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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of England of My Heart--Spring, by Edward Hutton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: England of My Heart--Spring
+
+Author: Edward Hutton
+
+Release Date: November 18, 2003 [EBook #10120]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLAND OF MY HEART--SPRING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Carol David and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PILGRIMS' ROAD
+
+ROCHESTER TO FAVERSHAM
+
+
+The old road leaves Rochester to pass through Chatham, and is by no
+means delightful until it has left what Camden called "the best
+appointed arsenal the world ever saw." Chatham, indeed, is little else
+but a huge dockyard and a long and dirty street, once the Pilgrim's
+Way. There is, however, very little to detain us; only the Chapel of
+St Bartholomew to the south of the High Street is worth a visit for
+Bishop Gundulph's sake, for he founded it. Even here, however, only
+the eastern end is ancient. The parish church of Our Lady was for the
+most part rebuilt in 1788, but it still keeps a good Norman door to
+the south of the nave. It was here that Our Lady had in Chaucer's day
+a very famous shrine concerning which the following rather gruesome
+legend is told. The body of a man, no doubt a criminal or suicide,
+having been cast upon the beach in this parish, was buried here in
+the churchyard. Our Lady of Chatham, however, was offended thereby,
+and by night went Herself to the house of the clerk and awakened him.
+And when he would all trembling know wherefor She was come. She
+answered that near to Her shrine an unshriven and sinful person had
+been laid, which thing offended Her, for he did naught but grin in
+ghastly fashion. Therefore unless he were removed She Herself must
+withdraw from that place. The Clerk arose hurriedly we may be sure,
+and, going with Our Lady along towards the church, it happened that
+She grew weary and rested in a bush or tree by the wayside, and ever
+after this bush was green all the winter through. But the Clerk, going
+on, dug up the body and flung it back into the water from which it
+had so lately been drawn.
+
+Now, as to this story, all I have to say of it is that I do not
+believe a word of it. Not because I am blinded by any sentimentalism
+of to-day, which, as in a child's story, brings all right for everyone
+in the end; but for this very cogent reason that of all created beings
+Our Lady is the most merciful, loving and tender--Refugium
+Peccatorum.
+
+Also I know a better story. For it is said that one day Our Lord was
+walking with Sampietro in Paradise, as the Padrone may do with his
+Fattore, when after a while He said, not as complaining exactly but
+as stating a fact, "Sampietro, this place is going down!"
+
+Here Sampietro, who is always impetuous and knew very well what He
+meant, dared to interrupt, "Il Santissimo can't blame me," said he
+huffily. "Il Santissimo does not suppose they all come in by the gate?
+_Che Che!_"
+
+"Not come in by the gate, Sampietro. What do you mean?" said Our Lord.
+"If Il Santissimo will but step this way, round by these bushes," said
+Sampietro, "He shall see." And there sure enough He saw; for there was
+Our Lady drawing us all up helter-skelter, pell-mell, willy-nilly into
+Heaven in a great bucket, to our great gain and undeserved good. O
+clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
+
+The road between Chatham and Sittingbourne might seem to be
+unquestionably that by which the pilgrims rode, and as certainly the
+Roman highway. It is, however, rather barren of mediaeval interest,
+little being left to us older than the change of religion. At Rainham
+we have a church, however, dedicated in honour of St Margaret, parts
+of which date from the thirteenth century, though in the main it is a
+Perpendicular building. Within are two ornaments of the late
+seventeenth century, and two brasses, one to William Bloor, who died
+in 1529, and the other to John Norden, who died in 1580, and to his
+four wives. As for William Bloor, there is a local story of some
+relation of his, Christopher Bloor by name, and of a nightly journey
+on a coach driven by a headless coachman beside whom sits a headless
+footman, and all drawn by headless horses, Christopher himself sitting
+within, his head in his hands. So much I heard, but I could not find
+out what it portended or referred to.
+
+But it is not till we come into Newington that we find any sign or
+memory of St Thomas or the Pilgrimage. This village, however, became
+famous as a station for the pilgrims, because on his last journey from
+London to Canterbury, the great Archbishop here administered the rite
+of Confirmation. A cross was erected to commemorate this event, and
+there the pilgrims knelt to pray. But Newington in St Thomas's day was
+better known on account of a great scandal involving the name of the
+convent there. This convent was held of the king, of his manor of
+Middleton. We read that divers of the nuns, "being warped with a
+malicious desire of revenge, took advantage of the night and strangled
+the lady abbess, who was the object of their fury and passionate
+animosities, in her bed; and after, to conceal so execrable an
+assassination, threw her body into a pit, which afterwards contracted
+the traditional appellation of Nun-pit." [Footnote: Philipotts,
+"Villare Cantianum," quoted by Littlehales, _op. cit._ p. 27.] Now
+whether this tale be true or an invention to explain the queer name
+"Nun-pit" we shall never know, but as it happens we do know that the
+nuns were removed to the Isle of Sheppey and that St Thomas persuaded
+King Henry II. to establish at Newington a small house of seven
+secular canons to whom was given the whole manor. But curiously
+enough, one of these canons was presently found murdered at the hands
+of four of his brethren. Exactly where this convent was situated
+would seem to be doubtful. What evidence there is points to Nunfield
+Farm at Chesley, about a mile to the south of the high road.
+
+Newington itself in its cherry-orchards is a pretty place enough to-
+day, with an interesting, if restored, church of Our Lady in part of
+the thirteenth, but mainly of the fourteenth century. It is a fine
+building with charming carved details and at least four brasses, one of
+the end of the fifteenth century (1488) to William Monde, two of the
+sixteenth century (1510 and 1581) and one of the year 1600. There is
+nothing, however, in the place to delay anyone for long, and the
+modern pilgrim will soon find himself once more on the great road.
+
+On coming out of Newington such an one will find himself in about a
+mile at Key Street, where is the Fourwent Way, in other words the
+cross roads, where the highway from the Isle of Sheppey to Maidstone
+crosses the Pilgrims Way. Here of old stood a chapel of St
+Christopher or another, at which the pilgrims prayed, and remembering
+this, I too, at the cross roads, though there was no chapel, prayed in
+the words of the prayer which begins:
+
+         St Christopher who bore Our Lord
+         Across the flood--O precious Load....
+
+
+So I prayed, "er I come to Sidingborne," as Chaucer says.
+
+The author of "Sittingbourne in the Middle Ages" tells us that,
+"Mediaeval Sittingbourne consisted of three distinct portions. The
+chief centre of population was near the church, but there was an
+important little hamlet called Schamel at the western extremity of the
+parish on the London Road ... as any traveller from London approached
+Sittingbourne in the Middle Ages, the first thing to attract his
+attention was a chapel and hermitage standing on the south side of the
+road, about three parts of the way up that little hill which rises
+from Waterlanehead towards the east; this was Schamel Hermitage and
+the Chapel of St Thomas Becket, to which were attached houses for the
+shelter of pilgrims and travellers. A small Inn called "The
+Volunteers" now stands upon or close to the site of this ancient
+chapel and this hermitage." The chapel and hermitage it seems were
+first built at Schamel in the time of King John, when they were
+occupied by a priest named Samuel. He said Mass daily in the chapel
+and gave such accommodation as he had to wayfarers, by whose alms he
+lived. After his death the chapel fell into disrepair, but in the time
+of Henry III. it was rebuilt on a larger scale. A hermit named
+Silvester, of the "Order of St Austin," was appointed to the house
+which had now attached to it four lodgings for pilgrims on the road to
+Canterbury. But on Silvester's death it was realised that the chapel
+interfered so much with the parish church that before the end of the
+thirteenth century it was suppressed. It re-arose, and in Chaucer's
+day would seem to have been in a flourishing condition; at any rate it
+continued till the spoliation.
+
+If indeed Chaucer and his pilgrims slept in Sittingbourne, as one may
+well believe, it is probable that they slept either at this chapel at
+Schamel or at the Lion Inn in the town. This Inn was certainly in
+existence in his time, and there in 1415 King Henry V. was entertained
+on his return from Agincourt by the Squire of Milton. There, too, in
+all likelihood, Cardinal Wolsey rested in the autumn of 1514, and
+there Henry VIII., who spoiled the face of England and changed her
+heart, "paied the wife of the Lyon in Sittingbourne by way of rewarde
+iiiis. viiid." for the accommodation given. This famous Inn stands in
+the centre of the town, the road passing to the south of it. Unhappily
+the church is less interesting, having been almost entirely rebuilt in
+1762; but close by it were some old houses which apparently once
+formed part of another old Inn called the White Hart. Certainly much
+of the town must have been devoted to the entertainment of travellers.
+
+From Sittingbourne I wandered out to Borden, lovely in itself and in
+its situation upon the rising ground under the North Downs. It
+possesses a very fine church with a low Norman tower and western door
+of the same date. Within is a very nobly carved Norman arch under the
+belfry.
+
+If Schamel was, as it were, the western part of Sittingbourne with its
+chapel and hermitage, Swanstree was the eastern part, and it, too, had
+its chapel of St Cross and its hospital of St Leonard. There is,
+however, this difference, that, whereas the priest and people of
+Sittingbourne did all they could to suppress the chapel and hermitage
+of Schamel, they on the contrary did all they could to encourage the
+chapel and hospital of Swanstree. Why? Because pilgrims coming from
+London or the north with full pockets towards Canterbury, would reach
+Schamel _before_ passing through Sittingbourne, but Swanstree only
+_after_ passing through the town!
+
+Following the Pilgrim's Road out of Sittingbourne one soon comes to
+Bapchild, where at the exit from the village on the north side of the
+road of old stood an oratory, and a Leper's Hospital, of which nothing
+seems really to be known save that it was founded about the year 1200.
+According to Canon Scott-Robertson, it was dedicated in honour of St
+James, which is a curious dedication for a Leper House, but common
+enough in a Hospital for pilgrims. Oratory and Hospital have alike
+disappeared, but close by the place where they stood there still
+remains St Thomas's Well, now known as Spring Head or Spring.
+
+So I went on through Radfield, where of old was a wayside chapel, and
+Green Street to the Inn at Ospringe, passing, half a mile away to the
+north, Stone Farm, and, nearer the road, the ruins of Stone Chapel,
+another of those little wayside oratories still so common in Italy
+and France but which nowadays in England we lack altogether.
+
+Ospringe itself is an interesting place. To begin with, the very
+ancient inn by the roadside, together with the equally old house
+opposite were once, according to Hasted, the historian of Kent, a
+Hospital founded by Henry II., for the benefit especially of pilgrims.
+This hospital, he tells us, "was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and
+was under the management of a master, three brethren and two clerks
+existed till the time of Edward IV." Henry VIII., having seized by
+force all such property as this in England, gave this Hospital to St
+John's College in Cambridge, which still owns it to the loss of us poor
+travellers. No doubt what money comes to the college from this poor
+place goes to the support and bolstering up of the Great Tudor Myth
+upon the general acceptance of which most of the vested interests in
+England largely depend. But let us poor men lift up our hearts. The
+Great Tudor Myth is passing, and every day it is becoming more evident
+that it can be supported very little longer. Let us determine,
+however, that we will not be taken in again, and under the pretence of
+a reformation of religion fix upon our necks a new political despotism
+worse than the Whig and Protestant aristocracy that the sixteenth
+century brought into being, to the irreparable damage of the Crown
+and the unspeakable loss of us the commonalty. May St Thomas avert an
+evil only too likely to befall us. As for Ospringe, however, it was
+after all in some sort royal property, the Crown having anciently a
+Camera Regis there for the King's use when he was on his way to
+Canterbury or to France.
+
+At Ospringe I left the great road to visit Davington and to sleep at
+Faversham. The long spring day was already drawing in when I came into
+Davington, as delightful and charming a little place as is to be found
+anywhere along the great road. Upon a hill-top there perhaps the
+Romans had a temple or a villa, at any rate they called the place
+Durolevum, and so it stands in the Antonine _Itinerary_. There is
+evidence, too, that the site was not abandoned when with the failure
+of their administration and the final departure of the Legions, there
+went down the long roads, our youth and hope. Where the present church
+stands, in part a Norman building, there was probably a Saxon Chapel.
+Then in 1153 came Fulke de Newenham and founded here and built a
+Benedictine nunnery in honour of St Mary Magdalen. That the house was
+never richly endowed nor large at all, we may know from that name it
+had--the house of the poor nuns of Davington. We know, however, very
+little about them or it, but its poverty did not save it of course at
+the dissolution. The Priory was then turned into a manor house, and
+this in part remains so that we find there a part of the cloisters of
+the time of Edward I., and other remains of Edward III.'s time. Then
+in Elizabeth's day the house seems to have been practically rebuilt.
+As for the little church, it owes all it is to-day to its late owner
+and historian, Mr Willement, and though it is not in itself of very
+great interest it serves as a memorial of his enthusiasm and love.
+
+Davington is less than a mile out of the town of Faversham, and
+therefore it was not quite dark when I made my way into that famous
+place. Faversham must always have been an important place from its
+position with regard to the great road. We have seen how the source
+of the greatness of Rochester lay in its position upon the Watling
+Street where that great highway crossed the Medway. Faversham has half
+Rochester's fortune, for it stands where the road touches an arm or
+creek of the Swale, that important navigable waterway, an arm of the
+sea which separates Sheppey from the mainland.
+
+The Swale there served the road and made of Faversham a port, but the
+road did not cross it and therefore the Swale, unlike the Medway, was
+never an obstacle or a defence. Thus Faversham never became a great
+fortress like Rochester; it was a port, and as it happened a Royal
+Villa, where so long ago as 930 Athelstan held his witan. Its fate,
+however, after the Conquest, was to be more glorious. In 1147 Stephen
+and his wife, Matilda, founded an abbey of Benedictine monks here at
+Faversham in honour of Our Lord, and known as St Saviours, upon land
+she had obtained from William of Ypres, Stephen's favourite captain,
+in exchange for her manor of Littlechurch in this county. At the end
+of April 1152 she fell sick at Hedingham Castle in Essex, and dying
+there three days later, was buried in the abbey church at Faversham.
+In August of the following year her eldest son, Eustace, was laid
+beside her, and in 1154 Stephen, the King, was also buried here. The
+abbey was, as I have said, dedicated to Our Saviour, and this because
+it possessed a famous relic of the True Cross which had been the gift
+of Eustace of Boulogne; the abbey was thus founded "In worship of the
+Croys," and one might have expected some such dedication as "Holy
+Cross." As founder, the King, for he and his Queen had been equally
+concerned in the foundation, claimed after the death of the abbot
+certain toll such as the abbot's ring, drinking cup, horse and hound.
+The abbot was a very great noble, held his house "in chief" and sat in
+Parliament. At the Suppression Henry VIII. granted the place to Sir
+Thomas Cheynay. Now mark the almost inevitable end. The Cheynays were
+living on Church property obtained by theft; at the least they were
+receivers of stolen goods. Do you think they could endure? They
+presently sold to a certain Thomas Arden, sometime Mayor of
+Faversham. Upon Sunday, 15 February 1551, this man was foully murdered
+in the abbey house he called his own, by a certain Thomas Mosby, a
+London tailor, the lover of Alice Arden, Thomas Arden's wife. This
+tragic affair so touched the imagination of the time that not only
+did Holinshed relate it in detail, but some unknown writer who, by not
+a few, has been taken for Shakespeare himself, used the story as the
+plot for a play. Arden of Faversham, according to the dramatist, was a
+noble character, modest, forgiving, and affectionate. His wife Alecia
+in her sleep by chance reveals to him her adulterous love for Mosby;
+but Arden forgives her on her promising never again to see her
+seducer. From that moment she plots with her lover to murder her
+husband, and succeeds at last, after many failures, by killing him in
+the abbey house by the hands of two hired assassins, while he is
+playing a game of draughts with Mosby. All concerned in the affair
+were brought to justice, but the abbey of Faversham was no longer
+coveted as a place of abode.
+
+Almost every stone has disappeared of the abbey church in which lay
+Stephen, his Queen, and their son. It stood on the northern side of
+the town, where indeed the Abbey Farm still remains. It is to the
+parish church of Our Lady of Charity that we must turn for any memory
+of the conventual house where many a pilgrim must often have knelt to
+venerate the relic of the Holy Cross.
+
+The great church which remains to us is said to have been used by the
+monks, and if not part of the abbey itself which would seem to have
+stood at some distance from it, more than one thing that remains in it
+would seem to endorse such a theory. To begin with, the church is
+very spacious, and cruciform in plan, though the tower is at the west
+end. This, however, is a very ugly affair, dating from 1797. In the
+main the great church, which has been tampered with at very various
+times, if not rebuilt, must have been Early English in style. As we
+see it we have a building divided into three aisles, in nave, chancel
+and transepts. The nave as it is at present may be neglected, but in
+the north transept we have a curious hagioscope or other opening in
+the shape of a cross and there used to be some remains of paintings;
+the Nativity, the Virgin and Child, the Gloria in Excelsis, the
+Crucifixion and the holy women at the Sepulchre of Our Lord. In the
+chancel were other remains of paintings. There still remain the very
+noble stalls which seem to assure us of the monastic use of the
+church, and a fine altar tomb of the fifteenth century; this on the
+north side. On the south are very fine sedilia and piscina. Close by
+is a brass to William Thanbury, the vicar here, dating from 1448. The
+inscription considering the use of the church to-day, is pathetic; for
+there we read CREDO IN SANCT. ECCLES. CATH., a pleasing misreading of
+the true text which every one, though for different reasons, will
+rejoice to read.
+
+We are told by local tradition or gossip that the tomb at the end of
+the south aisle is that of King Stephen. This, however, could only be
+true if this were indeed the church of the monastery. The tomb is
+Decorated in style and has a canopy, but is without inscription.
+
+Our Lady of Charity was, however, chiefly famous for its chapel of St
+Thomas of Canterbury on the north side of the chancel, and for its
+altars of SS. Crispin and Crispian and of St Erasmus. Many pilgrims
+turned aside from the road to visit Faversham which was not a station
+on the pilgrimage, for the sake of these shrines and altars and
+especially to pray in the chapel of St Thomas.
+
+It is said, indeed, that "no one died who had anything to leave
+without giving something to St Erasmus light." As for SS. Crispin and
+Crispian they were the patrons of the town and leapt into great fame
+after the victory of Agincourt upon their feast day, October 25, when
+the King had invoked them upon the field.
+
+         This day is called the feast of Crispian;
+         He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
+         Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named,
+         And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
+
+         And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by
+         From this day to the ending of the world,
+         But we on it shall be remembered.
+
+
+The two saints, Crispin and Crispian, are not less famous in France
+than in England. They were indeed Rome's missionaries in Gaul about
+the middle of the third century. They seem to have settled at
+Soissons, where now a great church stands in their honour. There they
+practiced the craft of cobblers and of all cobblers they are the
+patrons. After some years the Emperor Maximian Hercules coming into
+Gaul, a complaint concerning them was brought to him. They were tried
+by that most inhuman judge Rictius Varno, the Governor, whom,
+however, they contrived to escape by fleeing to England and to
+Faversham, where, as some say they lived, but as others assert they
+were shipwrecked. For us at any rate their names are secure from
+oblivion, not so much by reason of the famous victory won upon their
+day as because Shakespeare has gloriously recorded their names with
+those familiar in our mouths as household words:
+
+        Harry the King, Bedford, and Exeter,
+        Warwick, and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+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.
+
+
+
+ CHAPTER VI
+
+ THE CITY OF ST THOMAS
+
+
+When a man, alone or in a company, entered Canterbury at last by the
+long road from London, in the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth
+century, he came into a city as famous as Jerusalem, as lovely as
+anything even in England, and as certainly alive and in possession of a
+soul as he was himself.
+
+When a man comes into Canterbury to-day he comes into a dead city.
+
+I say Canterbury is dead, for when the soul has departed from the body,
+that is death. Canterbury has lost its soul.
+
+Go into the Cathedral, it is like a tomb, but a tomb that has been
+rifled, a whited sepulchre so void and cold that even the last trump
+will make there no stir. It was once the altar, the shrine, and as it
+were the mother of England, one of the tremendous places of Europe into
+which every year flocked thousands upon thousands upon thousands of
+men. The altar is thrown down, the shrine is gone and forgotten, in all
+that vast church the martyred Saint who made it what it was is not so
+much as remembered even in an inscription or a stone; and the
+enthusiasm and devotion of centuries have given place to a silence so
+icy that nothing can break it. The place is dead.
+
+I remember very well the first time I came to Canterbury. I was a boy,
+and full of enthusiasm for St Thomas, I would have knelt where he
+fell, I would have prayed, yes with all my fathers, there where he was
+laid at last on high above the altar. But there was nothing. I was
+shown, as is the custom, all that the four centuries of ice have
+preserved of the work of my forefathers; the glorious tombs of King
+and Bishop, the storied glass of the thirteenth century, unique in
+England, the litter and the footsteps of thirteen hundred years. I was
+led up past the choir into that lofty and once famous place where for
+centuries the greatest and holiest shrine in England stood. All about
+were still grouped the tombs of Princes; Edward, the Black Prince, the
+hero of Crecy, Henry IV., the usurper, Cardinal Chatillon; but of the
+shrine itself, of the body it held up to love and honour and worship
+there was nothing, no word even, no sign at all to tell that ever such
+a thing had been, only an emptiness and a space and a silence that
+could be felt.
+
+Later I was led down into that north-west transept, once known as the
+Martyrdom, where St Thomas laid down his life; and left alone there, I
+remember I tried in all that dumbness and silence to recollect myself,
+to pray, at least to recall, something of that great sacrifice which
+had so moved Christendom that for centuries men flocked here to
+worship--where now no man kneels any more for ever.
+
+I remember very well how it came to me in that tingling and icy silence
+that St Thomas died for the liberty of the Church, that here in England
+she might not become the king's chattel or anyway at all the creature
+of the civil power. I was too young to smile when I remembered that in
+the very place where St Thomas laid down his life in that cause, there
+sits to-day in his usurped place one who eagerly acknowledges the king
+as the "Supreme Governor of the Church within these realms." Yet in my
+heart I heard again those tremendous words, "Were all the swords of
+England hanging over my head you could not terrify me from my obedience
+to God and my Lord the Pope." They who slew him fled away, and their
+title, shouted in the winter darkness that filled the church, was heard
+above the thunder and has echoed down the ages since: Reaux! Reaux!
+King's men! King's men! Is it not they who now sit in Becket's place?
+
+But to-day I am content with a judgment less bitter and less logical.
+Who may know what is in the heart of God? Perhaps after all, after this
+age of ice, Canterbury will rise again and my little son even may hear
+them singing in the streets, gay once more and alive with endless
+processions that noble old song:
+
+         Laureata novo Thoma,
+         Sicut suo Petro Roma,
+            Gaude Cantuaria!
+
+
+[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM CHRISTCHURCH GATE]
+
+For though St Thomas be forgot in Canterbury, he is on high and
+valiant, and one day maybe he will return from exile as before, to
+accomplish wonderful things.
+
+And indeed dead as she is and silent, Canterbury is worthy of
+resurrection if only because she is as it were a part of him and a
+part, too, of our origins, the well, though not the source from which
+the Faith was given us. For some thirteen hundred years when men have
+spoken of Canterbury, they have had in mind the metropolitan church
+of England, the great cathedral which still stands so finely there in
+the rather gloomy close behind Christ Church gate, rightly upon the
+foundations of its predecessors, Roman, Saxon, and Norman buildings.
+Ever since there was a civilisation in England, there has been a
+church in this place; it is our duty, then, as well as our pleasure to
+approach it to-day with reverence.
+
+Canterbury began as we began in the swamps and the forests, a little
+lake village in the marshes of the Stour, holding the lowest ford, not
+beyond the influence of the sea nor out of reach of fresh water. When
+great Rome broke into England lost in mist, here certainly she
+established a city that was as it were the focus of all the ports of
+the Straits whence most easily a man might come into England from the
+continent. Canterbury grew because she was almost equally near to the
+ports we know as Lympne, Dover, Richborough and Reculvers, so that a
+man setting out from the continent and doubtful in which port he would
+land, wholly at the mercy of wind and tide as he was, would name
+Canterbury to his correspondent in England as a place of meeting. Thus
+Canterbury increased. There in the Roman times doubtless a church
+arose which, doubtless, too, perished in the Diocletian persecution.
+That it re-arose we know, for Venerable Bede describes it as still
+existing when, nearly two hundred years after the departure of the
+Roman legions, St Augustine came into England, sent by St Gregory to
+make us Christians. He came, as we know, first into Kent to find
+Canterbury the royal capital of King Ethelbert, and when, says Bede,
+"an episcopal see had been given to Augustine in the king's own city
+he _regained possession (re_cuperavit) with the king's help, _of a
+church there which he was informed had been built in the city long
+before by Roman believers_. This he consecrated in the name of the
+Holy Saviour Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, and fixed there a home
+for himself and all his successors." [Footnote: Bede, _Hist. Eccl._, I.
+xxviii.] This church, rudely repaired, added to and rebuilt, stood
+until Lanfranc's day, when it was pulled down and destroyed to make
+way for the great Norman building out of which the church we have has
+grown.
+
+The little church which Lanfranc destroyed and which had seen so many
+vicissitudes, was probably a work of the end of the fourth century, at
+any rate in its foundations. Eadmer indeed who tells us all we know of
+it says that it was built on the plan of St Peter's in Rome. "This
+was that very church," he writes, "which had been built by Romans as
+Bede witnesses in his history, and which was duly arranged in some
+parts in imitation of the church of the blessed Prince of the Apostles,
+Peter, in which his holy relics are exalted by the veneration of the
+whole world." We shall never know much more than Eadmer tells us, for
+if the foundations still exist they lie within the present church. It
+is recorded, however, that in the time of St Elphege the church was
+badly damaged by the Danes, the archbishop himself being martyred at
+Greenwich. No doubt as often before, the church was patched up, only to
+perish by fire in 1067, the year after the Battle of Hastings.
+
+When Lanfranc then entered Canterbury, he found his Cathedral a mere
+ruin, but with his usual energy, though already a man of sixty-five, he
+set to work to re-establish not only his Cathedral but also the
+monastery attached to it. He did this on a great scale, providing
+accommodation for three times the number of monks that had served the
+Cathedral in the decadent days of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was
+done he first "destroyed utterly" the Romano-Saxon church and then "set
+about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070-
+1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to
+perfection." That he worked in great haste and too quickly seems
+certain. In fact it must be confessed that Lanfranc's church in
+Canterbury was a more or less exact copy of his church of St Stephen at
+Caen, but, built much more quickly, was too mean for its purpose. It
+soon became necessary to rebuild the choir and sanctuary; the nave,
+however, was allowed to stand until the end of the fourteenth century;
+but even then its design so hampered the builders of the present nave,
+for it had been decided to preserve one of Lanfranc's western towers,
+that to this day the nave of Canterbury is too short, consisting of
+but eight bays.
+
+Lanfranc's choir was of but two bays and an apse. This was too
+obviously inadequate to be tolerated by the monks. In 1096 it was
+pulled down and a great apsidal choir of ten bays was built over a
+lofty crypt, with a tower on either side the apse and an eastern
+transept having four apsidal chapels in the eastern walls, two in the
+north arm and two in the south. All this was done in the time of St
+Anselm and finished in 1115, when Conrad was Prior of Christ Church.
+
+It was this church with Lanfranc's short Norman nave, western façade
+and towers, and Conrad's glorious great choir high up over the crypt,
+a choir broader than the nave and longer too, and with two transepts,
+the western of Lanfranc's time, the eastern of St Anselm's, that St
+Thomas knew and that saw his martyrdom in 1170.
+
+Materials for the life of St Thomas are so plentiful that his modern
+biographers are able to compose a life fuller perhaps in detail and
+fact than would be possible in the case of any other man of his time.
+But no account ever written of his martyrdom is at once so simple and
+so touching as that to be found in the Golden Legend. It was this
+account which the man of the Middle Age knew by heart, and which
+brought him in his thousands on pilgrimage to Canterbury, and
+therefore I give it here.
+
+"When the King of France had made accord between St Thomas and King
+Henry, the Archbishop," Voragine tells us, "came home to Canterbury,
+where he was received worshipfully, and sent for them that had
+trespassed against him, and by the authority of the Pope's Bull openly
+denounced them accursed, unto the time they came to amendment. And
+when they heard this they came to him and would have made him assoil
+them by force; and sent word over to the King how he had done, whereof
+the King was much wroth and said: If he had men in his land that loved
+him they would not suffer such a traitor in his land alive.
+
+"And forthwith four knights took their counsel together and thought
+they would do to the King a pleasure and emprised to slay St Thomas
+and suddenly departed and took their shipping toward England. And when
+the King knew of their departing he was sorry and sent after them,
+but they were in the sea and departed ere the messenger came,
+wherefore the King was heavy and sorry.
+
+"These be the names of the four knights: Sir Reginald Fitzurse, Sir
+Hugh de Morville, Sir William de Tracy and Sir Richard le Breton.
+
+"On Christmas Day St Thomas made a sermon at Canterbury in his own
+church and, weeping, prayed the people to pray for him, for he knew
+well his time was nigh, and there executed the sentence on them that
+were against the right of Holy Church. And that same day as the King
+sat at meat all the bread that he handled waxed anon mouldy and hoar
+that no man might eat of it, and the bread that they touched not was
+fair and good for to eat.
+
+"And these four knights aforesaid came to Canterbury on the Tuesday in
+Christmas week, about evensong time and came to St Thomas and said that
+the King commanded him to make amends for the wrongs he had done and
+also that he should assoil all them that he had accursed anon or else
+they should slay him. Then said Thomas: All that I ought to do by
+right, that will I with a good will do, but as to the sentence that is
+executed I may not undo, but that they will submit them to the
+correction of Holy Church, for it was done by our holy father the Pope
+and not by me. Then said Sir Reginald: But if thou assoil not the King
+and all other standing in the curse it shall cost thee thy life. And St
+Thomas said: Thou knowest well enough that the King and I were accorded
+on Mary Magdalene day and that this curse should go forth on them that
+had offended the Church.
