THE PILGRIMS' ROAD
FROM DARTFORD TO ROCHESTER
The entry into Dartford completes the first and, it must be confessed,
the dullest portion of the Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury. Here at
Dartford the pilgrims slept, here to-day we say farewell to all that
suburban district which now stretches for so many miles in every
direction round the capital, spoiling the country as such and making
of it a kind of unreality very hard to tolerate. The traveller must
then realise that it is only at Dartford his pleasure will begin.
Dartford, as one sees at first sight, is an old, a delightful, English
town, full of happiness and old-world memories. Its situation is
characteristic, for it lies in the deep and narrow valley of the
Darent between two abrupt hills, that to the west of chalk, that to
the east of sand, up both of which it climbs without too much
insistence. Between these two hills runs a rapid stream from the Downs
to the southward, that below the town opens out suddenly into a small
estuary or creek. Where the Watling Street forded the Darent there
grew up the town of Dartford, on the verge of the marshes within reach
of the tide, but also within reach of an inexhaustible river of fresh
water. The ford was presently replaced by a ferry, and later still, in
the latter years of Henry VI., by a great bridge, as we see, but the
town had already taken its name from its origin, and to this day is
known as Dartford, the ford of the Darent.
The situation of Dartford is thus very picturesque, and as we might
suppose its main street is the old Roman highway that the pilgrims
used. This descends the West Hill steeply after passing the Priory, or
as it is now called the Place House, the first religious house which
Dartford could boast that the pilgrims would see. In Chaucer's day
this was a new foundation, Edward III., in 1355, having established
here a convent of Augustinian nuns dedicated in honour of Our Lady and
St Margaret. The house became extremely popular with the great
Kentish families, for it was not only very richly endowed, but always
governed by a prioress of noble birth, Princess Bridget, youngest
daughter of Edward IV., at one time holding the office, as later did
Lady Jane Scrope and Lady Margaret Beaumont: all are buried within. In
the miserable time of Henry VIII., when it was suppressed, its
revenues amounted to nearly four hundred pounds a year. The king
immediately seized the house for his own pleasure, but later gave it
to Anne of Cleves. On her death it came back to the Crown, but James
I. exchanged it with the Cecil family for their mansion of Theobalds.
They in their turn parted with it to Sir Edward Darcy. Little remains
of the old house to-day, a gate-house of the time of Henry VII., and a
wing of the convent, now a farm-house; but considerable parts of the
extensive walls may be seen.
It may well have been when the bell of that convent was ringing the
Angelus that Chaucer and his pilgrims entered Dartford on that April
evening so long ago. As they came down the steep hill, before they
entered the town, they would pass an almshouse or hospital, midway
upon the hill, a leper-house in all likelihood, dedicated in honour of
St Mary Magdalen. Something of this remains to us in the building we
see, which, however, is later than the Reformation.
Nothing I think actually in the town can, as we see it, be said to
have been there when Chaucer went by except the very noble church. He
and his pilgrims looked and wondered, as we do still, upon the great
tower said to have been built by Gundulph as a fortress to hold the
ford, which, altered though it has been more than once, is still
something at which one can only admire. The upper part, however, dates
from the fifteenth century. Then there is the chancel restored in
1863, the north part of which is supposed to have been built in the
thirteenth century in honour of St Thomas himself, no doubt by the
pilgrims who, passing by on their way to Canterbury, were wont to
spend a night in Dartford town, and certainly to hear Mass in the
place of their sojourn e'er they set out in the earliest morning. The
screen is of the fourteenth century, as are the arcades of the nave
and the windows on the north, and these too Chaucer may have seen; but
all the monuments, some of them interesting and charming, are much
later, dating from Protestant days. Certain brasses, however, remain
from the fifteenth century, notably that of Richard Martyn and his
wife (1402), that of Agnes Molyngton (1454), and that of Joan Rothele
(1464). There is, too, a painting of St George and the Dragon at the
end of the south chancel chapel, behind the organ.
