ENGLAND of my HEART
SPRING
BY
EDWARD HUTTON
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS BY
GORDON HOME
MCMXIV
TO MY FRIEND
O.K.
INTRODUCTION
England of my heart is a great country of hill and valley, moorland
and marsh, full of woodlands, meadows, and all manner of flowers, and
everywhere set with steadings and dear homesteads, old farms and old
churches of grey stone or flint, and peopled by the kindest and
quietest people in the world. To the south, the east, and the west it
lies in the arms of its own seas, and to the north it is held too by
water, the waters, fresh and clear, of the two rivers as famous as
lovely, Thames and Severn, of which poets are most wont to sing, as
Spenser when he invokes the first:
"Sweete Themmes runne softly till I end my song";
or Dryden when he tells us of the second:
"The goodly Severn bravely sings
The noblest of her British kings,
At Caesar's landing what we were,
And of the Roman conquest here...."
Within England of my heart, in the whole breadth of her delight, there
is no industrial city such as infests, ruins, and spoils other lands,
and in this she resembles her great and dear mother Italy. Like her,
too, she is full of very famous towns scarcely to be matched for beauty
and ancientness in the rest of the world, and their names which are
like the words of a great poet, and which it is a pleasure to me to
recite, are Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury, Bath,
Wells, Exeter, and her ports, whose names are as household words, even
in Barbary, are Dover, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, and Bristol.
All these she may well boast of, for what other land can match them
quite?
But there is a certain virtue of hers of which she is perhaps unaware,
that is nevertheless among her greatest delights: I mean her infinite
variety. Thus she is a true country, not a province; indeed, she is
made up of many counties and provinces, and each is utterly different
from other, and their different genius may be caught by the attentive
in their names, which are Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset,
Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and
Berkshire. Her variety thus lies in them and their dear, and let us
hope, immortal differences and characteristics, their genius that is,
which is as various as their scenery. For England of my heart not only
differs fundamentally from every other country of the known world,
but from itself in its different parts, and that radically. Thus in
one part you have ranges of chalk-hills, such as no other land knows,
so regular, continuous, and tremendous withal, that you might think
some army of archangels--and such might well abide there--had thrown
them up as their vast and beautiful fortifications, being good Romans
and believing in the value of such things, and not as the heathen
despising them. These chalk downs are covered, as indeed becomes
things so old, with turf, the smoothest, softest, and sweetest under
the sun.
There are other hills also that catch the breath, and these be those
of the west. They all bear the beautiful names of home, as Mendip,
Quantock, Brendon, and Cotswold. And as there are hills, so there are
plains, plains uplifted, such as that great silent grassland above
Salisbury, plains lonely, such as the Weald and the mysterious marsh
of Romney in the east by which all good things go out of England, as
the legions went, and, as, alas, the Faith went too, another Roman
thing many hundred years ago. There is also that great marsh in the
west by the lean and desolate sea, more mysterious by far, whence a
man may see far off the great and solemn mountains of another land.
By that marsh the Faith came into England of my heart, and there lies
in ruin the greatest of its shrines in loving but alien hands, and
desolate.
I have said nothing of the valleys: they are too many and too fair,
from the fairest of all through which Thames flows seaward, to those
innumerable and more beloved where are for sure our homes. I say
nothing of the rivers, for who could number them? Yet I will tell you
of some if only for the beauty of their names, passing the names of
all women but ours, as Thames itself, and Medway, Stour, and Ouse and
Arun and Rother; Itchen and Test, Hampshire streams; and those five
which are like the fingers of an outstretched hand about Salisbury in
the meads, Bourne and Avon and Wylye and Nadder and Ebble; and those
of the West, Brue, which is holiest of all, though all be holy, Exe
and Barle, Dart and Taw, Fal under the sloping woods, Tamar, which is
an eastern girdle to a duchy, and Camel, which kissed the feet of
Iseult, and is lost ere it finds the sea.