+
+"Then one of the knights smote him as he kneeled before the altar, on
+the head. And one Sir Edward Grim, that was his crossier, put forth his
+arm with the cross to bear off the stroke, and the stroke smote the
+cross asunder and his arm almost off, wherefore he fled for fear and so
+did all the monks that were that time at Compline. And then each smote
+at him, that they smote off a great piece of the skull of his head,
+that his brain fell on the pavement. And so they slew and martyred him,
+and were so cruel that one of them brake the point of his sword against
+the pavement. And thus this holy and blessed archbishop St Thomas
+suffered death in his own church for the right of all Holy Church. And
+when he was dead they stirred his brain, and after went in to his
+chamber and took away his goods and his horse out of his stable, and
+took away his Bulls and writings and delivered them to Sir Robert
+Broke to bear into France to the King. And as they searched his
+chambers they found in a chest two shirts of hair made full of great
+knots, and then they said: Certainly he was a good man; and coming
+down into the churchyard they began to dread and fear that the ground
+would not have borne them, and were marvellously aghast, but they
+supposed that the earth would have swallowed them all quick. And then
+they knew that they had done amiss. And soon it was known all about,
+how that he was martyred, and anon after they took his holy body and
+unclothed him and found bishop's clothing above and the habit of a
+monk under. And next his flesh he wore hard hair, full of knots, which
+was his shirt, and his breech was of the same, and the knots sticked
+fast within his skin, and all his body full of worms; he suffered
+great pain. And he was thus martyred the year of Our Lord one thousand
+one hundred and seventy-one, and was fifty-three years old. And soon
+after tidings came to the King how he was slain, wherefore the King
+took great sorrow, and sent to Rome for his absolution...."
+
+Of the King's penance Voragine says nothing, but indeed it must have
+reverberated through Europe, though not perhaps with so enormous a
+rumour as the humiliation of the Emperor Henry IV. before Pope Gregory
+VII. at Canossa scarce a hundred years before had done. The first and
+the most famous of Canterbury pilgrims came to St Dunstan's church upon
+the Watling Street, outside the great West Gate of Canterbury, as we
+may believe in July 1174. There he stripped him of his robes and,
+barefoot in a woollen shirt, entered the city and walked barefoot
+through the streets to the door of the Cathedral. There he knelt, and
+being received into the great church, was led to the place of Martyrdom
+where he knelt again and kissed the stones where St Thomas had fallen.
+In the crypt where the body of the martyr was preserved, the King laid
+aside his cloak and received five strokes with a rod from every Bishop
+and Abbot there present, and three from every one of the eighty monks.
+In that place he remained through the whole night fasting and weeping
+to be absolved on the following day.
+
+[Illustration: WEST GATE, CANTERBURY]
+
+The martyrdom of St Thomas, the penance of the King, these world-
+shaking and amazing events might in themselves, we may think, have
+been enough to transform the church in which they took place, if as
+was thought at the time, heaven itself had not intervened and
+destroyed Conrad's glorious choir by fire. This disaster fell upon
+the city and the country like a final judgment, less than two months
+after the penance of the King in 1174, and within four years of St
+Thomas's murder.
+
+Something of the great masterpiece that then perished is left to us
+especially without, and it is perhaps the most charming work remaining
+in the city, the tower of St Anselm, for instance, and much of the
+transept beside it.
+
+For the rest the choir of Canterbury, as we know it, the choir began
+in 1174 by William of Sens, is as French as its predecessor, but in
+all else very different. In order perhaps to provide a great space for
+the shrine of the newly canonised St Thomas of Canterbury, to whose
+tomb already half Europe was flocking, the choir was built even longer
+than its predecessor. The great space provided for the shrine in the
+Trinity Chapel behind the choir and high altar opened on the east into
+a circular chapel known, perhaps on account of the relic it held, as
+Becket's Crown. Till 1220 when all was ready, the body of St Thomas lay
+in an iron coffin in the crypt, and the great feast and day of
+pilgrimage in his honour was the day of his martyrdom, December 29, so
+incredibly honourable as being within the octave of the Nativity of Our
+Lord. But in 1220 it was decided to translate the body from the crypt
+to the new shrine in the Trinity Chapel in July, for the winter
+pilgrimage was irksome. From that year a new feast was established, the
+feast of the Translation of St Thomas upon July 7th, and thus in
+England down to our own day, St Thomas has two feasts, that of his
+Martyrdom on December 29, when still his relics are exposed in the
+great Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, and in the little church of St
+Thomas, the Catholic sanctuary in Canterbury, and that of his
+Translation upon July 7th.
+
+Of that first summer pilgrimage to the new shrine of St Thomas we have
+very full accounts. It was the most glorious and the most extraordinary
+assemblage that had perhaps ever been seen in England. The Archbishop
+had given two years' notice of the event, and this had been circulated
+not only in all England, but throughout Europe. "Orders had been issued
+for maintenance to be provided for the vast multitude not only in the
+city of Canterbury itself, but on the various roads by which the
+pilgrims would approach. During the whole celebration along the whole
+way from London to Canterbury, hay and provender were given to all who
+asked, and at each gate of Canterbury in the four quarters of the city
+and in the four licensed cellars, were placed tuns of wine to be
+distributed gratis, and on the day of the festival, wine ran freely
+through the gutters of the streets." In the presence of the young
+Henry III., too young himself to bear a part, the coffin in which lay
+the relics of St Thomas was borne on the shoulders of the Papal
+Legate, the Archbishop Stephen Langton, the Grand Justiciary Hubert de
+Burgh, and the Archbishop of Rheims, from the crypt up to the Trinity
+Chapel in the presence of every Bishop and Abbot of England, of the
+great officials of the kingdom and of the special ambassadors of every
+state in Europe.
+
+         Of bishops and abbots, prior and parsons,
+         Of earls and of barons and of many knights thereto,
+         Of sergeants and of squires and of his husbandmen enow,
+         And of simple men eke of the land--so thick hither drew.
+
+So was St Thomas vindicated and God avenged. And St Thomas reigned as
+was thought for ever on high, in the new sanctuary of his Cathedral
+Church.
+
+I say he reigned on high. The choir and sanctuary of Canterbury had
+even in St Anselm's time as we have seen, been high above the nave.
+William of Sens designed the new choir, as high as the old, but very
+nobly raised still higher, the great altar, and higher yet the Chapel
+of the Trinity in which stood the shrine. St Thomas had an especial
+devotion to the Holy Trinity. It was in a former Trinity Chapel that
+he had said his first Mass, and whether on this account or another,
+his devotion was such that it was he who first established that Feast,
+till then merely the octave of Whitsunday. His shrine then was well
+placed in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity.
+
+In examining the church to-day one can well understand the beauty of
+William of Sens' idea, and see, too, where, and perhaps understand
+why, it really fails or at least comes short of perfection.
+
+William of Sens trained in Latin traditions had, and rightly, little
+respect, we may think, for the work of the past. He would have had all
+new. But by 1174, unlike Anselm in 1096, and still more unlike
+Lanfranc in 1070, he had in all probability a genuine English and
+national prejudice to meet, an English dislike of destruction and an
+English hatred of anything new.
+
+It has been said that the failure of William of Sens' design was due
+to the meanness of the monks of Christ Church. But meanness is not an
+English failing; on the contrary, our great fault is the very
+opposite, extravagance. It was surely not meanness and at such a time
+and in such a cause that forced the monastery to deny William of Sens
+the free hand he desired; it was prejudice and a fear, almost
+barbaric; of destruction. The monks forced their builder to
+accommodate the new choir to what remained of the old work. They
+refused to sacrifice St Anselm's tower on the south or the tower of
+St Andrew on the north, therefore the wide choir of Canterbury,
+already wider than the nave and growing wider still as it went
+eastward, had to be strangled between them, and to open again as well
+as it could into the Trinity Chapel and the Corona. All that was old,
+too, and that they loved they used; the old piers of the crypt were to
+remain and still to support the pillars of the choir, which were thus,
+no doubt to William's disgust, unequally placed so that here the
+arches are pointed but there round. In many ways William must have
+considered his employers barbarians, and in the true sense of that
+much abused term, he was right. No man brought up in the Greek and
+Latin traditions would have hesitated to destroy in order to build
+anew. The English cannot do that; they patch and make do, and what
+must be new they cannot love until it is old; their buildings are not
+so much works of art as growths, and there is much to be said for
+them. Only here at Canterbury their prejudice has been a misfortune.
+Not even the most convinced Englishman can look upon the twisted and
+constricted choir of Canterbury and rejoice.
+
+William of Sens, however, hampered though he was, is responsible for
+the work we see. It is true he died after some four years of work at
+Canterbury, falling one day from a scaffold, but William the
+Englishman who followed him only completed what was really already
+finished. The design, the idea, and the genius of Canterbury choir are
+
+French, spoiled by English prejudice, but undoubtedly French for all
+that.
+
+As it appeared when that great Transitional choir was finished,
+Canterbury Cathedral remained till 1379. It is true that the north
+wall of the cloister and the lovely doorway in the north-east corner
+were built in the Early English time. It is equally true that the
+lower part of the Chapter House and the screens north and south of the
+choir and a glorious window in St Anselm's Chapel are Decorated work,
+but the Cathedral itself knows nothing of the Early English or of the
+Decorated styles. It stood till 1379 with a low and short Norman nave
+and transept to the west, and a great Transitional choir and transept
+to the east. In 1379 Lanfranc's nave and transept were destroyed.
+
+It may be thought that at last a great and noble nave would be built
+north of the Frenchman's choir. Not at all. Again the English prejudice
+against destruction--a lack of intellectual daring in us perhaps--
+prevented this. One of the western towers of Lanfranc was to remain,
+and therefore the new nave though loftier than the old, was no longer,
+and it remains a glory certainly without, but within a hopeless
+disappointment saved from utter ineffectiveness only by the noble
+height of the great choir above it. It remains without life or zest,
+not an experiment but a task honestly and thoroughly done in the
+Perpendicular style.
+
+To the same period belong the great western screen of the choir, the
+Chapel of St Michael and the Warrior's Chapel in the south transept,
+the Lady Chapel in the north transept, the Chantry and the tomb of
+Henry IV. in the Trinity Chapel, the Black Prince's Chantry and the
+screens of the Lady Chapel in the Crypt, the upper part of the Chapter
+House, now lost to us by restoration, and the south-west Tower.
+
+There remained at the end of the fifteenth century but one thing
+needed--the central Tower. This, as it happened, was to be the last
+great Gothic work undertaken in this country, and in every way it is
+one of the most impressive and successful. Begun in 1475 and finished
+in 1503, the Angel Steeple is the last of Catholicism in England, and
+I like to think of it towering as it does over that dead city, and the
+low hills of Kent, over all that was once so sacred and is now
+nothing, as a kind of beacon, a sign of hope until it shall ring the
+Angelus again and once more the sons of St Benedict shall chant the
+Mass of St Thomas before the shrine new made: _Gaudeamus omnes in
+Domino, diem festum celebrantes, sub honore beati Thomae Martyris, de
+cujus passione gaudent angeli et collaudant filium Dei_.
+
+For the great shrine, which for so long had been the loftiest beacon
+in England of the Christian Faith, was destroyed. It was the first
+work of the last Henry to avenge his namesake, and having made another
+Thomas martyr in the same cause, to wipe out for ever all memory of
+the first who had steadfastly withstood his predecessor. It is strange
+that the severed head of Blessed Thomas More should lie in the very
+church whence Henry II. set forth to do penance for the murder of the
+first Thomas.
+
+We have no authentic record of the final catastrophe, such deeds are
+usually done in darkness. All we really know is that in 1538 "the
+bones, by command of the Lord (Thomas) Cromwell, were there and then
+burnt ... the spoile of the shrine in golde and precious stones filled
+two greate chests such as six or seven strong men could doe no more
+than convey one of them out of the church." That the shrine was of
+unsurpassed magnificence we have many witnesses. "The tomb of St Thomas
+the Martyr," writes a Venetian traveller who had seen it, "surpasses
+all belief. Notwithstanding its great size it is wholly covered with
+plates of pure gold; yet the gold is scarce seen because it is covered
+with various precious stones as sapphires, balasses, diamonds, rubies
+and emeralds; and wherever the eye turns something more beautiful than
+the rest is observed; nor in addition to these natural beauties is the
+skill of art wanting, for in the midst of the gold are the most
+beautiful sculptured gems, both small and large as well as such as are
+in relief, as agates, onyxes, cornelians and cameos; and some cameos
+are of such size that I am afraid to name it; but everything is far
+surpassed by a ruby, not larger than a thumb-nail, which is fixed at
+the right of the altar. The church is somewhat dark and particularly in
+the spot where the shrine is placed, and when we went to see it the sun
+was near setting and the weather cloudy; nevertheless I saw the ruby as
+if I had it in my hand. They say it was given by a king of France."
+
+To carry out the theft with impunity it was first of all necessary to
+degrade the great national hero and saint and expose his memory to
+ridicule. In November 1538 St Thomas was declared a traitor, every
+representation of him was ordered to be destroyed, and his name was
+erased from all service books, antiphones, collects and prayers under
+pain of his Majesty's indignation, and imprisonment at his Grace's
+pleasure. The saint indeed is said to have been cited to appear at
+Westminster for treason, and there to have been tried and condemned.
+That seems, too superstitiously insolent even for such a thing as
+Henry. But we may believe Marillac, the French Ambassador, when he
+tells us "St Thomas is declared a traitor _because_ his relics and
+bones were adorned with gold and stones."
+
+So perished the shrine and memory of St Thomas, and with it the
+thousand year old religion of England to be replaced by one knows not
+what.
+
+With the destruction of religion went the destruction of the religious
+houses. Of these the chief was the Benedictine monastery of Christ
+Church which lay to the north of the Cathedral and whose monks from St
+Augustine's time had always served it. Almost nothing remains of this,
+save the Cloister and Chapter House and Treasury attached to the
+Cathedral, the Castellum Aquae, now called the Baptistery, the Prior's
+Chapel, now the Chapter Library, the Deanery, once part of the Prior's
+lodging, the Porter's gate, the Norman staircase of the King's school
+and the fragmentary ruins scattered about the precincts, including
+the remains of the Archbishop's Palace in Palace Street.
+
+Not less venerable than the Benedictine House of Christ Church was the
+other Benedictine monastery, also founded by St Augustine in honour of
+SS. Peter and Paul, to which dedication St Dunstan added the name of
+St Augustine himself. This stood outside the city to the east. It is
+said to have been founded by St Augustine outside the walls with a
+view to his own interment there since it was not the Roman custom, as
+we know, to bury the dead within the walls of a city. So honourable a
+place in the Order did this great house hold that we are told the
+abbot of St Augustine's Canterbury sat next to the abbot of Monte
+Cassino, the mother house, in the councils of the Order, and none but
+the archbishop himself consecrated the abbot of St Augustine's, and
+that in the Abbey Church. This also Henry stole away, seizing it for
+his own use. But by 1844 what was left of the place had become a
+brewery, and to-day there remains scarcely more than a great
+fourteenth century gateway and hall, the work of Abbot Fyndon in 1300.
+Of the church there is left a few fragments of walling, of St
+Augustine's tomb, nothing whatsoever.
+
+Less still remains to us of the smaller religious houses that abounded
+in Canterbury. Of the Austin Canons, the Priory of St Gregory founded
+by Lanfranc in 1084 near St John's Hospital, also a foundation of
+Lanfranc, in Northgate Street, really nothing, a fragment of old
+wall; of the Nunnery of St Sepulchre, a Benedictine house, nothing at
+all. As for the Friars' houses scarcely more remains. Of the earliest,
+the Dominican house, only the scantiest ruins of the convent, the
+refectory, however, once in the hands of the Anabaptists, is now a
+Unitarian chapel. Of the White Friars, nothing. Of the Franciscan
+house, the charming thirteenth century ruin that stands over the river
+to the south of St Peter's Street. That is all.
+
+The Canterbury of St Thomas is no more, it perished with his shrine
+and his religion. Even the hospital he is said to have founded, which
+at any rate was dedicated in his honour, was suppressed by Edward VI.;
+it is, however, still worth a visit, if only for the sake of the wall
+painting recovered in 1879, in which we see the Martyrdom, and the
+penance of the King.
+
+But in Canterbury to-day St Thomas is really a stranger, no relic,
+scarcely a remembrance of him remains; yet he was the soul of the
+city, he is named in the calendar of his Church St Thomas of
+Canterbury.
+
+No relic do I say? I am wrong. Let all the pilgrims of the past come
+in at the four gates in their thousands and their thousands; let the
+great processions form as though this were a year of jubilee, they
+shall not be disappointed. Yet it is not to the Cathedral they shall
+go, but to an ugly little church (alas!), in a back street, where over
+the last altar upon the Epistle side there is a shrine and in the
+shrine a relic--the Soutan of St Thomas. The place is humble and meek
+enough to escape the notice of all but the pilgrims who sought and
+seek Canterbury only for St Thomas.
+
+Musing there in the late spring sunshine, for the church is open and
+quiet, and within there is always a Guest, I fell asleep; and in my
+sleep that Guest came to me and I spoke with Him. It seemed to me that
+I was walking in early morning--all in the England of my heart--across
+meadows through which flowed a clear translucent stream, and the
+meadows were a mass of flowers, narcissus, jonquil, violet, for it was
+spring. And beyond the meadows was a fair wood all newly dressed, and
+out of the wood there came towards me a man, and I knew it was the
+Lord Christ. And I went on to meet Him. And when I was come to Him I
+said: "I shall never understand what You mean ... I shall never
+understand what You mean. For You say the meek shall inherit the
+earth.... I shall never understand what You mean."
+
+And He looked at me and smiled, and stretching forth His hands and
+looking all about He answered: "But I spoke of the flowers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE VALLEY OF THE STOUR
+
+CAESAR IN KENT
+
+
+It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I
+set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the
+shoulder of Harbledown, some little way past St Dunstan's, turned out
+of the Watling Street, south and west into the old green path or
+trackway, which, had I followed it to the end, would have brought me
+right across Kent and Surrey and Hampshire to Winchester the old
+capital of England. This trackway, far older than history, would
+doubtless have perished utterly, as so many of its fellows have done,
+but for two very different events, the first of which was the
+Martyrdom of St Thomas, and the other the practice of demanding tolls
+upon the great new system of turnpike-roads we owe to the end of the
+eighteenth century. For this ancient British track leading half across
+England of my heart, a barbarous thing, older than any written word
+in England, was used and preserved, when, with the full blossoming of
+the Middle Age in the thirteenth century, it might have disappeared.
+It was preserved by the Pilgrims to St Thomas's Shrine. All those men
+who came out of the West to visit St Thomas, all those who came from
+Brittany, central and southern France and Spain, gathered at
+Winchester, the old capital of the Kingdom, and when they set out
+thence for Canterbury this was the way they followed across the
+counties; this most ancient way which enters Canterbury hand in hand
+with the Watling Street by the West Gate.
+
+To describe a thing so ancient is impossible. It casts a spell upon
+the traveller so that as he follows under its dark yews across the
+steep hop gardens of Kent from hillside to hillside, up this valley or
+that, along the mighty south wall of the North Downs to the great ford
+of the Medway, and beyond and beyond through more than a hundred miles
+to Winchester he loses himself; becomes indeed one with his
+forefathers and looks upon that dear and ancient landscape, his most
+enduring and most beautiful possession as a child looks upon his
+mother, really with unseeing eyes, unable to tell whether she be fair
+or no, understanding indeed but this that she is a part of himself,
+and that he loves her more than anything else in the world.
+
+But that glorious way in all its fulness was not for me. I had
+determined to follow the Pilgrims' Road but a little way, indeed but
+for one long day's journey, so far only as Boghton Aluph, where it
+turns that great corner westward and proceeds along the rampart of the
+Downs. But even in the ten miles twixt Canterbury and Boghton, that
+ancient way gives to him who follows it wonderful things.
+
+To begin with, the valley of the Stour. There can be few valleys in
+this part of England more lovely than this steep and wide vale,
+through the hop gardens, the woods and meadows of which, the Great
+Stour proceeds like a royal pilgrim, half in state to Canterbury, and
+on to the mystery of the marshes, and its death in the sea. Above
+Canterbury certainly, and all along my way, there is not a meadow nor
+a wood, nor indeed a single mile of that landscape, which has not been
+contrived and created by man, by the love and labour of our fathers
+through how many thousand years. And this is part of the virtue of
+England, that it is as it were a garden of our making, a pleasaunce we
+have built, a paradise and a home after our own hearts. And in that
+divine and tireless making we, without knowing it, have so moulded
+ourselves that we are one with it, it is a part of us, a part of our
+character and nature. There lie ever before us our beginnings, the
+earthworks we once defended, the graves we built, the defeats, the
+victories, the holy places. By these a man lives, out of these he
+draws slowly and with a sort of confidence the uncertain future, glad
+indeed of this divine assurance that there is nothing new under the
+sun.
+
+Such monuments of an antiquity so great that they have no history but
+what may be gathered from barrows and stones, accompany one upon any
+day's journey in southern England, but it is only in one place that a
+man can stand and say: Here began the history of my country. That
+place as it happens lies as it should upon the Pilgrims' Road.
+
+Beyond Harbledown, some two miles from Canterbury, he Pilgrims' Road
+along the hillside passes clean through earthwork of unknown antiquity.
+Well, it was here the Seventh Legion charged: here, indeed, we stand
+upon the very battlefield which saw the birth of civilisation in our
+island. Lying there in the early morning sunshine I considered it all
+over again.
+
+Caesar's first landing in Britain in B.C. 55 had been, as he himself
+tells us, merely a reconnaissance. In the following summer, however,
+he returned in force, indeed with a very considerable army, and with
+the intention of bringing us, too, within that great administration
+which he and his adoptive son Augustus were to do so much to make a
+final and in many ways an indestructible thing.
+
+It might seem that in spite of the lack of the means of rapid
+communication we possess, the admirable system of Roman roads enabled
+Caesar to administer his huge government--he was then in control of
+the two Gauls--with a thoroughness we might envy. After his first
+return from Britain in the early autumn of B.C. 55 he crossed the
+Alps, completed much business in Cisalpine Gaul, journeyed into
+Illyricum to see what damage the Pirustae had done, dealt with them
+effectively, returned to Cisalpine Gaul, held conventions, crossed the
+Alps again, rejoined his army, went round all their winter quarters,
+inspected all the many ships he was building at Portus Itius and other
+places, marched with four Legions and some cavalry against a tribe of
+Belgae known as the Treviri, settled matters with them, and before the
+summer of B.C. 54 was back at Portus Itius, making final preparations
+for the invasion of Britain.
+
+This invasion, glorious as it was to be, and full of the greatest
+results for us, was accompanied all through by a series of petty
+disasters. Caesar had purposed to set out certainly early in July, but
+delay followed upon delay, and when he was ready at last, the wind
+settled into the north-west and blew steadily from that quarter for
+twenty-five days. It had been a dry summer and all Gaul was suffering
+from drought. The great preparations which Caesar had been making for
+at least a year were at last complete, the specially built ships, wide
+and of shallow draft, of an intermediate size between his own swift-
+sailing vessels and those of burthen which he had gathered locally,
+were all ready to the number of six hundred, with twenty-eight _naves
+longae_ or war vessels, and some two hundred of the older boats. But
+the wind made a start impossible for twenty-five days.
+
+It was not till August that the south-west came to his assistance. As
+soon as might be he embarked five Legions, say twenty-thousand men,
+with two thousand cavalry and horses, an enormous transport, and
+doubtless a great number of camp followers, leaving behind on the
+continent three legions and two thousand horse to guard the harbours
+and provide corn, and to inform him what was going on in Gaul in his
+absence, and to act in case of necessity.
+
+He himself set sail from Portus Itius, which we may take to be
+Boulogne, at sunset, that is to say about half-past seven; but he must,
+it might seem, have devoted the whole day to getting so many ships out
+of harbour. The wind was blowing gently from the south-west, bearing
+him, his fortunes and ours. At midnight the second of those small
+disasters which met him at every turn upon this expedition fell upon
+him. The wind failed. In consequence his great fleet of transports
+was helpless, it drifted along with the tide, fortunately then running
+up the Straits, but this bore him beyond his landing-place of the year
+before, and daybreak found him apparently far to the east of the North
+Foreland. What can have been the thoughts of the greatest of men,
+helpless in the midst of this treacherous and unknown sea? To every
+Roman the sea was bitter, even the tideless Mediterranean, how much
+more this furious tide-whipt channel. Caesar cannot but have
+remembered how it had half broken him in the previous year. Very
+profoundly he must have mistrusted it. But his Gaulish sailors were
+doubtless less disturbed; they expected the ebb, and when it came,
+every man doing his utmost, the transports were brought as swiftly as
+the long ships to that "fair and open" beach where Caesar had landed
+in the previous summer, the long beach which Deal and Sandwich hold.
+
+Caesar himself, as it happens, does not tell us that he landed in the
+same place upon this his second invasion of Britain as he had done
+before; it is to Dion Cassius that we owe the knowledge that he did
+so. It is Caesar, however, who tells us that he landed about mid-day
+and that all his ships held together and reached shore about the same
+time. He adds that there was no enemy to be seen, though, as he
+afterwards learned from his prisoners, large bodies of British troops
+had been assembled, but, alarmed at the great number of the ships,
+more than eight hundred of which, including the ships of the previous
+year and the private vessels which some had built for their
+convenience, had appeared at one time, they had retreated from the
+coast and taken to the heights. The heights must have been the hills
+to the south of Canterbury, nearly a day's march from the sea.
+
+If Caesar landed, as we know from Dion Cassius that he did, in the
+same place as he had done in the previous year, he must have known all
+there was to know about the natural facilities there for camping,
+about the supply of fresh water for instance. But perhaps he had not
+considered the dryness of the summer. In any case it might seem to
+have been some pressing need, such as the necessity for a plentiful
+supply of fresh water, which forced him immediately to make a night
+march with his army. Leaving as he tells us, under Quintus Atrius,
+ten cohorts, that is, as we may suppose, two cohorts from each of his
+five legions, and three hundred horse to guard the ships at anchor,
+and to hold the camp, hastily made between midday and midnight, in the
+third watch, that is between midnight and three o'clock, he started
+with his five legions and seventeen hundred horse, as he asserts, to
+seek out the enemy. Something, we may be sure, more pressing than an
+attack upon a barbarian foe there was no hurry to meet, must have
+forced Caesar to march his army sleepless now for two nights, one of
+which had been spent upon an unusual and anxious adventure at sea, out
+of camp, in the small hours, into an unknown and roadless country in
+search of an enemy which had taken to its native hills. The necessity
+that forced Caesar to this dangerous course was probably a lack of
+fresh water. He was seeking a considerable river, for the smaller
+streams, as he probably found, could not suffice after a long drought
+for so great a force as he had landed.
+
+He himself asserts that he advanced "by night" across that roadless and
+unknown country a distance of twelve miles. We know of course of what
+the armies of Caesar were capable in the way of marching; there have
+never been troops carrying anything like their weight of equipment
+which have done better than they; but to march something like fifteen
+thousand men and seventeen hundred horse twelve miles in about three
+hours into the unknown and the dark, is an impossible proceeding. That
+march of "about twelve miles" cannot have occupied less than from six
+to eight hours, one would think, and the greater part of it must have
+been accomplished by daylight, which would break about half-past three
+o'clock. As we have good reason to think, Caesar's march, however long
+a time it may have occupied, was in search of fresh water, and it is
+significant that when the Britons were at last seen, they "were
+advancing to the river with their cavalry and chariots from the higher
+ground." In other words, Caesar's march had brought him into the valley
+of the Great Stour, where he not only found the water he sought, but
+also the enemy, who had probably followed his march from the great
+woods all the way.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE STOUR NEAR CANTERBURY]
+
+The spot at which Caesar struck the valley was, as we may be sure, that
+above which the great earthwork stands, opposite Thannington. Here upon
+the height was fought the first real battle of Rome upon our soil. It
+was opened by the Britons who "began to annoy the Romans and to give
+battle." But the Roman cavalry repulsed them so that they again sought
+refuge in the woods where was their camp, "a place admirably fortified
+by nature and by art ... all entrance to it being shut by a great
+number of felled trees." But like all barbarians, the Britons were
+undisciplined and preferred to fight in detached parties, and as
+seemed good to each. Every now and then some of them rushed out of the
+woods and fell upon the Romans, who continually were prevented from
+storming the fort and forcing an entry. Much time was thus wasted
+until the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, having formed a _testudo_
+and thrown up a rampart against the British fort, took it, and drove
+the Britons out of the woods, receiving in return a few, though only a
+few, wounds. Thus the battle ended in the victory of our enemies and
+our saviours. Caesar tells us that he forbade his men to pursue the
+enemy for any great distance, because he was ignorant of the nature
+of the country, and because, the day being far spent, he wished to
+devote what remained of the daylight to the building of his camp.
+
+Caesar speaks of this camp and rightly of course, as a thing of
+importance. We know from his narrative, too, that it was occupied by
+some fifteen thousand foot and seventeen hundred horse, with their
+baggage and equipment for more than ten days. Where did it stand? It
+must have been within reach of the river, for without plentiful water
+no such army as Caesar encamped could have maintained itself for so
+long a period as ten days; exactly where it was, however, we shall in
+all probability never know.
+
+Wherever it was, there Caesar spent the night, both he and his army,
+sleeping soundly, we may be sure, after the sleepless and anxious
+nights, one spent in the peril of the sea, the other in a not less
+perilous night march in a roadless and unknown country.
+
+Yet did Caesar sleep? Towards sunset the wind arose, and all night a
+great gale blew. This was the fourth misfortune the expedition had
+experienced. It had first been delayed for twenty-four days in
+starting; it had then lost the wind and had been for hours at the mercy
+of the tide, only landing at last when the day was far spent after a
+whole night upon the waters; it had been compelled by lack of water to
+quit the camp at the landing-place without rest, and utterly weary and
+sleepless, to undertake a perilous night march in search of water. And
+now in the darkness, after the first encounter with the enemy, a great
+gale arose.
+
+How often during that night must Caesar have awakened and thought of
+the sea and his transports. It was, as he would remember, just such a
+storm which had ruined him in the previous summer. To avoid a like
+disaster he had had his boats built for this expedition, shallow of
+draft and with flat bottoms that they might be beached. But with the
+Mediterranean in his mind and the certain weather of the south, Caesar,
+seeing the August sky so soft and clear, had anchored and not beached
+the ships after all. Perhaps the late landing, the necessity of
+building a large camp, and finally the perilous lack of water had
+prevented him from calling upon his men for a task so enormous as the
+beaching of eight hundred ships. Whatever had prevented him, that
+task was not undertaken. The eight hundred ships were anchored in the
+shallows, when, upon that third night of the expedition, a great gale
+arose.
+
+Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the
+following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre
+and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men
+were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus
+Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report "almost all the ships
+dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors
+and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or
+pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces
+one against another."
