Ancient
Town of Rye
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“But where is
the sea?” could well be the cry of someone
visiting Rye, who knows that it was one of the two Ancient Towns, added
in the 14th century to the Cinque Ports. A full two miles away is
the answer: across a flat expanse of shingle and silt which has
steadily accumulated over the past 500 or 600 years, until it fills
what was once a fine natural harbour. |
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In 1377 the French were able to sail right
up to Rye, burn to
the ground every timber building and capture its complete peal of
church bells. Seventeenth-century illustrations show water close
below its cliffs, though shallow by then. As late as 1823 the
Town Salts, once used to extract salt from the sea by evaporation, were
still sometimes under water. Today they are children’s
playgrounds. Past them the river Rother makes its gentle way to a
Channel, which is often out of sight in the mist.back to
top
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The winds and
tides, which have brought such disaster to Rye
as a port and spoilt its chance of ever becoming a seaside resort, have
been the greatest good fortune for today’s visitor. Rye has been
preserved as little more than a large village, with a population of
about 5000. At the same time it has kept that flavour of salty
realism, which saves it from being a museum - witness the row of 20-30
fishing boats, tied up on the Rother’s bank, in full view of its
fortified gateway. |
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They cast
their happy influence over the whole town. The
men who walk the streets in Aran sweaters and turned-down Wellingtons
are not all weekend yachtsmen; many are working fishermen. Shops
sell oilskins; fishmongers offer whiting and flounders, fresh from the
Channel. Down by the boats a stall, which specialises in scallops
in season, has fish even fresher. |
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The one
surviving medieval gateway, known as the Land gate, is
a good place to start to explore Rye. The sharp drop to the left
tells vividly of its seaside past. Here a sloping hillside was
the site of another defensive gateway and an Augustine friary until the
sea washed all away.back to top |
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A short walk
up into the town and you begin to realise that
Rye has had a further stroke of luck. Miraculously - no one seems
to know how, but perhaps its hilltop position helped - it has been
preserved from developers. Everywhere are complete terraces of
houses any one of which would be a landmark in a less fortunate
town. The narrowness of its cobbled alleys is even more important
in preserving Rye as a strangely wonderful survival from the
past. Here the explanation is that many a Georgian facade stands
above the original medieval foundations. |
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The Flushing Inn is typical. The
elegant dining room
covers a cellar, which predates the French destruction. It was
once used by Rye’s notorious smugglers who hauled their contraband up
the sloping cliff from the beach, which at the time lay immediately
below.
In a town of Rye’s architectural richness,
the town hall
itself, a respectable brick building with Portland stone dressings, is
overshadowed by the much earlier grammar school. Founded in 1636
by Thomas Peacock and left to the town when he died, a school until
1908 it now sells memorabilia to Rye’s swarming summer visitors, but
its facade is a fine as ever.back to top
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A hundred
yards above, at the corner of West Street, stands
the house of Mayor Lamb, much later to be Henry James’s
residence. This is now the property of the National Trust and
contains an elegant panelled room where his library is being
re-collected, but sadly the detached garden room where he worked was
entirely destroyed by a bomb in 1940. |
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James could
look directly from his front windows up yet
another cobbled alley to Rye Church. This impressively large
building dominated the town. Broad and solid, with diminutive
slate steeple, it crowns the hill from whatever direction you
look. Below it the houses cluster with the complex haphazardness
of a hill town in Tuscany. Its ancient clock is its showpiece,
with 400 year old mechanism, quarter boys which strike the quarters
(but not the hours) and 18ft. gilded pendulum swinging above the heads
of the congregation in the church below. back to top |
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Close by the
churchyard is a true curiosity; an oval 18th
century brick water cistern, no longer a functioning part of the town’s
water supply in these days of the water closet. A little beyond,
Ypres Tower (Wipers, to the natives, despite Rye’s many families
descended from Huguenot refugees), now houses the town’s museum.
How delightfully manageable are local museums, and Rye’s is a good an
example as you will find. Here are the uniforms of local
regiments, examples of Rye pottery through the ages, (it is still a
flourishing trade), and the town’s old hand operated fire engine -
proof, if any were needed - of the insecurity of life in the last
century. back
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From the museum’s elevated terrace there is
one of Rye’s
finest views. The east coast reaches away as far as the cliffs of
Dover.
The charms of Rye are so extensive and the
surrounding
villages seem almost gratuitous, but Rye will not be understood without
a visit to Rye Harbour, a little separate village which has grown up
beside the Rother halfway to the sea.
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Inland form
Rye, where the country is strangely hilly, divided
by deep valleys, the little villages of Brede and Udimore are
especially worth a visit, with their white weather board cottages each
with a church set almost in a farmyard. So too is Northiam’s
Great Dixter, a fine example of the use made local builders of the oak
forests which once covered the country. In its unspoilt valley
Bodiam Castle stands with virtually untouched towers and outer walls
surrounded by a full moat, while the Rother passes in a field
below. It was probably built to prevent an up-river invasion from
France and provides impressive evidence of the days when Rye was one of
the country’s principal ports of entry. |
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History and beauty,
quaintness and quiet is
an apt
description of old fashioned market town that is the Borough of Rye.back to top
Standing on sandstone
cliff rising from
luxurious marshland
pastures around; the houses cluster around the old church to make the
conical town
whose fame is worldwide.
Its old bouldered streets
“that harass the
feet,” its
medieval buildings, its houses and shops with their window boxes and
odd
corners with flowers make the town a place of real beauty.
The River Rother flows at
the foot of the
cliff to reach the
sea two miles away in the English Channel.
