THE PILGRIMS' ROAD
ROCHESTER
One comes down the hill into Rochester, through Strood, on this side
the Medway, to find little remaining of interest in a place that has
now become scarcely more than a suburb of the episcopal city. Some
memory, however, lingers still in Strood of St Thomas, for certain
folks there hated him and to spite him one day as he rode through the
village they cut the tail from his horse. Mark now the end of this
misdeed. In Strood thereafter everyone of their descendants was born,
it is said, with a tail, even as the brutes which perish.
The church of Strood, restored in 1812, is without interest, but close
to the churchyard is the site of a Hospital, founded, in the time of
Richard I., who endowed it, by Bishop Glanville of Rochester. This
place must have been known to Chaucer and his pilgrims. It was
dedicated in honour of Our Lady and cared for "the poor, weak, infirm
and impotent as well as neighbouring inhabitants or travellers from
distant places, until they die or depart healed." Those who served it
followed the Benedictine Rule. A singular example of the hatred of
these for the monks of Rochester appears in the story of the fight
between the monks and the Hospital staff with whom sided the men of
Strood and Frinsbury, a village hard by, which took place in the
orchard of the Hospital. The Bishop, however, soon brought all to
reason, and as a punishment the men of Strood were obliged to go in
procession to Rochester upon each Whit-Monday, carrying the clubs with
which they had assaulted the monks.
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY OF THE MONASTERY CLOSE, ROCHESTER]
That Strood stood on the ancient way its name assures us, since it is
but another form of Street or Strada, as they say in Italy. From
Strood we cross the great iron bridge, the successor of that at the
Strood end of which Bishop Glanville built a small chapel. The story
of the bridge is interesting. We do not know that there was a bridge
at all in Roman times, but certainly a wooden bridge was supplemented
in the time of Richard II. by a new one of stone, consisting of
twenty-one arches of different spans. This bridge stood higher up the
river than that of to-day, nearer indeed to the Castle, and as at its
western end there was a chapel, so at its eastern under the Castle,
John de Cobham founded, in Chaucer's time, in 1399, a Chantry for all
Christian souls, of which some ruins remain. This bridge, patched,
altered, and constantly repaired, lasted till the existing bridge was
built in our own time on the site of the old one of wood.
From the bridge we enter the High Street, almost certainly lying over
the old Roman road. Here are the old Inns, the Crown, the Bull, and
the King's Head. It is even probable that Chaucer may have stayed at
the Crown, the oldest of the three, not of course in the present
house, but in that which stood on the same site till 1863, and which
was said to date from the fourteenth century. [Footnote: The old house
was famous at least as the scene of Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," pt. i.
act ii. sc. i., as the resting-place of Queen Elizabeth in 1573, and as
the inn honoured by Mr Pickwick. It should never have been destroyed.]
In Rochester, serene and yet active, the very ancient seat of a
bishopric, we have something essentially Roman, the fortress on the
Watling Street guarding the passage of the Medway, precisely as
Piacenza was and is a Roman fortress upon the Emilian Way guarding the
passage of the Po. The Romans called the place Durobrivae, and though
we know little of it during the Roman occupation of Britain, we may be
sure it was a place of very considerable importance, as indeed it has
remained ever since, twice in fact in our history the possession of
Rochester has decided a whole campaign.
Rochester, indeed, could not have escaped the military eye of the
Romans. It must be remembered that the natural entry into England is
by the Straits of Dover, and that for a man entering by that gate
there is only one way up into England and that the line of the Watling
Street, for he must cross the Thames, even though he be going only to
London. The lowest ford upon the Thames is that at Lambeth, which the
Watling Street used. Now there is but one really formidable obstacle
in the whole length of the Watling Street south of the Thames. That
obstacle is the estuary of the Medway, which Rochester guarded and
possessed. Rochester then was first and foremost a great fortress,
just as Piacenza was and is.
What was its fate in the Dark Age that followed the failure of the
Roman administration we do not know; but with the advent of St
Augustine Rochester at once received a Bishop. It was, indeed, the
first post in St Augustine's advance from Canterbury, King Ethelbert
himself building there a church in 597 in honour of St Andrew. It thus
became a spiritual as well as a material fortress. Of its fate after
the Battle of Hastings we know little, but it submitted without
resistance and came into the hands of that Odo of Bayeaux who gave so
much trouble to William Rufus.
It is now that we see Rochester suddenly appear in its true greatness.
Odo, expelled by William, had on the Conqueror's death returned and
successfully obtained of Rufus his estates, among them the Castle of
Rochester, which he had built. In 1088, however, he was once more in
rebellion against the Crown on behalf of the Conqueror's eldest
brother, Robert of Normandy. Rufus struck him first at Pevensey, which
was the Norman gate of England. He took it but unwisely released Odo,
on his oath to give up Rochester Castle and leave the country.
