Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 5/The Cinque Ports and the Bredenstone at Dover
THE CINQUE PORTS AND THE BREDENSTONE AT DOVER.
Our ever youthful Premier has recently given éclat to an ancient ceremony which has been revived for the nonce out of the records of one of our most ancient and loyal institutions,—we allude to his inauguration as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of the Castle of Dover.
At the grand banquet given on that occasion in the “Maison Dieu,” Lord Palmerston expressed his conviction that “nothing tends to distinguish a man more than a respect for traditions, where the latter are harmless in their character, and do not interfere with social progress.” We may therefore be pardoned for carrying back our readers over a short retrospect of the past history of the Cinque Ports and the high dignity of their Lord Warden.
The Cinque Ports were originally five only, as their name implies,—Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney, in Kent, and Hastings, in Sussex; and it is curious to note that when at a later period the two “ancient towns” of Winchilsea and Rye were added to their number, no change was made in their collective designation—they were the “Cinque Ports” still.
Attempts have been made by enthusiastic antiquaries to carry back the foundation of the Cinque Ports to Anglo Saxon times; but although it is probably true, as stated by Jeake,[1] that “the five ports were enfranchised in the time of Edward the Confessor” (for the fact stands recited in the first charter which they received from Edward I.), yet the organisation of the Cinque Ports as a body politic, such as it has existed during the last 800 years, is plainly to be traced to the policy of William the Conqueror in securing for England easy and constant communication with the continent, together with immunity from foreign attack; and the permanence of the Norman name of the seven towns collectively seems to warrant the same inference, in spite of the fact that all and each of the towns included under the collective name enjoyed some special privileges even before the Conquest.
It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader how, after the battle of Hastings, the southern and eastern coasts of Kent formed that portion of his newly acquired kingdom which William was most anxious to secure; how he made it his first object to reduce that tract of seaboard even before he marched on London; or how he exacted from Harold, even during the lifetime of Edward, a solemn pledge that he would surrender into his hands the castle and keep of Dover,—no doubt as being the centre of all military action in respect of the opposite coasts.
“To enable his government to wield the resources of this maritime district with the greater vigour and promptitude,” says a writer on the Cinque Ports, “William severed it wholly from the civil and military administration of the counties of Kent and Sussex, erecting it into a kind of palatine jurisdiction under a gardien or warden, who had the seat of his administration at the castle of Dover, and exercised over the whole district the combined civil, military, and naval authority; thus uniting in his own hands all the various functions which (to use the terms most intelligible to modern readers) we may describe as those of a Sheriff of a County at large, a Custos Rotulorum, a Lord- lieutenant, and an Admiral of the Coast.”
It is well known that from the conquest to the reign of Henry VIII. the country at large had no navy, the maritime defence of the kingdom being all along entrusted to the “good men and true” of the Cinque Ports, who were bound jointly to fit out, at their own cost, such armaments as were wanted from time to time. Such being the case (the army and navy not being as yet separate services), the Warden of the Cinque Ports held really, to some extent, the modern post of Minister or Secretary at War; and formed part of the executive of the nation; and, accordingly, it is still a prescriptive rule that no one but a privy councillor is capable of being nominated to that office. In the reign of Edward I. the Ports, we find, were ordered to supply jointly a fleet of fifty-seven sail, fully equipped for fifteen days’ service; but in the reign of Edward III. the respective quota was assigned to each port and its members, or tributary towns; and English history teems with similar examples. The gradual rise of the British navy and its permanent organisation have, of course, rendered obsolete the naval services of the ancient palatinate of the Cinque Ports, and indeed, even if such had not been the case, the same result would have followed from the great physical changes which have come over the ports and harbours by the change of the coast line; even “New” Romney and Sandwich—the latter once well known to history as the “port of London”—being now both separated from the sea by a mile or two of alluvial deposit, to say nothing of Winchilsea, which is now remarkable for little but its ecclesiastical antiquities.
Another proof of the Norman origin of the Cinque Ports is to be found in the use of the terms “Jurats” and “Barons,” in lieu of the analogous Saxon names of “Aldermen” and “freemen,” so familiar to English ears, and so redolent of English liberties. In former days, under the Norman and Plantagenet kings, and indeed to a much later date, the civil and municipal rulers of the Ports used to meet and transact their business in a Parliament of their own, the framework of which still remains in the “Brotherhood” and “Guestling,” which is convened from time to time for purposes of internal regulation. It was assembled during the present century in 1811, and again in 1828, and more recently on two occasions, and according to present arrangement it is ordered to be convened once, at least, in every seven years. When the Brotherhood is convened, the barons and combarons still meet in the parish church at New Romney to elect a speaker with the ancient solemnities, which are celebrated with a scrupulous adherence to ancient precedent, that, pleasing as it may be to the lover of old associations, can scarcely fail to raise a smile on the lips of those who care as little as most men in the middle of the nineteenth century care for shadows whose substance has departed. It is remarkable that to the present day the members returned to parliament by the boroughs of Hastings, Dover, Hythe, and Sandwich, are still termed “Barons” of the Cinque Ports, and that they still claim to exercise, in virtue of the original grant, the honorary office of holders of the canopy over the head of the sovereign at every successive coronation. Their claim as of right to dine, as they dined in olden days, on the right hand of the sovereign at the dinner in Westminster Hall was most ruthlessly and cruelly ignored at the coronation of George IV., when the barons, to maintain and assert their right, refused to give place, or withdraw, and stood (we are told), all the time till the banquet was over, for which act, no doubt, they were subsequently rewarded by the thanks of their grateful combarons, of whose privileges we may literally term them the upright representatives.