Of the uplifted moorlands which are a part of the mystery of the west,
of the forests, of the greenwood, of the meads, of the laughing coast,
white as with dawn in the east, darkling in the west, I know not how
to speak, for in England of my heart we take them for granted and are
satisfied. They fill all that quiet and fruitful land with their own
joy and beneficence, and are a part of God's pleasure. Because of them
the name of England of my heart might be but Happiness, or--as for
ages we have named that far-off dusky Arabia,--Anglia Felix.
And yet, perhaps, the chief thing that remains with the mere sojourner
in this country of mine, the true Old England, is that in the whole
breadth of it, it is one vast graveyard. Do you not know those long
barrows that cast their shadows at evening upon the lonely downs,
those round tumuli that are dark even in the sun, where lie the men of
the old time before us, our forefathers? Do you not know the grave of
the Roman, the mystery that seems to lurk outside the western gate of
the forgotten city that was once named in the Roman itinerary and now
is nothing? Do you not know many an isolated hill often dark with
pines, but, more often still, lonely and naked where they lie of whom
we are come, with their enemies, and they call the place Battlebury or
Danesbury, or for ever deserted like all battlefields it is nameless?
If you know not these you know not England of my heart, though you
know those populous graveyards about the village churches where the
grass is so lush and green and the dead are more than the living;
though you know that marvellous tomb, the loveliest thing in all my
country, where the first Earl of Salisbury lies in the nave of the
great church he helped to build; though you know that wonder by the
roadside where Somerset and Wiltshire meet; though you know the
beauty that is fading and crumbling in the little church under the
dark woods where the dawn first strikes the roots of the Quantock
Hills.
There is so much to know, and all must be got by heart, for all is a
part of us and of that mighty fruitful and abiding past out of which
we are come, which alone we may really love, and which holds for ever
safe for us our origins.
After all, we live a very little time, the future is not ours, we hold
the present but by a brittle thread; it is the past that is in our
hearts. And so it is that to go afoot through Southern England is not
less than to appeal to something greater and wiser than ourselves, out
of which we are come, to return to our origins, to appeal to history,
to the divine history of the soul of a people.
There is a _genius loci_. To look on the landscapes we have always
known, to tread in the footsteps of our fathers, to follow the Legions
down the long roads, to trudge by the same paths to the same goal as
the pilgrims, to consider the silence of the old, old battlefields, to
pray in forgotten holy places to almost forgotten deities, is to be
made partakers of a life larger and more wonderful than that of the
individual, is to be made one with England. For in the quietness of
those ancient countrysides was England made by the men who begat us.
And even as a man of the Old Faith when he enters one of his
sanctuaries suddenly steps out of England into a larger world, a
universal country; so we in the earthwork by Thannington or the Close
of Canterbury, or upon the hill where Battle Abbey stood, surely have
something added to us by the genius of the place, indeed pass out of
ourselves into that which is England, a splendour and a holiness
beyond ourselves, which cannot die.
It is in such places we may best face reality, for they lend to
history all its poetry and, as Aristotle knew, there is more truth in
poetry than in history. And this, at least to-day, is perhaps the real
value and delight of our churches; I mean those great sanctuaries we
call Cathedrals which stand about England like half-dismantled castles
and remind us more poignantly than any other thing of all we are fain
to forget. There are the indelible words of our history most clearly
written. Consider the bricks of S. Martin's, the rude stones of the
little church of Bradford, the mighty Norman work of Romsey, the Early
English happiness of Salisbury, the riches and security of the long
nave of Winchester. Do we not there see the truth; can stones lie or
an answer be demanded of them according to folly? And if a man would
know the truth, let us say, of the thirteenth century here in England,
where else will he find any answer? Consider it then, the joy as of
flowers, the happiness as of Spring, in that architecture we call
Early English, which for joy and happiness surpasses any other in the
world. The men who carved those shafts and mouldings and capitals
covering them with foliage could not curb their invention nor prevent
their hands from beauty and joy. They forgot everything in their
delight, even the great logic of design, even to leap up to God, since
He was here in the meadows in this garden of ours that He has given us
and blest.
