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,
When ended was the lyf of seint Cecyle,
Er we had riden fully fyve myle,
At Boghton under Blee us gan atake
A man, that clothed was in clothes blake,
And undernethe he hadde a whyt surplys....
It semed he had priked myles three.
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.
Wite ye nat wher ther stant a litel town
Which that y-cleped is Bop-up-and-down
Under the Blee in Caunterbury weye?
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.
Wayfaring Tree! What ancient claim
Hast thou to that right pleasant name?
Was it that some faint pilgrim came
Unhopedly to thee
In the brown desert's weary way
'Midst thirst and toils consuming sway,
And there, as 'neath thy shade he lay,
Blessed the Wayfaring Tree?
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:
Judas he japed
With Jewish siller
And sithen on an elder tree
Hanged himsel.
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.
Felix locus, felix ecclesia
In qua Thomae vivit memoria:
Felix terra quae dedit praesulem
Felix ilia quae fovit exsulem.
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.