Sandwich

How will the men of Kent react to this? Will they be annoyed to see foreign backed invaders landing on their nice beaches? Or are they enticed by the prospect of joining them for a free piss-up? That question is answered quickly and comprehensively when a local dignitary arrives on the scene.

It's the mayor of the next town along the coast, Sandwich.

And this cat has no interest whatever in a bout of day drinking and paddling in the sea.

As the leader of a coastal town, his number one priority at any time of the day is to protect these shores from hostile ships.

As soon as they clap eyes on the invaders, he orders them to attack.

You can forget free beer and hippie love.

The mayor of Sandwich regards Warbeck as a joke, a famed duke and a painted image who's only supported by aliens and strange people.

He gives the order and his men go to work.

Picture it.

It's the spring of 1436 in Sandwich, a little port town on the Kent coast.

The town council makes two decisions.

First, they'll lay planks across the town gates so men can move from house to house to defend the streets.

And for weeks, the crown had been flooding the kingdom with writs warning of the, quote, perpetual reproach, villainy, and shame that would fall on the realm if Calais was lost.

In July, a royal messenger named John Sewall and 16 others rode out to every county in England carrying the king's letters.

And somewhere between Westminster and the beach at Sandwich, a message about defending a far-off fortress in Calais, right, in northern France, turned into a whole town piling rocks in their kitchens.

By July, rumors were running up and down the South Coast.

They were so quick.

Um, so straight away we're, we're following, you know, and the follow turns into a pursuit, and I can remember driving down a particular road, uh, between Sandwich and Deal.

So Sandwich is a little village in Kent, and Deal is obviously one of the bigger towns.

And again, he turns around and looks at us through the rear view, uh, rear, rear window, and I see him reach across, take off his seatbelt at about 90 mile an hour, and then drive off the road.

He goes off into a field.

Yeah.

This happened in the UK between Kent and De Se- uh, Canterbury and Sandwich.

You know the place called Sandwich?

Yep.

Um-

After the Earl

... which is fan-

After the Earl of Sandwich.

Yes.

So when I was a little boy, I went to the, uh, to the PGA, uh, which was down in Sandwich.

And, uh, and I- as a little boy, I got Seve's, uh, uh, Seve's autograph, and that was, uh ...

I got, uh, Seve Ballesteros, Peter Oosterhuis, and Tony Jacklin, and I came back a very happy little boy, that's for sure.

When they failed in 1345, an event which Villani tells us plunged all Florence in distress, and which was chiefly owing to Edward's unpaid debt to them of nine hundred thousand gold florins, he betook himself to the brethren of the Hanseatic Steel Yard, an association of German traders who had established themselves on the banks of the Thames in the reign of Henry III.

By way of security on the present occasion he gave the Bardi an order on the collectors of customs at Sandwich and Southampton, and directed his treasurer to pawn the royal jewels if the amount in his hands proved insufficient to pay his debt to Sir John of Hainaut.

The next care of the government was to bring about, if possible, a permanent peace with Scotland.

After some preliminary negotiations, a parliament was summoned to meet at York, for thus early in his career the young king began the system of taking the advice of his parliament on all important questions.

But in the meantime King Philip had resolved to make himself master of Guyenne before Edward could arrive to defend it, and early in February intelligence was brought to England that the French had already laid siege to certain towns in the Agenois.

Notwithstanding this, Edward issued a proclamation on the twenty-fourth of that month declaring that at the instance of the cardinals he had postponed the invasion of France till midsummer.

But with characteristic inconsistency he wrote the day after to order a levy of one thousand men from Wales to be sent to Sandwich and as many more to Portsmouth for immediate embarkation, and a fortnight later directed his admiral to arrest seventy large ships to carry them and others to Aquitaine, intending to invade from that quarter and from the north at the same time.

And now news reached him that the French had actually landed at Portsmouth and burnt it and were laying waste the country round.

When the Romans came, they could not pronounce the word Llyn, Llyn in the British way, and called it Lon, hence their word Londinium.

Presently, adventurous merchants from Gaul pushed across to Dover and sailed along the coast of Kent past Sandwich and through the open channel which then separated the island of Thanet from the mainland into the broad Thames, and sailing up with the tide, dropped anchor off the fishing villages which lay along the river and began to trade.

What did they offer? What Captain Cook offered the Polynesians: weapons, clothes, adornments.

What did they take away? Skins and slaves at first.

Perhaps the Roman building which most resembles this fort is the walled enclosure called Porchester, which stands at the head of Portsmouth Harbour.

This is rectangular in shape, and is contained by a high wall built of rubble stone and narrow bricks, with round hollow bastions at intervals.

One may also see such a stationary camp at Richborough near Sandwich, and at Pevensey in Sussex, and at Silchester near Reading, but the two latter are not rectangular.

One end of this fort was on the top of the Walbrook bank, and the other, if you look in your map, on the site of Mincing Lane.

But let's look at food.

So in the United Kingdom, we've got a village called Sandwich, which is on the Kenyan coast.

And one day, Lord Sandwich was in one of his restaurants.

He said, I'm bored with bread.

I want you to put that food into the bread.

And as a direct result, that's where the sandwich came from, right? And they called it Lord Sandwich.

Sandwich was named after him.

If you look at America, you look at the Philadelphia cheesecake, Philly cheesecake, everyone knows Philly cheesecake, right? But anyhow, how did that arrive? Well, that was a cab driver, funny enough, and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Um, but he is not a holy fool or a simpleton, and if you look at the pre-conquest sources that aren't trying to spin him, he behaves like a kind of typical, um, uh, mid-11th century warrior king.

So when there are, um, Viking, not attempts at conquest, but when there are, uh, there are Scandinavian menaces to his kingdom in its early years, in, in the early years of his reign, he is going down to Kent, uh, mustering a fleet at Sandwich, and sailing out to sea to, with his, you know, housecarls, with his, you know, retainers, um, to ward off Scandinavian attack.

So he's, you know, in many respects, just, you know, a typical figure rather than an atypical one as he's presented in later sources.

So and, and one, one follow-up with that is that, you know, you already said he was close to the Godwins.