But these great buildings, scarcely to be understood by us save by the
grace of God and now a little lonely too, missing so many of their
sisters, and certainly in an alien service, are how much less
appealing and less holy than those village churches so humble and so
precious that everywhere ennoble and glorify England of my heart. They
stand up still for our souls before God, and are to be loved above all
I think--and even the humblest of them is to be loved--for the tombs
they shelter within and without. More than any Cathedral they touch in
us some profound and fundamental mystery common to us all, that is the
life and the energy of the Christian soul. They, above all, express
England, England of my heart, in them we find utterance, are joined
with the great majority and together approach, in their humility,
beauty, and quietness, God who has loved us all and given us England
therein and thereby to serve Him in delight. They kneel with the hind
and now as ever in the name of Our Lord. It is enough. The Cathedrals
are haunted by the Old Faith, and by Rome, whose they are: but the
village churches are our own. Nor though we be of the Old Faith let us
be too proud to salute their humility. They stand admittedly in the
service of man, and this at least is admirable in the Church of
England of my heart--I mean her humility. To her, unlike Rome,
absolute Truth has not been revealed; she is so little sure of anything
that she will condemn no man, no, not one of her officers, though he
deny the divinity of Christ. She desires only to serve: and if any
man, even an atheist, can approach the God he ignorantly denies most
easily through her open gates, she will not say him nay, nor deny him,
nor send him away. It is her genius. Let us salute its humility.
And so I look upon England of my heart and am certain I am of the
civilisation of Christ. He hath said, ye shall not die but live--
England blossoms in fulfilment. He hath founded his Church, whose
children we are, whether we will or no, and after a far wandering
presently shall return homeward. For those words endure and will
endure; more living than the words even of our poets, more lasting
than the cliffs of the sea, or the rocks of the mountains, or the
sands of the deserts, because they are as the flowers by the wayside.
Therefore England is not merely what we see and are; it is all the past
and all the future, it is inheritance; the fields we have always
ploughed, the landscape and the sea, the tongue we speak, the verse we
know by heart, all we hope for, all we love and venerate, under God.
And there abides a sense of old times gone, of ancient law, of
friendship, of religious benediction.
E. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
TO CANTERBURY
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD TO DARTFORD
CHAPTER II
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD TO ROCHESTER
CHAPTER III
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD--ROCHESTER
CHAPTER IV
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD TO FAVERSHAM
CHAPTER V
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD TO CANTERBURY
CHAPTER VI
THE CITY OF ST THOMAS
CHAPTER VII
CAESAR IN KENT
CHAPTER VIII
THE WEALD AND THE MARSH
CHAPTER IX
RYE AND WINCHELSEA
CHAPTER X
THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
CHAPTER XI
LEWES AND SIMON DE MONTFORT
CHAPTER XII
THE DOWNS
CHAPTER XIII
THE WEALD
CHAPTER XIV
TO ARUNDEL AND CHICHESTER
CHAPTER XV
CHICHESTER
CHAPTER XVI
SELSEY, BOSHAM AND PORCHESTER
CHAPTER XVII
SOUTHAMPTON
CHAPTER XVIII
BEAULIEU AND CHRISTCHURCH
CHAPTER XIX
THE NEW FOREST AND ROMSEY ABBEY
CHAPTER XX
WINCHESTER
CHAPTER XXI
SELBORNE
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CHEYNEY COURT AND THE CLOSE GATE, WINCHESTER
SHOOTERS' HILL
DARTFORD CHURCH AND BRIDGE
THE GATEWAY OF THE MONASTERY CLOSE, ROCHESTER
ROCHESTER
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM CHRISTCHURCH GATE
WEST GATE, CANTERBURY
ON THE STOUR NEAR CANTERBURY
CHILHAM
A CORNER OF ROMNEY MARSH
RYE
WINCHELSEA CHURCH
BATTLE ABBEY
LEWES CASTLE
THE DOWNS
THE WEALD OF SUSSEX, NORTH OF LEWES
ARUNDEL CASTLE
THE MARKET CROSS, CHICHESTER
BOSHAM
THE TUDOR HOUSE, OPPOSITE ST MICHAEL'S CHURCH, SOUTHAMPTON
IN THE NEW FOREST
ROMSEY ABBEY
NORTH TRANSEPT, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL
ST CROSS, WINCHESTER
SELBORNE FROM THE HANGER
ENGLAND OF MY HEART
CHAPTER I
THE PILGRIMS' ROAD TO CANTERBURY
FROM THE TABARD INN TO DARTFORD
When I determined to set out once more to traverse and to possess
England of my heart, it was part of my desire first of all to follow,
as far as might be, in the footsteps of Chaucer's pilgrims. Therefore
I sought the Tabard Inn in Southwark.
