The weather-vane on the tower, fashioned to represent a horse's head, alludes to this story, and gives the local name of the "Horse Church." [Illustration: THE HORSE-VANE, MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY.] The siege of Shurland Castle belongs more to fiction than to history, and it is only in Tom Ingoldsby's pages that you can read how Guy Pearson, one of the defenders, "had got a black eye from a brickbat." Most of the people--John de Northwode, William of Hever, and Roger of Leybourne--who led the assault are real persons, and, indeed, the brasses of Sir John de Northwode and his wife, Joan of Badlesmere, are there, in the church of Minster, to this day. Haines, the author of the first, and still the standard, work on _Monumental Brasses_, says the knight's effigy "has undergone a peculiar Procrustean process, several inches having been removed from the centre of the figure to make it equal in length to that of his wife. The legs have been restored and crossed at the ankles, an attitude apparently not contemplated by the original designer. From the style of engraving, these alterations seem to have been made at the close of the fifteenth century." Since Haines wrote, the brass of the knightly sheriff has been again restored, a piece of metal having been inserted, with the effect of lengthening the figure considerably. The effect of a modern slip of brass let into this fifteenth-century engraving is not a little incongruous. The Baron who put John de Northwode and his _posse comitatus_ to flight left a daughter, his sole heiress. If one could believe Ingoldsby (which one cannot do) it would be sufficient to read that "Margaret Shurland in due course became Margaret Ingoldsby; her portrait still hangs in the gallery at Tappington. Her features are handsome but shrewish; but we never could learn that she actually kicked her husband." Diligent delving into old records proves, however, that Margaret Shurland married one William Cheyney; and the altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of good Queen Bess, stands in Minster church even now. That noble monument details how important a personage he was. Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle, Treasurer of the Household to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and Privy Councillor in the succeeding reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, he was obviously a man of affairs. Here the recumbent effigy of him lies, a surrounding galaxy of sixteen shields of arms setting forth the noble alliances of his house. He was a man of great wealth--probably he helped himself liberally out of the Treasury--and, razing Shurland Castle to the ground and leaving nothing to tell of the old stronghold, built in its stead the mansion now standing, but fallen from its old estate and become a farmhouse.