+
+The appalling seriousness of this disaster, as reported to Caesar, was
+at once understood by him. He recalled his three parties of
+skirmishers, and himself at once returned to Quintus Atrius and the
+ships. He tells us that "he saw before him almost the very things
+which he had heard from the messengers and by letters"; but he adds
+that only "about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be
+repaired with much labour." This he at once began with workmen from the
+Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same
+time he wrote to Labienus at Portus Itius "to build as many ships as
+he could." Then he proceeded to do what he had intended to do at
+first; with great difficulty and labour he dragged all the ships up
+on the shore and enclosed them in one fortification with the camp. In
+these matters about ten days were spent, the men labouring night and
+day. Then he returned to the main army upon the Stour.
+
+But that delay of ten days had given the Britons time to recover
+themselves and to gather all possible forces. Caesar returned to his
+army to find "very great forces of the Britons already assembled" to
+oppose him, and the chief command and management of the war entrusted
+to Cassivellaunus, who, though he had been at war with the men of
+Kent, was now placed, so great was the general alarm, in command of
+the whole war.
+
+Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by
+the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season. He at
+once began his march into Britain. We may well ask by what route he
+went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer. But it
+would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross
+the Stour, the Medway and the Thames. We may be sure then that his
+route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built
+up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the
+Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by
+the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the
+North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at
+Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble,
+Caesar himself giving no indications.
+
+Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness
+which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any
+history called Julaber's Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees. Here
+of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who
+fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the
+Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than
+it would have been now if he had built it.
+
+No one can ever have come, whether by the Pilgrims' Road or another,
+into the little hill-village of Chilham, into the piazza there, which
+is an acropolis, without delight. It is one of the surprises of
+England, a place at once so little, so charming and so unexpected that
+it is extraordinary it is not more famous. It stands at a point where
+more than one little valley breaks down into the steep valley of the
+Stour and every way to it is up hill, under what might seem to be old
+ramparts crowned now with cottages and houses, till suddenly you find
+yourself at the top in a large piazza or square closed at the end by
+the church, at the other by the castle, and on both sides by old lines
+of houses; really a walled _place_.
+
+The church dedicated in honour of Our Lady is of some antiquity in the
+main and older parts, a work of the fourteenth century replacing
+doubtless Roman, Saxon and Norman buildings, but with later additions,
+too, of the Perpendicular time in the clerestory, for instance, and
+with much modern work in the chancel. Of old the place belonged to the
+alien Priory of Throwley in this county, itself a cell of the Abbey of
+St Omer, in Artois; but when these alien houses were suppressed,
+Chilham like Throwley itself went to the new house of Syon, founded by
+the King. To-day, apart from the English beauty of the church, not a
+work of art but of history, its chief interest lies in its monuments,
+some strangely monstrous, of the Digges family--Sir Dudley Digges
+bought Chilham at the beginning of the seventeenth century--the
+Colebrooks, who followed the Digges in 1751 and a Fogg and a Woldman,
+the latter holding Chilham until 1860. There is little to be said of
+these monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste,
+the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the
+Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the
+Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered
+pattern in relief.
+
+[Illustration: CHILHAM]
+
+But it was not the church, beautiful though I found it on that
+afternoon of spring, that made me linger in Chilham, but rather the
+castle, which occupies the site of a Roman camp; and perhaps of what a
+camp? It may be that it was here Caesar lay on the first night of his
+resumed march after the disaster of the ships. It may be that it was
+here, after all, that Quintus Laberius fell, and that here he was
+buried so that the ancient earthwork known as Julaber's Grave, though
+certainly far older than Caesar, was in fact used as the tomb of the
+hero whose immortality Caesar insured by naming him in his
+Commentaries. Who knows? If Julaber is not a corruption of Laberius as
+the old antiquaries asserted, and as the people here about believe,
+one likes to think it might be, for no other explanation of this
+strange name is forthcoming.
+
+So I went on through King's wood, and as I came out of it southward I
+saw a wonderful thing. For I saw before me that division or part of
+the world which stands quite separate from any other and is not
+Europe, Asia, Africa nor America, but Romney Marsh. It lay there
+under the sunset half lost in its own mists, far off across the near
+meadows of the Weald, for I was now upon the southern escarpment of
+the North Downs and in the foreground rose the town of Ashford where
+I was to sleep. It was twilight and more, however, before I reached
+it, for in those woods I heard for the first time that year the
+nightingale, and my heart, which all day had been full of Rome, was
+suddenly changed, so that I went down through the dusk to Ashford,
+singing an English song:
+
+          By a bank as I lay, I lay,
+         Musing on things past, heigh ho!
+          In the merry month of May
+          O towards the close of day--
+         Methought I heard at last--
+          O the gentle nightingale,
+         The lady and the mistress of all musick;
+          She sits down ever in the dale
+         Singing with her notès smale
+         And quavering them wonderfully thick.
+          O for joy my spirits were quick
+        To hear the bird how merrily she could sing,
+         And I said, good Lord, defend
+         England with Thy most holy hand
+         And save noble George our King.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE WEALD AND THE MARSH
+
+
+Ashford as we see it to-day, a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants,
+is altogether a modern place and really in the worst sense, for it
+owes its importance and its ugliness to the railway; it is a big
+junction and the site of the engineering works of the South Eastern
+and Chatham Company. Lacking as it is in almost all material
+antiquity, it has little that is beautiful to show us, a fine church
+with a noble tower that has been rather absurdly compared with the
+Angel Steeple at Canterbury--nothing more--and its history is almost
+as meagre. It stands, the first town of the Kentish Weald, where the
+East Stour flows into the Great Stour, in the very mouth of the deep
+valley of the latter which there turns northward through the Downs. To
+the North, therefore, it is everywhere cut off by those great green
+uplands, save where the valley, at the other end of which stands
+Canterbury, breaks them suddenly in twain. To the south it is cut off
+by a perhaps greater barrier; between it and the sea, stands the
+impassable mystery of Romney Marsh. In such a situation, before the
+railways revolutionised travel in England, how could Ashford have had
+any importance? Even the old road westward from Dover into Britain,
+the Pilgrims' Way to Stonehenge or Winchester passed it by, leaving it
+in the Weald to follow the escarpment of the Downs north or west. No
+Roman road served it, and indeed it was but a small and isolated place
+till the Middle Age began to revive and recreate Europe. Even then
+Ashford was probably late in development.
+
+Its history, if one may call it history, is concerned with the owners
+of the manor of Ashford and not with any civil or municipal records.
+Indeed the earlier chroniclers, though they speak of Great Chart and
+Wye, know nothing of Ashford which in Domesday Book appears to have
+consisted of a few mills and a small church, the manor being in
+possession of Edward the Confessor, while St Augustine's at Canterbury
+and Earl Godwin held certain lands thereabout. Hugh de Montfort got
+what the King and Earl Godwin had possessed, after the Conquest, but
+the Monastery of St Augustine's seems to have continued to hold its
+land. We know nothing more of Ashford, which, as I have said, till
+late in the Middle Age consisted of a church and two mills and a dene
+for the pannage of hogs in the Weald. It is not one of the many
+owners of the Manor who is remembered to-day in Ashford as its
+benefactor, but the Lord of the Manor of Ripton during the Wars of the
+Roses, Sir John Fogge, who was Treasurer of the Royal Household and a
+Privy Councillor. In the fourteenth century the church had passed to
+Leeds Abbey, and with the abbey the church of Ashford remained until
+the suppression, when it passed to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.
+It was not, however, the Abbey of Leeds that rebuilt it as we see it, a
+poor example it must be confessed in spite of the nobility of the
+tower, of the latest style of English Gothic architecture, the
+Perpendicular. It was Sir John Fogge, who for this and other reasons,
+is the father of the town. He lies in a great tomb in the chancel. As
+for the Smyths, who lie in the south transept, Thomas, and Alicia his
+wife held the manor of Ashford in the sixteenth century. Alicia was the
+daughter of Sir Andrew Judde to whom the manor of Ashford had been
+mortgaged in the time of Henry VII. Her son, Sir Michael Smyth, lies
+close by. The family were later ennobled and bore the title of
+Viscounts Strangford.
+
+For the outside world, however, Sir John Fogge is not Ashford's
+greatest son. This honour belongs surely to Jack Cade whom Shakespeare
+speaks of as the "headstrong Kentish man John Cade of Ashford," and
+who, according to the poet, if headstrong, proved in the end so feeble-
+minded that in Shakespeare's play we might seem to have a picture of
+one suffering from general paralysis of the insane. Jack Cade, however,
+was, as we are beginning to realise, a much greater and more
+significant figure than Shakespeare allows us to see.
+
+But Ashford is not made for lingering, it is all for departure, the
+roads, if not the trains, lead swiftly away north, south, east and
+west. As for me I went by the south-west road which said twelve miles
+to Tenterden.
+
+I went under a fine rain on a day of married white and blue, and even
+before I had forgot Ashford, which was long before I crossed the Stour,
+the rain had ceased, the sun shone forth and a great wind came out of
+the marsh and the sea full of good tidings, so that climbing up to
+Great Chart I laughed in my heart to be in England on such a day and on
+such a road.
+
+Great Chart, as I saw while still far off, is a village typical of this
+country that I love, if indeed a place so completely itself is typical
+of anything: a little English village, but it outfaces the whole world
+in its sureness of itself, its quietness and air of immemorial
+antiquity. Many a city older by far looks parvenu beside Great Chart.
+Let us consider, with tears if you will, what they are making of Rome
+and be thankful that our ways are not their ways. For what wins you at
+once in Great Chart is the obvious fact that it has always stood there
+on its hill over the Weald, and as far as one may see at a glance, much
+the same as it stands to-day. And what delights you is the church there
+on the highest ground, on the last hill overlooking the great Weald, a
+sign in the sky, a portent, a necessary thing natural to the landscape.
+
+What you see is a rectangular building with three eastern gables over
+three Decorated windows, a long nave roof over square Perpendicular
+windows and clerestory, flat outer roofs and tall western Tower, a
+noble thing significant of our civilisation and the Faith out of which
+it has come.
+
+Within, one finds a church like and yet unlike that at Ashford. Nave
+and chancel are of the same width, and the arcades run from end to end
+of the church really without a break, though half way a wall, borne by
+three arches, crosses the church separating the chancel and its
+chapels from the nave. The central arch of the three is of course the
+chancel arch, but the wall it bears does not reach to the roof so that
+the nave, clerestory and roof are seen running on beyond it. All this
+is curious rather than lovely, but like every other strangeness in
+England of my heart, it is to be explained by the long, long history
+of things still--Deo gratias--remaining to us, so that when I said
+that our buildings were growths rather than works of art I spoke
+truth.
+
+The church of St Mary of Great Chart is not mentioned in the Domesday
+Survey, but that a church existed here in the twelfth century is
+certain, for even in the present building we have evidences of Norman
+work, for instance in the walling of the south chapel, and in the
+vestry doorway. According to the Rev. G.M. Livett, [Footnote: K.A.S.
+26.] the Norman nave was as long as that we have, which is built in
+all probability on its foundation. The aisleless Norman church,
+however, had a central tower to the east of the present chancel arch
+and transepts, as well as a chancel. This church appears to have stood
+till the fourteenth century, when it was entirely rebuilt and
+reclaimed, and all the lower part of the present church built, to be
+heightened and lengthened at the end of the fifteenth century when the
+clerestory and the chancel arcade were built, a new aisle wall set up
+on the north and the south aisle raised, the rood loft built or
+rebuilt.
+
+We are reminded of all this history by the fine altar tomb in the
+north chapel where lie William Goldwell and Alice his wife (d. 1485).
+Their son James was Vicar of Great Chart in 1458, and became Bishop of
+Norwich in 1472, when he obtained from the Pope "an indulgence in aid
+of the restoration of Great Chart church which had been damaged by
+fire." Here is the cause and the source of the fifteenth century
+alterations and the church we see. The brasses in the church are also
+interesting. Many of them commemorate the Tokes of Godinton, who
+founded the almshouse in the village, which, rebuilt more than once I
+think, we still see. All these things and more than these the great
+yew in the churchyard has seen as its shadow grew over the graves.
+
+From Great Chart I went on through the spring sunshine across the
+Weald to Bethersden, whose quarries have supplied so much of the grey
+marble one finds in Kentish churches, in the monuments and effigies
+and in the old manor houses in the carved chimney-pieces fair to see.
+These quarries are now all but deserted, but of old they were the most
+famous in Kent, which is poor in such things. Most of the stone for
+the cathedrals and greater religious houses in the county came from
+Caen, whence it was easily transported by water; but this stone not
+only weathered badly, but was too friable for monumental effigies or
+sculpture. For these harder stone was needed, resembling marble, and
+this Bethersden supplied, as we may see, in the Cathedrals of
+Canterbury and Rochester and especially at Hythe where the chancel
+arcade is entirely built of it.
+
+Something too we may learn at Bethersden of the true nature of the
+Weald. I shall have something to say of this later, but here at any
+rate the curiously difficult character of this country in regard to
+the going may be understood, though of course less easily now than of
+old. It is said that before, at the end of the eighteenth century,
+the excellent system of roads we still use was built up, the ways
+hereabouts were so bad--they are still far from good--that when spring
+came it was customary to plough them up in order that they might dry
+off. We hear of great ladies going to church in carriages drawn by
+teams of oxen. Hardly passable after rain, the roads, says Hasted,
+were "so miry that the traveller's horse frequently plunged through
+them up to the girths of the saddle; and the waggons sank so deep in
+the ruts as to slide along on the nave of the wheels and axle of
+them. In some few of the principal roads, as from Tenterden hither,
+there was a stone causeway, about three feet wide, for the
+accommodation of horse and foot passengers; but there was none further
+on till near Bethersden, to the great distress of travellers. When
+these roads became tolerably dry in summer, they were ploughed up, and
+laid in a half circle to dry, the only amendment they ever had. In
+extreme dry weather in summer, they became exceedingly hard, and, by
+traffic, so smooth as to seem glazed, like a potter's vessel, though a
+single hour's rain rendered them so slippery as to be very dangerous to
+travellers." The roads in fact were and are, little more than lanes
+between the isolated woods across the low scrub of the old Weald.
+
+The church of Bethersden is dedicated to St Margaret. It follows the
+local type having a nave with north and south aisles and a chancel with
+north and south chapels, vestry, south porch and western tower. The
+place is not mentioned in Domesday Book, but about 1194 we find
+Archbishop Herbert confirming the church of St Margaret of
+Beatrichesdenne, with the chapel of Hecchisdenne (Etchden) to the
+Priory of St Gregory in Canterbury. No sign of this Norman church
+remains, the building we see in Bethersden being mainly Perpendicular;
+but the double lighted windows at the west end of the north aisle are
+Early English and there is a Decorated niche under the entrance to the
+rood left. The tower is modern, but possesses a fourteenth century
+bell.
+
+It is curious that though the church is dedicated to St Margaret and
+the fair, according to Hasted, was held upon July 20th, St Margaret's
+day, the place should be spoken of as Beatrichesdenne as though there
+were some local St Beatrice; but of her we know nothing.
+
+Bethersden is connected with the Lovelaces for they owned it, Richard
+Lovelace, the poet, having sold Lovelace Place to Richard Hulse, soon
+after the death of Charles I. Three members of the Lovelace family
+lie in the church, their tombs marked by brasses; William Lovelace
+(1459) another William Lovelace, gentleman (1459), and Thomas Lovelace
+(1591).
+
+From Bethersden I went on to High Halden, which stands upon a ridge
+out of the Weald, a very characteristic and beautiful place, with a
+most interesting church dedicated to Our Lady. Indeed I do not know
+where one could match the strange wooden tower and belfry and the
+noble fourteenth century porch, masterpieces of carpentry, which close
+on the west the little stone church of the fifteenth century. Within
+the most interesting thing left to us is the glass in the east window
+of the south chancel where we see the Blessed Virgin with her lily,
+part of an Annunciation. There, too, in another window are the arms of
+Castile and of Leon, a strange blazon to find in the Weald of Kent.
+
+But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of
+this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and
+dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the
+south of High Halden.
+
+If we look at the ordnance map we shall see that the town of Tenterden
+is set upon a great headland thrust out by the higher land of the
+Kentish Weald, southward and east towards those low marshlands that
+are lost almost imperceptibly in the sea, and are known to us as
+Romney Marsh. This great headland, in shape something like a clenched
+fist, stands between the two branches of the Rother, the river which
+flows into the sea at Rye, and which was once navigable by ships so
+far up as Small Hythe just under the southern escarpment of the
+headland upon which Tenterden stands. Hither so late as 1509 the
+Rother was navigable, and we find Archbishop Warham on the petition of
+the people licensing a small chapel there of St John Baptist still in
+existence, for the use of the inhabitants and as a sanctuary or a
+graveyard for the burial of those wrecked on the "sea-shore" _infra
+predictum oppidum de Smallhyth_.
+
+Now in this lies all the greatness of Tenterden. Rye, which had early
+been added to the Cinque Ports, was a place of very considerable
+importance, but upon the east it was entirely cut off by Romney Marsh,
+upon the west, too, a considerable marshland closed by a great and
+desolate hill country closed it in, but to the north was a navigable
+river, a road that is, leading up into England, and at the head of it
+a town naturally sprang up. That town was Tenterden, and her true
+position was recognised by Henry VI., when he united her to Rye. Till
+then she was one of "the Seven Hundreds" belonging to the Crown.
+Domesday Book knows nothing of her; as a place of importance, as a
+town that is, she is a creation of Rye, and her development was thus
+necessarily late and endured but for a season. I suppose the great
+days of Rye to have been those of the thirteenth and fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries; and it was therefore during this period that
+Tenterden began its career as a town. After the failure of the sea,
+Rye sank slowly back into what it is to-day, but Tenterden would
+appear to have stood up against that misfortune with some success,
+for we find Elizabeth incorporating it under a charter.
+
+There can be but few more charming towns in Kent than Tenterden as we
+see it to-day, looking out from its headland southward to the great
+uplifted Isle of Oxney beyond which lies the sea, and eastward over
+all the mystery of Romney Marsh. The church which should, one thinks,
+have borne the name of St Michael, is dedicated in honour of St
+Mildred. It is a large building of the thirteenth, fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries, the tower, its latest feature, being also its
+noblest. Indeed the tower of Tenterden church, if we may believe the
+local legend, is certainly the most important in Kent. For it is said,
+and, rightly understood, there may after all be something in it, to
+have been the cause of the Goodwin Sands. Fuller asserts "when the
+vicinage in Kent met to consult about the inundation of the Goodwin
+Sands (date not given) and what might be the cause thereof, an old man
+imputed it to the building of Tenterden steeple in this county; for
+these sands, said he, were firm sands before that steeple was built,
+which ever since were overflown with sea-water. Hereupon all heartily
+laughed at his unlogical reason, making that effect in Nature which
+
+was only the consequent on time; not flowing from, but following after
+the building of that steeple."
+
+According to Latimer, however, it was Sir Thomas More who drew this
+answer from the ancient, and if this be so, it certainly fixes the
+date. "Maister More," says Latimer, "was once sent in commission into
+Kent to help to trie out (if it might be) what was the cause of Goodwin
+Sands and the shelfs that stopped up Sandwich haven. Thither cometh
+Maister More and calleth the countye afore him, such as were thought to
+be men of experience, and men that could of likelihode best certify him
+of that matter, concerning the stopping of Sandwich haven. Among others
+came in before him an olde man with a white head, and one that was
+thought to be little lesse than an hundereth yeares olde. When
+Maister More saw this aged man he thought it expedient to heare him say
+his minde in this matter, for being so olde a man it was likely that he
+knew most of any man in that presence and company. So Maister More
+called this olde aged man unto him and sayd, 'Father,' sayd he, 'tell
+me if ye can what is the cause of this great arising of the sande and
+shelves here about this haven the which sop it up that no shippes can
+aride here? Ye are the oldest man that I can espie in all this
+companye, so that, if any man can tell any cause of it, ye of all
+likelihode can say most in it, or at least wise more than any other man
+here assembled.' 'Yea forsooth, good maister,' quod this olde man, 'for
+I am well nigh an hundred yeares olde and no man here in this company
+anything neare unto mine age.' 'Well, then,' quod Maister More, 'how
+say you in this matter? What thinke ye to be the cause of these shelves
+and flattes that stop up Sandwiche haven?' 'Forsooth syr,' quod he, 'I
+am an olde man. I think Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin
+Sandes. For I am an old man syr' quod he, 'and I may remember the
+building of Tenterden Steeple and I may remember when there was no
+steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden Steeple was in
+building there was no manner of speaking of any flats or sands that
+stopped the haven; and therefore I thinke that Tenterden steeple is
+the cause of the destroying and decaying of Sandwich haven."
+
+Post hoc, propter hoc and this silly old man has been held up to all
+ensuing ages as an absurdly simple old fellow. But what after all if
+he should be right in part at least?
+
+Tenterden church, we are told, belonged to the Abbey of St Augustine
+in Canterbury, which also owned the Goodwin Sands, part, it is said,
+of the immense domain of Earl Godwin. Now it was in their hands that
+the money collected throughout Kent for the building and fencing of
+the coast against the sea had always been placed. We learn that "when
+the sea had been very quiet for many years without any encroachings,"
+the abbot commuted that money to the building of a steeple and
+endowing of the church in Tenterden, so that the sea walls were
+neglected. If this be so, that oldest inhabitant was not such a fool
+as he seems to look.
+
+I slept under the shadow of Tenterden steeple and very early in the
+morning set out for Appledore, where I crossed the canal and came into
+the Marsh. I cannot hope to express my enthusiasm for this strange and
+mysterious country so full of the music of running water, with its
+winding roads, its immense pastures, its cattle and sheep and flowers,
+its far away great hills and at the end, though it has no end, the
+sea. It mixes with the sea indeed as the sky does, so that no man far
+off can say this is land or this is water.
+
+It is famous as a fifth part of the world different from its fellows.
+And indeed, if it resembles anything I know it is not with the wide
+moors of Somerset, Sedgemoor, or the valley of the Brue, nor with the
+great windy Fenland in the midst of which Ely rises like a shrine or
+a sanctuary, I would compare it, but with the Campagna of Rome, whose
+tragic mystery it seems to have borrowed, at least in part, whose
+beauty it seems to wear, a little provincially, it is true, and whose
+majesty it apes, but cannot quite command. It is the Campagna in
+little; the great and noble mountains, the loveliest in the world are
+sunk to hills pure and exquisite upon which, too, we may still see the
+cities, here little towns and villages, as Rye, Winchelsea, Appledore,
+Lympne or Hythe, dear places of England of my heart, and all between
+them this mysterious and lowly thing not quite of this world, a
+graveyard one might think, as the Campagna is, a battlefield as is the
+Trasimeno plain, a gate and certainly an exit not only out of England
+but from the world and life itself.
+
+As one wanders about England here and there, one comes to understand
+that if its landscape is unique in its various charm and soft beauty,
+it is also inhuman in this, that most often it is without the figure
+of man, the fields are always empty or nearly always, the hills are
+uniformly barren of cities or towns or villages, it is a landscape
+without the gesture of human toil and life, without meaning that is,
+and we can bear it so. But no man could live in the Marsh for a day
+without that gesture of human life that is there to be seen upon every
+side. Lonely as it is, difficult as it is to cross, because of its
+chains and twisting lines of runnels, man is more visibly our comrade
+there than anywhere else in England I think, and this though there be
+but few men through all the Marsh. He and his beasts, his work too,
+and his songs, redeem the Marsh for us from fear, a fear not quite
+explicable, perhaps, to the mere passenger, but that anyone who has
+lingered there during a month of spring will recognise as always at
+his elbow and only kept out of the soul by the humanity which has
+redeemed this mysterious country, the shepherd with his flock, the
+dairyman with his cows, the carter with his great team of oxen in the
+spring twilight returning from the fields. And then there are the
+churches, whose towers stand up so strong out of the waters and the
+mist so that their heads are among the stars, and whose bells are the
+best music because they tell not only of God and his Saints but of
+man, of the steading and of home.
+
+[Illustration: A CORNER OF ROMNEY MARSH]
+
+Take Appledore, for instance, with its fine old church, with its air
+of the fourteenth century and its beautiful old ivy grown
+tower, once a port they say, on the verge of the Marsh; what
+could be more nobly simple and homely? Within, you may, if you
+will, find, in spite of everything, all our past, the very altar at
+which of old was said the Holy Mass, the very altar tomb maybe where,
+upon Maunday Thursday Christ Himself was laid in the sepulchre, an old
+rood loft, too, certain ancient screens complete, a little ancient
+glass. What more can a man want or at least expect from England of my
+heart? And if he demand something more curious and more rare, at Horn's
+Place, not a mile away, is a perfect chapel of the fifteenth century
+which served of old some great steading, where, for a hundred years
+Mass was perhaps said every day and the Marsh blessed. Or take Snargate
+with its church of St Dunstan. It, too, has a fine western tower of the
+fifteenth century, but much of the church dates from the thirteenth,
+and upon the north chancel roof-beams are heraldic devices, among them
+an eagle and the initials W.R. And here is a piece of fine old glass in
+which we may see the Lord Christ. Or take Ivychurch; so noble and
+lovely a thing is the church that even without it catches the breath,
+while a whole afternoon is not enough to enjoy its inward beauty. Or
+take Brenzett, where, it is true, the church has been rebuilt, but
+where you will still find a noble seventeenth century tomb with its
+effigies in armour.
+
+It is, however, at Romney, Old Romney and New, that we shall find the
+best there is to be had I think in this strange country from which the
+waters have only been barred out by the continual energy of man. We are
+not surprised to find that New Romney is older than Old Romney, it is
+almost what might have been expected, but no one can ever have come to
+these places without wonder at the nobility of what he sees.
+
+At New Romney there were of old five churches, dedicated in honour of
+St John Baptist, St Laurence, St Martin, St Michael, and St Nicholas,
+for Romney was, in the time of Edward I., the greatest of the Cinque
+Ports. It fell when, as we are told, in a great storm the course of
+the Rother was changed so that it went thereafter to serve Rye, and
+New Romney fell slowly down so that to-day but one of those five
+churches remains, that of St Nicholas. But what a glorious church it
+is, and if the rest were like it, what idea must we have of the
+splendour of New Romney in the thirteenth century? This great Norman
+church of St Nicholas with its partly fourteenth century nave, its
+clerestory, its fine chancel with sedilia and Easter sepulchre, and
+noble pinnacled tower is perhaps the greatest building in the Marsh.
+It belonged to the Abbey of Pontigny and was served by its monks who
+had a cell here, and the town it adorns and ennobles, was the capital
+of all this district.
+
+Nothing so glorious and so old remains in Old Romney, where the church
+of St Clement has nothing I think, earlier than the thirteenth
+century, and little of that, being mainly a building of the fourteenth
+and fifteenth centuries, and yet it is not to be despised, for where
+else in the Marsh will you find anything more picturesque or anything
+indeed more English?
+
+Not at Dymchurch for all its Norman fragments. But Dymchurch is to be
+visited and to be loved for other reasons than that of beauty. It is
+the sentinel and saviour of the Marsh, for it holds back the sea from
+all this country with its great wall, twenty feet high and twenty
+feet broad and three miles long. Also here we have certain evidence of
+the Roman occupation of the Marsh, and may perhaps believe that it was
+Rome which first drained it.
+
+I said that the church of St Nicholas at New Romney was the noblest
+building in the Marsh. When I said so had I forgotten the church of
+All Saints at Lydd, which is known as the Cathedral of the Marshes.
+No, glorious as All Saints is, it has not the antiquity of St
+Nicholas; it is altogether English and never knew the Norman. For all
+that, it is a very splendid building with a tower standing one hundred
+and thirty-two feet over the Marsh, a sign and a blessing. And yet
+before it I prefer the bell tower, built of mighty timber, aloof from
+the church, lonely, over the waters at Brookland. All Saints at Lydd
+belonged to Tintern Abbey, but All Saints at Brookland to St
+Augustine's at Canterbury, and as its font will tell us it dates from
+Norman times, for about it the Normans carved the signs of the Zodiac.
+
+Brookland, hard to get at, stands on the great road which runs south-
+westward out of the Marsh and brings you at last out of Kent into
+Sussex at Rye. It was there I lingered a little to say farewell.
+As one looks at evening across that vast loneliness, so desolate
+and yet so beautiful and infinitely subject to the sky, lying
+between the hills and sinking so imperceptibly into the sea,
+one continually asks oneself what is Romney Marsh, by whom
+was it reclaimed from the all-devouring sea, what forces built
+it up and gathered from barrenness the infinite riches we see?
+Was it the various forces of Nature, the racing tides of the
+straits, some sudden upheaval of the earth, or the tireless
+energy of men--and of what men? Those seventeen miles of richest
+pasture which lie in an infinite peace between Appledore and
+Dungeness, to whom do we owe them and their blessedness? That wall at
+Dymchurch which saves the marshes, Romney, Welland, Guildford and
+Denge, who contrived it and first took advantage of those great banks
+of shingle and of sand which everywhere bar out the great tides of the
+straits and have thus created and preserved this strange fifth part of
+the world? Was it the Romans? May we see in Romney Marsh the greatest
+material memorial of their gigantic energy and art to be found in the
+western provinces, a nobler and a greater work than the Wall as well
+as a more lasting? And if this be so, how well is the Marsh named
+after them, for of all they did materially in our island, this work of
+reclamation was surely the worthiest to bear their name.
+
+But to these questions there can perhaps never be an answer. Certainly
+the very aspect of the Marsh recalls nothing so much as the Campagna
+of Rome, in its nobility, loneliness and infinite subjection to the
+sun, the clouds, and the sky, so that at evening there we might almost
+think that Rome herself lay only just beyond that large horizon, and
+that with an effort we might reach the great gate of San Giovanni e'er
+darkness fell. It is as though in the Marsh our origins for once and
+unmistakably were laid bare for us and we had suddenly recognised our
+home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+RYE AND WINCHELSEA
+
+
+Out of the vagueness and loneliness of the Marsh, with its strange
+level light and tingling silence, I climbed one spring evening at
+sunset into the ancient town of Rye, and at first I could not believe
+I was still in England. No one I think can wander for more than a few
+days about the Marsh, among those half deserted churches, far too big
+for any visible congregation, whose towers in a kind of despair still
+stand up before God against the sea, raging and plotting far off
+against the land, without wondering at last into what country he has
+strayed. In Rye all such doubt is resolved at once, for Rye is pure
+Italy, or at least it seems so in the evening dusk. When I came up
+into it in the spring twilight out of the Marsh, I was reminded of one
+of those Italian cities which stand up over the lean shore of the
+Adriatic to the south of Rimini, but it was not of them I thought when
+in the morning sunlight I saw those red roofs piled up one upon
+another from the plain: it was of Siena. And indeed Rye is in its
+smaller, less complete and of course less exquisite way very like the
+most beautiful city in Tuscany. Here, too, as in Siena, the red-roofed
+houses climb up a hill, one upon another, a hill crowned at last by a
+great church dedicated in honour of the Blessed Virgin. But here the
+likeness, too fanciful for reality, ceases altogether. It is true that
+Siena looks out beyond her own gardens and vineyards upon a desert,
+but it is a very different desolation upon which Rye gazes all day
+long, out of which she rises with all the confidence, grace, and
+gaiety of a flower, and over which she rules like a queen.