For true delight, it seems to me, a journey, especially if it be for
love or pleasure, should always have about it something of devotion,
something a little rigid too, and dutiful, at least in its opening
stages; and in thus determining my way I secured this. For I promised
myself that I would start from the place whence they set out so long
ago to visit and to pray at the tomb of the greatest of English
saints, that I would sleep where they slept, find pleasure in the
villages they enjoyed, climb the hills and look on the horizons that
greeted them also so many hundred years ago, till at last I stood by
the "blissful martyr's tomb," that had once made so great a rumour in
the world and now was nothing.
In many ways I came short of all this, as will be seen; but especially
in one thing--the matter of time. Chaucer and his pilgrims are
generally thought to have spent three and a half or four days and
three nights upon the road. It is true they went ahorseback and I
afoot, but nevertheless a man may easily walk the fifty-six miles from
London to Canterbury in four days. I failed because I found so much to
see by the wayside. And to begin with there was London itself, which I
was about to leave.
It was very early on an April morning when I set out from my home,
coming through London on foot and crossing the river by London Bridge.
It was there I lingered first, in the half light, as it were to say
good-bye.
I do not know what it is in London that at long last and in some quite
impersonal way clutches at the heart and receives one's eager
affection. At first, even though you be one of her children, she seems
and for how long like something fallen, calling you with the
monotonous, mighty, complaining voice of a fallen archangel,
ceaselessly through the days, the years, the centuries and the ages.
She is one of the oldest of European cities, she is one of the most
beautiful, of all capitals she is by far the most full of character:
and yet she is not easy to know or to love. Perhaps she does not
belong to us, but is something apart, something in and for herself, a
mighty and a living thing, owing us nothing and regarding us, whom
she tortures, with a sort of indifference, if not contempt.
And yet she is ours after all; she belongs to us, is more perhaps our
very likeness and self than the capital of any other people. What is
Berlin but a brutalised village, or Paris now but cosmopolis, or Rome
but a universe? She is ours, the very gate of England of my heart. For
she stands there striding the boundary of my country, the greatest of
our cities, the greatest even of our industrial cities--a negative to
all the rest. To the North she says Nay continually, for she is
English, the greater successor of Winchester, and in her voice is the
soul of the South, the real England, the England of my heart.
Ah, we have never known her or loved her enough or understood that she
is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the
prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the
character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its
infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it.
Almost featureless if you will, she is always under the guidance of
her ample sky, responding immediately to every mood of the clouds; and
in her, beauty grows up suddenly out of life and is gone e'er we can
apprehend it....
But to come into Southwark on a Spring morning in search of Chaucer
and the Tabard Inn is to ask of London more than she will give you. It
is strange, seeing that she is so English, that for her the living are
more than the dead. Consider England, southern England, if you know
her well enough, and remember what in the face of every other country
of Europe she has conserved of the past in material and tangible
things--roads, boundaries, churches, houses, and indeed whole towns
and villages. Yet London has so little of her glory and her past about
her in material things, that it is often only by her attitude to life
you might know she is not a creation of yesterday. It is true the fire
of 1666 destroyed almost all, but apparently it did not destroy the
Tabard Inn, which nevertheless is gone--it and its successors.
