THE PILGRIMS' ROAD FAVERSHAM TO CANTERBURY

From Faversham at least to the environs of Canterbury, the Pilgrim's Road seems to be unmistakable, for the Watling Street runs all the way straight as a ruled line. Yet so few are the remaining marks of the pilgrimage, so little is that great Roman and mediaeval England remembered by men or even by the fields or the road which runs between them with so changeless a purpose, that at first sight we might think it all a myth. And yet everything that is fundamental or really enduring and valuable in our lives we owe to that England which was surely one of the most glorious and strong, as well as one of the happiest, countries in Europe. Yet must the disheartened voyager take comfort, for in how many small and negligible things may we not see even to-day the very mark and standard of Rome, her sign manual after all, under the rubbish of the modern world. And if you desire an example, let me give you weathercocks.

No man can walk for day after day along this tremendous road which leads us straight as a javelin thrust back through all the lies and excuses to the truth of our origins, without noticing, and especially since he must keep an eye on the wind and the weather, the astonishing number of weathercocks there be between London and Canterbury. Upon almost every steeple, chanticleer towers shining in the sun and wildly careering in the winds of spring. You think that nothing at all, the most ordinary sight in modern England? But for the seeing eye it reveals, how much! Everyone of these weathercocks crows there on the tip top of the steeple over each town or village because of an order of the Pope. They were to be the sign of the jurisdiction of St Peter, and that by a Bull of the ninth century. How entrancing it is to remember such a thing as that in the midst of modern England.

In spite of the weathercocks and their watchfulness, however, the memories of the great pilgrimage between Faversham and Harbledown are dishearteningly few. One might surely expect to find something at Preston for instance, where, coming out of Faversham, one rejoins the Watling Street, but there is nothing at all to remind one of the great past of the Way. It is true that Preston church, dedicated in honour of St Catherine, is both ancient and beautiful, and once belonged to the monastery of Christ Church in Canterbury; but neither in its channel, which must once, before the eastern window was inserted in 1862, with its single lancets and sedilia, have been extraordinarily fine, nor in the nave, is there any memory at all of St Thomas or the Pilgrims. It is not indeed until we come to Boughton that we are reminded of them.

The older part of the parish of Boughton is South Street, where, however, nothing now remains older than the sixteenth century at the earliest. Here, however, was anciently a wayside chapel to the south of the road where now Holy Lane turns out of it. About a mile, or rather less, to the south, and clean off the road, stands on the crest of a steep, though not a high hill, the lovely village of Boughton under Blee, which, curiously enough, if we consider what is omitted, is mentioned by Chaucer,

This man who, with his yeoman, overtakes the pilgrims, is the rich canon, the alchemist who could pave with gold "all the road to Canterbury town." He is said to have already ridden three miles, but whence he had come it is impossible to say. That the pilgrims who had ridden not quite five miles had come from Ospringe might seem certain, and since they were overtaken by the Canon it is possible that he was coming from Faversham. It is, however, more important to explain, if we can, what the pilgrims were doing more than a mile off the true Way at Boughton under Blean. The church of SS. Peter and Paul is of some interest and of considerable beauty it is true, but so far as we may know there was no shrine there of sufficient importance to draw the pilgrims from the road, as at Faversham, nor one might think would they be easily diverted from the goal of their journey almost within reach. All sorts of routes have been given here, one going so far as to lead the pilgrims south and east quite off the Watling Street and across the old green road, the Pilgrims Way from Winchester, to enter Canterbury at last by the South Gate. This is absurd. No good explanation has yet been offered, but perhaps we may be near the truth if we suggest that Chaucer and his pilgrims never visited Boughton under Blean and the church of SS. Peter and Paul at all. After all we have in Chaucer's text (Frag. G. Canon's Yeoman Prologue) merely the name, and that in the old form, Boghton under Blee. All this wild woodland and forest country which lies on a great piece of high ground stretching north-east and south-west across the Way parallel with the valley of the Great Stour, between Faversham and Canterbury, hiding the one from the other, was known as the Blean. It is equally certain that the village of Dunkirk was known as Boughton until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a set of squatters took possession of the ground, then extra parochial as of a "free- port" from which no one could dislodge them. The district including the greater part of the forest was afterwards erected into a separate villa called the "villa of Dunkirk." Now Boughton Hill rises abruptly beyond the village of Dunkirk, and it may well be that this and not the tiny hamlet nearly a mile to the south of the great Way, was Chaucer's Boghton under Blee, where the Canon and his yeoman overtook the "joly companye," and rode in with them to Canterbury. And it is there at Mad Tom's corner that we first catch sight of the glorious city of St Thomas.