+
+From the Porta Romana of Siena or the outlook of the Servi, you gaze
+southward across the barren, scorched valleys to the far-away
+mountains, to Monte Amiata, the fairest mountain of Tuscany. From the
+Ypres Tower of Rye or the Gun Garden below it, you look only across
+the level and empty Marsh which sinks beyond Camber Castle
+imperceptibly into the greyness and barrenness of the sea. To the
+east, across the flat emptiness, the Rother crawls seaward; to the
+west across the Marsh, as once across the sea, Winchelsea rises
+against the woods, and beyond, far away, the darkness of Fairlight
+hangs like a cloud twixt sea and sky.
+
+Indeed, to liken Rye to any other place is to do her wrong, for both
+in herself and in that landscape over which she broods, there is
+enough beauty and enough character to give her a life and a meaning
+altogether her own. From afar off, from Winchelsea, for instance, in
+the sunlight, she seems like a town in a missal, crowned by that
+church which seems so much bigger than it is, gay and warm and yet
+with something of the greyness of the sea and the sea wind about her, a
+place that, as so few English places do, altogether makes a picture in
+the mind, and is at unity with itself.
+
+And from within she seems not less complete, a thing wholly ancient,
+delightful, with a picturesque and yet homely beauty that is the child
+of ancientness. Yet how much has Rye lost! The walls of Coeur de Lion
+have fallen, and only one of the gates remains; but so long as the
+church and the beautiful strong tower of William de Ypres stand, and
+the narrow cobbled streets full of old and humble houses climb up and
+down the steep hill, the whole place is involved in their beauty and
+sanctity, our hearts are satisfied and our eyes engaged on behalf of a
+place at once so old and picturesque and yet so neat and tidy and
+always ready to receive a guest.
+
+A place like Rye, naturally so strong, a steep island surrounded by
+sea or impassable marsh, must have been a stronghold from very early
+times; it is in fact obviously old when we first hear of it as a gift,
+with Winchelsea, of Edward the Confessor's to the Benedictine Abbey of
+Fécamp just across the grey channel in Normandy. Both Rye and
+Winchelsea remained within the keeping of the Abbey of Fécamp until,
+for reasons of State easy to be understood, Henry III. resumed the
+royal rights in the thirteenth century, compensating the monks of
+Fécamp with manors in Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire. For before the
+end of the twelfth century it would seem Rye with Winchelsea had
+become of so much importance as a port as to have been added to the
+famous Cinque Ports, Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney and Hastings. From
+this time both play a considerable part in the trade and politics of
+the Channel and the Straits.
+
+It was to enable her to hold herself secure in this business and
+especially against raids from the sea that the Ypres Tower was built
+in the time of King Stephen, by William of Ypres, Earl of Kent. It was
+a watch tower and perhaps a stronghold, but it was never sufficient.
+Even in 1194 Coeur de Lion permitted the town to wall itself.
+Nevertheless Louis the Dauphin of France took Rye, and it may well
+have been this which determined Henry III. to take the town out of the
+hands of the monks of Fécamp and to hold it himself.
+
+Doubtless Rye's greatest moment was this thirteenth century, nor did
+she appear much less in the fourteenth and the first half of the
+fifteenth century. But often sacked and burned, the town was
+practically destroyed by the French in 1378 and 1448, when only the
+Ypres Tower, part of the church, the Landgate, the Strandgate and the
+so-called chapel of the Carmelite Friars escaped destruction. But from
+this blow Rye recovered to play a part, if a small one, in the defeat
+of the Armada, and though the retreat of the sea, which seems to have
+begun in the sixteenth century, undoubtedly damaged her, it did not
+kill her outright as it did Winchelsea, for she had the Rother to help
+her, and we find her prosperous not only in the time of the
+Commonwealth, but even to-day, when, with the help of a new harbour
+at the mouth of the river, she is still able to carry on her trade.
+
+[Illustration: RYE]
+
+Nothing in fact strikes the visitor to Rye more than the bustle and
+life of a place obviously so old. All the streets are steep and narrow
+and the chief of them, the High Street, seems always to be gay and
+full of business, and is as truly characteristic of Rye as those still
+and grass-grown ways cobbled and half deserted, which lead up to the
+noble great church in its curious _place_.
+
+It is of course to this great sanctuary dedicated in honour of the
+Blessed Virgin, that everyone will go first in Rye. It has been called
+the largest parish church in England, and though this claim cannot be
+made good, it is in all probability the largest in Sussex, is in fact
+known as the Cathedral of East Sussex, and if a church became a
+cathedral by reason of its beauty and size it might rightly claim the
+title. It is certainly worthy of the most loving attention.
+
+The church of Our Lady at Rye is a great cruciform building with
+clerestory, transepts, and central tower, but without western doors,
+the chief entrance being in the north transept. The church is of all
+dates from the Norman time onward, a very English patchwork, here due
+to the depredations, not so much of time, as of the French who have so
+often raided and burnt the town. The oldest part is the tower, which
+is Norman, as are, though somewhat later, the transepts, where certain
+details show the Transitional style. In this style again, but somewhat
+later, is the nave. The chancel and its two chapels are Early English,
+but with many important Decorated, Perpendicular and modern details,
+such as the arcade and the windows. The Early English chapel upon the
+north is that of St Clare, that upon the south is dedicated in honour
+of St Nicholas. In the south aisle of the nave is an Early English
+chantry, now used as a vestry. The communion table of carved
+mahogany is said to have been taken from a Spanish ship at the time
+of the Armada, but it would seem certainly not to be older than the
+end of the seventeenth century. The curious clock whose bells are
+struck by golden cherubs on the north side of the tower, is said to
+have been a gift of Queen Elizabeth and to be the oldest clock in
+England still in good order. It is probably of late Caroline
+construction, but even though it were of the sixteenth century its
+claim to be the oldest clock now at work in England could not be
+upheld for a moment, that in Wells Cathedral being far older. The
+pulpit is of the sixteenth century. In the north aisle is a curious
+collection of Bibles and cannon balls, and here, too, is a small
+window with glass by Burne Jones.
+
+To the south-west of the church is the so-called Carmelite Chapel, a
+late Decorated building. What exactly this was and to whom it
+belonged, is uncertain; it was not a chapel of Carmelite Friars. The
+only establishment belonging to that Order within the county of Susses
+was at Shoreham, founded in honour of the Blessed Virgin, by Sir John
+de Mowbray in 1316.
+
+So far as we know the only religious to be found in
+
+Rye at the time of the spoliation were the Austin Friars. Their house
+still stands--a building of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth
+century--on the Conduit Hill. It has passed through many strange uses,
+among others that of a Salvation Army barracks. It is now the Anglican
+Church House. This was the only settlement of the Austin Friars in
+Sussex, and of its origin nothing is known. In 1368 we hear that the
+prior and convent of the Friars Eremites of St Austin in Rye permitted
+one of their brethren, a priest, to say Mass daily, at the altar of St
+Nicholas, in the parish church for the welfare of William Taylour of
+Rye, and of Agnes his wife. In 1378 the town granted them a place
+called "le Haltone" near the town ditch. But apart from these two facts
+their history is altogether wanting.
+
+From the parish church one descends south-east to the Ypres Tower. This
+watch tower and stronghold was built in the time of King Stephen by
+William of Ypres, Earl of Kent, and is in many ways the most impressive
+building left to us in Rye. It is undoubtedly best seen from the river,
+but it and the garden below it afford a great view over the marshes on
+a clear day, eastward to the cliffs of Folkestone and westward to
+Fairlight. In itself it is a plain rectangular building with round
+towers at the angles, but with nothing of interest within. Yet what
+would Rye be without it. For many years it was the sole defence of the
+town.
+
+Most of those who come to Rye enter the town, and with a sudden
+surprise not to be found elsewhere, by the Landgate upon the north.
+There were, it is said of old, five gates about the town, but
+this is the only one left to us. Nothing, or almost nothing,
+of the walls remain. Doubtless the French destroyed anything
+in the nature of fortification so far as they could, only the
+Ypres Tower they failed to pull down or to burn, and this great round
+towered gateway upon the north--why we do not know?
+
+It is the Landgate which gives to Rye its power of surprise, so that a
+man coming up from the railway, at sight of it, is suddenly
+transported into the Middle Age, and in that dream enters and enjoys
+Rye town, which has never disappointed those who have come in the
+right spirit. For besides the monuments of which I have spoken there
+are others of lesser interest, it is true, but that altogether go to
+make up the charm and delight of this unique place. Among these I will
+name Mermaid Street where the grass grows among the cobbles and where
+stands the Mermaid Inn and the half timber house called the Hospital,
+Pocock's School and Queen Elizabeth's Well. Better still, for me at
+least, is the life of the river and the shipyards, where, though Rye
+is now two miles from the sea, ships are still built and the life of
+the place and its heart are adventured and set upon the great waters.
+
+So alluring indeed is this little town that one is always loath to
+leave it, one continually excuses oneself from departure. One day I
+delayed in order to see the famous poem in the old book in the town
+archives which I already knew from Mr Lucas's book. It is certainly
+of Henry VIII.'s time, and who could have written it but that unhappy
+Sir Thomas Wyatt who loved Anne Boleyn--
+
+         What greater gryffe may hape
+         Trew lovers to anoye
+         Then absente for to sepratte them
+         From ther desiered joye?
+
+         What comforte reste them then
+         To ease them of ther smarte
+         But for to thincke and myndful bee
+         Of them they love in harte?
+
+         And sicke that they assured bee
+         Ehche toe another in harte
+         That nothinge shall them seperate
+         Untylle deathe doe them parte?
+
+         And thoughe the dystance of the place
+         Doe severe us in twayne,
+         Yet shall my harte thy harte imbrace
+         Tyll we doe meete agayne.
+
+
+Then one sunny afternoon I went out by the road past Camber Castle
+across Rye Foreign for Winchelsea on its hill some two miles from Rye
+to the west.
+
+There is surely nothing in the world quite like Winchelsea. Lovelier by
+far than Rye, not only in itself, but because of what it offers you,
+those views of hill and marsh and sea with Rye itself, like I know not
+what little masterpiece of Flemish art, in the middle distance
+eastward, Winchelsea is a place never to be left or at worst never to
+be forgotten. One comes to it from Rye on a still afternoon of spring
+when the faint shadows are beginning to lengthen, expecting little. In
+fact, if the traveller be acceptable, capable of appreciating anything
+so still and exquisite, Winchelsea will appear to him to be, as it is
+one of the loveliest things left to us in England, place, as Coventry
+Patmore so well said, in a trance, La Belle an Bois dormant. Nowhere
+else in England certainly have I found just that exquisite stillness,
+that air of enchantment, as of something not real, something in a
+picture or a poem, inexplicable and inexpressible. How spacious it is,
+and how quiet, full of the sweetness and the beauty of some motet by
+Byrd. History is little to us in such a place, which is to be enjoyed
+for its own sake, for its own unique beauty and delight. And yet the
+history of Winchelsea is almost as unique as is the place itself.
+
+Winchelsea when we first hear of it as given by King Edward Confessor
+to the monks of Fécamp, was not set upon this hill-top as we see it
+to-day, but upon an island, low and flat, now submerged some three
+miles south and east of the present town. Here William the Conqueror
+landed upon his return from Normandy when he set out to take Exeter
+and subdue the West; here again two of those knights who murdered St
+Thomas landed in their pride, hot from the court of Henry their
+master. Like Rye, its sister, to whom it looked across the sea,
+Winchelsea was added to the Cinque Ports and was presently taken from
+the monks of Fécamp by Henry III. It was now its disasters began.
+In 1236 it was inundated by the sea as again in 1250, when
+it was half destroyed. Eagerly upon the side of Montfort it
+was taken after Evesham by Prince Edward, and its inhabitants
+slain, so that when in 1288 it was again drowned by the sea
+it was decided to refound the town upon the hill above, then in
+the possession of Battle Abbey, which the King purchased for this
+purpose. At that time the hill upon which Winchelsea was built, and
+still stands, was washed by the sea, and the harbour soon became of
+very great importance, indeed until the sixteenth century, when the
+sea began to retire, Winchelsea was of much greater importance than
+Rye. The retreat of the sea, however, completely ruined it, for it was
+served by no river as Rye was by the Rother.
+
+The town of Edward I., as we may see to-day, by what time has left us
+of it, was built in squares, a truly Latin arrangement, the streets
+all remaining at right angles the one to the other. It had three gates
+and was defended upon the west, where it was not naturally strong, by
+a great ditch. It was attacked and sacked by the French as often as
+Rye, though not always at the same time. Thus in 1377, when Rye was
+half destroyed, Winchelsea was saved by the Abbot of Battle, only to
+be taken three years later by John de Vienne, when the town was burnt.
+No doubt these constant and mostly successful attacks deeply injured
+the place which, after the sea had begun to retreat in the sixteenth
+century, at the time of Elizabeth's visit in 1573, only mustered some
+sixty families. From that time Winchelsea slowly declined till there
+remains only the exquisite ghost we see to-day.
+
+One comes up out of the Marsh into Winchelsea to-day through the
+Strand Gate of the time of Edward I., and presently finds oneself in
+the beautiful and spacious square in which stands the lovely fragment
+of the church of St Thomas of Canterbury.
+
+This extraordinarily lovely building dates from the fourteenth
+century. As we see it, it is but a fragment, consisting of the chancel
+and two side chapels, but as originally planned it would seem to have
+been a cruciform building of chancel, choir with side chapels, a
+central tower, transept and nave. It is doubtful, however, whether
+the nave was ever built, the ruins of the transepts and of two piers
+of the tower only remain.
+
+I say it was doubtful whether this nave was ever built. It has been
+asserted, it is true, that it was burnt by the French either in 1380
+or in 1449, but it seems more probable that it was never completed
+owing to the devastation of the Black Death of 1348-9, though certain
+discoveries made of late would seem to endorse the older theory.
+Certain it is that until the end of the eighteenth century, there
+stood to the south-west of the church a great bell tower, a detached
+campanile, now dismantled, whose stones are said to have been used to
+build Rye Harbour.
+
+The church, as we have it, is one of the loveliest Decorated buildings
+in the county; the Perpendicular porch, however, by which we enter does
+not belong to the church but possibly came here from one of the
+destroyed churches of Winchelsea, St Giles's or St Leonard's. Within
+we find ourselves in a great choir or chancel, with a chapel
+on either hand, that on the right dedicated in honour of St
+Nicholas and known as the Alard Chantry, that on the left the Lady
+Chapel known as the Farncombe Chantry. The arcades which divide these
+chapels from the choir are extraordinarily beautiful, as are the
+restored sedilia and piscina with their gables and pinnacles and
+lovely diaper work. The windows, too, are very noble and fine, and rich
+in their tracery, which might seem to be scarcely English.
+
+[Illustration: WINCHELSEA CHURCH]
+
+In the Chapel of St Nicholas, the Alard Chantry, on the south, are the
+glorious canopied tombs of Gervase Alard (1300) and Stephen Alard. The
+first is the finer; it is the tomb of the first Lord High Admiral of
+England. The sepulchral effigy lies cross-legged with a heart in its
+hands and a lion at its feet; and about its head two angels once
+knelt. The whole was doubtless once glorious with colour, traces of
+which still remain on the beautiful diaper work of the recess. The
+tomb of Stephen Alard is later, but similar though less rich. Stephen
+was Admiral of the Cinque Ports in the time of Edward II. Another of
+the family, Reginald, lies beneath the floor where of old a brass
+marked his tomb (1354).
+
+In the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin, the Farncombe Chantry, are three
+tombs all canopied with a Knight in chain armour, a Lady, and a young
+Squire. We are ignorant whose they may be. It is certain that these
+tombs are older than the church, and they are said to have been
+brought here from old Winchelsea.
+
+But Winchelsea has other ruins and other memories besides those to be
+found in the parish church.
+
+The Franciscans, the Grey Friars, were established in Winchelsea very
+early, certainly before 1253; and when old Winchelsea was destroyed
+and the new town built on the hill by the King it was agreed that no
+monastery or friary should be built there save only a house for the
+Friars Minor. This was erected where now the modern mansion called
+'The Friars' stands, the old convent having been pulled down so lately
+as 1819. A part of the ruined Chapel of the Blessed Virgin remains,
+however, the choir and apse. Decorated work not much later than the
+parish church, and of great beauty. Unhappily we know absolutely
+nothing of the Friars in Winchelsea, except that when the house was
+suppressed in 1538 it was exceedingly poor.
+
+The Franciscans, however, were not the only Friars in Winchelsea in
+spite of the agreement made at the foundation of the new town. In 1318
+Edward II. granted the Black Friars, the Dominicans, twelve acres on
+the southern side of the hill. This situation was found inconvenient,
+and in 1357 the Dominicans obtained six acres "near the town."
+Nothing, or almost nothing, remains of their house.
+
+Besides these two religious houses, Winchelsea possessed three
+hospitals, those of St John, St Bartholomew and Holy Cross.
+
+The Hospital of St Bartholomew was near the New Gate on the south-west
+of the town, and dated from the refounding of Edward. Nothing remains
+of it, or of the Hospital of Holy Cross, which had existed in old
+Winchelsea and was set up in the new town also near the New Gate. But
+the oldest and the most important of the three hospitals was that of
+St John. A fragment of this remains where the road turns towards
+Hastings to the north of the churchyard. Close by is the thirteenth-
+century Court House.
+
+It is always with regret I leave Winchelsea when I must, and even the
+beautiful road through Icklesham into Hastings will not reconcile one
+who has known how to love this place, to departure. And yet how fair
+that road is and how fair is the Norman church of St Nicholas at
+Icklesham upon the way! The road winds up over the low shore towards
+Fairlight, ever before one, and at last as one goes up Guestling Hill
+through a whole long afternoon and reaches the King's Head Inn at
+sunset, suddenly across the smoke of Hastings one sees Pevensey Level,
+and beyond, the hills where fell the great fight in which William Duke
+of Normandy disputed for England with Harold the King. At sunset, when
+all that country is half lost in the approaching darkness, one seems to
+feel again the tragedy of that day so fortunate after all, in which
+once more we were brought back into the full life of Europe and renewed
+with the energy Rome had stored in Gaul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
+
+
+It is not often on one's way, even in England of my heart, that one
+can come upon a place, a lonely hill-side or a city, and say: this is
+a spot upon which the history of the world was decided; yet I was able
+on that showery morning, as I went up out of Hastings towards Battle
+and saw all the level of Pevensey full of rain, to recall two such
+places in which I had stood already upon my pilgrimage. For I had
+lingered a whole morning upon the battlefield where the Romans first
+met and overthrew our forefathers and thus brought Britain within the
+Empire; while at Canterbury I had been in the very place where, after
+an incredible disaster, England was persuaded back again out of
+barbarism into the splendour of the Faith and of civilisation. These
+places are more than English, they are European sanctuaries, two of
+the greater sites of the history of Europe. Perhaps as much cannot
+rightly be said for the hill where the town of Battle stands, the
+landing-place at Pevensey and the port of Hastings.
+
+And yet I don't know. What a different England it would have been if
+William of Normandy had failed or had never landed here at all. And if
+such an England could have endured how changed would have been the
+whole destiny of Europe. I am not sure after all that we ought not to
+be as uplifted by the memory of Hastings as we are or should be by the
+memory of Caesar's advent. At any rate since Hastings was fought and
+won in the eleventh century any national prejudices that belong wholly
+to the modern world are quite as much out of place with regard to it as
+they are with regard to Caesar or St Augustine. And if we must be
+indignant and remember old injuries that as often as not were sheer
+blessings, scarcely in disguise, let us reserve our hatred, scorn and
+contempt for those damned pagan and pirate hordes that first from
+Schleswig-Holstein and later from Denmark descended upon our Christian
+country, and for a time overwhelmed us with their brutish barbarism.
+As for me I am for the Duke of Normandy; without him England were not
+the England of my heart.
+
+Now the great and beautiful road up out of Hastings, seven miles into
+Battle, is not only one of the loveliest in Britain, every yard of it
+is full of Duke William's army, and thence we may see how in its
+wonderful simplicity all that mighty business which was decided that
+October morning on the hill-top that for so long Battle Abbey guarded
+as a holy place, was accomplished. For looking southward over the
+often steep escarpment, always between three and five hundred feet
+over the sea plain, we may see Pevensey Castle, the landing, Hastings,
+the port, and at last come to Battle, the scene of the fight that gave
+England to the Norman for our enormous good and glory and honour.
+
+I say that the struggle for the English crown between Duke William of
+Normandy and Harold, King of England, was in no sense of the word a
+national struggle; on the contrary, it was a personal question fought
+and decided by the Duke of Normandy and his men, and Harold and his
+men. Indeed the society of that time was altogether innocent of any
+impulse which could be called national. That society, all of one piece
+as it was, both in England and in Gaul, was wholly Feudal, though
+somewhat less precisely so here than in Normandy. Men's allegiance
+was not given to any such vague unity as England, but to a feudal
+lord, in whose quarrel they were bound to fight, in whose victory they
+shared, and in whose defeat they suffered. The quarrel between King
+Harold and Duke William was in no sense of the word a national
+quarrel but a personal dispute in which the feudal adherents of both
+parties were necessarily involved, the gage being the crown and spoil
+of England. This is at once obvious when we remember that the ground
+of William's claim to the throne was a promise received from King
+Edward personally, unconfirmed by council or witan, but endorsed for
+his own part by Harold when shipwreck had placed him in Duke William's
+power. Such were the true elements of the dispute.
+
+It is true that the society of that time was, as I have said, all of
+one piece both in England and in Gaul, but it is certain that in
+England that society was less precisely organised, less conscious of
+itself, less logical in its structure, in a word less real and more
+barbarous than that of the Normans. The victory of Duke William meant
+that the sluggish English system would be replaced or at any rate
+reinvigorated by an energy and an intelligence foreign to it, without
+which it might seem certain that civilisation here would have fallen
+into utter decay or have perished altogether. The service of Duke
+William then, while not so great as that of Caesar and certainly far
+less than that of St Augustine, was of the same kind; he rescued
+England from barbarism and brought us back into the full light of
+Europe. The campaign in which that great service was achieved divides
+itself into two parts, the first of which comes to an end with the
+decisive action at Hastings which gave Duke William the crown; the
+second consists of three great fighting marches, the result of which
+was the conquest of England. I am only here concerned with the first
+part of that campaign, and more especially with the great engagement
+which was fought out upon the hill-top which the ruins of Battle Abbey
+still mark. Let us consider this.
+
+Harold, the second son of Earl Godwin, was crowned King of England at
+Westminster upon the feast of the Epiphany in the year 1066. When Duke
+William heard of it he was both angry and amazed, and at once began to
+call up his feudatories to lend him aid to enforce his claim to the
+Crown of England against King Harold. This was not an easy thing to
+do, nor could it be done at all quickly. It was necessary to gather a
+great host.
+
+Those lords who owed him allegiance had as often as not to be
+persuaded or bribed to fulfil their obligation; and they with their
+followers and dependents were not enough; it was necessary to engage
+as many as possible of those chiefs who did not own him as lord; these
+had to be bought by promises of gain and honour. Also a considerable
+fleet had to be built. All this took time, and Harold was therefore
+perfectly aware of what Duke William intended, and gathered his forces,
+both of ships and men, to meet him in the south of England. All through
+the spring and summer he waited, in vain. Meantime, soon after Easter,
+a strange portent appeared in the heavens "the comet star which some
+men call the hairy star," and no man could say what it might mean. It
+was not this, however, which delayed William; he was not ready. It is
+possible that had he been able to advance during the summer the whole
+history of England might have been different. As it was, when autumn
+was at hand with the Birthday of the Blessed Virgin, Harold's men were
+out of provisions and weary of waiting; they were allowed to disperse,
+Harold himself went to London and the fleet beat up into the Thames,
+not without damage and loss, against the wind, which, had he but known
+it, now alone delayed the Duke.
+
+But that wind which kept William in port brought another enemy of
+Harold's to England with some three hundred galleys, Hardrada of
+Norway, who came to support the claims of Tostig, now his man, King
+Harold's exiled brother, to Northumbria; for the Northumbrians had
+rebelled against him, and Harold had acquiesced in their choice of
+Morkere for lord. Neither Morkere nor his brother Edwin, with their
+local forces, was able to meet Hardrada with success. They attempted
+to enter York but at Fulford on the 20th September they were routed,
+and Hardrada held the great northern capital.
+
+Meanwhile Harold had not been idle. Gathering his scattered forces he
+marched north with amazing speed, covering the two hundred miles
+between London and Tadcaster in nine days, to meet this new foe; but
+this almost marvellous performance left the south undefended. He
+entered York on September 25th, and on the same day, seven miles from
+the city at Stamford Bridge, he engaged the enemy and broke them
+utterly. Three days later William landed at Pevensey.
+
+What could Harold do? He did all that a man could do. William had
+landed at Pevensey upon Thursday, September 28th. It is probable that
+Harold heard of it on the following Monday, October 2nd. Immediately
+he set out for London, which by hard riding he reached, though
+probably with but a few men, on Friday, October 6th, an amazing
+achievement, only made possible by the great Roman road between York
+and London. Upon the following Tuesday and Wednesday he was joined by
+his victorious forces from the north, who had thus repeated their
+unequalled feat and marched south again as they had north some two
+hundred miles in nine days. Upon Wednesday, October 11th, Harold
+marched out of London at the head of this force, and by the evening of
+October 13th--a day curiously enough to be kept later as the feast of
+St Edward the Confessor--this heroic force had marched in forty-eight
+hours some sixty miles across country, and was in position upon that
+famous hill some two hours from the coast, overlooking the landing-
+place of William at Pevensey and the port he had seized at Hastings.
+That great march has, I think, never been equalled by any British army
+before or since.
+
+It might seem strange that William, who had landed at Pevensey upon
+the 28th of September, had not advanced at all from the sea-coast when
+Harold and his men appeared upon that hill after their great march
+from York upon October 13th. But in fact William, Norman as he was,
+had a very clear idea of what he intended to do. He left little to
+chance. He landed his men at Pevensey, seized upon Hastings and
+beached his ships; then for a whole fortnight he awaited the hot and
+weary return of Harold. Harold appeared upon the evening of October
+13th. Upon the following day, a Saturday, the battle William had
+expected was fought, Harold was slain and his heroic force destroyed.
+
+The story of that day is well known. Harold's forces were drawn up upon
+the ridge where the ruins of Battle Abbey now stand. William, upon the
+thirteenth, had marched out of Hastings and had occupied the hill to
+the east called Telham, where to-day stands Telham Court. In those days
+probably no village or habitation of any sort occupied either of these
+heights; one of the chroniclers calls the battlefield the place of
+"the Hoar Apple Tree."
+
+It is said that the night of October 13th was passed by Harold and his
+men in feasting and in jollity, while the Normans confessed their sins
+and received absolution. However that may be, in the full daylight,
+about nine o'clock of Saturday, October 14th, the battle was joined.
+
+This tremendous affair which was to have such enormous consequences
+was opened by the minstrel Taellefer, who had besought leave of Duke
+William to strike the first blow. Between the two armies he rode
+singing the Song of Roland, and high into the air he flung his lance
+and caught it three times e'er he hurled it at last into the amazed
+English, to fall at last, slain by a hundred javelins as he rode back
+into the Norman front.
+
+Thus was begun the most famous battle ever fought in England. It
+endured without advantage either way for some six hours till the
+Norman horse, flung back from the charge, fell into the Malfosse in
+utter confusion, and the day seemed lost to the Normans. But Odo,
+Bishop of Bayeux, retrieved it and from that time, about three
+o'clock, the Normans began to have the advantage. The battle seems to
+have been decided at last by two clever devices attributed to William
+himself. He determined to break Harold's line, and since he had not
+been able to do this by repeated charges, he determined to try a
+stratagem. Therefore he ordered his men to feign flight, and thus to
+draw the English after them in pursuit. This was successfully done, and
+when the English followed they were easily surrounded and slain.
+William's other device is said to have been that of shooting high into
+the air so that the arrows might turn and fall as from the sky upon
+the foe. This stratagem is said to have been the cause of Harold's
+death; for it was an arrow falling from on high and piercing him
+through the right eye that killed him or so grievously wounded him
+that he was left for dead, to be finally killed by Eustace of Boulogne
+and three other knights.
+
+With Harold down there can have been little hope of victory left to
+his men, and indeed before night William had planted the Pope's banner
+where Harold's had floated and held the battlefield. There he supped
+among the dead, and having spent Sunday, October 15th, in burying the
+fallen, he set out not for London, but for Dover, for his simple and
+precise plan was to secure all the entries into England from the
+continent before securing the capital. When he had done this he
+marched up into England by the Watling Street, burned Southwark,
+crossed the Thames at Wallingford, received there the submission of
+the Archbishop of Canterbury, and at Berkhampstead the submission of
+London and the offer of the Crown which he received at Westminster at
+Mass upon Christmas Day; twelve days less than a year after Harold
+had been crowned in the same place.
+
+One comes to Battle to-day along that great and beautiful road, high
+up over the sea plain, which still seems full with memories of the
+Norman advance from Hastings, thinking of all that great business. If
+one comes up on Tuesday, upon payment of sixpence, one is admitted
+to the gardens of the house in which lie the ruins of the
+abbey William founded in thankfulness to God for his victory, the high
+altar of which was set upon the very spot where Harold fell: "Hic
+Harold Rex interfectus est."