Something remained that should have been sacred, not indeed from
Chaucer's day but at least from that of the Restoration, something
that was beautiful, till some forty years ago. All is gone now; of the
old Inn as we may see it in a drawing of 1810, a two-storied building
with steepish roofs of tiles, dormer windows and railed balconies
supported below by pillars of stone, above by pillars of wood,
standing about two sides of a courtyard in which the carrier's long
covered carts from Horsham or Rochester are waiting, nothing at all
remains. The last of it was finally destroyed in 1875, and the Tabard
Inn of the new fashion was built at the corner as we see.
The old hostelry, which besides its own beauty had this claim also
upon our reverence, that it represented in no unworthy fashion the
birthplace as it were of English poetry, owes of course all its fame
to Chaucer, who lay there on the night before he set out for
Canterbury as he tells us:
When that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote....
Bifel that, in that season on a day
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the shelter weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,
That I was of hir felawshipe anon
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey, there as I yow devyse.
It is in these verses lies all the fame of the Tabard, which it might
seem was not a century old when Chaucer lay there. In the year 1304 the
Abbot of Hyde, near Winchester, bought two houses here held of the
Archbishop of Canterbury by William de Lategareshall. The abbot bought
these houses in order to have room to build himself a town house, and
it is said that at the same time he built a hostelry for travellers; at
any rate three years later we find him applying to the Bishop of
Winchester for leave to build a chapel "near the inn." In a later deed
we are told that "the abbots lodgeinge was wyninge to the backside of
the inn called the Tabarde and had a garden attached." Stow, however,
tells us: "Within this inn was also the lodging of the Abbot of Hide
(by the city of Winchester), a fair house for him and his train when he
came from that city to Parliament."
Here then from the Inn of the Abbot of Hyde Chaucer set out for
Canterbury with those pilgrims, many of whose portraits he has given us
with so matchless a power. The host of the inn at that time was Harry
Bailey, member of Parliament for Southwark in 1376 and 1379. He was the
wise and jocund leader of the pilgrimage as we know, and though Chaucer
speaks of him last, not one of the pilgrims is drawn with a livelier
touch than he:
Greet chere made our hoste us everichon
And to the soper sette us anon;
And served us with vitaille at the beste,
Strong was the wyn, and wel to drinke us leste.
A semely man our hoste was with alle
For to han ben a marshal in an halle;
A large man he was eyen stepe,
A fairer burgeys is ther noon in Chepe;
Bold of his speche and wys, and wel y-taught,
And of manhod him lakkede right naught.
Eek therto he was right a mery man,
And after soper pleyen he bigan,
And spak of mirthe amonges others thinges,
Whan that we hadde maad our rekeninges....
A noble portrait in the English manner; there is but one, and that is
wanting, we should have preferred. I mean the portrait of Chaucer
himself--that "wittie" Chaucer who "sate in a Chaire of Gold covered
with Roses writing prose and risme, accompanied with the Spirites of
many Kyngs, Knightes and Faire Ladies." For that we must go to a lesser
pen, to Greene, who thus describes him in his vision:
His stature was not very tall,
Lean he was; his legs were small
Hos'd within a stock of red
A button'd bonnet on his head
From under which did hang I ween
Silver hairs both bright and sheen;
His beard was white, trimmèd round;
His countenance blithe and merry found;
A sleeveless jacket, large and wide
With many plaits and skirts side
Of water-camlet did he wear;
A whittle by his belt he bear;
His shoes were cornèd broad before;
His ink-horn at his side he wore,
And in his hand he bore a book;--
Thus did this ancient poet look.
There is one other personage upon whom indeed the whole pilgrimage
depended of whom Chaucer says next to nothing, but we should do wrong
to forget him: I mean the "blissful martyr" himself--St Thomas of
Canterbury. In old days, certainly in Chaucer's, we should have been
reminded of him more than once on our way e'er we gained the Tabard.
