On the 28th of April "the fleet entered the Downs, the wind blowing a gale at the time. A ship called the _Windsor_ was lost. I went to Deal to see the ships, and saw five ensigns." Small details of ablutions--rare enough they seem nowadays--bed-warming, and quaint remedies for trifling ailments sound queerly enough to us coming faintly across the gloom of two centuries, but in the midst of the chronicles of this small beer of visits paid and received, of the stomach-ache, and so on, brother John receives a writ, and we feel that we are witnesses of the process by which all this feasting {352} and revelry is completing the ruin of the ancient family that once owned broad lands and far manors all over Kent, which founded hospitals and colleges, and was closely allied to the regal Plantagenets, but whose possessions had even now shrunken to one poor mansion house of Danes Court and the few farms around it. John Fogge's father, Richard, whose pompous Latin epitaph is still in Tilmanston Church, written by his eldest son, Edward, and scoffed at in the family Bible by the degenerate John, had been true to the King's side during the civil war. His near neighbour, Sir John Boys of Betshanger, had hunted and harried the cavalier and sacked his house after the mad Kentish rising in 1648, and had frightened his favourite child to death, and for the whole of the Commonwealth period poor Richard had been plundered and well-nigh ruined. His sons Edward and John had been captured at sea by the Dutch, and Christopher had been taken prisoner by the Turks, and all three had had to be bought off with ransom. Stout old Richard Fogge therefore had left Danes Court sadly embarrassed at his death in 1680. His eldest son, Edward, died soon after, and John Fogge, the brother-in-law of our diarist, was rapidly continuing the ruin at the date of the diary. By the 30th of May Richard Bere had had enough of Danes Court, and started to Canterbury "with my brother's horse and servant, and so to Northfleet, where I visited my kinsman Childs." He mounted his horse at five o'clock in the morning and arrived at Northfleet at five in the evening, staying on the way only a short time at Canterbury to rest and drink with friend Best, at whose house he always alights when {353} he passes through the ancient city. The distance by road is a good fifty-five miles, so Richard no doubt thought he had earned his night's rest at Uncle Childs' before starting, as he did next day, by tilboat to London. The first thing he did when he arrived was to "drink with Higgs" and send for Benson to meet him at Phillips' mug-house. Benson appears to have been a humble friend or foster-brother, as Bere calls Benson's father "my father Benson," who went on all his errands, pawned his valuables, and faced his creditors. When Benson came they started out together and took a room, where they both slept, "at the sign of the 'Crown,' an inn in