"Mad Tom's corner!" That name, it is needless to say I hope, has no reference to the great archbishop or the pilgrimage. Mad Tom's corner, whence we get our first view of Canterbury, is intimately connected with the gate close by, called Courtenay's gate, and refers to the exploits of a mad Cornishman who came to Kent and especially to Canterbury about 1832, and presently proclaimed himself to be the New Messiah and showed to his deluded disciples the sacred stigmata in his hands and feet. It was the custom of these unhappy people to meet in the woods of the Blean, and it is said one may still see their names cut upon the trees. Mad Tom, who, besides proclaiming himself to be the Messiah, claimed also to be the heir to the earldom of Devon, and called himself Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, the Hon. Sydney Percy, Count Moses Rothschild and Squire Thompson, to say nothing of Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem, was a madman, with a method in his madness and a certain reasonable truth behind his absurdities. His mission was, he said, to restore the land to the people, to take it away, that is to say, from the great rascal families of the sixteenth century, the Russells, Cavendishes and so forth, who had appeared like vermin to feed upon the dead body of the Church, to gorge themselves upon her lands and to lord it in her Abbeys and Priories. In the minds of these people Tom was not only mad but dangerous. Mad he certainly was, for all his dreams. Nevertheless he stood for Canterbury in the year of the Reform Bill and polled 275 votes, and in the following year he started a paper called the Lion which ran to eighteen numbers. Five years later, however, he had become such a nuisance that a warrant was safely issued against him "on the charge of enticing away the labourers of a farmer." Tom shot one of the constables who served the warrant, and on the afternoon of the last morning of May in 1838, two companies of the 45th regiment were marched out of Canterbury to take him. They found him here in Blean Wood, surrounded by his followers. He, however, was a man of action, and he promptly shot the officer in command. The soldiers then began to fire, and next minute were charging with fixed bayonets. Tom and eight of his followers were killed, and three more died a few days later.

One may well ask what can have induced the stolid Kentish folk to follow so wild a Celt as this. We shall probably find the answer in the fact that Tom was exceedingly handsome in an Italian way, having "an extraordinary resemblance to the usual Italian type of the Saviour." Also, without doubt, he voiced, though inanely, the innate resentment of the English peasant against the great sixteenth century robber families and their sycophants. These great families, now on their last legs and about to be torn in pieces by a host, financial and disgusting, without creed or nationality, seven times worse than they, laughed at Tom. They do not laugh at those who, about to compass their destruction, led by another Celt, have digged a pit into which they trample headlong, and astonishing as it might seem, to the regret of that very peasantry which has hated them for so long. At least, and let us remember this, if they were greedy and unscrupulous their vices were ours, something we could understand. They were of our blood, we took the same things for granted, had the same prejudices, and after all the same sense of justice. They with us were a part of Europe and looked to Rome as their ancestor and original. But those who are about to displace them! Alas, whence do they come who begat them, from what have they issued out? I cannot answer; but I know that with all their faults, their sacrilege, robbery, and treason, Russell, Cavendish, Cecil and Talbot are English names, and they who bear them men of our blood, European, too, and of our civilisation. But who are those that now begin to fill their places? Aliens, Orientals and worse now received without surprise into the peerage of England and the great offices of justice. And the names which recall Elizabeth and whose syllables are a part of our mother tongue, are obliterated by such jargon as these.

These are miserable thoughts to come to a man on the road to Canterbury, but they are inevitable to-day in England of my heart. The new times belong to them. Let us then return to the old time before them and here for the first time in sight of Canterbury let us remember St Thomas, the greatest of English Saints, the noblest English name in the Roman calendar.

All that wonder which greets you from Mad Tom's corner upon Boughton Hill is, rightly understood, the work of St Thomas, and we might say indeed that the great Angel Steeple was the last of his miracles for it is the last of the Gothic in England, and it rose above his tomb, while that tomb was still a shrine and a monument in the hearts of men. For "the church dedicated to St Thomas erects itself," as Erasmus says, "with such majesty towards Heaven that even from a distance it strikes religious awe into the beholders."