For upon old London Bridge, the first stone bridge, built in the end of
the twelfth century, there stood in the very midst of it a chapel of
marvellous beauty with a crypt, from which by a flight of steps one
might reach the river, dedicated in honour of St Thomas Becket. This
chapel was built in memory of St Thomas by one Peter, priest of St Mary
Colechurch, where the martyr had been christened. It was this same
Peter who began to build the great bridge of stone, and when he died he
was buried in the chapel he had erected in the midst of it.
Such a wonder was, however, by no means the only memorial here, at the
very opening of the way, of the great and holy end and purpose of it.
Every schoolboy knows St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, but not all know
that the saint whose name that hospital bears is not the Apostle, but
England's Martyr. Now, until 1868 St Thomas's Hospital stood not in
Lambeth but in Southwark, upon the site of London Bridge Station.
[Footnote: The fact is still remembered in the name of St Thomas
Street, leading out of the Borough High Street on the east.] It seems
that within the precincts of St Mary Overy a house of Austin Canons,
now the Anglican Cathedral of St Saviour, Southwark, was a hospital for
the sick and poor founded by St Thomas, which after his beatification
was dedicated in his honour. But in the first years of the thirteenth
century, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, rebuilt the little
house in a healthier situation--_ubi aqua est uberior et aer est
melior_--where the water was purer and the air better, and this new
house, finished in 1215, of course also bore the name of St Thomas of
Canterbury. That the hospital fulfilled its useful purpose we know from
a petition which it presented to Pope Innocent VI., in 1357, wherein it
was stated that so many sick and poor resorted to it that it could not
support its charges. Not quite two hundred years later, in 1539, a few
days before the feast of St Thomas upon December 29, it was surrendered
to King Henry VIII., the infamous Layton having been its visitor. From
the king it was bought by the City of London, a rare comment upon its
suppression, and so notoriously useful was it that Edward VI. was
compelled to refound it, and therefore in some sort it still remains to
us. It is curious to note that, ages before the hospital came to
Lambeth, St Thomas was at home there, for he had a statue upon the
Lollards' Tower, and it was the custom of the watermen to doff their
caps to it as they rowed by.
It is meet and right that this pilgrimage should be begun with thoughts
of St Thomas, and especially of what we owe to him, for the first few
miles of the way upon what we need not doubt was of old the Pilgrims'
road, is anything but uplifting, crowded though it be with memories,
most of them of course far later than the Canterbury pilgrimage. As you
go down the Borough High Street, for Southwark is of course the old
_borgo_ of London, and all the depressing ugliness of modern life, it
is not of anything so serene as that great poet of the fourteenth
century, the father of English poetry, that you think, but of one who
nevertheless, in the characteristic nationalism of his art, in his
humanity and love of his fellow-men, was only second to Chaucer, and in
his compassion for the poor and lowly only second to St Thomas: I mean
Charles Dickens. No one certainly can pass the site of the Marshalsea
Prison without recalling that solemn and haunting description in the
preface to "Little Dorrit": "Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place,
turning out of Angel Court leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on
the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its
narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at
all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will
look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the
crowding ghosts of many miserable years."
It is still of Dickens most of us will think in passing St George's
Church, for was it not there that Little Dorrit was christened and
married, and was it not in the vestry there she slept with the burial-
book for a pillow? But St George's has other memories too, for it was
there that Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who staunchly refused the
oath of supremacy to Elizabeth, was buried at midnight after his death
in the Marshalsea, on September 5th, 1569. There too General Monk was
married to Anne Clarges.
These memories, for the most part so unhappy, have, however, nothing to
do with the Pilgrims' Way. No memory of that remains at all amid all
the dismal wretchedness of to-day, until one comes to the "Thomas à
Becket" public-house at the corner of Albany Road. This was the site of
the "watering of Saint Thomas":
A-morwe, whan that day bigan to springe,
Up roes our host, and was our aller cok,
And gadrede us togirde, alle in a flok,
And forth we riden, a litel more than pas
Unto the watering of seint Thomas.