Rochester was then in the hands of Eustace of Boulogne, sworn friend
of Duke Robert, and when Odo appeared with the King's Guard before the
Castle, demanding its surrender, he, understanding everything,
captured his own lord and the king's guard also and brought them in.
Rufus then turned to his English subjects and demanded their
assistance, for his Barons were then, as they have invariably been
throughout English history, against the Crown, which truly represented
and defended the people. They flocked to the Royal Standard, and after
six weeks' siege, plague and famine ravaging the garrison, Odo
surrendered and was imprisoned at Tonbridge, and later expelled the
kingdom. As this great rascal Bishop came out of Rochester Castle,
the English youths sang out "Rope and Cord! Rope and Cord for the
traitor Bishop." But Odo was too near to the king.
That was the first time we know of in which Rochester stood like the
gage of England; the second was in the Barons' wars. When King John,
in 1215, had taken Rochester and notably discomfited the rascal
Barony, they immediately invited Louis of France to assist them. He
set sail with some seven hundred vessels, landed at Sandwich, and
retook Rochester, which had been so badly damaged that it could not
defend itself. Forty-eight years later, in 1264, Henry III. being
king, Simon de Montfort coming into Kent, burnt the wooden bridge
over the Medway which was too strongly held by the loyal inhabitants
of Rochester for him to capture, took the city by storm, sacked the
Cathedral and the Priory, and laid siege to the Castle. He failed, and
Lewes could not give him what Rochester had denied.
Rochester Castle, which hitherto only famine had been able to open,
was to fall at last to Wat Tyler and his Peasants in 1381, with the
help of the people of the city. After that culminating misery of the
fourteenth century, which was so full of miseries, Rochester plays
little part in history for many years. She appears again to take part
in innumerable pageants, such as that in which Henry VIII. in 1540,
and on New Year's day, first saw Anne of Cleves and was astonished at
her little beauty, or that which greeted Elizabeth in 1573, or that
which greeted Charles I. and his bride after their wedding at
Canterbury, or that which shouted for the Merry Monarch, when Charles
II. rode down the High Street in 1660, after his landing at Dover. It
was his brother, unfortunate and unhappy, who came in without any
herald and stole away in the night of December 19, 1688, having
foregone a throne and lost a kingdom.
All these, sieges or pageants, however, what are they but a tale that
is told. There remains, in some sort at least, the Cathedral. This is
the oldest thing in Rochester and the most lasting. It was founded in
the end of the sixth century as we have seen, and its first Bishop
was that St Justus who had come with St Augustine from the monastery
of St Andrew on the Coelian Hill in Rome, the monastery we now know
by the name of the man who sent them, St Gregory the Great. St
Augustine and St Justus were not, however, at first received with
enthusiasm in Rochester. Indeed, it is said that fish tails were hung
to their habits as they went through the city and that in consequence
the people of the diocese of Rochester were ever after born with
tails, and were thus known as caudati or caudiferi, while upon the
Continent this beastly appellation was even till our fathers' time
applied to all English people.
What the Cathedral suffered in the centuries between its foundation
and the Norman Conquest, we shall never rightly know. That it was
ravaged, burnt and sacked by the Danes is certain and it seems even at
the time of the Norman Conquest to have scarcely recovered itself.
Indeed, Pepys, who was in Rochester in 1661, tells us that he found
the western doors of the church still "covered with the skins of
Danes." Nor did it fare much better when Odo of Bayeaux was lord. But
when Gundulph, the associate of the good and great Lanfranc, became
bishop in 1077, the Cathedral was almost entirely re-established and
the Priory which served it rebuilt. Gundulph, however, would have
nothing to do with the seculars who had hitherto served the great
church. He established Benedictine monks in their place and Ernulph,
Prior of Canterbury, where Lanfranc had done the same, succeeded him.
Of the Saxon church which St Justus built, he and his successors,
nothing remains but the foundations discovered in 1888. This church,
which was very small, about forty-two feet long by twenty-eight feet
in breadth, was furnished with an apse, but had neither aisles nor
transepts.
Of the first Norman church which Bishop Gundulph built, very little
remains, perhaps a part of the crypt, the nave, and the great fortress
tower he built on the north side of the church. This church was a very
curious piece of Norman building. It was a long aisled church, that
was unbroken from end to end, but the choir-proper was shut off from
its aisles by walls of stone as at St Albans. There were no transepts
or central tower, but two porches, one on the north and the other on
the south, and in the angle formed by them with the choir, Gundulph
built towers, one a belfry, the other a fortress detached from the
church. To the south of the nave stood the first monastery and it is
there that we may still see fragments, five arches in all, of
Gundulph's nave.