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In earlier times the port
on this part of
the coast had been
long developed and five large fortresses had been built by the Romans
in the
early fifth century, and had placed them under the charge of “The Count
of The
Saxon Shore.”
Six hundred years later,
Edward the
Confessor established
the five ports of Hastings Romney Hythe Dover and Sandwich as the
Cinque Ports
whose chief duty was guarding the narrow seas between England and the
Continent. back
to top
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To this powerful
confederation were added in
the 12th
Century “The Two Antient Towns of Winchelsea and Rye.”
It is interesting to
realise that on their
admission to the
Cinque Ports, Rye and Winchelsea were already Antient towns.
In 1287 occurred the great
storm, which
swept away Old
Winchelsea, and river Rother previously entering the sea at New Romney
now
flowed passed Rye.
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In 1289 Rye
received its Charter of
Incorporation as the
Royal Borough of Rye, which leads up to a very unusual circumstance.
The King’s
Bailiff was entitled to one macebearer and one mace: similarly, the
Mayor of
the Borough had one macebearer and one mace. On the termination of the
kings
Bailiff early in the 18th Century, the Corporation having
been
granted the Bailiwick, the Mayor of Rye became ex officio, King’s
Bailiff: and
so today the Mayor of rye is entitled to two maces, a privilege and
hour
afforded to very few other towns.
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In 1339, 1360
and 1377 Rye was sacked and in
the last burnt
to the ground by the French, although it appears from old records that
this was
becoming quite a habit with the French. It
is obvious from this that any building in the Town in
existence today
and build prior to 1377 must of necessity be stone buildings. A favourite pastime in these good old days was
stealing the church bells after burning the town and of this French,
Flemish
and English were alike guilty; and it is highly probable that the old
bells of
Rye were taken across the Channel only to be restored by the next
counter raid. |
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In 1400 we read the
Rippiers of Rye and
Winchelsea that
furnished London with fresh fish were privileged to sell their fish to
whom
they would, and the fishmongers of London prohibited to buy it to sell
again by
retail. Such was the fame of Rye Bay
fish even in those days. Plague
decimated the town in 1563 and 1569 and smallpox in 1625 and 1635.
The Huguenots sought
shelter here in 1572
after the massacre
on St. Bartholomew’s Day, and cloth making became a vast industry in
this area
as well as papermaking. Many traces of
the French language can be found in the surnames of Rye and Winchelsea
families, and in many local expressions used by the townsfolk.
In 1573 Queen Elizabeth
visited the town and
named it Rye
Royal.
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John Wesley came in 1773
and wrote in his
diary, “I found
the people willing to hear the good word at Rye but they will not part
with the
accursed thing smuggling.”
And so through the ages –
sacking and
burning, invaders and
pirates, smugglers and highwaymen, kings and Queens, statesmen and
reformers
and in more recent years, threats of invasion, bombs and incendiaries
to say
nothing of “doodle-bugs.” And yet
through it all Rye seems to stand quite imperturbable and seemingly
unconcerned
with the passage of time, for we read that in 1263 the Friars of the
Sack were
allowed “to dwell in peace and quietude . . . . in the Town of Rye,”
and we can
stand in the same street today and feel the same sense of “peace and
quietude”
and realize that nothing seems to have altered in the past 700 years.
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The peculiar appeal of Rye
is that inasmuch
as other towns
take you back to the past, Rye brings the past ages right into the
present day. back
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Towering high above the
magnificent Parish
Church of St.
Mary built circa 1120 and described as “the goodliest edifice of its
kind in
Kent or Sussex.” The clock has been
keeping time since 1561 and is reputed the oldest going clock with its
original
works in England. The pendulum of the
clock is 18ft. in length and swings within the church under the tower. The famous Quarter Boys (or at least one boy
and one girl) made of gilded oak and 4ft. 8½in. high strike the
quarter
hours. The church possesses some fine
lofty arches, some interesting windows and an altar table described as
“the
most beautiful carved table in Europe.” The
flying buttresses on the East and South side of the
Church are very
fine.
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The Landgate (The only
remaining gateway of
the original
three) faces the London Road. Once it
housed the machinery for the drawbridge over the town moat. These gateways were built about 1340 together
with the Town wall, considerable sections which still remain .back to top
The Ypres Tower built
about 1250 to protect
the town from
the French invaders, has had many uses during the centuries but today
as the
home of the Rye Museum, preserves a sense of history illustrated by
collections
of relics of the past of the ancient Town.
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The Gun Garden offers
unsurpassed views over
Romney Marsh,
Rye Bay and round to the Fire Hills of Fairlight and Dungeness.
The Mermaid Street – the
haunt of artists. It is said that if the
five most famous
streets in the whole world Mermaid Street is one. Legend
likes to tell of smugglers carrying their contraband up to
the inns and taverns that abounded in this part of the town; Kings riding up to the stately Lamb
House; reformers like Wesley and
Elizabeth Fry on their way to the chapels that remain today – all these
have
passed, but the boulders of Mermaid
Street remain unchanged, just as uneven and as torturous to walk upon
as in
those days.
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The Mermaid
Inn is perhaps the best specimen
Rye possesses
of medieval building. Believed to have
been build in 1420 it was used as a hostelry in the coaching days, it
housed
pack horses in the stables at the rear. It
was a resort of smugglers and highwaymen, for during
structural
alterations much evidence of their visits was unearthed, and booty
hidden away
was found. back
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The Byre,
Pattletons Barn, Doleham Lane, Westfield, Hastings. TN354ST 01424
882371 byre@pattletons.co.uk |