+
+It was while William was encamped upon Telham Hill, expecting the
+battle of the morrow, that he vowed an abbey to God if He gave him the
+victory. He was heard by a monk of Marmoutier, a certain William,
+called the Smith, who, when Duke William had received the crown at
+Westminster, reminded him of his promise. The King acknowledged his
+obligation and bade William of Marmoutier to see to its fulfilment. The
+monk thereupon returned to Marmoutier, and choosing four others,
+brought them to England; but finding the actual battlefield unsuited
+for a monastery, since there was no water there, he designed to build
+lower down towards the west. Now when the King heard of it he was angry
+and bade them build upon the field itself, nor would he hear them
+patiently when they asserted there was no water there, for, said he:
+"If God spare me I will so fully provide this place that wine shall be
+more abundant there than water is in any abbey in the land." Then said
+they that there was no stone. But he answered that he would bring them
+stone from Caen. This, however, was not done, for a quarry was found
+close by. Also the King richly endowed the house, giving it all the
+land within a radius of a league, and there the abbot was to be
+absolute lord free of bishop and royal officer, [Footnote: The unique
+privileges of the abbot of Battle included the right to "kill and take
+one or two beasts with dogs" in any of the King's forests.] and very
+many manors beside. Yet ten years elapsed before the Abbey of Battle
+was sufficiently completed to receive an abbot. In 1076, however,
+Robert Blancard, one of the four monks chosen by William of Marmoutier,
+was appointed, but he died e'er he came to Battle. Then one Gausbert
+was sent from Marmoutier, and he came with four of his brethren and
+was consecrated "Abbot of St Martin's of the place of Battle." Beside
+the extraordinary gifts and privileges which the Conqueror
+had bestowed upon the Abbey in his lifetime, upon his death he
+bequeathed to it his royal embroidered cloak, a splendid collection of
+relics and a portable altar containing relics, possibly the very one
+upon which Harold had sworn in his captivity in Normandy to support
+his claim to England. William is said to have intended the monastery
+to be filled with sixty monks. We do not know whether this number ever
+really served there. In 1393, but that was after the Black Death,
+there appear to have been some twenty-seven, and in 1404 but thirty.
+In 1535, on the eve of the Suppression, Battle Abbey was visited by
+the infamous Layton who reported to Thomas Cromwell that "all but two
+or three of the monks were guilty of unnatural crimes and were
+traitors," adding that the abbot was an arrant churl and that "this
+black sort of develish monks I am sorry to know are past amendment."
+Little more than two years later the abbot surrendered the abbey and
+received a pension of one hundred pounds. The furniture and so forth
+of the house was then very poor. "So beggary a house I never see, nor
+so filthy stuff," Layton writes to Wriothesley. "I will not 20s. for
+all the hangings in this house...." In August 1538 the place was
+granted to Sir Anthony Browne, who is said to have removed the cloak
+of the Conqueror and the famous Battle Abbey Roll to Cowdray. This
+rascal razed the church and cloisters to the ground, and made the
+abbot's lodging his dwelling. It is said that one night as he was
+feasting a monk appeared before him and solemnly cursed him,
+prophesying that his family should perish by fire. To the fulfilment of
+this curse Cowdray bears witness even to this day.
+
+[Illustration: BATTLE ABBEY]
+
+What spoliation, time and neglect have left of the Abbey is beautiful,
+especially the great fourteenth century gateway which faces the Market
+Green. Nothing save the foundations is left of the great church. From
+the terrace, doubtless, we look across the battlefield, but all is so
+changed, the bleak hill-top has become a superb garden, that it is
+impossible to realise still less to reconstruct the battle, and indeed
+since we can only visit the place amid a crowd of tourists, our present
+discomfort makes any remembrance of the fight or of the great and
+solemn abbey which for so long turned that battlefield into a sanctuary
+impossible.
+
+Nor indeed are we more fortunate in the parish church which was
+originally built by Abbot Ralph in the twelfth century. It has been so
+tampered with and restored that little remains that is unspoilt. There,
+and I think most fittingly, lies that Sir Anthony Browne who got Battle
+Abbey from the King who had stolen it.
+
+Now when I had seen all this I went on my way, and because I was
+unhappy on account of all that theft and destruction, and because where
+once there had been altar and monks to serve it, now there was none,
+and because what had once been common to us all was now become the
+pleasure of one man, I went up out of Battle into the hills by the
+great road through the woods and so on and up by Dallington and
+Heathfield and so down and down and down all a summer day across the
+Weald till at evening I came to Lewes where I slept. I remember
+nothing of that day but the wind and the hills and the great sun of
+May which went ever before me into the west so that I soon forgot to
+be sorry and rejoiced as I went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LEWES AND SIMON DE MONTFORT
+
+
+I do not know of a more beautiful town than Lewes in all the wide
+south country; it is beautiful not only in itself but in its
+situation, set there upon an isolated hill over the Ouse and
+surrounded, as though they were great natural bastions set there in
+her defence, by Malling Hill on the north, Mount Caburn on the west,
+the broken heights of the Downs to the south, through which the Ouse
+flows towards Newhaven and the sea, and on the east by Mount Harry
+under which was fought the very famous battle of Lewes in which Simon
+de Montfort took his king prisoner.
+
+The natural strength and beauty of this situation has been much
+increased by the labour of man, for Lewes is set as it were all in a
+garden out of which it rises, a pinnacle of old houses crowned by the
+castle upon its half precipitous hill. It is a curiously un-English
+vision you get from the High Street for instance, looking back upon
+the hill or from the little borgo of Southover or from Cliffe, and yet
+there can be few more solidly English places than Lewes.
+
+That the Romans had here some sort of settlement there can be no
+doubt, that Lewes was a place of habitation in the time of the Saxons
+is certain, indeed in Athelstan's day it boasted of two mints, but the
+town, as it appears to us in history, grew up about the Cluniac
+Priory of St Pancras under the protection of the Castle, and to these
+it owes everything except its genesis.
+
+Whatever Lewes may have been before the Conquest that revolution saw
+it pass into the power of one of the greatest of William's nobles,
+that William de Warenne who was his son-in-law. It was he and his wife
+Gundrada, generally supposed to be the Conqueror's daughter, who
+founded the Priory of St Pancras at Southover. It is probable, even
+certain, that a chapel, possibly with some sort of religious house
+attached to it, existed here before William de Warenne obtained from
+the Conqueror the rape and town of Lewes. In any case it can have
+been of small importance. But within ten years of the Conquest William
+de Warenne and his wife determined to found an important monastery at
+the gates of their town, and with this intention they set out on
+pilgrimage for Rome to consult, and to obtain the blessing of, the
+Pope. They got so far as Burgundy when they found that it was
+impossible to go on in safety on account of the war between the Pope
+and the Emperor. When they found themselves in this predicament they
+were not far from the great Abbey of SS. Peter and Paul at Cluny.
+
+Now the Cluniac Congregation, the first great reform of the
+Benedictine Order, had been founded there in the diocese of Macon in
+910, and it was then at the height of its power and greatness. Cluny
+was the most completely feudal of the orders, for the Cluniac monks
+were governed by Priors each and all of whom were answerable only to
+the Abbot of Cluny himself, while every monk in the Order had to be
+professed by him, that mighty ecclesiastic at this time can have been
+master of not less than two thousand monks. Cluny's boast was its
+school and the splendour of its ceremonies and services; God was
+served with a marvellous dignity and luxury undreamed of before, and
+unequalled since Cluny declined. It was to this mother house of the
+greatest Congregation of the time that William de Warenne turned with
+his wife when war prevented them on the road to Rome, and we cannot
+wonder that they were so caught by all they saw that they determined
+to put the monastery they proposed to build under the Abbot of Cluny
+and to found a Cluniac Priory at the gates of their town of Lewes.
+They therefore approached the Abbot with the request that he would
+send three or four of his monks to start the monastery. They did not
+find him very willing; for the essence of Cluny was discipline, the
+discipline of an army, and doubtless the Abbot feared that, so far
+away as Sussex seemed, his monks would be out of his reach and might
+become but as other men. But at last the Conqueror himself joined his
+prayers to those of William de Warenne, and in 1076 the Abbot of Cluny
+sent the monk Lanzo and three other brethren to England, and to them
+William de Warenne gave the little church of St Pancras especially
+rebuilt for their use with the land about it, called the
+Island, and other lands sufficient to support twelve monks. But the
+Abbot of Cluny had no sooner agreed to establish his congregation in
+England than he seems to have repented. At any rate he recalled Prior
+Lanzo and kept him so long that William de Warenne, growing impatient,
+seriously thought of transferring his foundation to the Benedictines;
+but at length Prior Lanzo returned and all was arranged as was at
+first intended. The monastery flourished apace and grew not only in
+wealth but in piety. Prior Lanzo proved an excellent ruler, and the
+Priory of St Pancras at Lewes became famous for its sanctity through
+all England.
+
+To the same William de Warenne Lewes owes the foundation or the
+refoundation of its Castle the second centre about which the town
+grew.
+
+A glance at the map will assure us that Lewes could not but be a place
+of great importance, increasing with England in wealth and strength.
+The South Downs stand like a vast rampart back from the sea, guarding
+South England from surprise and invasion. But this great wall is
+broken at four different places, at Arundel in the west where the Arun
+breaks through the chalk to find the sea, at Bramber where the Adur
+passes seaward, at Lewes where the Ouse goes through, and at
+Wilmington where the Cuckmere winds through the hills to its haven.
+Each of these gaps was held and guarded by a castle while the level
+eastward of Beachy Head was held by Pevensey. Of these castles I
+suppose the most important to have been Lewes, for it not only held
+the gap of the Ouse but the pass by Falmer and in some sort the
+Cuckmere Valley also.
+
+[Illustration: LEWES CASTLE]
+
+But the great day of Lewes Castle was that of Simon de Montfort--I
+shall deal with that later. Here it will be enough to point out that
+only a fragment of the great building with its double keep, whose ruin
+we see to-day, dates from the time of the first De Warenne, the rest
+being a later work largely of Edward I's. time.
+
+Let me now return to the Priory which, in the development of the town,
+played a part at least as great as that of the Castle.
+
+The Priory had always been famous for its piety, and in 1199, Hugh,
+who had been Prior there till 1186, was raised to be Abbot of Cluny
+itself. This is interesting and important for we have thus an ex-Prior
+of Lewes as Abbot of Cluny during the great dispute between the Order
+and the Earl of Warenne. In 1200 Lewes was without a Prior, and Abbot
+Hugh appointed one Alexander. For some reason or other De Warenne
+refused to accept him and even went so far as to claim that the
+appointment lay with him, an impossible pretension. Yet even within
+the Priory he is said to have won support, certain of the monks
+claiming that, save for a tribute of one hundred shillings a year to
+Cluny, they were independent. The Pope was appealed to and he of
+course gave a clear decision, not in the English way of compromise,
+which is the way of a barbarian and a coward, but like an honest man
+deciding 'twixt right and wrong. His judgment was wholly in favour of
+the Abbot of Cluny. The Earl then began to bluster and to attempt to
+appeal beyond the Pope; he even dared to place armed men at the Priory
+gate and to stop all communications with Cluny. The Abbot replied by
+an interdict upon Lewes, and things were in this confusion when the
+Pope appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of
+Chichester and Ely to hear what De Warenne had to say in excuse for his
+violence. The Abbot of Cluny himself came over and was insulted in
+Lewes by De Warenne's men. In appointing English judges to hear the
+case the Pope must have known that all would end in a compromise. At
+any rate this is what happened, and it was decided that in future, when
+a vacancy occurred, the Abbot of Cluny should nominate two candidates
+of whom De Warenne should choose one for Prior. This ridiculous
+judgment decided nothing. Of two things, one; either the Abbot was
+right or he was wrong. If he were right why should he forego his claim,
+to satisfy De Warenne who was wrong? A decision was what was needed. In
+1229 the Pope rightly declared the compromise null and void, and the
+Abbot of Cluny regained his rights. At once the moral condition of the
+house improved, and when it was visited in 1262 everything was reported
+to be satisfactory, and unlike any other Cluniac house in England this
+of Lewes was not in debt.
+
+The turning point in the history of the Priory would seem to have been
+the one great moment in the story of the town; the appalling affair in
+which it was involved by Simon de Montfort in 1264 when he took the
+town, then Henry III.'s headquarters, and captured the King and young
+Prince Edward. It would seem that De Montfort's soldiers had very
+little respect for holy places, for we read that not only were the
+altars defiled but the very church was fired and hardly saved from
+destruction.
+
+The quarrel between the King and his barons would seem, too, to have
+involved the monks, for we find the sub-prior and nine brethren were
+expelled from Lewes for conspiracy and faction and went to do penance
+in various houses of the Congregation. Indeed such was the general
+collapse here that before the end of the century the Priory was
+practically bankrupt.
+
+That Lewes suffered severely from the Black Death of 1348-49 is
+certain, but we know very little about it, and indeed the history of
+the house is negligible until, in the beginning of the fifteenth
+century the whole system of Cluny was called in question and it was
+claimed on behalf of Lewes that it should be raised to an abbacy with
+the power to profess monks. It will be remembered that the Abbot of
+Cluny--the only Abbot within the Congregation--alone could profess, and
+in times of war, such as the fourteenth century, this must have been
+very inconvenient. Indeed we read of men who had been monks their whole
+life long, but had never been professed at all. It is therefore not
+surprising that such a claim should at last have been put forward. It
+is equally not surprising that such a claim was not allowed. The Abbot
+of Cluny refused to raise Lewes to the rank of an abbey, but he granted
+the Prior the privilege of professing his monks; this in 1410. So
+things continued till in 1535, the infamous Layton was sent by Thomas
+Cromwell to inquire into the state of the Priory of Lewes, to nose out
+any scandal he could and to invent what he could not find. His methods
+as applied to Lewes are notorious for their insolence and brutality. He
+professes to have found the place full of corruption and rank with
+treason. And in this he was wise, for his master Cromwell wanted the
+house for himself. Upon November 16, 1537, the Priory of St Pancras at
+Lewes was surrendered. It was then served by a Prior and twenty-three
+monks and eighty servi; and it and its lands were granted by the
+King to Thomas Cromwell.
+
+Such was the end of the most famous Cluniac house in England, the
+sanctuary founded by that De Warenne who had built up Lewes between
+his Castle on the height and his monastery in the vale. Almost nothing
+remains to-day of that great and splendid building, but in 1845, in
+building the railway, the coffins of the founders De Warenne and his
+wife Gundrada were found. These now lie in St John's Church, here in
+Southover close by, which belonged to the Priory. It was originally a
+plain Norman building of which the nave remains, the rest of the
+church as we see it, being for the most part either Perpendicular or
+altogether modern.
+
+Of course the Priory of St Pancras was not alone in the fate that
+befell it at the hands of the Tudor in 1537. The only other religious
+house in Lewes suffered a like fate. This was the convent of the
+Franciscans, dedicated, as most authorities agree, in honour of Our
+Lady and St Margaret. The Friars Minor were established in Lewes
+before 1249, and their convent was one of the last to be surrendered,
+in 1538.
+
+From St John's Church, the visitor, not without a glance at the old
+half timber house close by said to have been the residence of Anne of
+Cleves, will pass up to the High Street where, under the Castle,
+stands the parish church of St Michael, the only ancient part of which
+is the round Norman tower, a rare thing. A fourteenth century brass to
+one of the De Warennes is to be seen within. Further west is the
+Transitional Norman church of St Anne, with curious capitals on the
+south side of the nave. Here is a fine basket-work Norman font, and
+in the south aisle at the east end a vaulted chapel. To the north of
+the chancel is a recessed tomb.
+
+But it is not in the churches we have in Lewes that we shall to-day
+find the symbol, as it were, of that old town, still so fair a thing,
+which held the passage of the Ouse through the Downs and in the
+thirteenth century witnessed the great battle in which Simon de
+Montfort, mystic and soldier, defeated and took captive his king. For
+that we must go to the Castle ruin that crowns Lewes as with a
+battlement.
+
+The Castle is reached from the High Street near St Michael's church by
+the Castlegate. It was founded, as I have said, by the first De
+Warenne, but the gate-house by which we enter is later, dating from
+King Edward's time, the original Norman gate being within. The Castle
+had two keeps, a rare feature. Only one of these remains, reached by a
+winding steep way, and of this only two of the fine octagonal towers
+are left to us. These two are thirteenth century works. From the
+principal tower, now used as a museum, we may get the best view of the
+famous battlefield under Mount Harry, one of the most famous sites of
+the thirteenth century in England, for the battle that was fought
+there seemed to have decided everything; in fact it decided nothing,
+for its result was entirely reversed at Evesham by the military genius
+of Prince Edward.
+
+The cause contested upon these noble hills to the north-west of Lewes
+is one which continually recurs all through English history; the cause
+of the Aristocracy against the Crown. The monarchies of western
+Europe, which slowly emerged from the anarchy of the Dark Ages and
+helped to make the Middle Age the glorious and noble thing it was,
+are, if we consider them spiritually at least, democratic weapons, or
+rather, politically, they seem to sum up the national energy and to
+express it. In them was vested, and this as of divine right, the
+executive. Without the Crown nothing could be done, no writ issued, no
+fortress garrisoned. In the Crown was gathered all the national ends,
+it was a symbol at once of unity and of power. Against this glorious
+thing in England we see a constant and unremitting rebellion on the
+part of the aristocracy. It was so in the time of King John when the
+rascal barons curbed and broke the central government; it was so in
+the time of Henry III. when Simon de Montfort led, and for a time
+successfully, the rebellion. It has been so always and not least in
+the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century so falsely represented
+as a democratic movement, when the parvenu aristocracy founded upon
+the lands and wealth of the raped Church in the sixteenth century,
+broke the Crown up and finally established in England a puppet king, a
+mere Venetian Doge incapable, as we have seen in the last few years,
+of defending the people against an unscrupulous and treasonous
+plutocracy led by a lawyer as certainly on the make as Thomas
+Cromwell. The infamous works of such men as these have most often been
+done under the hypocritical and lying banner of the rights of the
+people as though to gain his ends the devil should bear the cross of
+Christ. It is so to-day; it was so in the time of Simon de Montfort.
+
+I have said that the King was the fountain of all power in the England
+of Simon; it was therefore his supreme object to get possession of the
+King's body that he might have control of the executive machinery of
+the country and thus in fact be king _de facto_. It was this which he
+achieved upon the battlefield of Lewes in 1264.
+
+For some ten years before that battle the Barons of England had been
+restless under the yoke of the central government, the Crown, which
+stood not for them but for us all. They had already wrung from Henry
+III. under compulsion, when he was within their power and not a free
+agent, certain concessions which now he refused to confirm to them.
+They called him liar and covered him with the same abuse that their
+successors hurled at Charles I.; but Henry stood firm, he refused
+what had been dragged from him by force, and Simon de Montfort, Earl
+of Leicester, raised an army not from the people but from his own
+feudal adherents and his friends and took the field, striking into the
+valley of the Severn, where he seized Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester
+and Bridgnorth with their castles. Then he marched straight upon
+London where, among the Guilds, he had many adherents and friends. War
+seemed inevitable, but, as it happened, a truce was called, and the
+question which Simon had made an excuse for his rising, the question
+of the King's refusal to confirm the grant of privileges wrung from
+him by force, was submitted for decision to St Louis of France,
+undoubtedly the most reverent, famous, and splendid figure of that
+day. St Louis, unlike an Englishman, decided not with a view to peace
+as though justice were nothing and right an old wives' tale, but
+according to law and his conscience, honestly and cleanly before God
+like an intelligent being. Of two things one, either the King was
+right or he was wrong. St Louis decided that the King was right, and
+this upon January 23rd, 1264.
+
+Simon refused to abide by the decision. This man in his own conception
+was above law and honour and justice, he was the inspired and
+privileged servant of God. In this hallucination he deceived himself
+even as Oliver Cromwell did later and equally for his own ends. He,
+too, would break the Crown and himself govern England. He, too, was
+brutal beyond bearing, proud and insolent with his inferiors,
+imperious even to God, a great man, but one impossible to suffer in
+any state which is to endure, a dangerous tyrant.
+
+This great mystical soldier at once took the field, and when Henry
+returned from Amiens, where the court of St Louis had sat, he found
+all England up, the Cinque Ports all hot for Simon, London ponderous
+in his support, and in all south-eastern England but one principle
+fortress still in loyal hands, that of Rochester.
+
+North and west of London, however, things were less disastrous, and
+Henry's first move was to secure all this and to cut off London, the
+approach to which he held on the south-east in spite of everything,
+since he commanded Rochester, from the Midlands and the West. Simon's
+answer was the right one; he struck at Rochester and laid siege to it.
+Down upon him came King Henry to relieve it and was successful. Simon
+swept back upon London, there he gathered innumerable levies and
+again advanced into the south against the King.
+
+Henry having relieved Rochester, marched also into the south,
+doubtless intent upon the reduction of the Cinque ports; for this,
+however, Simon gave him no time. He came thundering down, half London
+weltering behind him, across the Weald, and Henry, wheeling to meet
+him, came upon the 12th of May up the vale of Glynde and occupied
+Lewes. On the following day Simon appeared at Fletching in the vale of
+the Weald, some nine miles north of Lewes; there he encamped. Very
+early in the morning of the 14th May, Simon arrayed his troops and
+began his march southward upon the royal army. Dawn was just breaking
+when his first troopers came over the high Down and saw Lewes in the
+morning mist, the royal banners floating from the Castle--all still
+asleep. Slowly and at his ease Simon ordered his men. Upon the north,
+conspicuously, he set his litter with his standard above it and about
+it massed the raw levies of London. Upon the south he gathered the
+knights and men-at-arms led by the young Earl of Gloucester. As for
+himself he remained with the reserve. Then when all was ready he gave
+the order and both wings, north and south, began to advance upon the
+town "hoping to find their enemies still abed."
+
+Simon's plan was a simple one, he hoped to surprise his foes and he
+intended in any case to throw his main strength southward upon the
+Priory of St Pancras, while pretending that his main attack was to be
+upon the Castle. He did not altogether succeed in surprising his
+foes, but in everything else he was successful. The royalists were
+aware of his approach only at the last moment, so that when they
+poured out of the Castle and Priory and town they were in some
+confusion. Then Prince Edward, observing the standard of Simon over
+the litter, flung himself upon the Londoners, who broke and fled while
+he pursued them, nor did he stay his hand till he was far away from
+Lewes. He returned at last victorious and triumphant to find Simon's
+banner floating from Lewes Castle, the King of the Romans and the King
+of England in Simon's hands and the day lost. Weary though he was, he
+attempted with all the impetuosity of youth to reverse that verdict.
+Through the streets of Lewes he fought, till at length he was forced
+to take refuge in the church of the Franciscans, where indeed Simon
+found him.
+
+Such was the battle of Lewes, which gave all England to De Montfort for
+more than a year; till indeed Lewes was reversed, by Prince Edward who,
+escaping from his hands at Hereford, gathered a new army about him and
+forced Simon to meet him upon the field of Evesham where, when the
+great soldier-mystic saw the royal banners upon the dawn, he cried out
+that last great word of his, "The Lord have mercy on our souls for our
+bodies are Prince Edward's": to be answered when he demanded mercy,
+"there is no treating with traitors."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE DOWNS
+
+LEWES TO BRAMBER
+
+
+Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is
+the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of
+the South Country; from the noble antiquity of Winchester to the
+splendour of Beachy Head they run like an indestructible line of Latin
+verse beneath the blazon of England. They stand up between the land and
+the sea, the most Roman thing in England, and of all English land it is
+their white brows that the sun kisses first when it rises over the sea,
+of all English hills every morning they are the first to be blest.
+
+The most Roman thing in England I call them; and indeed this "noble
+range of mountains" has not the obvious antiquity of the Welsh
+mountains or the Mendip Hills, nor the tragic aspect as of something as
+old as time, as old as the world itself, of the dark and sea-torn
+cliffs of Cornwall, or the wild and desolate uplands of Somerset and
+Devon. The South Downs seem indeed not so much a work of Nature as of
+man; and of what men! In their regular and even line, in their
+continuity and orderly embankment, in their splendid monotony of
+contour they recall but one thing--Rome; they might be indeed only
+another work of that mighty government which conceived and built the
+great Wall that stretches from the Solway to the Firth of Forth which
+marked the limit of the Empire and barred out its enemies. And this
+wall of the South Downs, too, marked but another frontier of the same
+great government; beyond it lay the horizons unknown, and it barred
+out the sea.
+
+But how much older than Rome are the South Downs! Doubtless before the
+foundation of Rome, e'er Troy was besieged, these hills stood up
+against the south and served us as a habitation and a home. Nor indeed
+have we failed to leave signs of our life there so many thousand years
+ago, so that to-day a man wandering over that great uplifted plateau
+which slopes so gradually towards the sea, though he seem to be
+utterly alone, as far as possible from the ways and the habitations of
+men, immersed in an immemorial silence, in truth passes only from
+forgotten city to forgotten city, amid the strongholds and the burial
+places of a civilisation so old that it is only the earth itself which
+retains any record or memory of it. Here were our cities when we
+feared the beast, before we had knowledge of bronze or iron, when our
+tool and our weapon was the flint.
+
+The man, our ancestor, who chipped and prepared the flints for our use
+at Cissbury for instance, doubtless looked out upon a landscape
+different from that we see to-day and yet essentially the same after all.
+The South Downs in their whole extent slope, as I have said, very
+gradually seaward and south, and there of old were our cities chiefly set,
+but northward their escarpment is extraordinarily steep, rising from time
+to time into lofty headlands of which the noblest, the most typical and
+the most famous is Chanctonbury. Standing above that steep escarpment a
+man to-day looks all across the fruitful Weald till far off he sees the
+long line of the North Downs running as it were parallel with these
+southern hills, and ennobled and broken by similar heights as that of
+Leith Hill. Between, like an uneven river bed with its drifts and
+islands of soil, running from west to east, lies the Weald, opening at
+last as it were into the broad estuary of Romney Marsh, half lost in
+the sea. And what we see to-day our neolithic forefathers saw too--with
+a difference. Doubtless the Downs then were as smooth and bare as they
+are now, but the Weald, we may be sure, was different, wilder and
+certainly fuller of woodland, though never perhaps the vast and
+impenetrable forest of trees of which we have been told.
+
+I say that the Downs, now deserted save by the shepherd and his flock,
+were of old populous, and of this fact the evidence is plentiful. There
+is indeed not one of the five main stretches of the Downs that does not
+bear witness to the immemorial presence of man. To say nothing of the
+discoveries about Beachy Head, the earthworks there, and the neolithic
+implements and bronze weapons discovered about East Dean and Alfriston,
+we have in the Long Man of Wilmington, that gigantic figure cut out in
+the chalk of the hill-side, something comparable only with the Giant of
+Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the White Horses of Wiltshire. That figure is
+some two hundred and forty feet in height and holds in each hand a
+stave or club two hundred and thirty feet long. It would seem
+impossible to be certain either of its age or its purpose, but we may
+perhaps be sure that it lay there upon the Downs above Polegate before
+the landing of Caesar, and it may have been the foundation of one of
+those figures described by him as formed of osiers and filled with
+living men to be destroyed by fire as a sacrifice for our barbarian
+gods.
+
+Nor is this all. The whole range of the Downs as I say is scattered
+thick with the work of our pre-historic forefathers. In Burlough Castle
+and Mount Caburn we have fortresses so old that it is impossible to
+name the age in which they were contrived and built, nor can we assert
+with any confidence who they were that first occupied the camp upon
+Ditchling Beacon, the highest point of the South Downs, or who first
+defended Wolstanbury. And it is the same with those most famous places
+Cissbury Ring and Chanctonbury. But the flint mines upon Cissbury give
+us some idea of the neolithic men, our forefathers, which should and
+does astonish us. The Camp itself is less wonderful than the mines upon
+the western side of it. Here we have not only numerous pits from ten to
+seventy feet in diameter and from five to seven feet deep, but really
+vast excavations leading to galleries which tap a belt or band of
+flints. That these mines were worked by neolithic man it is impossible
+to doubt, but he may not have discovered or first used them. They may
+be older than he, though all record even upon that marvellous hill-
+side, has been lost of those who first exploited them. Nor is
+Chanctonbury, though it cannot boast of mines such as these, less
+astonishing or less ancient. The camp set there following the contour
+of the hill can only have been one of the most important in south-
+east England. It commands the camps at Cissbury, the Devil's Dyke,
+High Down and White Hawk, the whole breadth of the Weald lay beneath
+it and a signal displayed upon Leith Hill upon the North Downs could
+easily be answered from this noble mountain; Mount Caburn itself was
+not more essentially important.
+
+It has been thought that the Romans may have used Chanctonbury, but if
+so they have left but little mark of their occupation, and indeed,
+though the Downs as a whole far off are stamped with so Roman a
+character, there is but one spot in their whole length where we may
+say; here certainly the Legions have been. That spot lies upon the
+last division of the Downs towards the west, the line of hills which
+stands between Chichester and the Weald.
+
+It is certain that the Romans were, in Sussex, most at home on that
+great sea plain towards which the Downs slope so gradually southward.
+Here indeed they built their town of Regnum, and perhaps towards the
+end of their occupation of Britain they laid out the only purely military
+highway which they built here from Regnum to London Bridge. This great
+Roman road, known as the Stane Street, coming out of the eastern gate
+of Chichester, takes the Downs as an arrow flies, crossing them
+between Boxgrove and Bignor, nor is the work of Rome even to-day
+wholly destroyed, for there under Bignor Hill we may still see the
+pavement of their Way, while at Bignor itself we have perhaps the
+best remains of a Roman villa left to us in Sussex.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOWNS]
+
+But though all these marks and signs, the memory and the ruins not
+only of our forefathers, but of those our saviours who drew us within
+the government of the Empire so that we are to-day what we are and not
+as they who knew not the Romans, make the Downs sacred to us, it is
+not only or chiefly for this that we love them or that in any thought
+of Southern England, when far away, it is these great hills which
+first come back into the mind and bring the tears to our eyes. We love
+them for themselves, for their beauty and their persistence
+certainly, but really because we have always known them and they more
+than any other thing here in the south remind us and are a symbol of
+our home. A man of South England must always have them in his heart
+
+for every day of his childhood they have filled his eyes. And to-day
+more especially they stand as a sign and a symbol. For not only are
+they the first great hills which the Londoner sees, but they offer the
+nearest relief and repose from the modern torture and noise of that
+enormous place which has ceased to be a city and become a mere asylum
+of landless men. From the mean and crowded streets he seeks with an
+ever increasing eagerness the space of the Downs, from the noise and
+confusion and throng, this silence and this emptiness; from the
+breathless street, this free and nimble air, which is better than
+wine. And so to-day more than ever the Downs have come to stand as a
+symbol of an England half lost, which might seem to be passing away,
+but that is, as indeed these hills assure us, eternal and
+indestructible, the very England of our hearts, which cannot die.