The jurisdiction of the Cinque Ports, which now extends from Seaford in Sussex to Birchington near Margate, originally embraced a large portion of the Essex coast, and also employed a deputy or bailiff at Great Yarmouth; but they have lately been shorn of these outlying portions of their jurisdiction. The Ports, we should add (except Hythe and Winchilsea), had each several detached “members” assigned to them, as tributaries—not unlike the συντελεῖς πόλεις of early Greek antiquity. Thus, to Hastings were attached Pevensey, Seaford, and part of Bexhill and St. Leonards, together with Beaksbourne near Canterbury, and Granch near Rochester; to Rye was tacked on Tenterden; to Romney, Denge Marsh, Lydd, and Orlestone; to Dover, the towns of Folkestone, Faversham, and Margate, and the parishes of St. Peter, Birchington, and Ringwold; to Sandwich, the towns of Fordwich, Deal, and Ramsgate, and the villages of Walmer, Sarr, and Brightlingsea: but some of the most distant “members” were pruned off some fifty years ago, on account of the many practical difficulties which arose in the administration of justice, and other inconveniences. It is by the several surviving “members” of these Ports that the bailiffs and jurats are sent to the court of the Guestling abovementioned, the court of the Brotherhood being restricted to the mayors of the Five Ports and two “ancient towns,” together with a certain number of jurats, thus forming a sort of Upper House.
As may naturally be expected, the list of the Lords Warden of the Cinque Ports includes several names well known in history, including more than one member of the royal family. Since the office was held by James, Duke of York, afterwards James II. (who, by the way, was married at Dover Castle to Mary of Modena), it has been held by Lord Sydney, Prince George of Denmark, the Earl of Dorset, the Duke of Ormonde, Sydney Earl of Leicester, D’Arcy Earl of Holdernesse, Lord North, William Pitt, the Earl of Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington, and the Marquis of Dalhousie.
It does not appear from the existing records that any of the Lords Warden have been formally installed with a public solemnity since the Duke of Dorset, who was thus inaugurated, in 1765, at the “Bredenstone.” Even of this installation there is no authentic record in the public documents of the authorities of the Cinque Ports; and we understand that for the entire programme of the ceremonies performed at the admission of Lord Palmerston, recourse was had to an old newspaper of the day which had recorded the affair with the minuteness of a reporter of our own time. Even “Sylvanus Urban” has placed upon record no outline of the proceedings among his Domestic Occurrences in the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” As our readers are already familiar with the procession and its accompanying solemnities, we will only ask them to walk leisurely up the western heights of Dover to nearly the top of the “Drop Redoubt,” where they will see worked into the wall of the newly-constructed barracks part of the ancient “Bredenstone,” of which they have heard so much of late.
This “Bredenstone,” or “Kissingstone”—or “Devil’s Drop,” as it is vulgarly styled by tradition among the inhabitants of Dover—was certainly standing on the western heights in the middle of last century, as it is not only mentioned in his “History of Dover Castle” by Darell, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth (the original of which is in the Herald’s College in Doctors’ Commons), but a cut of it, as it appeared in 1760, is to be seen in the edition of Darell published at that date. As to the name, the story is, that the good people of Dover thought it was too big a mass to have been made by the hands of man, and therefore somewhat hastily concluded that it must have been the work of the Prince of Darkness.
The masonry of which it is composed is of hard reddish concrete, flint, Kentish rag, and Roman fluted tiles; it was laid upon a platform of flintwork of the same date, and, to judge from its site and from other points, it must have formed the lower portion of a second Roman Pharos, or lighthouse, corresponding to the well-known Pharos still standing within the walls of the castle on the opposite hill, which is nearly coeval with the Christian era. Such, at all events, is the opinion of a well-known local antiquary, Mr. Knocker, the present worthy town-clerk of Dover, who tells us, in a lecture which he delivered some three years ago, that there is a tradition that a third Pharos of a similar shape and material once stood on the heights above Boulogne. At all events, it is an authenticated fact that this Bredenstone for many centuries was the spot at which the Lords Wardens were installed into their office—the last instance of its use on record, we believe, being just ninety-six years ago. In the year 1808, when the present Drop redoubt was formed, the general in command of the engineers, being more of a soldier than a scholar, and there probably being at hand no local antiquary to rescue it from destruction, and the military authorities, unable to pick it to pieces with axes, tumbled it over on the ground and buried it in situ, where it was found a few weeks since. It now forms a portion of the barrack wall, and we hope that ere long a brass plate will be let into the solid masonry, to tell of its past history and of its present and future use—for we suppose that even Lords Warden have no patent of immortality; and, though we trust that it may be a distant day, yet the day must come in due course when the Bredenstone will witness a repetition of the solemnity of the 28th of August, 1861.
- ↑ “Magna et Antiqua Charta Quinque Portuum.” Folio edition. 1728. With a comment by Mr. Jeake, long an inhabitant of one of the ports in question.