nor there...."

[Illustration: _The Ypres Tower, Rye._]

[Sidenote: JOHN WESLEY]

It was under the large tree of the west wall of the churchyard that in
1790 John Wesley preached his last outdoor sermon, afterwards walking
through "that poor skeleton of ancient Winchelsea," as he called it.

Rye, like Winchelsea, has had a richer history than I can cope with. She
was an important seaport from the earliest times; and among other of our
enemies who knew her value were the Danes, two hundred and fifty of
whose vessels entered the harbour in the year 893. Later the French
continually menaced her, hardly less than her sister Cinque Port, but
Rye bore so little malice that during the persecutions in France in the
sixteenth century she received hundreds of Huguenot refugees, whose
descendants still live in the town. Many monarchs have come hither,
among them Queen Elizabeth, in 1573, dubbing Rye "Rye Royal" and
Winchelsea "Little London."

[Sidenote: THE THREE JEAKES]

Rye has had at least one notable son, John Fletcher the dramatist,
associate of Francis Beaumont and perhaps of Shakespeare, and author of
"The Faithful Shepherdess." Fletcher's father was vicar of Rye. The town
also gave birth to a curious father, son, and grandson, all named Samuel
Jeake. The first, born in 1623, the author of "The Charters of the
Cinque Ports," 1728, was a lawyer, a bold Nonconformist, a preacher, an
astrologer and an alchemist, whose library contained works in fifteen
languages but no copy of Shakespeare or Milton. He left a treatise on
the Elixir of Life. The second, at the age of nineteen, was "somewhat
acquainted with the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, rhetoric, logic, poetry,
natural philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, astronomy,
astrology, geography, theology, physics, dialling, navigation,
caligraphy, stenography, drawing, heraldry and history." He also drew
horoscopes, wrote treatises on astrology and other sciences, suffered,
like his father, for his religion, and when he was twenty-nine married
Elizabeth Hartshorne, aged thirteen and a half. They had six children.
The third Samuel Jeake was famous for constructing a flying machine,
which refused to fly, and nearly killed him.

Rye also possessed an unknown poet. On a blank leaf in an old book in
the town's archives is written this poem, in the hand of Henry VIII.'s
time:--

What greater gryffe may hape
Trew lovers to anoye,
Then absente for to s