+There are some doubtless who grumble at this invasion and are fearful
+lest even this last nobility should be destroyed by the multitude or
+this last sanctuary desecrated by the rapacity of the rich, or this
+last silence broken by the brutal noise of the motor car. But the
+Downs are too strong, they have seen too many civilisations pass away,
+and the men and the ages that built upon their hill-sides have become
+less than a dream in the morning. They remain. And is it nothing that
+in our day if a man hears a bird sing in a London street in spring it
+is of the Downs he thinks, if the wind comes over the gardens in some
+haggard suburb it is these hills which rise up in his mind, these
+hills, which stand there against the south, our very own from
+everlasting to everlasting.
+
+But to possess the Downs at least as a symbol, to dream of them as a
+refuge, it is not necessary to know them in all their secret places,
+to have seen all their little forgotten homesteads, or to be able to
+recognise all their thousand steep tracks one from another.
+
+For me indeed the Downs, long as I have known them, remain most dear
+as a spectacle, but this you will miss altogether if you are actually
+upon them, lost amid their rolling waves of green turf with only the
+sky and the wind and the sun for companions. Therefore when I set out
+from Lewes to go westward I did not take the way up past the race-
+course over the battlefield south of Mount Harry towards Ditchling
+Camp and Beacon. Let me confess it, I followed the road. And what a
+road! In all South England I know no other that offers the traveller
+such a spectacle, where above him, in full view, that great rampart
+stands up like a wall, peak speaks to peak, till presently with a
+majesty and a splendour, not to be matched I think in our island,
+Chanctonbury stands forth like a king crowned as with laurel towering
+upon the horizon.
+
+Now this road I followed passes westward out of Lewes and then turns
+swiftly north, climbing as it goes, under the Downs beyond Offham,
+turning west again under Mount Harry and so on past Courthouse Farm
+and Plumpton church, which stands lonely in a field to the north of
+the road, till suddenly by Westmaston church under Ditchling Beacon it
+turns north again towards the Weald and enters the very notable
+village of Ditchling. All that way is worth a king's ransom, for it
+gives you all the steepness of the Downs upon their steepest side,
+their sudden north escarpment, towering up over the Weald some seven
+hundred feet or more. On a spring morning early I know no way more
+joyful.
+
+Ditchling Beacon itself stands some eight hundred and fifty feet above
+the sea and is the highest point in all the range of the South Downs,
+though it lacks the nobility of Chanctonbury. The earthworks here are
+irregular and not very well defined, but there is a fine dewpound to
+the east of the camp though perhaps this has not much antiquity, a
+seemingly older depression now dry in the north-west corner is rather
+an old rainwater ditch than a dewpound. Altogether it might seem that
+Ditchling Camp was rather a refuge for cattle than a military
+fortress.
+
+Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber
+house, and the church of St Margaret's is not only interesting in
+itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of
+the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs
+anywhere to be had from the Weald. It consists of a cruciform building
+of which the north transept and the north wall of the nave were
+rebuilt in the thirteenth century. The chancel, however, has some
+beautiful Early English work to show and the nave is rather plain
+Transitional. The eastern window and most of the windows in the nave
+are of the early Decorated period, the window in the south chancel
+aisle being somewhat later.
+
+Something better than Ditchling church awaits the traveller at Clayton
+where the little church of St John the Baptist possesses a most
+interesting chancel arch, round and massive, that may well be Saxon.
+The chancel itself is of the thirteenth century with triple lancets at
+the western end with two heads, perhaps of a king and queen on the
+moulding. Here, too, on the south chancel wall is a fine brass of 1523
+in which we see a priest holding chalice and wafer. In the nave are
+the remains of frescoes of the Last Judgment.
+
+Right above Clayton rises Wolstanbury, a hill-top camp or circular
+work some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter. It is interesting
+because it is curiously and cleverly fortified, the rampart being
+built up below and outside the fosse, owing to the steepness of the
+hill. To the left are certain pits which may have been the site of
+dwellings; certainly many neolithic implements have been found here.
+
+Below Wolstanbury which thrusts itself out into the Weald like a great
+headland nearly seven hundred feet in height, lies Pyecombe to the
+south-west. This little place which lies between the heights of
+Wolstanbury and Newtimber Hill is celebrated for two things, its
+shepherds' crooks and the Norman font of lead in the little church
+whose chancel arch is Norman too. You may see here even in so small a
+place, however, all the styles of England, for if the font and chancel
+arch are Norman, the lancets in the chancel are Early English, the
+double piscina is Decorated and the windows of the nave are
+Perpendicular while the pulpit is of the seventeenth century.
+
+Pyecombe is hard to reach from Clayton without a great climb over the
+Downs, but there is a way, though a muddy one, which turns due west out
+of the Brighton road where the railway crosses it. This leads one round
+the northern side of Wolstanbury (and this is the best way from which
+to visit the camp on the top) and so by a footpath past Newtimber
+Place, a moated Elizabethan house well hidden away among the trees west
+of the road to Hurstpierpoint.
+
+From Pyecombe there is a delightful road winding in and out under the
+Downs about Newtimber Hill to Poynings. Poynings is, or should I say
+was, one of the loveliest, loneliest and most unspoiled villages to be
+found here under the Downs, but of late it has been accessible by
+railway from the Devil's Dyke and Brighton. Nothing, however, can spoil
+the beauty and interest of its church which is, I suppose, one of the
+earliest Perpendicular works in the county, built before 1368 by the
+third Baron de Poynings, some remains of whose old manor-house may
+still be found east of the churchyard. The church is a Greek cross with
+central tower, and is dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity.
+Everything in it is charming, especially the beautiful eastern window,
+the triple sedilia and the piscina; but the pulpit and altar rails are
+of the seventeenth century as is the great south window which once
+stood in Chichester Cathedral. The Poynings lie in the south transept,
+but their tombs have been defaced. The north transept is the Montagu
+Chapel; here in the window is some old glass in which we may see the
+Annunciation.
+
+The Devil's Dyke, which stands right above Poynings, is a great trench
+in the Downs, dug according to the legend by the devil, whose genial
+intention it was to drown holy Sussex by letting in the sea. He was
+allowed from sunset to sunrise to work his will, but owing to the
+vigilance of those above who had Sussex particularly in their keeping,
+the cocks all began to crow long before the dawn, and the devil,
+thinking his time was spent, went off in a rage before he had
+completed his work. This would seem to prove what I have often
+suspected that the devil is as great a fool as he looks.
+
+The camp above the Devil's Dyke is of the usual design of a hill-top
+fortress, the defence following the natural line of the hill, the
+look-out having been apparently upon the north-west, whence a
+remarkably extensive view is to be had both over the Weald and the
+Downs. But as no water would seem to have been conserved here it is
+difficult to believe that this camp was ever a permanent fortress
+which only a very large number of people could have defended.
+Nevertheless a great number of neolithic implements have been found
+there.
+
+From Poynings in full view of Chanctonbury the beautiful road runs all
+the way at the foot of the Downs to that great gap through which the
+Adur seeks the sea, and which of old was guarded by Bramber Castle. On
+the way it passes through the loveliest of villages, to wit, Edburton,
+where in the Early English church of St Andrew is the second of the
+three Norman fonts of lead within this county. The church is
+altogether interesting, for if it is for the most part of the
+thirteenth century, it has a charming Decorated eastern window
+and it is said that Archbishop Laud himself presented the
+pulpit and altar rails. What the two low side windows were for I
+know not, but the chapel on the north was dedicated in honour of St
+Catherine of Alexandria.
+
+It was already dusk when I came out of Edburton church, the late dusk
+of a day in early May; and so, liking the place passing well, I
+determined to sleep there and soon found a hospitable cottage. In the
+morning I liked the place better still, and remembering the "tarmac"
+and the sophistication (alas!) of Steyning, I decided to stay where I
+was two or three days and to visit thence a place in the Weald it had
+long been my desire to see. And so having made up my mind, before
+nine o'clock I set out on my way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE WEALD
+
+
+There can be no one who has stood upon one of the great heights of the
+Downs north and south, upon Ditchling Beacon, Chanctonbury or Leith
+Hill, who, looking across the Weald, has not wondered what this
+country, lying between the two great chalk ranges, might be, what is
+its nature and its history and what part it has played in the great
+story of England. For even to the superficial onlooker it seems to
+differ essentially not only from the great chalk Downs upon which he
+stands, but from any other part of England known to him. It lies,
+thickly sprinkled with scattered and isolated woodlands, a mighty
+trench between the heights, not a vast plain but an uneven lowland
+diversified by higher land but without true hills, and roughly divided
+west and east into two parts by a great ridge known by various names,
+but in its greater part called the Forest, St Leonard's Forest,
+Ashdown Forest, Dallington Forest, and so forth. This country which we
+know as the Weald is obviously bounded north and south by the Downs
+which enclose it, as they do, too, upon the west, where between
+Winchester and Petersfield and Selborne the two ranges narrow and
+meet. Thence, indeed, the Weald spreads eastward in an ever widening
+delta till it is lost in the marshes and the sea.
+
+Such is the aspect of this great country as we see it to-day from any
+of the heights north and south of it; but what is its true character
+and what is its history?
+
+We hear of it first under a Saxon name, Andredeswald, whence we get our
+name of the Weald, and we find it always spoken of not only by the
+Saxons, but by the Romans before them as an obstacle, though not, it
+would seem, an insurmountable one. It was, in fact, a wild forest
+country of clay containing much woodland, everywhere covered with
+scrub, and traversed by various sleepy and shallow streams. That it was
+difficult to cross we have Roman evidence; that it was a secure hiding-
+place we know from the Saxons; but as we look upon it to-day neither of
+these historic facts is self-evident, and therefore a curious myth has
+grown up with regard to the Weald; and the historian, seeking to
+explain what is not to be understood without time and trouble and
+experience, tells us that the Weald was once an impenetrable forest, a
+whole great woodland and undergrowth so thick that no man might cross
+it without danger. Such an assertion is merely an attempt on the part
+of men, who do not know the Weald, to explain the facts of which I have
+spoken, namely, that the Weald appears as an obstacle in our early
+history, though not insurmountable, and that it continually offered a
+secure hiding-place and refuge to the fugitive.
+
+The Weald as it appears to us first, is the secure home of those who
+first smelted the ironstone in which it abounds, and as such it
+remained during many ages. But the two main facts about it which help
+to explain everything in its history are first that it consisted for
+the most part of clay, and secondly that it was everywhere ill
+watered. Let us consider these things.
+
+The Weald, even as we see it to-day, tilled and cultivated and tended
+though it be, remains largely a country of scattered woodland, very
+thickly wooded, indeed, as seen in a glance from any height of the
+Downs, but revealing itself, as we traverse it, as a country of
+isolated woods, often of oak, and with here and there the remains of
+a wild and rough moorland country, of which, as we may think, in the
+Roman times, it, for the most part, consisted. It later possessed some
+six forests properly so called, but itself was never a legal forest
+nor in any sense of the words an impenetrable wood. It always
+possessed homesteads, farms and steadings, but almost nowhere within
+it was there a great or populous town; men lived there it is true, but
+always in a sort of isolation. And this was so not because the Weald
+was an impassable forest of woodland and undergrowth--it was never
+that; but because of its scarcity of water or more accurately its
+uncertainty of water and its soil, the Wealden clay. The state of
+affairs anciently obtaining in the Weald does not fundamentally differ
+from what obtains to-day, and in a word it was and is this: in dry
+weather there is no water, but the going is good; in wet weather there
+is plenty of water, but the going is impossible. Of course, these
+conditions have in modern times been modified by the building of roads
+and the sinking of wells and the better embankment and preservation of
+the rivers, but in Roman times, as later, the Weald was an obstacle
+because it was difficult, though never impossible, to cross on account
+of the badness of the going or the lack of water. It was a secure
+hiding-place for such a fugitive as a Saxon king because he could not
+be pursued by an army; he himself with a few followers could move from
+steading to steading and enjoy a certain amount of state, but a
+pursuing army would have perished.
+
+Evidence in support of this explanation of the secret and character of
+the Weald is not far to seek. The Weald lay between the Channel and
+its ports, that is to say, the entries into England from the
+continent, and the Thames valley; it was then an obstacle that had to
+be overcome. Had it been merely a great woodland forest, it would not
+have troubled the Romans who would merely have driven a great road
+through it. But the Romans had more to face than an impenetrable
+woodland or the roughness of the country; they had to overcome the
+lack of water, and therefore in the Weald their day's march of some
+twelve miles was pressed to double its normal length. The French
+armies, according to Mr Belloc, do exactly the same thing in the Plain
+of Chalons to-day. And indeed a man may see for himself, even yet,
+what exactly the Weald was if in summer he will cross it by any of the
+winding byways that often become good roads for a mile or so and then
+lapse again into lanes or footpaths. Let him follow one of these afoot
+and drink only by the wayside. And then in winter let him follow the
+same tracks if he can. He will find plenty of water, but his feet will
+be heavy with clay. For an army or even a regiment to go as he goes
+would be almost impossible, and this not because of the woodland or
+undergrowth, but because of the lack of water, the lack of towns or
+large villages and the clay underfoot.
+
+Such then was the nature of the barrier which lay between the ports of
+the Channel and the valley of the Thames. The Weald was indeed
+inhuman, and this helps to explain why it was not only a barrier but a
+refuge.
+
+We read in the rude chronicle of the Saxons of two men who sought
+refuge in the Weald, in the seventh and eighth centuries. The first of
+the three was Caedwalla, (659?-689) a young man of great energy,
+according to Bede, and probably a dangerous aspirant to the West-Saxon
+throne. At any rate he was exiled from Wessex and he took refuge with
+his followers in the forest of Anderida, that is to say in the Weald.
+There about 681 he met St Wilfrid who had fled, too, from the West
+Saxon kingdom. Wilfrid was busy converting the South Saxons, and
+Caedwalla, going from steading to steading with his followers, saved
+from any considerable pursuit by the nature of the country, became
+great friends with him. This, however, did not prevent him in 685
+from ravaging Sussex, slaying the South Saxon king and at last
+succeeding his old enemy Centwine upon the West Saxon throne.
+Caedwalla, after conquering the Isle of Wight and putting
+to death the two sons of King Arvaldus, having allowed them first to
+be baptised, was himself converted, and to such purpose that he laid
+down his crown, went on pilgrimage to Rome, and was baptised under the
+name of Peter, by the Pope, on the vigil of Easter 689. He died,
+however, before Domenica in albis, and was buried in Old St Peter's,
+nor was he the only English king that lay there.
+
+All this came out of the Weald; but it is most significant for us
+because it allows us to understand the nature of this refuge and what
+it offered in the way of safety to an exile.
+
+This is confirmed by the experience of Sigebert, King of the West
+Saxons. He, too, first took refuge in the Weald when deposed by his
+witan. He fled away and was pursued, we read, by Cynewulf, so that he
+took refuge in the forest of Andred where he was safe from pursuit by
+many men, being killed at last at Privet near Petersfield in Hampshire
+by a swineherd in revenge for his master's death. Such then was the
+nature of the Weald and such fundamentally it remains, a stubborn and
+really untameable country, even to-day not truly humanised, still
+largely empty of towns and villages but scattered with isolated farms
+and steadings. And the essential inhumanity of the true heart of the
+Weald is borne out by the scarcity of religious houses there. Only the
+little Priory of Rusper, a small Benedictine nunnery perhaps founded by
+one of the De Braose family before the end of the twelfth century, and
+the small Benedictine nunnery of Easebourne founded in the thirteenth
+century may be said to belong to the true Weald; of the others, such
+as the Abbey of Robertsbridge, the Priories of Michelham and Shulbred,
+the Abbeys of Otham, Bayham, and Dureford not one is really old or
+stands really within the true Weald. Nor are they of very much
+importance. The greatest of these houses was the Cistercian Abbey of
+Robertsbridge founded in 1176 by Alfred de St Martin, Sheriff of the
+rape of Hastings, within which the abbey stood, really upon the last
+of the forest ridge towards the Level of Pevensey. It is true that this
+abbey played a considerable part in history during the first years of
+its existence; for it was the Abbot of Robertsbridge who set out with
+the Abbot of Boxley to search for Coeur de Lion in 1192 and who found him
+in Bavaria, and we find the Abbot of Robertsbridge employed more than
+once again as an ambassador; but its fame soon dwindled, and though
+it escaped the first suppression and indeed survived till 1538 it
+could boast then of but eight brethren.
+
+[Illustration: THE WEALD OF SUSSEX, NORTH OF LEWES]
+
+The only other houses as old as Robertsbridge are those of Otham and
+Dureford, houses of Premonstratensian Canons, neither in the heart of
+the Weald, and both dating from the twelfth century. The other
+religious houses, Michelham and Shulbred of the Augustinian Canons,
+Easebourne of Augustinian nuns and Bayham the successor of Otham, all
+date from the thirteenth century, and indeed no more belong to the
+true Weald than do the rest. It is, in fact, only to-day that a great
+monastery stands in the heart of the Weald, and of all wonderful
+things that is a Carthusian House of the like of which Pre-reformation
+England boasted but twelve, and Sussex none at all.
+
+It was one day as I came over the Adur by Moat Farm that I became
+aware of this great establishment, for there suddenly, as I turned a
+corner, by the Lord, the road was full of Carthusian monks all in
+their white habits, a sight as marvellous as delightful once more upon
+an English road. And so I found my way to the great house of St Hugh
+at Parkminster.
+
+One should learn to be astonished at nothing in England of my heart,
+for it will beggar one's admiration. But Carthusians! Was it not this
+Order which Henry II. had brought into England as part of his penance
+for the murder of St Thomas? Was it not this Order which had first been
+established in my own Somerset, and alone of all Orders in England by a
+Saint, and which there at Witham and at Hinton, still so fair and
+lovely, built its first two houses in England, of which all told there
+were but twelve? Was it not this Order that had faced and outfaced
+Henry Tudor to the last so that the monks of the London Charterhouse
+were burnt at the stake at Tyburn?
+
+Well is this monastery dedicated in honour of St Hugh. And if you do
+not know why let me write it here. It is well known that after the
+murder of St Thomas and Henry II.'s public repentance for his part in
+all that evil, Pope Alexander III. gave him for penance a crusade of
+three years in the Holy Land, but when that was found not to be
+convenient he commuted it for the building of three monasteries of
+which one was to be Carthusian, for the Carthusians at that time had no
+house in England. This Order had been founded at Grenoble in 1086 by St
+Bruno, who had been sent by St. Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, to a desert
+spot in the Alps 14,000 feet above the sea. There St Bruno founded his
+monastery known as the Grande Chartreuse. His monks were hermit monks,
+each had, as each has still, his own little dwelling. The Order, which
+has never been reformed--Cartusia nunquam reformata Quia nunquam
+deformata--and has uniformly followed the Rule approved by
+Pope Innocent XI., recognises three classes of brethren, the
+fathers, the conversi or lay brethren, and nuns. Each house is
+governed by a Prior and each monk lives, as I have said, in a separate
+dwelling of five little rooms and a tiny cloister, or rather
+ambulatory, facing a little garden. His food is given him through a
+hatch at the foot of the stairs leading to his rooms. He attends Mass
+in Choir, Matins and Vespers too, but the other Hours are said in his
+cell. As the Carthusians were when they first came into England so
+they are to-day.
+
+But it is not in honour of St Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, that the
+monastery at Parkminster is dedicated, but of quite another saint.
+
+When Henry II. set out to found a Carthusian house in England in
+obedience to the Pope, the place he chose for it was Witham in
+Selwood, a solitude, for the Rule of the Order demanded it, and that
+is also why we have this monastery in the Weald to-day. It bears
+witness as nothing else could do to-day, perhaps, to the true
+character of the Weald.
+
+Witham, it is true, was not so desolate as the Grande Chartreuse, but
+it was in the heart of the Forest, far from the abode of men. Even to-
+day Witham is not easy to reach by road. This house, thus founded did
+not flourish; whether the place was too hard for the monks, or whether
+there was some other cause we know not, but the first two priors,
+though both from the Grande Chartreuse, failed to establish it. Then
+King Henry was advised to beg of the mother-house her great and
+shining light, Hugh of Avalon, not of Avalon in England, but of Avalon
+in Burgundy. He was successful in his request. The Bishop of Bath and
+Wells, his ambassador, then in the Alps, was able to bring Hugh home
+with him, though the loss of that "most sweet presence," as the Prior
+declared, widowed his house; and Hugh came to England and to Witham
+and was received as "an angel of the Lord." It is in honour of this
+great and holy man, later Bishop of Lincoln and known as St Hugh of
+Avalon, that the Carthusian monastery of Parkminster is dedicated. I
+have here no room to speak of him, the true founder of the Order in
+England, of his holy, brave and laborious life in Selwood or of his
+rule there of ten years. He is forgotten even at Witham and his name
+no longer, alas, means anything to us whom he served. Only the
+Carthusians have not forgotten, and to the keeping of no other saint
+in the Calendar could they so honourably have entrusted their new
+house.
+
+This monastery, founded in the Weald, upon October 17, 1877, is a
+great, if not a beautiful, pile of buildings, and is, in fact, one of
+the largest houses of the Order in the world. The visitor rings at the
+gate, and is admitted by a lay-brother dressed in the beautiful white
+habit, caught about the waist by a leathern girdle from which a rosary
+hangs. Upon his feet are rough shoes and his head is shorn but he
+greets you with a smile of welcome and leads you into a large
+quadrangle, where before you is the great Romanesque church with a
+chapel upon one side and the refectory upon the other, and all about
+are cloisters. Here over the entrance to the church is a statue of St
+Hugh. Within, the church is divided by a screen into two parts, the
+choir for the Fathers, the nave for the lay-brothers. Over the screen
+is a rood, and beneath, two altars, dedicated in honour of St John the
+Baptist, who went into the desert, and St Bruno, the founder of the
+Order. From the church one is led to the Chapter House, in which there
+stands an altar and Crucifix, and there upon the walls are depicted
+scenes from the martyrdom of the London Carthusians in the time of
+Henry VIII. From the Chapter House one is led to the Chapel of the
+Relics, where there is a beautiful silver reliquary that belonged to
+the English Carthusians before the Reformation, and in it is a relic
+of St Thomas of Canterbury. Here, too, is the stole of St Hugh and a
+bone of St Bruno.
+
+The monastery proper lies behind the church, where a vast quadrangle,
+the Great Cloister, some three acres in extent, opens out, surrounded
+on three sides by the little houses of the monks, with the graveyard
+in the midst. Here the monks live, and are buried without coffin or
+shroud in their white habits, the hood drawn over the face. The cells
+are delightful to look upon, "a solitude within a solitude"; each
+consists of five rooms, two below and three above, reached by a
+staircase, the whole approached from a passage closed by a door giving
+on to the Great Cloister. Here live and pray some thirty-six monks,
+with a like number of conversi or lay-brothers.
+
+I do not know in all England a place more peaceful than this one, more
+solemn and salutary to visit in the confusion of our modern life. Here
+is one of the lightning conductors that preserves the modern world
+from the wrath of God. Let others think as they will, for me the
+monastery of St Hugh in the Weald is holy ground.
+
+And at any rate, even though you may not agree with me so far, in this
+at least I shall carry you with me, when I say that this monastery,
+and especially because it is Carthusian, bears out the old character
+of the Weald and endorses it. I have said the Weald was ever a wild
+and inhuman place where only few men could go together, without great
+towns and with only infrequent villages; not a thick or impenetrable
+woodland but a difficult and a lonely country sparsely scattered with
+steadings. Well, it is such places that the Carthusians have ever
+sought out for their houses, such was Witham and such was the Grande
+Chartreuse also. That a Carthusian monastery should have been founded
+to-day in the midst of the Weald proves, if anything can, that it has
+not yet wholly lost its character.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+TO ARUNDEL AND CHICHESTER
+
+
+From my little quiet retreat at Edburton, I set out one May morning to
+follow the road under the Downs, through Steyning for Arundel and
+Chichester, because it is one of the fairest ways in all the world,
+and, rightly understood, one of the most interesting. And to begin
+with, I found myself crossing one of those gaps in the South Downs,
+each of which is held by a castle. The one I now crossed was that made
+by the Adur, and it was held by the Castle of Bramber.
+
+Now Bramber, merely beautiful to-day, must in the old times always have
+been of importance, for it holds an easy road through the rampart of
+the Downs, one of the great highways into Normandy, because of the
+harbour of Shoreham at the mouth of the Adur, one of the principal
+ports upon this coast. Of immemorial antiquity, the harbour of
+Shoreham, first of Old Shoreham, perhaps the Roman Portus Adurni, and
+then when that silted up of New, has played always a great part in the
+history of South England. That the Romans knew and used it is certain.
+It was probably here that the Saxon Ella and his three sons Cymne,
+Cissa, and Wlencing, landed in 477, and it is not likely that it was
+neglected by the Normans, who, in fact, built here a very noble
+cruciform church, dark and solemn, indeed, rather a fortress than a
+church. It was at Shoreham certainly that John landed when he returned
+to England to make himself king after the death of Coeur de Lion, and
+we may gather some idea of the real importance of the port from the
+fact that it furnished Edward III. with twenty-six ships for his fleet
+in 1346. Thereafter the place declined, but history repeated itself
+when Charles II., in flight in 1651 and anxious to reach the French
+coast, set out from Shoreham and landed at Fécamp. Shoreham thus was
+an important way in and out of England, but the road by which it lived
+was not in its keeping at all, but in the power of the Castle of
+Bramber which dominated and held it on the north side of the Downs,
+where it issued out of the pass or gap made by the Adur.
+
+Bramber Castle stands upon a headland thrust out into the valley and
+the Weald in the very mouth of the pass; and even in its ruin, only an
+old gateway tower and a fragment of the lofty barbican in which is a
+Norman window remain. It is easy to understand how important and how
+strong it must once have been. Indeed, Norman though these remains
+are, it was by no means the Normans who first fortified this
+promontory and held this pass. It is probable that the Castle of
+Bramber occupies the site of a Roman Castellum and a Saxon fortress,
+some say a palace of the Saxon kings. After the Conquest the castle
+came into the hands of the great William de Braose, lord of Braose,
+near Falaise in Normandy, who received such great estates in England
+from the Conqueror. He fixed his seat, however, here at Bramber, and
+built or rebuilt the Castle which became the greatest fortress in his
+possession. Later, by marriage, it passed to the Mowbrays, and from
+them descended to the Dukes of Norfolk, the present Duke, indeed,
+still holding it. It is, however, of William de Braose we think in
+Bramber; for he not only built the great Castle which gives its
+character to the place even to-day, but the church of St Nicholas
+also, under the Castle, of which the nave and tower of his time only
+remain. He built it indeed as a chapel to his Castle, and to serve it
+he founded there a small college of secular canons under a dean, and
+endowed it with the church of Beeding and many tithes, among them
+those of Shoreham. But about 1080 William de Braose seems to have
+repented of what he had done, for he then granted to the Abbey of St
+Florent in Saumur the reversion of the church of St Nicholas here,
+when the last of the canons then living in his college at Beeding
+should have died. It was thus that the Abbey of St Florent came to
+establish a Priory at Beeding, or Sele as the monks called it, and
+this about 1096; and William's son Philip confirmed them in his
+father's gifts, and before the end of the twelfth century this alien
+priory possessed the churches of Sele, Bramber, Washington, Old
+Shoreham and New, to say nothing of the little chapel of St Peter on
+the old bridge between Bramber and Beeding.
+
+This old bridge over the Adur is worth notice, for it is said to have
+been first established by the Romans upon a road of theirs that ran
+under the north escarpment of the Downs from Dover to Winchester.
+Certain Roman remains have indeed been found there, and the chapel of
+St Peter _de veteri ponte_ was doubtless founded in order to guard it
+and keep it open and in order.
+
+Evil days fell upon the Priory with the rise of nationalism and the
+wars of the fourteenth century. Like every other alien house it came
+under suspicion of spying, and being near the coast, indeed, at the
+very threshold of an important gate, it was seized by the Crown. At
+last, in 1396, Richard II. permitted it to naturalise itself, and its
+only connection thereafter with St Florent was the payment of a small
+annual tribute. But the misfortunes of the Priory were not over. For
+sixty years or more all went well, but in 1459 the Bishop of
+Winchester bought the patronage of the place from the Duke of
+Norfolk, and won leave from the Pope and the Bishop of Chichester to
+suppress it and appropriate it to his new College of St Mary Magdalen
+in Oxford. The suppression, however, was not to take effect till the
+last monk then living should die, and this came to pass in 1480. For
+thirteen years the Priory was unoccupied, and then in 1493 the Fellows
+of Magdalen allowed the Carmelite Friars of Shoreham to use the place,
+their own house in Shoreham having been engulfed by the sea. These
+White Friars were the poorest in all Sussex; so poor were they that
+they failed even to maintain themselves at Sele. In July 1538, when
+the Bishop of Dover came to visit the place, he found "neither friar
+nor secular, but the doors open ... and none to serve God." Such was
+the end of the house William de Braose had built in the first years of
+the Conquest. What remains of it will be found in the church of St
+Peter in Upper Beeding, an Early English building of no great interest
+save that it contains many carved stones from the Priory, a window and
+a door also from the same house, upon the site of which the vicarage
+now stands.
+
+William de Braose, who made Bramber his chief seat, must have had an
+enormous influence upon building in this neighbourhood, which abounds
+in Norman churches such as those of Botolphs and Coombes, to say
+nothing of those at Shoreham Old and New; but he was by no means the
+only renewer of life here.
+
+The most beautiful thing in the still beautiful village of Steyning is
+the great church of St Andrew, but with this the Lord of Bramber has
+nothing to do; the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp rebuilt this noble
+sanctuary, but its foundation is said to be due to an English saint,
+St Cuthman, who, having been a shepherd boy, upon his father's death
+came out of the west into Sussex bearing his mother, who was crippled,
+in a kind of barrow which he dragged by a cord. A thousand queer
+stories are told of him as he went on his way, happily enough it
+seems, until he came to Steyning, where the cord of his barrow broke.
+There he built a hut for his mother, and constructed a little church
+of timber and wattles in which at last he was buried. In his life he
+had performed divers miracles so that his grave became a place of
+pilgrimage, and it is said to have been about this shrine that the
+village and church of Steyning grew up. It remained a holy place, and
+Ethelwolf, the father of Alfred, is said to have been buried there,
+his body later being removed to Winchester.
+
+That the place was of some sort of importance would seem to be
+evident, for we find Edward the Confessor, granting the manor and
+churches of Steyning to the Benedictines of Fécamp, Harold taking it
+from them, and the Conqueror restoring it. Two churches at Steyning
+are spoken of in the Domesday Survey, and it has been thought that the
+second of these is really that at Warminghurst. But we find a church
+in Steyning in the thirteenth century served by secular canons. This
+was, however, in all probability the church of St Andrew we know,
+which in 1290 was a royal free chapel answerable neither to the
+Archbishop nor to the Bishop of Chichester, but to the Abbot of Fécamp
+only. The College of Canons had by then, if indeed it ever served
+this church, been dissolved. At the suppression of the alien priories
+in the fifteenth century Steyning passed to the new Abbey of Sion.