The "watering of St Thomas" was a spring dedicated to St Thomas, and
it came to be the first halting-place of the pilgrims. It is still
remembered in the name of St Thomas's Road close by, and not
inappropriately in the tavern which bears St Thomas's name. It was
here that the immortal tales were begun:
And there our host bigan his hors areste,
And seyde; Lordinges, herkneth, if yow leste.
Ye woot your forward, and it yow recorde
If even-song and morwe-song acorde,
Lat see now who shal telle the firste tale....
No memory of the pilgrims would seem to remain at all in the road
after St Thomas's watering until we come to Deptford. The "Knight's
Tale" and the "Miller's Tale" have filled, and one would think more
than filled that short three miles of road, till in the Reve's
Prologue the host began "to spake as loudly as a king...."
Sey forth thy tale and tarie nat the tyme,
Lo, Depeford! and it is half-way pryme.
Nothing more lugubrious is to be found to-day in the whole length of
the old road than Deptford; but it is there that we begin to be free
of the mean streets. For Deptford, which the pilgrims reached, after
their early start, at "half-way pryme"--any hour, I suppose, between
six and nine--lies at the foot of Blackheath Hill above Greenwich:
Lo, Greenwich, ther many a shrewe is inne.
Deptford Bridge, the only remaining landmark of old time, by which
we cross Deptford Creek, had in the fourteenth century a hermitage at
its eastern end dedicated in honour of St Catherine of Alexandria, and
Mass was said there continually from Chaucer's day down to the
suppression in 1531, the king, Henry VIII., having previously helped
to repair the chapel.
It is at Deptford, as I say, that we begin to leave the mean streets,
for at the cross-roads we turn up Blackheath Hill, and though this is
not in all probability the ancient way, it is as near it as modern
conditions have allowed us. The old road, as far as can be made out,
ran farther to the east, quite alongside Greenwich Park, and not over
the middle of the Heath, as the modern road does. Blackheath is not
alluded to in Chaucer's poem, though it must have been famous at the
time he was writing, for in 1381 Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and their
company were there gathered. Perhaps the most famous spectacle,
however, that Blackheath has witnessed was not this abortive revolt
of the peasants nor the rising of Jack Cade in 1450, but the meeting
here in 1400 of King Henry IV. and the Emperor of Constantinople, who
came to England to ask for assistance against the ever-encroaching
Turk, then at the gates of Constantinople, which some fifty years
later was to fall into his hands. Blackheath, indeed, has always played
a considerable part in the history of southern England, partly because
it was the last great open space on the southern confines of London,
and partly because of the royal residence at Greenwich. Fifteen years
after it had seen a guest so strange as the Emperor of the East, it
saw Henry V. return from Agincourt, and the Mayor of London with the
aldermen and four hundred citizens, "all in scarlet with hoods of red
and white," greet the hero king.
... London doth pour out her citizens
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort
Like to the senators of the antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in!
Across the Heath we go, taking the road on the right at the triangle,
before long to find ourselves perhaps for the first time on the very
road the pilgrims followed--the great Roman highway of the Watling
Street.
I call the Watling Street a great Roman highway, for that, as we know
it, is what it is, but in its origin it is far older than the Roman
occupation. It ran right across England from the continental gate at
Dover, through Canterbury to Chester, fording the Thames at Lambeth,
and it was the first of the British trackways which the Romans
straightened, built up, and paved. It has been in continuous use for
more than three thousand years, and may therefore be said to be the
oldest road in England. It is older than the greatness of London, for
in its arrow flight across England it ignores the City. After the ford
at Lambeth, to-day represented by Lambeth Bridge, an older crossing of
the Thames than that at London Bridge, it mounted the northern slope,
passing perhaps across the present gardens of Buckingham Palace and
the eastern end of Hyde Park, where to-day it is lost or merely
represented by Grosvenor Place and Park Lane, to cross the great
western road out of London at Tyburn, the original "Cross Roads," the
ancient place of execution close by the present Marble Arch, and to
pursue its way, as we may see it still, directly and in true Roman
fashion down what we know as Edgware Road. That great north-western
highway lies over the very pavement of the Romans, which lies only a
few feet below the surface of the modern road.
