NOTES.
153
by the stream and about the church, however, attentive observers
may find irregular elevations, having no relation to present works,
and these I take to be evidence of the ancient works, Moreover,
as the fleet of ships lay in the Beamfleet, it is obvious that the Camp
must have partaken of the character of a fortified Hythe, with the
wall landward and the shore open to the fleet and the ships, an
obvious protection. That the ships lay there I had curious evidence
some years ago. An old gentleman, to whose politeness I am
indebted, told me that when the railway bridge across the fleet was
being built, the navvies came upon many ships deep in the mud,
several of which on exposure had evidently been burnt, as their
charred remains showed. Indeed, about them lay numerous
human skeletons.
This little anecdote, so interesting to me, came out in a general
talk on matters affecting the population of the place, which touched
on a terrible visitation of cholera and the loss of thirty or forty of
the navvies at once by that plague, which loss was caused, in my
informant's opinion, most probably by the men having worked
among the skeletons. He knew nothing of Hasten nor guessed the
meaning of the charred ships beyond suggesting a fight of some
kind in the last century or so. Haesten's fleet numbered not less
than 300 ships at the time, and they must have covered the foreshore
for a long distance at low water. They were doubtless crowded
together and easily fired. I cannot doubt that the remains were
part of Haesten's fleet, and their depth in the mud is in accord with
the slight submergence which has happened since. I do not
hesitate to place the Camp at Beamfleet on the shore where the
village and church stands—the latter first raised, perhaps, after the
manner of those days, on the site of the great victory.
Marten at Hazeleigh.—I know how unsatisfactory a record of a rare animal
is when it has not actually been obtained, but as I have little hopes just now of
succeeding in capturing the Marten that I have been in search of for the last
month, I put the facts before our members to be taken for what they are worth.
One day in the winter of 1884, my bailiff, Abraham Carter, told me they had
chased a Marten-cat out of my Jenkyns stackyard up the lane into the wood ; the
men hunted it for an hour and frequently struck at it with forks and sticks. Some
of the men called it a fox cub, but Carter knew what a Marten-cat was, as he
assisted at the capture of one some twenty-five years previously at Braxted Park,
and participated in the five shillings that Sir Charles Du Cane's keeper paid for
this royal vermin. It was unmistakably described to me as being about as large