Aspects of Kentish Local History

within, and did it designedly to affront him. But the King gave the fellow no other reproof than just looking out of his window and telling him that he made haste to be rich. This house either is at this time or was then inhabited by one Southouse. They were the trained bands of this place that the King was taken by, having been forced again to the shore, as he endeavoured to get to sea through this creek, which is very difficult to get clear of, without a very skilful pilot, which it seemed he had not procured.
   Out of this street we turned into a lesser one on the right, called Church Street, which, agreeably to its denomination, led us into the church, in which are many monuments of antiquity. And I am in some measure contented for my not having had time to transcribe them, by being since told by our good Rochester physician that he had got all of them, and would send copies amongst other things of that kind which he had promised to send. But there is one modern one, which I cannot help remembering out of the particular regard I have to hypocrisy and vanity joined together. On the north side within the church there is a very handsome monument fixed up in the wall, with an English inscription giving notice, in very ample terms, that there is left to the parish a considerable benefaction of 20s. a year for a sermon to be preached on such a day, and 5s. annually

for the clerk for his [p.80] attendance on that day, and 20s. to the sexton, who is enjoined, upon the penalty of forfeiting his title to this benefit, to expend two bottles of oil (one every half year) upon the iron rails of an altar monument, which is in the north side of the churchyard. This last particularity of the oil (though there were other ostentatious singularities which I do not remember) excited our curiousity to see what was further done in the churchyard, and there we saw a very grand monument of that sort, with inscriptions on all sides of the greatest humility and arrogance that one would desire to read; but the rails were the chief things to be observed, which, considering the oil which was to be bestowed on their purification, would not have surprised one with an extraordinary brightness. I mean, if its brightness and cleanliness were something singular, as indeed they were, for the oil was just slovenly poured on without any rubbing, in order for to clean the irons, that it made it ten times more nasty and dirty than it would otherwise have been by suffering the plain calamity of the weather. The person who ordered this splendid monument and the other marble one in the church was one Isles, who was a poor lad of the lower rank of this town, and had been bound to some inferior trade in it, but run away from his master to London, where he got into some way of life which