Kent is the realm’s gate. Every road to the southern water runs through it, the crossing is made from its coast, and the capital is seventy-one miles from Dover and fifty-six from Canterbury. What that means in practice is a packet leaving before dawn and lying at a Lyonnais quay by the evening bell, which is true perhaps two hundred days in the year and is the whole advertisement of the service. It also means that a man who crosses is out of the realm’s law for the length of the passage and does not fully re-enter it on the Near Coast. And it means that the customs officers of this port hold, between them and in no document, the realm’s only honest ordering of which southern seals may be believed.
Kent at a Glance
20 min read
Book V, chapter 4The Port, the Quays, and the Port-Reeve
25 min read
Book V, chapter 8The Water, and What a Crossing Costs
19 min read
Book V, chapter 10The Coast, the Caves, and the Rocks Offshore
18 min read
Book V, chapter 15The Drowned Lands, and the Edge That Holds Them Off
12 min read
Book V, chapter 19The See That Lost the Ordering
16 min read
Book V, chapter 22What Kent Feeds, and to Whom
15 min read
Book V, chapter 24The Marsh, the Levels, and the Sheep
16 min read
Book V, chapter 25Maidstone, the Guildhall, and the Mayor
18 min read
Book V, chapter 26The Pikes of Wye, and a House on Its Own Ground
20 min read
Book V, chapter 29Sandwich, Romney, and the Ports That Silted
17 min read
Book V, chapter 30Wye, Godmersham, and the Chalk
17 min read