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Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury

<h2>CHAPTER X HOLLINGBOURNE TO LENHAM</h2> THE village of Hollingbourne lies at the foot of the hill, and an old inn at the corner of the Pilgrims’ Road, now called the King’s Head, was formerly known by the name of the Pilgrims’ Rest. The history of Hollingbourne is full of interest. The manor was granted to the church at Canterbury, “for the support of the monks,” by young Athelstan, the son of Æthelred II., in the year 980, and was retained by the monastery when Lanfranc divided the lands belonging to Christ Church between the priory and the see. It is described in Domesday as Terra Monachorum Archiepi, the land of the monk and the Archbishop; in later records as Manorium Monachorum et de cibo eorum, a manor of the monks and for their food. The Priors of Christ Church held{154} their courts here, and the convent records tell us that Prior William Sellyng greatly improved the Priory rooms at Hollingbourne. Their residence probably occupied the site of the present manor-house. This handsome red-brick building, rich in gables and mullions, in oak panelling and secret hiding-places, was built in Queen Elizabeth’s reign by the great Kentish family of the Culpepers, who at that time owned most of the parish. More than one fragment of the earlier house, encased in the Elizabethan building, has been brought to light, and a pointed stone archway of the thirteenth century, and an old fireplace with herring-bone brickwork, have lately been discovered. Many are the interesting traditions which belong to this delightful old manor-house. The yews in the garden are said to have been planted by Queen Elizabeth on one of her royal progresses through Kent, when she stayed at Leeds Castle, and was the guest of Sir Henry Wotton at Boughton Malherbe. According to another very old local tradition, Katherine Howard, whose mother was a Culpeper, spent some years here as a girl, and the ghost of that unhappy{155} queen is said to haunt one of the upper chambers of the house. Another room, called the Needle-Room, was occupied during the Commonwealth by the daughters of that faithful loyalist, John Lord Culpeper, Frances, Judith, and Philippa, who employed the weary years of their father’s exile in embroidering a gorgeous altar-cloth and hangings, which they presented to the parish church on the happy day when the king came back to enjoy his own again. The tapestries, worked by the same deft fingers, which once adorned the chambers of the manor-house, are gone, and the hangings of the reading-desk in the church have been cut up into a frontal, but the altar-cloth remains absolutely intact, and is one of the finest pieces of embroidery of the kind in England. Both design and colouring are of the highest beauty. On a ground of violet velvet, bordered with a frieze of cherub heads, we see the twelve mystic fruits of the Tree of Life—the grape, orange, cherry, apple, plum, pear, mulberry, acorn, peach, medlar, quince, and pomegranate. The richest hues of rose and green are delicately blended together, and their effect{157} is heightened by the gold thread in which the shading is worked. The lapse of two centuries and a half has not dimmed the brightness of their colours, which are as fresh as if the work had been finished yesterday. A needle which had been left in a corner of the altar-cloth all those long years ago was still to be seen sticking in the velvet early in the last century, but has now disappeared. <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_155_sml.png" width-obs="409" height-obs="285" alt="HOLLINGBOURNE HOUSE." title="HOLLINGBOURNE HOUSE." /> HOLLINGBOURNE HOUSE. This goodly manor-house was only one of several seats belonging to the Culpepers in this neighbourhood. They had a mansion at Greenway Court, which was burnt down in the last century, and another of imposing dimensions where Grove Court now stands. In the seventeenth century the Lords Culpeper also owned Leeds Castle, that noble moated house, a mile to the south, which was once a royal park, and is still one of the finest places in Kent. But the second Lord Culpeper died without a male heir in 1688, and this famous house passed by marriage into the Fairfax family. The Hollingbourne branch of the Culpepers died out in the course of the last century, and at the present time no member{158} of this illustrious family is known to exist in England, although persons bearing this ancient name are still to be found in America. The church at Hollingbourne contains a whole