It was Ernulph who built the second monastery to replace the probably
wooden buildings of the first, to the south of the choir of which
parts remain to us. This done, he turned to the Cathedral and began
entirely to rebuild it, recase it with Caen stone or to remodel what
he left. It is therefore twelfth century Norman work we see at
Rochester. All this work, however, some of it not twenty-five years
old, was damaged in 1179 by fire, and once more the monks began to
rebuild their church. They seem to have begun on the north aisle of
the choir, and then to have set to work on the south aisle. Thence
they proceeded to rebuild the eastern end of the church, erecting a
transept beyond the old choir, finishing their new sanctuary in 1227.
The work did not stop there, however; by 1245 the north-west transept
was finished, and by 1280 the south-west and the two eastern bays of
the nave. It is astonishing to find the monastery able to support such
immense and extravagant operations, but we know that in 1201 the monks
had successfully established a new shrine in their church, the shrine
of St William. This popular sanctuary was the tomb of a Scotch pilgrim
from Perth who had been a baker. "In charity he was so abundant that
he gave to the poor the tenth loaf of his workmanship; in zeal so
fervent that in vow he promised and in deed attempted, to visit the
places where Christ was conversant on earth; in which journey he made
Rochester his way, where, after he had rested two or three days, he
departed towards Canterbury. But ere he had gone far from the city,
his servant--a foundling who had been brought up by him out of
charity--led him of purpose out of the highway and spoiled him both of
his money and his life. The servant escaped, but his master, because
he died in so holy a purpose of mind, was by the monks conveyed to St
Andrews and laid in the choir. And soon he wrought miracles
plentifully."
The enormous fame of St William and the popularity of his shrine, not
only with those who were on the way to Canterbury, but with such as
were merely travellers to the coast, lasted for nearly a hundred
years, enriching the monks of Rochester. By the end of the thirteenth
century, however, this shrine of St William had been utterly eclipsed
by the fame of the shrine of St Thomas. For this reason, then, the
monks of Rochester were happily never able to rebuild their nave,
which remains a Norman work of the twelfth century.
In the fourteenth century the central tower was at last completed, but
it ceased to exist in 1749. Indeed, the resources of Rochester seem to
have been small after the third quarter of the thirteenth century.
They had no Lady Chapel and when one was provided it was contrived
out of the south-west transept. Later the north aisle of the choir,
always dark on account of Gundulph's tower, was heightened and vaulted
and lighted with windows. Later still, similar Perpendicular windows
were placed in the old nave, the Norman clerestory was destroyed and a
new one built, together with a new wooden roof and the great western
window was inserted. In 1830 Cottingham, and in 1871 Scott, worked
their wills upon the place under the plea of restoration. Little has
escaped their attention, neither the beautiful Decorated tomb of
Bishop Walter de Merton (1278) nor that of Bishop John de Sheppey
(1360). The best thing left to us in the Cathedral and that which
gives it its character is the great western doorway with its sombre
Norman carving of the earlier part of the twelfth century. The nave is
also beautiful and the crypt is undoubtedly one of the most
interesting monuments left in England. Of the Priory practically
nothing remains but a few fragments.
[Illustration: ROCHESTER]
Doubtless Chaucer and his company did not leave the great church
unvisited nor fail to look curiously, nor perhaps to pray, at the
shrine of St William, for they, too, were travellers and pilgrims. But
the spectacle in the little city which it might seem most filled their
imagination, as it does ours, was not the Cathedral at all, but the
great Keep which stands above it, frowning across the busy Medway.
Nothing more imposing of its kind than this great Norman Castle remains
in England. Having a base of seventy feet square, and consisting of
walls twelve feet thick and one hundred and twenty feet high, it still
seems what in fact it was, almost impregnable by any arms but those of
the modern world. Its great weakness lay always in the matter of
provision, but it was perfectly supplied with water, by means of a well
sixty feet under ground, in which stood always ten feet of water. From
this well a stone pipe or tunnel, two feet nine inches in diameter, led
up to the very roof, access to it being given on each of the four
floors into which the keep was divided within. These apartments one
and all were divided from east to west by walls five feet thick, so
that on each floor there were two chambers forty-six feet long by
about twenty feet in breadth. That this enormous keep is the work of
Gundulph and contemporary with the Tower of London, there seems to be
no reason to doubt. Of the great part it played in English history I
have already spoken. But even in ruin it impresses one as few things
left to us nowadays, when everything we make is so monstrous in
comparison with the work of our fathers, are able to do. To stand
there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look
out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with
factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway and
the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards down the stream, is to
receive an impression of the fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our
civilisation such as few other places in South England would be able
to give us suddenly between two heart beats.
