| Share page |
|
IN DENIS DUVAL'S COUNTRY. 47
openings for themselves elsewhere, so that by 1622 there were only between twenty and thirty foreigners, presumably recent arrivals, as the descendants of the older settlers would now be recognised as townspeople. When the persecution of 1680 began there was a new irruption, and in 1682 the parishoners agreed to allow the use of the church for services in French from eight to ten, and from twelve to two " as hertofore." The last record of the congregation in Rye is of the year 1728, when they received £35 2s. od. from the Royal Bounty Fund.
The home of the Duvals was in " Port St," an imaginary name for one of the Winchelsea thoroughfares. Here one evening in 1769 the Comtesse heard the story of the woman burned to death on Penenden or Pickenden Heath for the murder of her husband. The case was a very curious one. A well-to-do butcher at Hythe, in Kent, fell in love with his servant girl, who, however, refused to marry him, and to escape his importunities returned to her friends who lived in another town of the same county. Here she found a more acceptable suitor in a young smuggler named Benjamin Buss. This fellow's love was not of a very delicate order, and he |
||