series of Culpeper monuments. The most remarkable is the white marble altar-tomb, which bears the recumbent effigy of Elizabeth Lady Culpeper, who died in 1638, and is described in the inscription on her monument as Optima Fœmina, Optima Conjux, et Optima Mater. This lady was the heiress of the Cheney family, whose arms, the ox’s hide and horns, appear on the shield at the foot of the tomb, and are repeated in the stained glass of the chapel window. Tradition says that Sir John Cheney had his helmet struck off, when he fought by the victor’s side on Bosworth Field, and fixed a bull’s horns on his head in its place. Afterwards Henry VII. gave him this crest, when he made him a Baron and a Knight of the Garter, in reward for his valour on that hard-fought field. A monument on the north wall of the chancel records the memory of John Lord Culpeper, who was successively Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls, and Privy Councillor to{159} Charles I. and Charles II. “For equal fidelity to the king and kingdome,” says the epitaph on his tomb, “he was most exemplary.” He followed the last-named king into exile and remained there until the Restoration, when “with him he returned tryumphant into England on the 29th of May, 1660,” only to die six weeks afterwards, “to the irreparable losse of his family.” Another descendant of the Culpepers is buried under the altar in this church, Dame Grace Gethin, a great grand-daughter of Sir Thomas Culpeper, and wife of Sir Richard Gethin, of Gethinge Grott, in Ireland, whose learning and virtues were so renowned that monuments were erected in her honour both at Bath and in Westminster Abbey. This youthful prodigy, who died at the age of twenty-one, is here represented kneeling between two angels, and holding in her hand the commonplace book which she filled with extracts from her favourite authors, and which was afterwards published under the title of “Reliquiæ Gethinianæ.” Her piety was as great as her personal charms, and the inscription on her monument records how, “being adorned with all the Graces and{160} Perfections of mind and body, crowned them all with exemplary Patience and Humility, and having the day before her death most devoutly received the Holy Communion, which she said she would not have omitted for Ten Thousand Worlds, she was vouchsafed in a miraculous manner an immediate prospect of her future Blisse, for the space of two hours, to the astonishment of all about her, and being, like St. Paul, in an unexpressible Transport of joy, thereby fully evincing her foresight of the Heavenly Glory, in unconceivable Raptures triumphing over Death, and continuing sensible to the last, she resigned her pious soul to God, and victoriously entered into rest, Oct. 11th, anno ætatis 21, D’ni: 1697. Her dear and affectionate Mother, whom God in mercy supported by seeing her glorious end, erected this monument, she being her last surviving issue.” Soon after leaving Hollingbourne, the Pilgrims’ Way enters the grounds of Stede Hill, and passes through the beech-woods that spread down the grassy slopes to the village and church of Harrietsham—Heriard’s Home in Domesday—in the{161} valley below. An altar-tomb, to the memory of Sir William Stede, who died in 1574, and several other monuments to members of the same family, may be seen in the south chapel of the church, a fine building of Early English and Perpendicular work, with a good rood-screen, standing in an open space at the foot of the Stede Hill grounds. The rectory of Harrietsham was formerly attached to the neighbouring Priory of Leeds, but was granted by Henry VI. to Archbishop Chichele’s newly founded College of All Souls, Oxford, which still retains the patronage of this living. The manor was one of many in this neighbourhood given to Odo of Bayeux after the battle of Hastings, and afterwards formed part of the vast estates owned by Juliana de Leyborne, called the Infanta of Kent, who was married three times, but died without children, leaving her lands to become crown property. A mile farther the Pilgrims’ Way enters the town of Lenham. This parish contains both the sources of the river Len—the Aqua lena of the Romans—which flows through Harrietsham and by Leeds Castle into the Medway, and that of the{162} Stour, which runs in the opposite direction towards Canterbury. Lenham has held a charter, and enjoyed the privileges of a town from mediæval times. The bright little market-square, full of old houses with massive oak beams, and quaint corners jutting out in all directions, hardly agrees with Hasted’s description of Lenham