[Illustration: ROMNEY MARSH: THE MARTELLO TOWERS AND MILITARY CANAL: MOONLIGHT.]
But it has a late story of its own, a tragical story of the tragic and epoch-making age of Henry the Eighth. In those last few years when it was still roofed and weather-proof it was used by the cunning priests of a declining and damnable creed for the purpose of keeping alive their almost exploded superstitions. Reformation was in the air, in things spiritual and temporal alike, and the religious houses were presently to be dissolved and to be made loose their hold upon the large proportion of English soil they had accumulated by centuries of bequests. Some sign, any sign, was required by the doomed clergy of that age by which the pretensions of their class could be bolstered up and the actions of a King bent upon reform discredited; and such a sign, the religious of Canterbury acutely believed, could be made to appear from the strange possession, demoniacal or angelic--that had suddenly befallen a peasant girl in Aldington, one Elizabeth Barton, at that time a servant in the employ of Master Thomas Cobb, bailiff to the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Cobb lived in the little house still standing at Aldington, and now known as “Cobb’s Hall,” and was startled when his maid-servant suddenly developed strange and terrifying behaviour, and began to rave on religious matters. To modern ideas the symptoms detailed in the lengthy old accounts of Elizabeth Barton’s career would seem to point to epileptic fits, followed by religious mania; but the simple folk of those times thought her inspired, and those others who were not so simple, and knew a good deal better, took excellent good care that the notion of her inspiration should be well nursed. Religious mania is generally the product of outside influences acting upon a diseased body and an ill-balanced mind; and it may be suspected, since the crisis in the affairs of the Church was then the chief topic in the mouths of all men, that Elizabeth had been influenced by the talk she heard, and by the preaching of the then rector of Aldington, Richard Masters. In her trances and somnambulistic exploits and in her ravings the ordinary people thought her possessed of evil spirits; but Richard Masters declared she had always been a devout girl, and he now professed, when called to her bedside, to have heard her say “very godly certain things concerning the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments.” This, in the view of the Church, was inspiration. Masters journeyed to London, and at Lambeth Palace acquainted the old and failing Archbishop Warham with this strange portent, and was encouraged to keep diligent account of all her utterances.