To-day, apart from the English beauty of the church, not a
work of art but of history, its chief interest lies in its monuments,
some strangely monstrous, of the Digges family--Sir Dudley Digges
bought Chilham at the beginning of the seventeenth century--the
Colebrooks, who followed the Digges in 1751 and a Fogg and a Woldman,
the latter holding Chilham until 1860. There is little to be said of
these monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste,
the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the
Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the
Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered
pattern in relief.
[Illustration: CHILHAM]
But it was not the church, beautiful though I found it on that
afternoon of spring, that made me linger in Chilham, but rather the
castle, which occupies the site of a Roman camp; and perhaps of what a
camp? It may be that it was here Caesar lay on the first night of his
resumed march after the disaster of the ships. It may be that it was
here, after all, that Quintus Laberius fell, and that here he was
buried so that the ancient earthwork known as Julaber's Grave, though
certainly far older than Caesar, was in fact used as the tomb of the
hero whose immortality Caesar insured by naming him in his
Commentaries.
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