as a dull, unfrequented place, where nothing thrives in the barren soil, and the inhabitants, when asked by travellers if this is Lenham, invariably reply, “Ah, sir, poor Lenham!” The picturesqueness of its buildings is undeniable, and its traditions are of the highest antiquity. The manor of Lenham was granted to the Abbey of St. Augustine at Canterbury by Cenulf, king of Mercia, more than a thousand years ago, and in the twelfth century the church was appropriated to the Refectory of St. Augustine; that is to say, the rectorial tithes were made to supply the monks’ dinners. Some fragments of the original Norman church still exist, but the greater part of the present structure, the arcade of bays, the fine traceried windows of the aisle, and most of the chancel, belong to the Decorated period, and were rebuilt after the great{163} fire in 1297, when not only the church, but the Abbot’s barns and farm buildings were burnt to the ground by an incendiary. So great was the sensation produced by this act of wanton mischief, that Archbishop Winchelsea himself came to Lenham to see the ravages wrought by the fire, and fulminated a severe excommunication against the perpetrators of the wicked deed. The sixteen oak stalls for the monks, and an arched stone sedilia, of the fourteenth century, which served the Abbot for his throne when he visited his Lenham estates, are still to be seen in the chancel. Here, too, is a sepulchral effigy let into the north wall in a curious sideways position, representing a priest in his robes, supposed to be that of Thomas de Apulderfelde, who lived at Lenham in the reign of Edward II., and died in 1327. Both the western tower and the north chancel, dedicated to St. Edmund, and containing tombs of successive lords of East Lenham manor, are Perpendicular in style, and belong to the fourteenth or early part of the fifteenth century. Fragments of the fourteenth-century paintings, with which the walls of the whole church were once adorned,{165} may still be distinguished in places. Among them are the figures of a bishop, probably St. Augustine, and of St. Michael weighing souls, with devils trying to turn the balance in their favour, on one side, and on the other the crowned Virgin throwing her rosary into the scale which holds the souls of the just. The church was dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin, and her image formerly occupied the niche in the timbered porch which, with the old lych-gate, are such fine specimens of fifteenth-century wood-work. The beautiful Jacobean pulpit was given by Anthony Honywood in 1622, and is charmingly carved with festoons of grapes and vine-leaves. The Honywoods also built the almshouses, with carved bargeboards and door-posts, in the street at Lenham, and an inscription in the chancel floor records the memory of that long-lived Dame, Mary Honywood, who before her death in 1620 saw no less than three hundred and sixty-seven of her descendants! <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_163_sml.png" width-obs="430" height-obs="272" alt="MARKET-PLACE, LENHAM." title="MARKET-PLACE, LENHAM." /> MARKET-PLACE, LENHAM. Close to the church are the great tithe barns, built after the fire in the fourteenth century by the Abbots of St. Augustine. The largest{166} measures 157 feet long by 40 feet wide, and, saving the low stone walls, is built entirely of oak from the forests of the Weald. The enormous timbers are as sound and strong to-day as they were six hundred years ago, and for solidity of material and beauty of construction, this Kentish barn deserves to rank among the grandest architectural works of the age. The monks are gone, and the proud Abbey itself has long been laid in ruins, but these buildings give us some idea of the wealth and resources of the great community who were the lords of Lenham during so many centuries. They could afford to lend a kindly ear to the prayer of the poor vicar when he humbly showed the poverty with which he had to contend, and the load of the burden that he had to bear. The Abbot, we are glad to learn, granted his request, and agreed to give him a roof over his head and to allow his two cows to feed with the monks’ own herds in the pastures at Lenham, during the months between the feast of St. Philip and St. James and Michaelmas.{167} <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_167_sml.png" width-obs="291" height-obs="217" alt="IN CHARING VILLAGE." title="IN CHARING VILLAGE." /> IN CHARING VILLAGE. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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