Such a vision of feverish and yet noble energy and endeavour, wholly
material if you will, and seemingly unaware of any world or life but
this, is altogether alien from Rochester itself, where an old
fashioned leisure, an air almost Georgian lingers yet. Indeed, one
expects to meet Mr Pickwick in the High Street or at least Charles
Dickens come in from Gadshill.
The only mood that has quite passed from Rochester, and that is yet
more securely crystallised there in the Cathedral and the Castle than
any other, is that of the Middle Age. You will not find it in any of
the churches now, nor in any inn that is left to us, nor in the houses
often both interesting and charming. All day long Rochester expects
the coach and not the pilgrims; but at night, under a windy sky, if
you wander up the hill and linger about the Cathedral in the shadow of
the great Keep while the moon reels steeply up the heavens, you may
in early Spring at any rate return for a little to that age which
built such things as these, so that they have outlasted everything
that has followed them and put it under their feet. And yet their
heart was set upon no such victory, but in the heavens. It was the
great and self-forgetting act of an obscure baker, but a saint of
God, that built the mighty half abandoned church we see at Rochester,
nor was he for sure altogether forgotten when all England went by to
kneel and to pray beside Becket's shrine at Canterbury, raised there
in a heavenly cause, which must prevail in the end, though neither
Rochester nor Canterbury to-day might seem to bear out any such
certainty.
The modern pilgrim, knowing what he knows, will be fain to remember at
Rochester, on his way to St Thomas, one who died in the same cause,
but as it might seem, disastrously without success.
For the liberty of the Church St Thomas died, that neither the king
nor any civil power should control, or govern that which Christ had
founded long ago upon the rock of Peter. In that same cause died
Blessed John Fisher, the last Catholic Bishop of Rochester, in the year
1535. He was almost the first of Henry's victims, and he was beheaded,
as was Blessed Thomas More, for refusing to recognise the royal
supremacy. It was treason to deny the king's right to the title of
Supreme Governor of the Church in England; and though it be still
treason to deny it, a host to-day will gladly stand beside St Thomas
Becket and Blessed John Fisher of Rochester.
This quarrel need never have arisen had not Henry, perjured and
adulterous, desired to make the Pope his accomplice in putting away
his lawful wife in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn. Because the
Pope refused to aid him in this crime Henry destroyed the Catholic
Church in England, and he and his successors founded the so-called
Church of England, with himself as first Supreme Governor.
Among those who had most strenuously opposed the claim for divorce was
Blessed John Fisher of Rochester, and with equally unflinching
firmness he opposed the doctrine of the royal supremacy. He asserted
that "The acceptance of such a principle would cause the clergy of
England to be hissed out of the society of God's Holy Catholic
Church." He was right, his prophecy has come true, and he nearly won.
His opposition so far prevailed that a saving clause was added to the
oath of convocation, "so far as the law of God allows." This Henry
refused. The King persecuted him, Anne Boleyn tried to poison him, all
England was putrid with lies concerning him contrived by those masters
of lies, the Tudors; but the imperial ambassador asserted that the
Bishop of Rochester was "the paragon of Christian prelates both for
learning and holiness," and the Pope made him Cardinal with the title
of San Vitalis. Henry, in November 1534, with the passing of the Act
of Supremacy, attainted him of treason and declared the see of
Rochester vacant. But Blessed John Fisher said, as St Thomas had said,
"The King our Sovereign is not supreme head on earth of the Church in
England." For this he was condemned to die a traitor's death; that is,
to be hanged, disembowelled, and quartered at Tyburn in order that
Henry might enjoy his Kentish mistress in peace, and found a new
Church eager to acknowledge his adultery as lawful and to enjoy the
spoil of God.
That death, once shameful but soon to be rendered glorious by the
Carthusians, was denied to Fisher. His sentence was commuted to that
of death by beheading upon Tower Hill, where he suffered upon June
22, 1535. His head was exposed on London Bridge; his body, interred
without ceremony, now lies in the Tower, where a little later that of
Blessed Thomas More was laid beside it--two countrymen of St Thomas
Becket martyred in the same cause.
They might seem to have died in vain; their cause, as old as
Christendom, might seem to have been long since defeated. Not so: this
battle truly is decided, but in their favour, and my little son may
live to see the glory of their victory. For he shall know and believe
in his heart that his love and hope are set upon a country and a city
founded in the heavens of which David sang, to which St John looked
forth from Patmos, and of which these our Saints have told us.