland, Switzerland. . . . The plain, in each case [of the Sussex Marshes], is great enough to expand and satisfy the eye.  It is, in each case, set off by the immediate neighbourhood of hills not less than eight hundred feet high – - an altitude which, in our atmosphere, is quite as good as three thousand in Italy or the South of France

and he praised

the sight of masts and sails at more or less remote distances, impressing us with the presence of the sea even more powerfully than the actual sight of it would.

And J.M.W. Turner, foremost British landscape painter, having been introduced to Rye, Winchelsea, and the Camber, Pett and Brede Levels said, according to Patmore::

that he had seen there, in our one day’s visit, more subjects for pictures than he had ever met with in any other part of Europe in a week.

For more quotations about Rye from Patmore and other visitors, click here.

Topographical

Van Dyck drew it from the South
From the river, seeing a plateau,
The great church riding eastward
In its tideless ocean of faith.

From the East, coming over the marsh
Or from the golf-club it’s a pyramid
With the church tower at the top.
A black silhouette in the twilight.

Turner halfway from Winchelsea,
From the West, romantically stationed
Upon some dangerous sea-stropped
Causeway of his imagination.

Drew Camber Castle flaoted away
Almost hull-down to the east
And Rye in a spotlight,  half Italian,
And half as it were a volcano.

With smoke and fire belching
From the church, it is always the church
That crowns the unique town.

From the North you come down hill
From the mainland then climb again,
Up this rocky hillock like a moraine heap:
Rye is an island, St Mary’s Mount.

Is also a castle, should have a drawbridge,
There are aeons of life in this pyramid,
Fire in this volcano,–
Is also like a beautifully jewelled broach
Worn at South England’s throat,
As land gives way to channel:
The Tillingham mates with the Brede
And both mix in the Rother
The sweet and the salt waters,
Below Watchbell Street and under
The eyes of the Ypres Tower,
Last dry land or first island,
A place between past and future,
A historic present to speak of
In a language of salty silence
That is sweet on every tongue.

Rye

It seems solid enough as you come through the Landgate
And the streets climb up to the church
That, like a stranded ark,
       Straddles the hilltop.

But Time is different here,
The streets are full of beggars
You cannot see, who speak
The tongues of centuries
     To the deat tourists.

‘We have always been perverse
And unprofessional beggars,
Fort we want to give, not take,
To offer you this town’s
     Particular nature.

‘It is not what you see
As you trip on the cobbles
And say the houses are quaint,
Nor was it ever like that,
     It is our presence.’

The town keeps whispering
Its history–fishermen, merchants–
Lifetimes that have been built
From unimportant scraps
     To construct a clement

Enclave and sanctuary,
Once you have understood this,
You will feel Rye within,
And be disposed to come back,
     If you ever leave it.

Years of Depression

1698
Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary 

(Original spelling and punctuation)

{Tunbridge] Wells to Rye 31 miles . . . I passed much through little Lanes and villages and near Rye I went thro’ a Common full of Bushes and ffurze and heath; its a pretty steep hill I ascended which is called beggars hill and being Bartholomew tide here was a faire which was Rightly Called beggarhill faire being the saddest faire I ever saw–ragged tatter’d Booths and people–but the musick and danceing Could not be omitted.  This hill on the top gave the view of ye sea and a great tract of Land on Each side.  That is Choak’d ip witjh samd which formerly was a good haven for shipps; the sea does still Come up to Rhye town as yet but its shallow, and ye Castle which stands a Little distance–a mile–is also left of the sea at least  4 miles.  This is Winchelsea Castle . . . .

 Rhye town is not very bigg–a little Market place–this is famous for fish; from hence all the good turbutt, pearle and Dorea and al sort of sea ffish Comes to supply ye  [Tunbridge Wells] and London, but I could get little.  Ye faire took up ye fishermen. Indeed hefre I dranke Right french white wine and Exceeding good . . . .

1724
Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through England and Wales

. . . Rye would flourish again, if her harbour, which was once able to receive the royal navy, could be restored, 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 doubful, whether it will be effectual to the main end or not, 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 hargour, whre they could to oldly in, and ride safe in all weathers, and then go to sea again at pleasure.

2:  19th Century

c1816
G.A. Cooke, Topographical and statistical Description ohe County of  Sussex

[How much of this description is still true today?   What facts have changed?]

The harbour, which is on the south-east side of the town, is at present in an indifferent state; notwithstanding it admits vessels of two hundred tons burthen, which come quite up to the town key on the north side of the town one  mile and a half from the entrance.  The town, at spring high tides, is encompassed about two thirds round with water. 