+
+There can be no doubt that the church we have at Steyning is due to
+the Benedictines of Fécamp, and it is one of the noblest buildings in
+the county. Of the earlier church they built here much would seem to
+remain, the rudely carved arches at the eastern end of the aisles, the
+Norman window on the north, and much of the aisle walls. This church
+was probably cruciform and may have been larger than that we now see.
+It was rebuilt again by the monks in the middle of the twelfth
+century, when the great chancel arch we have, the beautiful nave
+arcades and clerestory were built, with the fine mouldings and
+capitals and dog-tooth ornament. The font, too, would seem to be of
+about this time. The tower only dates from the sixteenth century, and
+the chancel is modern.
+
+Now Steyning lies under Chanctonbury, but I resisted the temptation to
+spend the afternoon in the old camp there looking over the "blue
+goodness of the weald," for I wished especially to visit the church of
+Wiston, and to see, if I might, Wiston House, which Sir Thomas
+Shirley built about 1576, and where those three brothers were born who
+astonished not only Sussex and all England, but Rome itself and the
+Pope by their marvellous daring and adventures.
+
+The old manor house is delightfully situated in its beautiful park
+under the dark height of Chanctonbury, and though much altered,
+retains on the whole its fine Elizabethan character. The manor
+originally belonged to the De Braose, from whom it passed by marriage
+to the Shirleys. In the church, a small Decorated building, there is
+a fine brass of 1426 to Sir John de Braose, on which over and over
+again we read Jesu Mercy: this in the south chapel. His little son is
+buried under an arch on the north, where there is a curious effigy of
+him. The first Shirley, whose monument we find here, though only in
+part, is that of Sir Richard, who died in 1540; but it was Sir Thomas,
+who also has his monument, that built Wiston and was the father of
+those three remarkable sons. He was the great-grandson of Ralph Shirley
+of Wiston, and the son of William Shirley, who died in 1551. Till his
+time the family had of course been Catholic; it was he who first
+abandoned the Faith; perhaps it was this spirit of adventure so
+unfortunate in him which descended to that famous "leash of brethren"
+and drove them out upon their adventures. The least remarkable and the
+most unfortunate of these sons of his was the eldest, Thomas, whose
+life, however, as a soldier and freebooter, both on shore in the Low
+Countries and at sea, is sufficiently full of adventure to satisfy
+anyone. He came, however, to utter grief at last, and had to sell
+Wiston, retiring to the Isle of Wight, where he died in 1630.
+
+It was his brother Anthony who really made the Shirleys famous. He had
+graduated at Oxford in 1581, and having, as he said, "acquired those
+learnings which were fit for a gentleman's ornament," he went to the
+Low Countries with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was present at
+the battle of Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney fell. In 1591 he was in
+Normandy with the Earl of Essex, whom he devotedly followed, in support
+of Henry of Navarre, who made him a knight of St Michael. For accepting
+a foreign knighthood without her leave, Elizabeth locked him up in the
+Fleet, and only let him out when he promised to retire from the
+Order. This he actually did, but his title stuck to him, and he was
+always known as Sir Anthony. He then married Elizabeth Devereux, a
+first cousin of his patron, the Earl of Essex; but the marriage was
+unfortunate; he could not abide his wife, and in order to "occupy his
+mind from thinking of her vainest words," in 1595 he fitted out with
+Essex's aid and his father's a buccaneering expedition to the Gulf of
+Guinea. But in something less than two years after the most amazing
+adventures he came home to Wiston under the Downs, "alive but poor,"
+and with his passion for adventure in nowise abated. In 1597 he
+accompanied Essex on the "Islands voyage," but, seeking more paying
+adventure, in the winter of 1598 he consented at Essex's suggestion to
+lead a little company of English adventurers to assist Cesare D'Este to
+regain his Duchy of Ferrara, then in the hands of the Pope. He set
+forth, but upon reaching Venice found that Cesare had submitted. Again
+he was out of employment; but it was upon the quays of Venice that he
+conceived the most astonishing enterprise that even an Englishman has
+ever undertaken. He proposed to set out for Persia with the object of
+persuading the Shah to ally himself with Christendom against the Turk,
+and hoped also to establish commercial relations between England and
+Persia. Upon this astonishing Crusade he left Venice with his brother
+Robert and twenty-five Englishmen disappointed of a row in Ferrara, on
+May 29, 1599, for Constantinople. Thence he went on to Aleppo, and so
+down the Euphrates, to Babylon, to Isapahan and Kazveen, where
+he met the Shah Abbas the Great. There, thanks to the Shah's
+two Christian wives, he had a good reception; the rank of Prince
+was conferred upon him, and he won the concession, for all Christians,
+of the right, not only to trade freely, but to practise their religion
+in Persia. For five months he remained at the court of the Shah, and
+then returned to Europe as his ambassador to invite all Christian
+powers to ally themselves with Persia against the Turk. He went first
+to Moscow, where he was, however, treated with contempt, as was his
+mission. He went to Prague and was well received. At last, in 1601,
+after visiting Nuremberg, Augsburg, Munich, Innsbruck, and Trent, he
+arrived in Rome, and, professing enthusiasm for the Faith his father
+had repudiated, was well received. The truth was, he was in grave money
+difficulties, and indeed in 1603 was arrested by the Venetians and
+imprisoned "in a certain obscure island near unto Scio." The English
+Government, however, came to his aid and obtained his release, but
+refused him permission to return to England. He went to Prague, and
+thence on the business of the Emperor to Morocco. There he was received
+in great state and remained five months. Before leaving, however, he
+released certain Portuguese whom he found in slavery, and sailed with
+them for Lisbon, where he hoped to reimburse himself for their ransom.
+In this he was disappointed, so on he went to Madrid, where he was made
+very much of and promised the Order of Sant'Iago. In the service now of
+Spain, he went to Naples in 1607, after a visit to the Emperor at
+Prague where he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. He seems
+to have travelled considerably in Southern Italy, and after a brief
+visit, to obtain money, to Madrid, set out for Sicily in command of a
+fleet to attack the Moors and Turks. He achieved nothing and was
+dismissed. In 1611 he appeared again in Madrid in utter poverty, but
+the King took compassion upon him and gave him a pension, and in Madrid
+he remained writing an account of his adventures till he died in
+beggary. The English ambassador notes in 1619, "The poor man sometimes
+comes to my house and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making
+himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince." It might
+indeed seem a long road from Wiston under the Downs to the Gulf of
+Guinea, the Quays of Venice, Constantinople, the Euphrates, Babylon,
+Moscow, Prague, Rome, and Morocco, to die at last a beggar in purse,
+but in heart a great Prince in Madrid.
+
+Now, when I had been reminded of all this, I was directed to visit
+Buncton Chapel to the north of Wiston Park, where I found indeed some
+Norman work in the nave and chancel arch. And so I went on my way
+through the failing afternoon by that beautiful road within sight of
+the high Downs to the Washington Inn, where I slept, for it is a quiet
+place not to be passed by.
+
+And on the morrow I went on my way, still through as fair a country as
+is to be found in all South England, through Storrington, and so by way
+of Parham Park, with its noble Elizabethan house and little church with
+the last leaden font in Sussex, a work of the fourteenth century, to
+Amberley in the meads of the Arun, a dear and beautiful place.
+
+Amberley boasts a Castle and stands right in the mouth of one of those
+gaps in the Downs as Bramber does, the gap of the Arun, and it might
+well be thought that Amberley held this pass. As a fact she did not.
+That gap is held by Arundel; the Castle at Amberley was a palace of the
+Bishop of Chichester, granted to the Bishop of Selsey long before the
+Conquest; it was only castellated in the fourteenth century. It is none
+the less an interesting ruin, very picturesque, with remains of a
+chapel, while the beautiful house built within the castle walls early
+in the sixteenth century is altogether lovely. And as for the church, I
+can never hope to tell of all its interest and beauty. Certainly a
+Norman church once stood here, of which the nave of that we see was
+part, as was the very noble chancel arch; but the chancel itself, the
+south aisle, and the tower are of the thirteenth century, while the
+south door is very early Decorated, most beautifully carved. There is
+not surely in all Sussex a more delightful spot than this lying so
+quietly in the meads, with its beautiful church, its ruined castle, and
+fine old Elizabethan house, where Arun bends slowly and lazily towards
+the Downs and the sea.
+
+It was with real regret that on that May morning I left Amberley,
+turning often to look back at it, and last from the great seven-arched
+bridge over the Arun, whence one may look down stream upon the wooded
+slopes of Arundel Park. Then I went on up the road that winds through the
+steep village of Houghton swiftly up on to the Downs, wooded here very
+nobly, and so at the top of Rewell Hill I turned to the left and made my
+way through the noble park to the little town of Arundel.
+
+Now I cannot say why, but in spite of its seduction, which is full of
+splendour, of its noble history and great buildings, I have never been
+able to love Arundel. One is there always I feel too much in the shadow
+of that mighty Castle which for the most part is not old at all, too
+much in the power of that great new church that surely was never built
+by English hands, which has altogether blotted out the older
+sanctuary, and which, Catholic though it be, has never won my
+affection. Arundel itself is all in the shadow of these two things,
+each of which is too big for it, too heavy for free laughter and light-
+heartedness. So it seems to me.
+
+All I can find in Arundel that pleases me lies in the little town
+itself, and in the old church of which one half, the chancel, has been
+closed to all who do not hold the Duke's written permission to enter
+it--as though the house of God, even though it be the property of a
+Catholic duke, were not by nature as it were free to all. And so there
+is a kind of sorrowfulness about Arundel that spoils my pleasure in it,
+yes, even in the very noble remains of the old Castle that are hidden
+away within the sham Gothic affair of 1791. Even in the beautiful old
+church, of which one half is closed, even in the steep little town
+which might have been as gay as Rye, I felt, overwhelmed by the new
+Castle and the new church, neither of which has any antiquity,
+tradition, or beauty.
+
+[Illustration: ARUNDEL CASTLE]
+
+The old Castle, with its great circular Norman keep within the huge
+sham "fortress" of the eighteenth century, beneath which the town lies
+like one afraid to ask for mercy, should not be left unvisited, for it
+was probably built by that Roger de Montgomery, who led the Breton
+centre at Hastings, and has thus nearly a thousand years of history
+behind it, to say nothing of three sieges, that of 1102, when it was
+surrendered to Henry I., that of 1139, when Stephen there held Matilda
+prisoner and allowed her to pass out, and that of 1643, when Waller
+took it after seventeen days.
+
+
+
+Nor indeed should anyone fail to visit the beautiful parish church of
+St Nicholas, a glorious cruciform building, Perpendicular in style,
+built in 1380. It, too, has a long history. The church was originally
+served by secular canons, but in 1177 the then Earl of Arundel
+introduced in their place four or five monks under a Prior from St
+Martin of Seez. In the fourteenth century, however, these alien monks
+withdrew to their mother house, and in 1380 the Priory of St Nicholas
+in Arundel was reconverted into a collegiate church. This college
+consisted of a master and sub-master, ten chaplains, two deacons, two
+sub-deacons, and five choristers. The choir of the church was the
+chapel of the college, the remainder being parochial. The college
+survived the general suppression, but was eventually bought by the Earl
+of Arundel, who had previously offered a thousand pounds for it. And so
+it was that after a long law-suit in 1880 the chancel of the parish
+church of Arundel was given up to the Duke of Norfolk.
+
+I did not sleep in Arundel, but, though it was already afternoon, I set
+out westward once more through the great park, and just before sunset I
+came to the great church of Boxgrove, which stands between the road I
+had followed from Arundel and the Roman Stane Street, where they
+approach to enter the East Gate of Chichester together at last. This
+great and beautiful sanctuary, gives one, I think, a better idea of
+what the great monastic churches really were, than any other building
+left to us in Sussex. It is like a cathedral for solemnity, and for
+size too, though it is only a fragment, and its beauty cannot be
+forgotten.
+
+In its foundation the church is very ancient, a small college of
+secular canons serving it in Saxon times. But all was changed when
+Robert de Haza, to whom Henry I. had granted the honour of Halnaker, in
+1105 bestowed the church upon the Abbey of Lessay, which sent hither
+its Benedictines and built for them a new sanctuary. Boxgrove was thus
+an alien priory from 1108 till in 1339. Richard II. affirmed its
+independence, and this was confirmed by the Pope in 1402. It seems
+then to have been in a bad way, but later recovered. In the thirteenth
+century it had boasted nineteen monks, but at the time of the
+suppression it only mustered eight priests, who seem to have kept a
+school for the children of the neighbourhood. What remains of the
+Priory, not much more than a gateway, for most of it was destroyed in
+1780, stands to the north of the church.
+
+The original Norman church here was cruciform. Of this building we
+still see the tower, the transepts and the lower part of what remains
+of the nave, and the arcade to the south. This Norman church was
+greatly enlarged in the twelfth century, when the nave now destroyed
+was built, the tower piers were then cased in the Transitional style
+and the arches which carry the tower were altered. Later, about 1235,
+the chancel we see and its aisles, as lovely as anything in southern
+England, were added in the Early English style, that often reminds one
+of Chichester Cathedral. To the fourteenth century belong the south
+porch and more than one window in the aisles, while the font and other
+windows are Perpendicular.
+
+I had often read of the unique vaulting of the choir of Boxgrove
+Priory, but the twilight was so deep in the church, for it was already
+evening, that I could not see it. I saw, however, the empty tomb, very
+fine and splendid, of the Earl de la Warr, who begged Boxgrove of
+Thomas Cromwell unsuccessfully; and then I went out and marched on into
+Chichester, the East Gate of which I entered not long after dark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+CHICHESTER
+
+
+The mere plan of Chichester proclaims its Roman origin. It is a little
+walled city lying out upon the sea plain of Sussex, cruciform by reason
+of its streets, North Street, South Street, East Street, and West
+Street, which divide it into four quarters, of which that upon the
+south became wholly ecclesiastical: the south-west quarter being
+occupied by the Cathedral and its subject buildings, while the south-
+east quarter was the Palatinate of the Archbishop. As for the quarter
+north-east it was appropriated to the Castle and its dependencies, of
+which however, nothing remains, while the quarter north-west was
+occupied by the townspeople, and to-day contains their parish church of
+St Peter Major. These four quarters meet at the Market Cross, whence
+the streets that divide the city set out for the four quarters of the
+world.
+
+To come into Chichester to-day even by the quiet red-brick street--
+South Street--from the railway station, the least interesting entry
+into the city, is to understand at once what Chichester is; one of
+those country towns that is to say, cities in the good old sense,
+because they were the seat of the Bishop, which are not only the pride
+of England, but perhaps the best things left to her and certainly the
+most characteristic of all that she truly means and stands for. If such
+places are without the feverish and confused life of the great
+industrial centres of modern England, let us thank God for it, they
+have nevertheless a quiet vitality of their own, which in the long run
+will prove more persistent and strong than the futile excitement of
+places noisy with machinery and wretched with the enslaved poor. Such
+places as Chichester may indeed stand for England in a way that
+Manchester, for instance, with its cosmopolitan population and
+egotistical ambition, its greed, its helplessness, and appalling
+intellectual mongrelism and parvenu and international society, can
+never hope to do. England truly remains herself, the England of my
+heart, because of such places as Chichester, Winchester, Salisbury,
+Wells, and those dear market towns which still remember and maintain
+her great past and renew the ways of our forefathers. All are very old,
+co-eval with England, all have sturdy and unforgotten traditions, and
+in these, if we but knew it, lies our best hope for the future.
+
+Among these dear places Chichester is no exception, rather is she most
+typical; she has an immemorial past, and out of it she will contrive
+somehow or other to face and to outface whatever the future may bring.
+Like everything that is best in England, that is indeed most typical of
+ourselves, her origins are not barbarian, but Roman. Her ancient name
+was Regnum, the city, it is said, first of Cogidubnus, King of the
+Regni and Legate in Britain of Claudius Caesar. That the Romans built
+and maintained an important town here cannot be doubted; the very form
+of the city to-day would be enough to establish this, apart from the
+notable discoveries of buildings, pavements, urns, inscriptions, and I
+know not what else belonging to the whole of the Roman occupation of
+Britain. It is obvious that Chichester played a great part in the Roman
+administration of South Britain; its port was large, safe and
+accessible, while it was the first town upon the east of that great
+group of creeks and harbours which run up out of Spithead and
+Southampton Water. Throughout the Middle Ages, Bosham, the port of
+Chichester, maintained its position, while even in the eighteenth
+century Chichester harbour was sufficiently important to warrant the
+cutting of the canal which unites the Arun with Chichester Channel.
+There is, however, something else which must always place beyond doubt
+the importance of Chichester in Roman times. It was from Chichester,
+out of the East Gate, that the great Roman road set forth for London,
+the road we know as the Stane Street, chiefly, as we may suppose, a
+great military way. This was the only Roman road over the South Downs,
+the only road that connected London with the greater harbours of the
+South Coast. Its terminus was Chichester.
+
+[Illustration: THE MARKET CROSS, CHICHESTER]
+
+Of the early connection of the town with Christianity there is to say
+the least high probability. An inscription found in North Street, and
+now preserved at Goodwood, recording the dedication of a Temple by the
+College of Smiths to Neptune and Minerva, would seem to refer to that
+Claudia and that Pudens mentioned by St Paul, and thus to connect them
+with Regnum. However that may be, we know that it with the rest of Britain
+must have been a Christian city long before the failure of the Roman
+administration.
+
+With that failure and the final departure of the Legions, Regnum fell
+on evil days. Its position as the key to those harbours which had given
+it its importance now exposed it to the first raids of the pirates.
+These barbarians, according to legend, were Ella and his three sons,
+one of whom, Cissa, is said to have given Chichester her name--Cissa's
+camp, Cissa's Ceaster. Of Chichester's story during the Dark Ages we
+know as little as we know of most of the cities of England, but that it
+was destroyed utterly, as has been asserted, common sense refuses to
+allow us to believe. It certainly continued to exist, in barbarous
+fashion perhaps, but still to live, till with the conversion of the
+English it began to take on a new life, and with the Conquest was
+finally established as the seat of the Bishop.
+
+The apostle of the South Saxons, St Wilfrid, wrecked upon the flat and
+inhospitable shore of Selsey, was, as we know, their first bishop. He
+established his See, however, not at Chichester, but at Selsey where it
+remained until the Conqueror began to reorganise England upon a Roman
+plan, when more than one See was removed from the village in which it
+had long been established to the neighbouring great town. So it was
+with the Bishopric of Sussex, which in the first years of the Norman
+administration was removed from Selsey to Chichester.
+
+Thus Chichester was restored in 1075 to the great position it had held
+in the time of the Romans. Its lord was that Roger de Montgomery who
+received it from the Conqueror, together with more than eighty manors,
+and to him was due the castle which stood in the north-east quarter,
+and the rebuilding of the Roman walls, which continually renewed and
+rebuilt, still in some sort stand, upon Roman foundations, and mark the
+limits of the Roman town.
+
+Of the South Saxon cathedral church at Selsey we know almost nothing.
+It seems to have been established as a Benedictine house under an
+abbot who was also bishop, but later the monks were replaced by secular
+canons. Then when in 1075 the See was removed from Selsey to Chichester
+the old church dedicated in honour of St Peter, which stood upon the
+site of the present cathedral, was used as the cathedral church, and
+the Benedictine nuns, to whom it then belonged were dispossessed in
+favour of the canons. This, however, did not last long; by 1091 a new
+Norman church, the work of Bishop Ralph, whose great stone coffin
+stands in the Lady Chapel, had been built upon this site and dedicated
+in honour of the Blessed Trinity, the old church being commemorated in
+the nave, which still was used as the parochial church of St Peter
+Major. This new building, however, was soon so badly damaged by fire
+that it was necessary to rebuild it--this in 1114; but a like fate
+befell it in 1187, and again the church was restored, this time by
+Bishop Seffrid. Then in the thirteenth century came Bishop Richard. He
+was consecrated in 1245, and ruled the diocese for eight years. This
+man was a saint, and in 1261 he was canonised. Thus Chichester got a
+shrine of its own, which became exceedingly famous and attracted vast
+crowds of pilgrims, and thus indirectly brought so much money to the
+church that great works, such as the transformed Lady Chapel, and the
+many chapels which the Cathedral boasts, were able to be undertaken.
+
+St Richard of Chichester was not a Sussex man; he was born about 1197,
+at Droitwich in Worcestershire, and thus gets his name Richard de
+Wyche. His father, a man well-to-do, died, however, when Richard was
+very young, and he being only a younger son fell into poverty. We find
+him, according to his fifteenth-century biographer, labouring on his
+brother's land, and to such good purpose, it is said, that he quite re-
+established his family, and withal such love was there between the
+brothers that the elder would have resigned all his estates in favour
+of the younger. But Richard would not consent, preferring to go as a
+poor scholar to Oxford, where, we learn, that he lived in the utmost
+poverty sharing indeed a tunic and a hooded gown with two companions,
+so that the three could only attend lectures in turn. At Oxford he
+seems chiefly to have devoted himself to the study of Logic, and for
+this purpose he presently went to Paris, returning, however, to Oxford
+to take his degree. Thence once more he set out, this time to study
+Canon Law at Bologna, where he not only won a great reputation, but was
+appointed a public professor of that faculty. So beloved and respected
+was he in that great university, where there was always a considerable
+English contingent, that his tutor offered him his daughter in
+marriage, and gladly would he have taken her, but that marriage was not
+for him. So he set out for England and Oxford, where he was joyfully
+received and indeed such was his fame that he was made chancellor of
+the university. In truth, he was in such great demand that both
+Canterbury and Lincoln wished to secure him, and at last Archbishop
+Edmund Rich succeeded where Robert Grosseteste failed, and Richard
+became chancellor of Canterbury and the dear friend of the Archbishop.
+They were indeed two saints together, and even in their lifetime were
+greeted as "two cherubim in glory." Together they faced the king, when
+he continued to allow so many English bishoprics to remain vacant, and
+together they went into exile to Pontigny, and later to Soissy, where
+St Edmund died. Heart-broken by the loss of so dear a friend Richard
+retired into a Dominican house in Orleans and immersed himself in the
+study of Theology. There he was ordained priest, and there he founded a
+chapel in honour of St Edmund. But Boniface of Savoy, who had succeeded
+St Edmund in the archbishopric of Canterbury, besought him to return.
+He obeyed, and was appointed rector of Charing and vicar of Deal in
+1243, becoming once more Chancellor of Canterbury. But still there
+remained the enmity of the King. Two good things Henry III. gave us,
+Westminster Abbey and Edward I.; but he was almost as difficult as
+Henry II., with regard to investitures. Fortunately he was not so
+obstinate, or we might have had a martyr instead of a confessor in
+Chichester, as we have in Canterbury.
+
+In the year 1244 the See of Chichester fell vacant by the death of
+Bishop Ralph Neville, and at the King's suggestion the canons elected
+their archdeacon, a keen supporter of his. Boniface at once held a
+synod, quashed the election, and recommended his chancellor Richard as
+Bishop, to which the chapter agreed. The king was, of course, furious.
+Richard, who was received by him, could do nothing with him, and so
+immediately appealed to the Pope, Innocent IV., it was, who consecrated
+him at Lyons upon March 5, 1245. Even this did not move the King.
+Richard returned to England, found the temporalities of his See
+disgracefully wasted by the King, sought and obtained an interview with
+Henry, but achieved nothing. For a time he lived at Tarring with a poor
+priest named Simon, for in his own diocese he was a beggar and a
+stranger as it were in a foreign land. In 1246, however, the Pope
+having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at
+once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to
+restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in
+his diocese. He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in
+alms that he was always a beggar. Usurers were punished by
+excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues. It
+was he, too, who first established the custom of the Easter offering
+contribution from the faithful to the Cathedral, known later as St
+Richard's pence. He loved the Friars, more especially the Dominicans,
+who had befriended him at Orleans, and to which Order his confessor
+belonged. He ardently preached the crusade and was eagerly loyal to St
+Peter. It was, indeed, as he was journeying through southern England,
+urging men to take the Cross, that at Dover he fell ill and died there
+during Mass in the Hospitium Dei. His body was buried in a humble
+grave, we read, near the altar he had built in honour of St Edmund, his
+friend, in the Cathedral of Chichester. And from the moment of his
+death he was accounted a saint. Miracles were performed at his tomb,
+which even Prince Edward visited, and in 1262, in the church of the
+Fransicans at Viterbo, Pope Urban IV. raised him to the altar. In June
+1276 St Richard's body was taken from its grave in the nave of
+Chichester Cathedral, and in the presence of King Edward I. and a crowd
+of bishops, was translated to a silver gilt shrine. Later, this was
+removed to the tomb in the south transept.
+
+St Richard was not only a popular hero and saint both before and after
+his death, to him and his shrine is due very much that is most lovely
+in the Cathedral, and it was he who really reformed the chapter there.
+
+Chichester had always been served by a dean and chapter of secular
+canons. The canons were originally, of course, resident, but the
+chapter had always been poorly endowed, and as time went on residence
+was actually discouraged. Perhaps then arose the canon's vicars who
+represented the canons and chanted in choir. The vicars choral were,
+however, not incorporated until 1465; they were assisted by ten or
+twelve boy choristers, whose chief business it was, I suppose, to sing
+the Lady-Mass in prick-song. Beside this company of canons, vicars and
+choristers directly serving the cathedral, a number of chaplains served
+the various altars and chantries within it, which at the Dissolution
+numbered fifteen. St Richard not only reorganised the cathedral staff,
+but also established the "use" of Chichester, which he ordered to be
+followed throughout the diocese. This "use" was followed until 1444,
+when, by order of the archbishop, that of Sarum, was established.
+
+With the Reformation, of course, everything but the Cathedral itself
+and the form of its administration and government was swept away. Nor
+was it long before even what Henry and Elizabeth had spared was
+demolished. In 1643 Chichester was besieged by Waller and taken after
+ten days. His soldiers, we read, "pulled down the idolatrous images
+from the Market Cross; they brake down the organ in the Cathedral and
+dashed the pipes with their pole-axes, crying in scoff, "Harke! how the
+organs goe"; and after they ran up and down with their swords drawn,
+defacing the monuments of the dead and hacking the seats and stalls."
+Indeed, such was their malice that it is wonderful to see how much
+loveliness remains.
+
+No cathedral, I think, and certainly no lesser church in England is so
+completely representative of the whole history of our architecture as
+is Chichester. In Salisbury we have the most uniform building in our
+island, in Chichester the most various, for it possesses work in every
+style, from the time of the Saxons to that of Sir Gilbert Scott.
+
+It was Bishop Ralph who before 1108 built the church we know, and
+completed it save upon the west front, where only the lower parts of
+the south-western tower are Norman. But work earlier than his, Saxon
+work, may be seen in the south aisle of the choir, where there are two
+carved stones representing Christ with Martha and Mary and the Raising
+of Lazarus. Bishop Ralph's church was badly damaged by fire in 1114,
+and it would seem that the four western bays of the nave date from the
+following rebuilding and restoration. Then in 1187 the Cathedral was
+burnt again, and Bishop Seffrid vaulted it for the first time--till
+then only the aisles had been vaulted--building great buttresses to
+support this and re-erecting the inner arcade of the clerestory.
+Apparently the apse and ambulatory which till then had closed the
+great church, on the east had been destroyed in the fire. At any rate
+Bishop Seffrid replaced them with the exquisite retro-choir we have,
+and square eastern chapels. He did the same with the old apses of the
+transepts, and he recased the choir with Caen stone, using Purbeck very
+freely and with beautiful effect. All this work is very late
+Transitional, the very last of the Norman or Romanesque.
+
+Then in the thirteenth century, which was to see St Richard Bishop of
+Chichester, the beautiful south porch was built, a pure Early English
+work, the north porch almost as lovely and of the same date, and later
+the sacristy beside the south porch. In St Richard's own day the south-
+west tower was built as we see it. The Norman tower over the crossing
+was destroyed and a lighter one built in its place as we see, and the
+galilee was set up before the western doors. Then, too, the chapels
+were built out from the nave aisles, upon the north those of St Thomas,
+St Anna, and St Edmund, upon the south, those of St George and St
+Clement, things unique in England, and all largely works of the second
+half of the thirteenth century and the early Decorated style, which
+indeed give to the Cathedral, with its dark Norman nave, all its charm,
+its variety and delight.
+
+Not much later than this transformation of the nave, though the nave
+itself was not touched, was the rebuilding or rather the lengthening
+and transformation of the Lady Chapel. Fundamentally this beautiful
+Decorated chapel is a Norman work, transformed into a Transitional one,
+to be glorified and transfigured in the very end of the thirteenth
+century, and now spoilt as we see. All this was done either by St
+Richard himself, or with the money gathered at his shrine.
+
+In the first half of the fourteenth century little would appear to
+have been built, save that certain beautiful windows, as that in the
+end of the south aisle of the choir and that in the south transept,
+with Bishop Langton's tomb beneath it, were inserted, and the fine
+stalls were built in the choir.
+
+In the Perpendicular period the detached campanile was erected to the
+north-west and the Cathedral was crowned by the great spire, a noble
+work lost to us in our own time and replaced by the copy of Sir Gilbert
+Scott. Later still, in the sixteenth century, a great stone screen, now
+destroyed, was erected across the church, with chantries, and the
+cloister was built. There, over a doorway on the south, is a shield,
+with the arms of Henry VII., and two figures kneeling before the
+Blessed Virgin, attended by an angel holding a rose.
+
+A few tombs of interest or beauty, which the Puritans failed to
+destroy, remain to this great Catholic building. These are the tombs of
+St Richard, of which I have spoken, in the north transept against the
+choir, the restored Arundel Chantry and tomb of Richard Fitzalan in the
+north aisle of the nave, and the exquisite Decorated tomb in the chapel
+of St John Baptist at the eastern end of this aisle; little beside.
+
+It must indeed be confessed that when all is said and done, essentially
+romantic as the Cathedral of Chichester is with its so various styles
+of architecture, lovely as certain parts of it are still, it must
+always have been a building rather interesting than beautiful, and it
+has suffered so much from vandalism and restoration that it cannot be
+accounted a monument of the first order. Nevertheless, I always return
+to it with delight and am reluctant to go away, for in England
+certainly a cathedral, even of the second order, of restricted grandeur
+and spoilt beauty, may be a very charming and delightful and precious
+thing as indeed this church of Chichester is.
