[Illustration: FORDWICH TOWN HALL.] The dungeons beneath the town hall are provided with only a narrow barred opening, shuttered from the outside and admitting the least possible rays of light. On their walls may yet be seen the many scrawls of old-time prisoners. In one cell were secured those who had offended against the municipal authority of Fordwich, and in the other the captives of the Monastery of St. Augustine in Canterbury were laid by the heels; for two jurisdictions, the cause of many jealousies, ruled here. In none was there more heat shown than in the sole right and privilege of fishing for trout at Fordwich, claimed by the monastery and bitterly disputed by the port. The rough, whitewashed interior of the court-room is simple but highly curious. The primitive bench and bar where prisoners were arraigned and causes heard are still here. Prosecutors had a difficult task in those days. Sometimes the court would decide that ordeal by battle was the best way of settling a dispute--a mean way, it will be acknowledged, of shirking its judicial responsibilities--and would secure seats outside to witness the fray, which suggests too engrossing a love of sport; at other times, when the court did patiently hear and adjudicate upon plaints, it left the prosecutor with the disagreeable task of executing the convicted felon himself,--both successful ways of discouraging litigation. A good deal more modern than those barbarous practices, but still of a respectable antiquity, is the ducking-stool, resting on a transverse beam of the interior roofing. It is long since this engine for punishing scolds was used; not, perhaps, altogether by reason of gentler modern methods, nor that the feminine arts of scolding and nagging are decayed, but doubtless because the punishment was not effectual, and the last state of the nagged and henpecked, after the nagger and pecker had been ducked, was worse than the first. The old clumsy wooden crane at the angle of the town hall, still overlooking the river, was the place whence the scolding wives of Fordwich, first firmly bound, were slung in the chair, swung out over the stream, and ducked, deeply overhead. Raving with fear and shrieking with fury they were ducked again and again, while their good men, standing amid the delighted crowd, miserably anticipated a worse time than ever--and, by all accounts, generally got it. [Illustration: STURRY.] Leaving Fordwich and returning to Sturry, the Canterbury road is regained. At its extremity, where one crosses the Stour, Sturry retrieves its reputation and exchanges its hard-featured street for a pretty riverside grouping, where the church, an ivy-covered ruined red-brick gateway of Sturry Court, and a plentiful background of trees make a gracious picture. It is the last picture of the kind on this route, for Canterbury is less than two miles ahead, entered past the barracks and by its least attractive streets. CHAPTER XVII THE ISLE OF SHEPPEY