So I went on my way in the mid-afternoon down hill to what in my heart I knew to be Bob-up-and-down on the far side of which lies and climbs Harbledown and the hospital of St Nicholas.

This "littel town" it might seem, has disappeared, unless indeed it be Harbledown itself, which certainly bears geographically much resemblance to that descriptive name, as Erasmus describes it in his strange book. "Know then," says he, "that those who journey to London, not long after leaving Canterbury, find themselves in a road at once very hollow and narrow and besides the banks on either side are so steep and abrupt that you cannot escape; nor can you possibly make your journey in any other direction. Upon the left hand of this road is a hospital of a few old men, one of whom runs out as soon as they perceive any horseman approaching; he sprinkles his holy water and presently offers the upper part of a shoe bound with an iron hoof on which is a piece of glass resembling a precious stone. Those that kiss it give some small coin.... Gratian rode on my left hand, next to the hospital, he was covered with water; however he endured that. When the shoe was stretched out, he asked the man what he wanted. He said that it was the shoe of St Thomas. On that my friend was angered and turning to me he said, 'What, do these brutes imagine that we must kiss every good man's shoe? Why, by the same rule, they would offer his spittle to be kissed or other bodily excrements.' I pitied the old man, and by the gift of a small coin I comforted his trouble."

It is easy to see that we are there in the modern world on the very eve of the Reformation. The unmannerly Gratian was John Colet to be the Dean of St Paul's, hardly defended from the charge of heresy by old Archbishop Wareham. And like so many of his kidney he seems to have forgotten the scripture upon which, as he would have asserted, his whole philosophy and action was based,—the scripture I mean which speaks of One, "the lachet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." We shall not have the opportunity of being so proud and impatient as Dean Colet of unhappy memory, for no shoe, alas, of St Thomas or any other saint will be offered for our veneration in the Hospital of St Nicholas at Harbledown to-day. Yet not for this should we pass it by, for of all places upon the road, it best of all conserves the memory of those far away days when Chaucer came by, and half-way up the hill rested awhile and prayed, e'er from the summit he looked down upon Canterbury.

The Hospital of the Forest or Wood of Blean, dedicated in honour of St Nicholas, lies upon the southern and western side of the last hill before the western gate of the city. It was founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc, and no doubt for a time served as a hospital for Lepers, but it was soon appropriated for the use of the sick and wayfarers generally, and though nothing save the chapel remains to us from Lanfranc's day, the whole place is so full of interest that no one should pass it by.

The chapel became in time the parish church of this little place on the hillside which grew up about the hospital which itself was probably placed here on account of the spring of water known as St Thomas's or the Black Prince's well, south and west of the building. Most of the chapel is of Norman building, the western doorway for instance, the pillars and round arches on the north of the nave dating from Lanfranc's time. But the south side is later, of the thirteenth century, and the font and choir are later still, being Perpendicular fifteenth century work.

The hospital, however, as we see it, is a rebuilding of the seventeenth century, but it was fundamentally restored in the nineteenth. In the "Frater Hall," however, are some interesting remains of the old house, among them a fine collection of mazers and two bowls of maple wood, in one of which lies perhaps the very crystal which Erasmus saw, and which was set in the upper leather of the shoe of St Thomas.

Below the hospital in the orchard is the old well known as St Thomas's. Above it grows an elder, surely a relic of the days of the Pilgrimage. For the elder was known as the wayfaring tree and was sacred to pilgrims and travellers. It is not strange then, that it should cool with its shade the spring of St Thomas; it is only strange that the vandal has spared it for us to bless. But why the elder was sacred to travellers I do not know.

But doggerel never solved anything. In truth a very different story is told of the elder and on good authority too. For if we may not trust Sir John Maundeville who tells us that, "Fast by the Pool of Siloe is the elder tree on which Judas hanged himself ... when he sold and betrayed our Lord," Shakespeare says that, "Judas was hanged on an elder," and Piers Plowman records:

It is from the quietness and neglected beauty of this well of St Thomas that under the evening I turned back into the road and, climbing a little, looked down upon what was once the holiest city of fair England.

In that hour of twilight, when even the modern world is hushed and it is possible to believe in God, I looked with a long look towards that glory which had greeted so often and for so many centuries the eager gaze of my ancestors, but I could not see for my eyes like theirs were full of tears.