Within the town one or two houses remain, perhaps in their
foundations, from the fifteenth century. The best of these is that on
the left just west of the church, at the corner of Bullis Lane. This
house, according to Dunken, the historian of Dartford, was the
dwelling of one "John Grovehurst in the reign of King Edward IV. That
gentleman in 1465 obtained permission of the Vicar and church-wardens
of Dartford to erect a chimney on a part of the churchyard, and in
acknowledgment thereof provided a lamp to burn perpetually during the
celebration of divine service in the parish church. The principal
apartment in the upper floor (a room about twenty-five feet by twenty
feet) was originally hung round with tapestry, said to be worked by
the nuns of the priory, who were occasionally permitted to visit at
the mansion. The principal figures were in armour, and two of them as
large as life, latterly called Hector and Andromache; in the
background was the representation of a large army with inscribed
banners."
[Illustration: DARTFORD CHURCH AND BRIDGE]
The churchyard upon which John Grovehurst was allowed to erect a
chimney was till about the middle of the nineteenth, century larger
than it now is, part of it at that time being taken "to make the road
more commodious for passengers." This road was of course the
Pilgrims' Road, the Watling Street. That this always passed to the
south of the church is certain, but it may have turned a little in
ancient time to take the ford. It turns a little to-day to approach
the bridge, and thereafter climbs the East Hill.
Dartford Bridge, which already in the Middle Ages had supplanted ford
and ferry, happily remains to the extent of about a third of the width
of the two pointed arches which touch the banks. It was kept in order
and repair by the hermit who dwelt in a cell at the foot of the bridge
on the east, a cell older than the bridge, for the hermits used to
serve the ford. Here stood the Shrine of Our Lady and St Catherine of
Alexandria, which was much favoured by the pilgrims, so we may well
suppose that Chaucer and his friends did not pass it by without a
reverence.
Here too at the eastern end of the town stood a hospital dedicated in
honour of the Holy Trinity, but this Chaucer knew not, any more than
we may do, for it was only founded in 1452. It seems, however, to have
been built really over the stream upon piers, perhaps in something
the same way as the thirteenth-century Franciscan house at Canterbury
was built, which we may still see.
Dunken tells us that "the steep ascent of the Dover road leading
towards Brent was in ancient times called St Edmunde's Weye from its
leading to a Chapel dedicated to that saint situated near the middle of
the upper churchyard." This chapel, of which nothing remains, Edward
III. bestowed upon the Priory of Our Lady and St Margaret. On its
site, such is the irony of time, a "martyr's memorial" has been
erected to the unhappy and unfortunate folk burnt here in the time of
Queen Mary.
But Dartford is too pleasant a place to be left with such a merely
archaeological survey as this. It is a town in which one may be happy;
historically, however, it has not much claim upon our notice, its
chief boast being that it was here the first act of violence in the
Peasants' Revolt of 1381 occurred, when Wat Tyler broke the head of
the poll-tax collector who had brutally assaulted his daughter. Wat or
Walter--Tyler, because of his trade, which was that of covering roofs
with tiles--would seem, however, not to have been a Dartford man at
all. The very proper murder of the tax-collector would appear to have
been the work of a certain John "Tyler" of the same profession, here
in Dartford.
The Peasants' Revolt, which, alas! came to nothing, brings us indeed
quite into Chaucer's day, but it would have had little sympathy from
him, nor indeed has it really anything specially to do with this town.
The true fame of Dartford, which is its paper-making, dates from the
end of the sixteenth century, when one Sir John Speelman, jeweller to
Queen Elizabeth, is said to have established the first paper-mill.
If Dartford is poor in history, nevertheless it is worth a visit of
more than an hour or so for its own sake, as I have said. It boasts of
a good inn also, and the country and villages round about are
delicious. All that upper valley of the Darent, for instance, in which
lie Darenth, Sutton-at-Hone, Horton Kirby, and, a little way off
Fawkham, Eynsford, and Lullingstone, is worth the trouble of seeing
for its own beauty and delight.