The river Rother, which washes it on the east side, before its influx into the sea, and the branch of the tides called Tillingham water, on the north-west side form together a sort of peninsula which was formerly a ferry, but which now has a bridge.

The makerel and herrings taken in the bay in their seasons are reckoned to be the finest of their kind.  All the rest of the year they troll for soles, plaice, and other flat fish, which are also excellent in their season, and which are frequently carrried up by the rippiers  to the London markets, which they perform in three stages. 

Rye is well supplied with water by pipes from two hills on the land side. 

The principal business is in hops, wool, timber, kettles,  cannon chimneybacks, etc which are cast at the iron works at Bakely, four miles to the north-west, and at Breed,  miles the south-west of the town

Revival

1850
H. P. Clark, Rye printer, in the first Guide to Rye

The road is paved with boulders . . . wth the hard ends upwards.  Visitors are respectfully cautioned to ieep their eyes open, to prevent falling or stumbling.  There are a great number of cellar doors opening in the pavement, many of which are left open and unguarded . . . Equestrians . . . will find it quite necessary to drive steady, keep in the middle, look both sides at once, and not squint!

The warning about boulders with hard end upwards elicited this reminder from William Holloway:

. . . But as Dr Johnson said, A pebble that paves the street is in itself more useful than the diamond upon a lady’s finger:

Then hobble on and never mind,
  For what’s the use of talking
Hurt or not hurt, why, only think,
  On Diamonds you are walking.

1872
Wilson, Imperial Gazeteer of England and Wales

[Rye] is a head port. a seat of petty sessions and county courts, and a polling-place, publishes two weekly newspapers, has undergone some revival of prosperity after a long period of decline . . . Presents an antiquated appearance, with narrow winding, grass-grown streets, and has a head post office, a railway station with telegraph, two banking offices, three chief inns, a town hall and market house, a jail and police station, a custom house, a remaining gate of its ancient walls, three bridges, a railway swing bridge, a church, four dissenting chapels, remains of ancient Carmelite and Augustinian friaries, an endowed grammar school with £100 a year, a national school, alms-houses., and a workhouse.

A corn and cattle market is held every alternate Wednesday and a fair on 10 Aug.  A great trade exists in wool, corn, hops, timber and oak bark; shipbuilding is carried on; works for making concrete blocks are at the harbour; and kettle nets,  for catching mackerel and other fish, are on the shore.  The harbour has been much improved and it receives vessels [from British and foreign ports] of 100 tons . . . ..

1882
Black’s Guide to Kent

A picturesque town in Rye, with a curious mouldiness of antiquity about it, with streets where horses’  hooves are not frequent enough to keep down the fast-climbling grass . . . with memories of a busy past in every stone.

1887
Coventry Padmore,  Hastings, Lewes, Rye and the Sussex Marshes

In the singularly old-world character of the streets, and in the truly superb and always different views at the end of most of them, consist the attractions of the town . . .  The precipitous streets are paved with round flints, scarely any of the houses are less than a hundred years old, and many of them at least four hundred as the moulding of cornices, barge boards, door posts, and window frames testify.

There is an unpublished character about everything in Rye.  The . . . beautiful remains of ancient architecture in Mermaid and West Streets look as if they silently apologise for surviving in the presence of Georgian taverns and doctors’ and lawyers’ mansions in the High Street.

Rye is a bit of old world living pleasantly on, in ignorance of the new–even the butchers and innkeepers going on unaware of their right to cent per cent profits.

1898
Rye Conservation: No gas or electricity please!

This citizen seems to regret that gas was ever permitted to light Rye streets.  As for any further ‘improvements for the town . . .

I would] deplore anything that would in any way modernise it.  Incandescent gas…. sadly spoils the evening effects that are so picturesque here. Let us have our cobbled streets, however unpleasant they may be to our boots.  Let us still allow grass to grow in a few of our streets, but above all, do not let us have electric light.’
Rye resident Charles Foulkes, December 1898

c 1900
Henry James, who made his home at Lamb House from 1897

At favoured seasons there appear within the precincts sundry slouch-hatted gentlemen who study Rye’s charms through a small telescope formed by their finger and thumb, leading a train of English and American lady pupils.  There are ancient doorsteps, which are used for the convenience of their views, and where the fond proprietor, going and coming,  has to pick his way among their paraphernalia or to take flying leaps over industry and genius.

.