It is then upon this most ancient highway that in the footsteps of the
Britons, the Romans their beneficent conquerors, and the English
pilgrims our forefathers, we shall march on to Canterbury. The road of
course is broken here and there, indeed in many places, and notably
between Dartford and Rochester, but for the most part it remains after
three thousand years the ordinary highway between the capital and the
archi-episcopal city.
The Watling Street takes Shooters' Hill, so called, I suppose, from
the highwaymen that infested the woods thereabouts, in true Roman
fashion, and it is from its summit that we get the first really great
view on our way, for that so famous from Greenwich Park does not
properly belong to our journey. We must, however, turn to another and
a later poet than Chaucer for any description of that tremendous
spectacle. Here indeed, more than in any other prospect the road
affords, the horizon is changed from that Chaucer looked upon.
[Illustration: SHOOTERS' HILL]
For we turn to gaze on London, the Protestant, not the Catholic, city:
A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping,
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amid the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;
A huge dun cupola like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head--and there is London town!
Don Juan had got out on Shooters' Hill
Sunset the time, the place the same declivity
Which looks along that vale of good and ill
Where London streets ferment in full activity;
While everything around was calm and still
Except the creak of wheels which on their pivot he
Heard--and that bee-like, babbling, busy hum
Of cities, that boil over with their scum.
The prospect eastward across the broad valley of the Darent, if less
wonderful, is assuredly far lovelier than that north-westward over
London; but from the top of Shooters' Hill we probably do not follow
the actual route of the ancient way until we come to Welling. The
present road down the hill eastward is said to date from 1739 only.
[Footnote: See H. Littlehales, "Some Notes on the Road from Canterbury
in the Middle Ages" (Chaucer Society, 1898).]
There is nothing to keep us in Welling, nor indeed in Bexley Heath,
except to note that they are the first two Kentish villages upon our
route, now little more than suburban places spoiled of any virtue they
may have possessed. It is said that at Clapton Villa in the latter
place there is preserved "an ancient and perfect sacramental wafer"--
perhaps an unique treasure.
The road runs straight on through a rather sophisticated countryside,
almost into Crayford, but in preparing to cross the Cray the old road
has apparently been lost. We may be sure, however, of not straying
more than a few yards out of the way, if we keep as straight on as
maybe, that is to say, if we take the road to the right at the fork,
which later passes Crayford church on the south.
Crayford, though it be anything but picturesque, is nevertheless not
without interest. It is the Creccanford of the "Saxon Chronicle,"
and was the scene of the half-legendary final battle between the
Britons here and Hengist, who utterly discomfited them, so that we
read they forsook all this valley, even, so we are asked to believe,
those strange caves which they are said to have burrowed in the chalk
for their retreat, and which are so plentiful hereabouts, but which
assuredly are infinitely older than the advent of the Saxon pirates.
The real interest of Crayford, however, as of more than one place in
this valley, lies in its church. This is dedicated in honour of the
companion of St Augustine, St Paulinus, who became the third Bishop of
Rochester. The form of the church is curious, the arcade of the nave
being in the midst of it, while the chancel, of about the same width
as the nave, is possessed of two arcades and divided into three
aisles; thus the arcade of the nave abuts upon the centre of the
chancel arch. Parts of the church certainly date from Chaucer's day,
but most of it is Perpendicular in style.
More interesting than Crayford itself are North Cray and Foot's Cray
in the upper valley beyond Bexley. At North Cray there is one of the
best pictures Sassoferrato ever painted, a Crucifixion, over the altar.
At Foot's Cray, the church, besides being beautiful in its situation,
possesses a great square Norman font.
These places are, however, off the Pilgrims' Road, which climbs up
through Crayford High Street, and then in about two miles begins to
descend into the very ancient town of Dartford, where it is said
Chaucer's pilgrims slept, their first night on the road.