There is Darenth for instance, Darne, as the people used to call it,
only two miles from the Pilgrims' Road, it is as old as England, and
doubtless saw the Romans at work straightening, paving, and building
that great Way which has remained to us through so many ages, and
which the Middle Age hallowed into a Via Sacra. What can be more
worthy and right than that a modern pilgrim should visit this little
Roman village to see the foundations of the Roman buildings, to
speculate on what they may have been, and generally to contemplate
those origins out of which we are come?
And then there is the church too, dedicated in honour of St Margaret,
the dear little lady who is so wonderfully and beautifully represented
in Westminster Abbey for all to worship her, high up over the rascal
politicians. All the village churches in England of my heart are
entrancingly holy and human places, but it is not always that one
finds a church so rare as that of St Margaret in Darenth. For not only
is it built of Roman rubble or brick, the work of the Saxons, the
Normans, and of us their successors, but it boasts also an arch of
tufa, has an Early English vaulted chancel of two stories, and a
Norman font upon which are carved scenes from the life of St Dunstan,
to say nothing of a thirteenth-century tower.
Not far away at Horton Kirby, to be reached through South Darenth, are
the remains of Horton Castle and a very interesting, aisleless
cruciform church of Our Lady with central tower, a great nave, arcaded
transepts, and much Early English loveliness, to say nothing of the
Decorated tomb of one of the De Ros family, lords of Horton Castle,
and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century brasses. Horton got its name of
Kirby in this manner. At the time of the Domesday Survey the place was
held by Auschetel de Ros from Bishop Odo, but the heir of De Ros was
Lora, Lady of Horton, who married into the north-country family of
Kirby, who, however, had for long owned lands hereabouts. In the time
of Edward I. the Kirby of that day, Roger, rebuilt the castle, but it
is not the ruins of his work we see, these being of a much later
building. Nor will any one who visits Horton fail to see Fawks, the
famous old Elizabethan mansion of the London Alderman Lancelot
Bathurst, who died in 1594.
All this valley, as I have said, was used and cultivated by the
Romans, whose work we find not only at Darenth but also here at
Horton. At Fawkham, however, on the higher ground to the east I found
something more germane to the pilgrimage. For in the old church of
Our Lady there, over the western door, is a window in which we may see
one William de Fawkham clothed as a pilgrim with a book in his hand,
and on one side a figure of Our Lord, on the other the Blessed Virgin.
But the goal of my journey from the highway was reached at Eynsford.
Here indeed I found my justification for leaving the road while on
pilgrimage to Canterbury. For not only is Eynsford a beautiful place
in itself, beautifully situated, but it was the quarrel which William
de Eynesford had with St Thomas Becket, when the great archbishop was
in residence at Otford Castle, that led to the murder in Canterbury
Cathedral and the great pilgrimage which has brought even us at this
late day on our way.
Becket's quarrel with the king and the civil power was, as we know,
concerning the liberty of the Church, and more particularly here a
dispute as to the presentation to the church of St Martin in Eynsford,
which still retains many features of that time. After the martyrdom,
William de Eynesford, though he does not appear to have been directly
concerned in the murder, was excommunicated, and Eynsford Castle was
left without inhabitants, for no one would enter it. It fell into
decay, and was never after used or restored or rebuilt, only Henry
VIII. venturing to use it as a stable; but his work has been cleared
away, and what we see is a ruin of the time of St Thomas, and indeed
in some sort his work. The ruin bears a strong resemblance to the
mighty castle of Rochester, and though it is of course very small in
comparison with that capital fortress, it must have been a place of
some strength when Henry II. was king.
St Martin's Church, whose spire rises so charmingly out of the
orchards white with spring, has a fine western doorway and tower of
Norman work, and a chancel and south transept lighted by Early English
lancets. That tower certainly heard the rumour of St Thomas's murder,
and frightened men no doubt crowded into that western door to hear
William de Eynesford denounced from the altar.
Now when I had seen all this and reminded myself thus of that great
tale which is England, I set out on my way back to Dartford, passing
by the footpath through the park to the south-east towards
Lullingstone Castle, which, however, is not older in the main than the
end of the eighteenth century.
And then from Lullingstone through the shining afternoon I made my way
by the western bank of the Darent to Sutton-at-Hone, where there are
remains of a Priory of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem; the place
is still called St John's. The church dedicated to St John Baptist is
a not uninteresting Decorated building, the last resting place of that
Sir Thomas Smyth of Sutton Place, who was not the least of Elizabethan
navigators, director of the East India Company, interested in the
Muscovy trade, and treasurer of the Virginia Company (1625). So I came
back to Dartford and on the next day set out once more for Canterbury.
One leaves Dartford, on the Pilgrim's Road, with a certain regret, to
find oneself, at the top of the East Hill, face to face with a problem
of the road. For there on the hill-top the road forks; to the left
runs the greater way of the two, into Gravesend; straight on lies a
lane which after a couple of miles suddenly turns southward to
Betsham, where the direct way is continued by a footpath across
Swanscombe Park. Which of these ways was I to follow? That question
was hard to answer, because the road through Gravesend is full of
interest, while the direct way is almost barren all the way to
Rochester. There can be little doubt, too, that many of the pilgrims
on the way to Canterbury did pass through Gravesend, to which town
doubtless many also travelled from London by water, while others
landed there from Essex and East Anglia. But the lane which is the
straight way and its continuation in the footpath across Swanscombe
Park is undoubtedly the line of the Roman road and in all probability
the route of Chaucer.
Face to face with these considerations, being English, I decided upon
a compromise. I determined to follow the Gravesend road so far as
Northfleet, chiefly for the sake of Stone, and there by a road running
south-east to come into the Roman highway again, two miles or so east
of Swanscombe Park, whence I should have a practically straight road
into Rochester.
I say I chose this route chiefly for the sake of seeing Stone. This
little place, some two miles and a half from Dartford, has one of the
loveliest churches in all England, to say nothing of a castellated
manor house known as Stone Castle. "It is a common jest," says
Reginald Scot, writing in the time of Elizabeth, "It is a common jest
among the watermen of the Thames to show the parish church of Stone to
their passengers, calling the same by the name of the 'Lanterne of
Kent'; affirming, and that not untruly, that the said church is as
light (meaning in weight not in brightness) at midnight as at
noonday." The church, indeed, dedicated in honour of Our Lady is a
very beautiful and extraordinarily interesting building of the end of
the thirteenth century, in the same style as the practically
contemporary work in Westminster Abbey and, according to the architect
and historian, G.E. Street, who restored it, possibly from the design
of the same master-mason. Certainly nothing in the whole county of
Kent is better worth a visit. It would seem to have been built with a
part of the money offered at the shrine of St William in the Cathedral
of Rochester upon the Pilgrim's Way; for Stone belonged to the Bishops
of Rochester, who had a manor house there. The nave, aisles, chancel,
and tower are all in the Early English style and very noble work of
their kind, built in the time of Bishop Lawrence de Martin of
Rochester (1251-1274); while to the fourteenth century belongs the
vestry to the north of the chancel and the western windows in nave and
aisles and the piers of the tower as we now see them. Perhaps the
oldest thing in the church is the doorway in the north aisle which
would seem to be Norman, but Street tells us that this "is a curious
instance of imitation of earlier work, rather than evidence of the
doorway itself being earlier than the rest of the church."
Within, the church is delightful, increasing in richness of detail
eastward towards the chancel where nothing indeed can surpass the
beauty of the arcade, so like the work at Westminster, borne by
pillars of Purbeck, its spandrels filled with wonderfully lovely,
delicate, and yet vigorous foliage. Here are two brasses, one of 1408
to John Lambarde, the rector in Chaucer's day, the other of 1530 to
Sir John Dew. In the north aisle we may find certain ancient paintings
the best preserved of which represents the Madonna and Child.
The north aisle of the chancel is not at one with the church; it was
built in the early sixteenth century by the Wilshyre family as their
Chantry. Here lies Sir John Wilshyre, Governor of Calais in the time
of Henry VIII. The glass everywhere is unfortunately modern.
One leaves Stone church with regret; it is so fair and yet so
hopelessly dead that one is astonished and almost afraid. Less than a
mile along the road, to the north of it one passes Ingress Abbey,
where once the nuns of Dartford Priory had a grange. The present
house, once the residence of Alderman Harmer, the radical and
reformer of our criminal courts, was built of the stone of old London
Bridge.
Here upon the high road one is really in the marshes by Thames side;
but a little way off the highway to the south on higher ground stands
Swanscombe and it is worth while to see it for it is a very famous
place. "After such time," says Lambarde, quoting Thomas the monk and
chronicler of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, "after such time as
Duke William the Conqueror had overthrown King Harold in the field at
Battell in Sussex and had received the Londoners to mercy he marched
with his army towards the castle of Dover, thinking thereby to have
brought in subjection this county of Kent also. But Stigande, the
archbishop, perceiving the danger assembled the countrymen together
and laid before them the intolerable pride of the Normans that invaded
them and their own miserable condition if they should yield unto them.
By which means they so enraged the common people that they ran
forthwith to weapon and meeting at Swanscombe elected the archbishop
and the abbot for their captains. This done each man got him a green
bough in his hand and beare it over his head in such sort as when the
Duke approached, he was much amazed therewith, thinking at first that
it had been some miraculous wood that moved towards him. But they as
soon as he came within hearing cast away their boughs from them, and
at the sound of a trumpet bewraied their weapons, and withall
despatched towards him a messenger, which spake unto him in this
manner:--'The Commons of Kent, most noble Duke, are ready to offer
thee either peace or war, at thy own choice and election; Peace with
their faithfull obedience if thou wilt permit them to enjoy their
ancient liberties; Warr, and that most deadly, if thou deny it
them.'"
They prevailed according to the legend and this as some say is the
difference between the Men of Kent and the Kentish Men, for the former
retained their old liberties and were never conquered, and these dwelt
in the valley of Holmsdale; but the rest were merely _victi_. As the
old rhyme has it--
The vale of Holmsdale
Never conquered, never shall.
It is pleasing with the memory of all this in one's heart--and upon it
there is a famous song--to come upon Swanscombe church, in which much
would seem to be of Saxon times, as parts of the walls of both nave and
chancel, and the lower part of the tower, where one may see signs of
Roman brick. The nave, however, at least within, is late Norman if not
Transitional, and the windows in the chancel are Norman and Early
English. Here, too, is the tomb of Sir Anthony Weldon, the malicious
gossip [Footnote: He was the author of "The Secret History of the first
Two Stuart Kings" and of "A Catt may look at a King, or a Briefe
Chronicle and Character of the Kings of England..."] of the time of
James I., who had acted as clerk of the kitchen to Elizabeth. His wife
lies opposite him with others of his family. It is more interesting for
us, however, to note that in Chaucer's day the church was chiefly
famous for its shrine of St Hildefrith, a soveran advocate against the
vapours.
I left Swanscombe in the early afternoon, and passing through
Northfleet with its great church of St Botolph I followed the road with
many happy glimpses of the Thames, avoiding Gravesend and making
southward for the Watling Street, which I found at last, and an old
Inn at the cross roads upon it. Thence I marched upon what I took to
be the veritable way and was presently assured of this at Singlewell,
which it is said was originally Schingled well, that is a well roofed
with shingles of wood. This well stood within the parish of Ifield,
but so famous was it, for it was known to every pilgrim, that it
presently quite put out the name of the parish, which in 1362 is
described as Ifield-juxta-Schyngtedwell, and to this day the place is
marked on the maps as Singlewell or Ifield. A chapel was soon built
beside the well and here doubtless the pilgrims prayed and made
offerings. Singlewell, however, must not be confused with St Thomas's
well a mile further on the road, which is still used and still known
as St Thomas's well.
All this proved to me that I was indeed upon the old road, and so I
went on across Cobham Park without a thought of the great house,
intent now on the noble city of Rochester, which presently as I came
over the last hill I saw standing in all its greatness over the broad
river of Medway, its mighty castle four square upon the further bank.
Then was I confirmed in my heart in the words of Chaucer--
Lo Rouchestre stant here fast by.