+
+At any rate it is by far the most interesting thing left to us in the
+city. The other churches, except perhaps St Olave's, are not worth a
+visit; even in St Olave's everything has been done to make it as little
+interesting as possible.
+
+The best thing left to us in Chichester, apart from the Cathedral and
+its subject buildings, is, I think, St Mary's Hospital, a foundation
+dating from the time of Henry II., which possesses a noble great hall,
+and a pretty Decorated chapel, with old stalls, which is still used as
+an almshouse. It stands upon the site of the first Franciscan house
+established in Chichester. In 1269 the Friars Minor left this place and
+moved to the site of the old Castle. There they built the church of
+which the choir still remains, a lovely work ruined at the dissolution
+and used as the Guildhall. It is now a store room. Nothing in
+Chichester is more beautiful than this Early English fragment, which
+seems to remind us of all we have lost by that disastrous revolution of
+the sixteenth century, whose latest results we still await with fear
+and dread.
+
+
+
+But let who will be disappointed in Chichester, I shall love it all my
+days; not so much for these its monuments, but for itself, its
+curiously sleepy air of disinterested quiet, its strong dislike of any
+sort of enthusiasm, its English boredom, even of itself, its complete
+surrender to what is, its indifference to what might be. May it ever
+remain secure within sight of the hills, within sight of the sea,
+steeped in the Tudor myth, certain in its English heart, that twice two
+is not four but anything one likes to make it, nor ever hear ribald
+voices calling upon it to decide what after all it stands for in the
+world, denying it any longer the consolation it loves best of finding
+in the conclusion what is not in the premises, or, as the vulgar might
+put it, of having its cake and eating it too.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+SELSEY, BOSHAM AND PORCHESTER
+
+
+It was my good fortune, while I was in Chichester, to be tempted to
+explore the peninsula of Selsey, which most authorities declare to have
+no beauty and little interest for the traveller to-day. For St
+Wilfrid's sake, I put aside these admonishments, and one morning set
+out upon the lonely road to Pagham, across a country as flat as a fen,
+of old, as they say, a forest, the forest of Mainwood, and still in
+spite of drainage and cultivation very bleak and lonely with marshes
+here and there which are still the haunt of all kinds of wild-fowl.
+
+It is only to the man who finds pleasure in the Somerset moors, the
+fens of Cambridgeshire or the emptiness of Romney Marsh that this
+corner of England will appeal, but to such an one it is full of
+interest and certainly not without beauty. Pagham, however, of which I
+had read, with its creek and harbour, its curious Hushing Well, its
+golden sands, and extraordinary melancholy, as it were a ruin of the
+sea, sadly disappointed me. Only its melancholy remains. Its harbour,
+where of old we read the sea-fowl were to be seen in innumerable
+flocks, and the whole place was musical with the cry of the wild-swan,
+has been wholly reclaimed, and the famous Hushing Well no longer exists
+at all. This last was a curious natural phenomenon and must have been
+worth seeing. It consisted apparently of a great pool in the sea, one
+hundred and thirty feet long by thirty feet broad, boiling and bubbling
+and booming all day long. This was caused, it is said, by the air
+rushing through a bed of shingle beneath which was a vast cavern from
+which the sea continuously expelled the air as it rushed in. Nothing of
+the sort exists at Pagham to-day; it has disappeared with the
+reclamation of the harbour, which itself was formed, we are told, in
+the fourteenth century by a tidal wave, when nearly three thousand
+acres were inundated. The only thing which the continual fight of man
+against water in this peninsula has left us that is worth seeing in
+Pagham to-day is the church of St Thomas of Canterbury. This is an
+Early English building much spoiled by restoration, the best thing
+remaining being the beautiful arcade of the end of the twelfth century.
+But the eastern window which consists of three lancets is charming, as
+is the fourteenth-century chantry at the top of the north aisle,
+founded in 1383 by John Bowrere. In the chancel is a curious slab with
+an inscription in Lombardic characters, perhaps a memorial of a former
+rector. The font is Norman. The church was probably built by one of
+the early successors of St Thomas in the See of Canterbury; for Pagham
+belonged to the Archbishops until the Reformation, and certain ruins of
+their palace remain in a field to the south-east of the church. At
+Nyetimber, on the Chichester road, a mile out of Pagham, are the ruins
+of a thirteenth-century chapel.
+
+To reach Selsey and its old church of Our Lady, what remains of it,
+from Pagham is not an easy matter, the footpaths across the fields
+being sometimes a little vague. The walk, however, is worth the trouble
+it involves, for you may thus gather some idea of the history of this
+unfortunate coast, which the sea has been eating up for at least
+fifteen hundred years. Indeed, in the time of St Wilfrid the peninsula
+was probably nearly twice as big as it is to-day, and Selsey was
+undoubtedly a little island, probably of mud, divided from the mainland
+at least by the tide. It was here, St Wilfrid was shipwrecked in 666,
+and it is from his adventures in Sussex that we learn of the
+extraordinary barbarism of the South Saxons, two generations after the
+advent of St Augustine.
+
+St Wilfrid's ship, it seems, was stranded on the mud flats, and the
+quite pagan South Saxons attacked him and the crew, and it was only the
+rise of the tide which floated the ship that saved them, with a loss of
+five men. It was not till 681 that Wilfrid, really a fugitive, came
+again into Sussex, and this time as to a refuge, for Ethelwalch, king
+of the South Saxons, and his queen were then Christians, though their
+people were still pagan. There was a certain monk, however, probably an
+Irishman, who had a small monastery at Bosham encompassed by the sea
+and the woods, and in it were five or six brethren who served God in
+poverty and humility; but none of the natives cared either to follow
+their course of life or to hear their preaching. Of these heathen St
+Wilfrid at once became the Apostle. For, as Bede tells us, he "not only
+delivered them from the misery of perpetual damnation, but also from an
+inexpressible calamity of temporal death, for no rain had fallen in
+that province in three years before his arrival, whereupon a dreadful
+famine ensued which cruelly destroyed the people. In short, it is
+reported that very often forty or fifty men, being spent with want,
+would go together to some precipice, or to the sea-shore, and there
+hand in hand perish by the fall, or be swallowed up by the waves. But
+on the very day on which the nation received the baptism of faith there
+fell a soft but plentiful rain; the earth revived again, and, the
+verdure being restored to the fields, the season was pleasant and
+fruitful. Thus the former superstition being rejected, and idolatry
+exploded, the hearts and flesh of all rejoiced in the living God and
+became convinced that He who is the true God had, through His heavenly
+grace, enriched them with wealth, both temporal and spiritual. For the
+bishop, when he came into the province and found so great misery from
+famine, taught them to get their food by fishing; for their sea and
+rivers abounded in fish, but the people had no skill to take them
+except eels alone. The bishop's men having gathered eel-nets
+everywhere, cast them into the sea, and by the blessing of God took
+three hundred fishes of several sorts, which, being divided into three
+parts, they gave a hundred to the poor, a hundred to those of whom they
+had the nets, and kept a hundred for their own use. By this benefit the
+bishop gained the affections of them all, and they began more readily
+to hear his preaching and to hope for heavenly good, seeing that by his
+help they had received that good which is temporal. Now at this time
+King Ethelwalch gave to the most reverend prelate Wilfrid, land of
+eighty-seven families, which place is called Selsey, that is, the
+Island of the Sea-Calf. That place is encompassed by the sea on all
+sides, except the west, where is an entrance about the cast of a sling
+in width; which sort of place by the Latins is called a peninsula, by
+the Greeks a chersonesus. Bishop Wilfrid, having this place given him,
+founded therein a monastery, which his successors possess to this day,
+and established a regular course of life, chiefly of the brethren he
+had brought with him; for he, both in word and actions, performed the
+duties of a bishop in those parts during the space of five years, until
+the death of King Egfrid. And forasmuch as the aforesaid king, together
+with the said place, gave him all the goods that were therein, with the
+lands and men, he instructed them in the Faith of Christ and baptised
+them all. Among whom were two hundred and fifty men and women slaves,
+all of whom he by baptism, not only rescued from the servitude of the
+devil, but gave them their bodily liberty also and exempted them from
+the yoke of human servitude."
+
+The church and monastery which St Wilfrid thus founded at Selsey,
+thereby establishing the bishopric of Sussex, have long since
+disappeared beneath the sea. Camden, however, tells us that
+he saw the foundations at low water; they lay about a mile to
+the east of the little church of Our Lady, which remained complete
+until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was all
+pulled down except the chancel which we see to-day in the graveyard
+which it serves as chapel. It is a work of the fourteenth century, and
+within is the fine sixteenth-century monument of John Lews and his
+wife. The old Norman font has been removed to the new church of St
+Peter at Selsey, built largely out of old materials. There, too, is an
+Elizabethan chalice and paten of the sixteenth century.
+
+Thus nothing at all remains at Selsey, not even the landscape as it was
+in St Wilfrid's day. Till yesterday, however, one might realise in the
+loneliness and desolation of this low, lean headland something of that
+far-off time in which the great bishop came here and had to teach that
+barbarous folk even to fish. Now even that is going, or gone, for the
+new light railway from Chichester is bringing a new life to Selsey,
+which, after all, it would ill become us to grudge her.
+
+By that railway indeed I returned to Chichester, and then at once set
+out westward for Bosham, where I slept. Bosham is perhaps the most
+interesting place in all this peninsula as well as probably the most
+ancient. That Bosham was a port of the Romans seems likely, but that it
+was the earliest seat of Christianity in Sussex after the advent of the
+pagans is certain. There, as Bede tells us, St Wilfrid, when he came
+into Sussex in 681, found a Scottish (most probably Irish) monk named
+Dicul, who had, in a little monastery encompassed by the sea and the
+woods, five or six brethren who served God in poverty and humility.
+With the conversion of the South Saxons that monastery flourished, the
+house grew rich, and Edward the Confessor bestowed it upon his Norman
+chaplain Osbern, Bishop of Exeter, whom, of course, the Conqueror did
+not dispossess. Indeed, the place became famous and appears in the
+Bayeaux tapestry, in the very first picture, where we see "Harold and
+his Knights riding towards Bosham" to embark for Normandy. Bosham,
+indeed, was one of Harold's manors, his father, according to the
+legend, having acquired it by a trick. _Da mihi basium_, says Earl
+Godwin to the Archbishop Aethelnoth, thus claiming to have received
+Bosham. That Earl Godwin held Bosham we are assured by the Domesday
+Survey, which also speaks of the church, presumably the successor of
+the old monastery of Dicul. This, as I have said, and as Domesday Book
+tells us, Bishop Osbern of Exeter "holds of King William as he had held
+it of King Edward." The Bishop of Exeter still held it, "a royal free
+chapel" in the time of Henry I. Then was established here, in place, as
+I suppose, of the monks, a college of six secular canons, the Bishop
+being the Dean. Exeter, indeed, only once lost the church of Bosham,
+and that in a most glorious cause, the cause of St Thomas. For when
+Henry II. quarrelled with Becket [Footnote: Herbert of Bosham, possibly
+a canon of Bosham, was St Thomas' secretary and devoted follower, and was
+certainly born in Bosham.] he deprived the Bishop of Exeter, who took his
+part, of this church and bestowed it upon the Abbot of Lisieux, who held
+it till 1177, when it came once more to the Bishop of Exeter, who held it,
+he and his successors till the Reformation. In 1548 the college was
+suppressed, only one priest being left to serve the church, with a
+curate to serve the dependent parish of Appledram.
+
+The church, as we have it to-day upon a little sloping green hill over
+the water, is of the very greatest interest. The foundations of a Roman
+building have been discovered beneath the chancel, and the foundation
+and basis of the chancel arch may be a part of this building. But the
+greater part of the building we have is undoubtedly Saxon; the great
+grey tower, the nave, the chancel arch, one of the most characteristic
+works of that period, and the chancel itself, though enlarged in later
+times, are without doubt buildings of Saxon England. Mr Baldwin Brown
+in his fine work upon "The Arts in Early England," thus speaks of it:
+"The plan, as will be seen at a glance, has been set out with more than
+mediaeval indifference to exactness of measurements and squareing, and
+the chancel diverges phenomenally from the axis of the nave. The
+elevations are gaunt in their plainness, and the now unplastered
+rubble-work is rough and uncomely, but the dimensions are ample, the
+walls lofty, and the chancel arch undeniably imposing." Of the bases
+here he says: "These slabs are commonly attributed to the Romans, but
+it is not easy to see what part of a Roman building they can ever have
+formed. The truth is that they bear no resemblance to known classical
+features, while they are on the other hand, characteristically Saxon.
+The nearest parallel to them is to be found in the imposts of the
+chancel arch at Worth in Sussex, a place far away from Roman sites. The
+Worth imposts, like the bases at Bosham, are huge and ungainly,
+testifying both to the general love of bigness in the Saxon builder
+and to his comparative ignorance of the normal features which in the
+eleventh century were everywhere else crystallising into Romanesque.
+Saxon England stood outside the general development of European
+architecture, but the fact gives it none the less of interest in our
+eyes."
+
+The church of Holy Trinity, Bosham, is thus the most important Saxon
+work left to us in Sussex, indeed save for the aisles and arcades and
+the Norman and Early English additions to the chancel, that glorious
+eastern window of five lancets, which in itself is worth a journey to
+see, the clerestory, and the furniture we have here really a complete
+Saxon work. The font is later Norman and not very interesting; but the
+exquisite recessed tomb with the effigy of a girl lying upon it is a
+noble work of the thirteenth century, said to mark the grave of
+Canute's daughter. The crypt dates also from that time. Near the south
+door is another fine canopied tomb, said to be that of Herbert of
+Bosham. The windows are Norman in the clerestory and Early English and
+Decorated elsewhere throughout the church. The stalls in the chancel
+are Perpendicular. But here if anywhere in south-eastern England we
+have a church dating from the Dark Age, in which happily we were
+persuaded back again within the influence of the Faith and of Rome.
+Bosham then for every Englishman is a holy place only second to
+Glastonbury and Canterbury: it is a monument of our conversion, of the
+re-entry of England into Christendom, of that Easter of ours which saw
+us rise from the dead.
+
+A few ruins, mere heaps of stones, mark the site of the college to the
+north of the church. Of Earl Godwin's manor-house only the moat remains
+near an ancient mill towards the sea; and there, upon the little green
+between the grey church and the grey sea, one may best recall the
+reverent past of this lovely spot. Little is here for pride, much to
+make us humble and exceeding thankful. God was worshipped here between
+the sea and the greenwood when our South Saxon forefathers were not
+only the merest pagans, but so barbarous that they knew not even how to
+fish, when they were so wretched that in companies they would cast
+themselves into the sea because there was no light in their hearts and
+nothing else to do. Out of that darkness St Wilfrid led them, but even
+before he came with the light of Christ and of Rome, in some half
+barbarous way in this little place men prayed and Mass was said, and
+there was the means of deliverance though men knew it not, being
+barbarians.
+
+It is as though at Bosham we were able to catch a glimpse, as it were,
+of all that darkness out of which we are come by the guiding of a star.
+
+[Illustration: BOSHAM]
+
+That Bosham was a harbour in Roman times, and that it had more than a
+little to do with the founding of Regnum, and the building perhaps of
+the Stane Street, I had long since convinced myself. All these creeks
+and harbours were probably known and used even then, and certainly all
+through the Middle Ages Bosham was of importance as a port; and the
+series of creeks, the most eastern of which it served, and the most
+western of which is Southampton Water, with Portsmouth Harbour between
+them, was still among the greatest ports in England, easily the
+greatest, I suppose, in the south country.
+
+In order to see something of this low and muddy coast, which has seen
+so much of the history of England, I set out from Bosham very early one
+morning, intending to make my way through Emsworth and Havant, by the
+Roman road which joins Chichester and Southampton and runs across the
+north of these creeks, which may perhaps be considered as one great
+port of which only the more western part is famous still.
+
+That way has little to recommend it, and indeed I learned little, for
+the modern world has obliterated with its terrible footsteps nearly all
+that might have remained of our humble and yet so glorious past, and it
+was still early morning when I crossed the Hampshire boundary and came
+into the little town of Emsworth, once famous for its trade in foreign
+wines, now, I suppose, best known as a yachting station. Emsworth was
+originally of far less importance than Warblington, of which it was a
+hamlet. There the fair was upon the morrow of the feast of the
+Translation of St Thomas of Canterbury, to which saint the parish
+church of Warblington is dedicated. This is a very beautiful and
+interesting building, but it is obvious at once that it cannot always
+have stood in the name of St Thomas, for part of its central tower--the
+church consists of chancel, and nave, with a tower between them, north
+chancel, vestry, north and south nave-aisles, and north porch--is of
+Saxon workmanship. Only one stage of this, however, now remains, the
+lower part having been altogether rebuilt. This tower was originally a
+western tower, the Saxon church standing to the east of it. There is no
+sign of Norman work here, and it seems probable that the Saxon church
+remained until in the first years of the thirteenth century a new nave
+and aisles were built to the west of the old tower, the lower part of
+which was then removed and the tower supported by arches in order to
+open a way into the nave of the old church, which thus became the
+chancel of the new. It was then in all probability that the church was
+newly dedicated in honour of St Thomas. The whole of the old church,
+nave and chancel together, however, was destroyed before the end of the
+thirteenth century, and a large new chancel built with a chapel or
+vestry at the eastern end upon the north; at the same time the aisles
+of the nave were rebuilt. Later in the fourteenth century the eastern
+arch bearing the tower was rebuilt, and thus appeared the church which
+in the main we still see. The difference in the north and south
+arcades of the nave is, though, very striking here, because of the
+great contrast between the exquisite and delicate beauty of the south
+with its clustered columns of Purbeck and the plain round stone columns
+of the north, common enough. Tradition has it that the church was built
+by two maiden ladies who lived in the old castle near the church, and
+that each built a side of the church according to her taste. One is
+said to lie in the chapel at the east end of the south aisle, where
+there is a tomb with effigy, the other in a tomb in the north aisle.
+The "castle" came in 1551 to Sir Richard Cotton, whose son George
+entertained Queen Elizabeth there for two days in 1586. In 1643 a
+Richard Cotton held the "strong house" of Warblington against the
+Parliament till it was taken by "sixty soldiers and a hundred muskets."
+All that remains of the place to-day is a beautiful octagonal tower of
+red brick and stone, once part of the main gateway.
+
+Now when I had seen all this I went on into Havant, and there at the
+cross-roads I found the church of St Faith close by an old sixteenth-
+century half-timbered house--the Old House at Home. Havant is, in
+spite of the modern world, a place of miracle; for it possesses a
+spring to the south-west of the church, called, I think, St Faith's,
+which never fails in summer for drought, nor in winter for frost. But
+for all that the most interesting thing in the town remains the church.
+This is a cruciform building with a tower over the crossing, and is
+as, we have it, of Norman foundation, though it seems to stand upon a
+Roman site, coins having been found when the old nave was destroyed in
+1832 and Roman brick and cement and foundations. The church we see,
+however, dates absolutely from the late twelfth century, and is
+nowhere, it would appear, older. Unhappily much is far later, the nave
+being really a modern building and even the central tower has been
+entirely taken down and rebuilt, and indeed all periods of English
+architecture would seem to have left their mark upon the church between
+the end of the twelfth century and our own day. The manor of Havant
+belonged when Domesday Survey was made to the monks of Winchester. But
+it is not of them but of William of Wykeham we think here, for his
+secretary, Thomas Aylward, was rector of this parish and in 1413 was
+buried here in the north transept, where his brass still remains,
+showing his effigy vested in a cope. He was not the only notable rector
+of Havant, for in 1723 Bingham, the author of the "Antiquities of the
+Christian Church," was holding the living when he died. Three years
+before he had been wrecked in the South Sea Bubble, and this is
+supposed to have caused his death. His work was put into Latin, and
+was, I think, one of the last English works to be translated into the
+universal tongue.
+
+Out of Havant I went, nor did I stay now on my way until a little after
+noon I reached Porchester; but in Bedhampton I did not forget to pray
+for the soul of Elizabeth Juliers, who died there after a most
+unfortunate and most wretched life in 1411. This lady, daughter of the
+Marquis of Juliers and widow of John Plantagenet, Earl of Kent, took
+the veil in her widowhood at Waverley. Then appears Sir Eustace
+Dabrieschescourt, and she being young, in spite of her vow, marries
+him. And having repented and confessed she devoted her life to penance,
+being condemned daily to repeat the Gradual and the Penitential Psalms,
+and every year to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas. This
+penance, with others, she performed during fifty-one years. She was
+married to Dabrieschescourt in the church of Wingham in Kent, and died
+here in Bedhampton, and was buried in the church of St Thomas, for the
+manor was her father's and part of her first dower.
+
+Porchester, where I found myself late in the afternoon, is a very
+interesting and curious place. What we really have that is ancient
+there is a great walled green about six hundred feet square. We enter
+this area to-day on the west, the outer gate being thus opposite to us
+in the eastern wall, the castle keep and bailey on our left in the
+north-west corner, and the church to the south-east. All this is
+mediaeval work, but the origins of Porchester are far older than that;
+the place was a fortress of the Romans.
+
+It is certain that a Roman road ran, as I have said, from Southampton
+to Chichester, which it entered by the West Gate, and met the Roman
+military highway, the Stane Street which entered Chichester by the East
+Gate, whither it had come from London' Bridge. This Roman road
+doubtless served many a little port upon these creeks and harbours that
+lie between Southampton Water and Chichester Harbour, but undoubtedly
+the most important port upon that road, apart from the two cities which
+it joined, was the Roman Porchester.
+
+
+
+It has been suggested, and not without reason, that the Stane Street
+itself dates only from the latter part of the Roman occupation of
+Britain, that it was, in fact, a purely military way built for the
+passage of troops, which until the fourth century were certainly not
+needed in any quantity in southern Britain. That they were needed then
+was due to the Saxon pirates. The same pagan robbers, who, when the
+Legions left us never to return in the first years of the fifth
+century, might seem to have overrun the whole country. Now it seems
+fairly certain that Roman Porchester was a military and perhaps a
+naval fortress, built not earlier than the fourth century here at the
+western extremity of what the Romans called the Litus Saxonicum, and
+for the purpose of defending southern Britain from the raids of these
+barbarous and pagan rogues. If so, it might seem to be of one piece
+with that presumably purely military Way the Stane Street, and to give
+it its meaning.
+
+At any rate, the mediaeval builder of Porchester Castle used, with the
+help of rebuildings and patchings, the Roman fortifications, which did
+not perhaps differ very much, and not at all in form, from those we
+see. Roman Porchester was just what mediaeval Porchester was, a great
+fortress, not a "city," nor a village, but a port similar to the others
+that lined the Saxon shore from the Wash to Beachey Head.
+
+Of what became of the place in Saxon times we are entirely ignorant.
+The Domesday Survey speaks of it as a "halla," but in the first half of
+the twelfth century the Normans built a castle in the north-west corner
+of the Roman enclosure, which in 1153 Henry II. granted to Henry
+Manduit, and from that time it appears as the military port, as it
+were, of the capital, Winchester; Henry II. Richard I. John and Henry
+III. not only frequently taking up their residence at Porchester, and
+there as in a strong place, transacting the most important business,
+but they all of them most frequently set out thence for the Continent
+in days when a king of England was as often abroad as at home. Except
+Edward I. there is scarcely an English king from Henry II. to Henry
+VIII. who did not use Porchester, and Elizabeth, the last royal
+visitor, held her court in the Castle.
+
+As we see it to-day the keep of Porchester Castle resembles that of
+Rochester, not only in its appearance, though there it comes short, but
+in its arrangement. It is, however, surrounded by some later ruins of
+the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the use of which has, I think,
+never been ascertained.
+
+The whole place is extraordinarily impressive, and not less so on
+account of its containing a church within the Roman walls, possibly
+occupying the site of a Roman sanctuary. The church of Our Lady of
+Porchester, however, as we see it, was, of course, a Norman building,
+built not later than 1133 when Henry I. gave it to the Austin Canons as
+their priory church, but about 1145 the canons were removed to
+Southwick, where a house was built for them. They must, indeed, have
+been very much in the way within so important a fortress seeing how
+international the interests of their congregation were. The church, of
+course, remained. It was originally a cruciform building, with central
+tower, but the south transept has been destroyed as has the chapel east
+of the north transept where now the vestry stands. The eastern apse,
+too, has been replaced by a square end. Apart from these changes,
+however, the church remains largely as it was in the time of Henry I.,
+the west front being especially fine, and the font with its relief of
+the Baptism of Our Lord, a very notable Romanesque work. I lingered
+long in Porchester, indeed till sundown. Nothing in all England rightly
+understood is more reverent than this great ruin, not even the Wall.
+It, too, like that great northern barrier, was built in our defence by
+our saviours against our worst foes the barbarians, the pagans. It,
+too, was an outpost of civilisation and of the Faith against the
+darkness. Wherever Rome has passed, there a flower will blow for ever,
+wherever Rome has been, there is light, wherever Rome has built, there
+is something which moves us as nothing else can do, and not least here
+in England of my heart upon the verge of the Saxon shore, while we
+recall the past at evening and question the future, the future which
+will not be known.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+SOUTHAMPTON
+
+
+When I left Porchester I went on into Fareham to sleep, and next
+morning set out by train, for it was raining, to go to Clausentum.
+Before I left the railway, however, the weather began to clear, and
+presently the sun broke through the clouds, so that when I came into
+Clausentum the whole world was again full of joy.
+
+Clausentum, which even to-day, is not without charm was as I understand
+it, the mother of Southampton, a Roman, perhaps even a Celtic
+foundation, for its name Clausentum is certainly of Celtic origin. Of
+its high antiquity there can at least be no doubt, for there we may
+still see parts of the Roman walls near nine feet thick and innumerable
+Roman remains have been found within them.
+
+The situation of Clausentum, too, was rather Celtic than Roman. It
+stands upon a tongue of land thrust out into the Itchen from the left
+bank, between Northam and St Denys on the right bank; the river washed
+its walls upon three sides, north, south and west, but upon the
+landward side to the east it was protected by two lines of defence, an
+outer and an inner, the one nearly three hundred yards from the other.
+At first this arrangement might seem rather Celtic than Roman, and in
+fact, it may well be that the Romans occupied here earthworks far older
+than anything built by them in Britain, and yet it seems perhaps more
+probable that they are responsible for all we have here, un-Roman
+though it seems, and that the true explanation is that the outer
+defences, while their work, are the older of the two; that with the
+decline of their administration in the fourth century, with the
+building of the Stane Street and the general walling of the Roman towns
+this older and larger defence was abandoned, and the place, whatever it
+may have been, reduced to a mere fort to hold which upon the landward
+side the inner defence was there built.
+
+Of the fate of Clausentum in the Dark Age we know nothing; if it was a
+mere fort with no life of its own it may or may not have been
+abandoned; but it would seem certain that with the renewal of
+civilisation in southern England, by the return of Christianity, a town
+was established upon the right bank of the estuary opposite Clausentum.
+This town was the first Southampton, and there Athelstane is said to
+have established mints. This town, however, does not seem to have
+occupied the same site as the Southampton we know, but rather to have
+been gathered about St Mary's church to the north-east as Leland was
+told when he visited Southampton in 1546. The place was probably burnt
+by the Danes, and it is to one of them, to Canute, that we owe the
+foundation of the town we know. If Canute was the founder of
+Southampton, however, it was the Normans who really and finally
+established it, the greatness of the place as a port really dating from
+the Conquest. The Normans seem to have settled there early in
+considerable numbers, and their energy and enterprise began the
+development which continued throughout the Middle Age and the
+Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, however, Southampton rapidly
+declined, and this continued till in the time of our grandfathers it
+was arrested and Southampton rose again, to become the chief port of
+southern England. So extraordinary indeed has been her modern
+development that it has completely engulfed the great town of the
+Middle Age, which, for all that, still forms the nucleus as it were of
+the modern city, though no one, I suppose would suspect it at first
+sight.
+
+Of the greatness of Southampton in the Middle Age, however, there can
+be no doubt. It was the best exit out of that England into Normandy,
+the natural port of the capital Winchester, and its whole record is
+full of glory. It was in a very real sense the gate of England. Hither
+came the great ships from the South and the East, from the ports of
+Normandy and Anjou, from Bayonne and Venice, with wine and Eastern
+silks, leather from Cordova, swords and daggers from Toledo, spices
+from India, and coloured sugars from Egypt. Here the merchants
+disembarked to trade in the capital or to attend the great fair of St
+Giles; hither came the pilgrims, thousands upon thousands, to follow
+the old road from Winchester to the Shrine of St Thomas at
+Canterbury; while out of Southampton streamed the chivalry of the
+Crusades; hence "cheerly to sea" sailed the fleets of Coeur de Lion for
+Palestine, of Edward III. for France, the army that won at Crecy, the
+army that won at Agincourt. All the glory of mediaeval England
+Southampton has seen pass by.
+
+That the abandonment of Guienne and Aquitaine by the English was a
+severe blow to Southampton is certain, but still it had the Venice
+trade, the "Flanders Galleys" laden with the spoil of the East, the
+wines of the Levant, the "fashions of proud Italy"; and the real
+decline of Southampton dates from the moment when Venice too was
+wounded even to death by the discovery of the Cape route to the East
+and the rise of Portugal.
+
+As it happens we have at the time of her greatest prosperity a
+description of the town from the hand of Leland. "There be," he writes,
+"in the fair and right strong wall of New Hampton, eight gates. Over
+Barr Gate by north is the _Domus Civica_, and under it the town prison.
+There is a great suburb without it, and a great double dyke, well
+watered on each hand without it. The East Gate is strong, not so large
+as Barr Gate, and in its suburb stands St Mary's Church, to the South
+Gate joins a Castelet well ordinanced to beat that quarter of the
+haven. There is another mean gate a little more south called God's
+house gate, of an hospital founded by two merchants joined to it; and
+not far beyond it is the Water Gate, without which is a quay. There are
+two more gates. The glory of the Castle is in the dungeon, that is both
+fair and large and strong, both by work and the site of it. There be
+five parish churches in the town. Holy Rood Church standeth in the
+chief street, which is one of the fairest streets that is in any town
+in England, and it is well builded for timber building. There be many
+fair merchants' houses, and in the south-east part was a college of
+Grey Friars. Here was also an hospital called God's House, founded by
+two merchants, appropriated since to Queen's College, Oxford."
+
+Of all this what remains? Happily more than might seem possible
+considering the enormous modern development of the place. The town of
+Southampton stood looking south-west upon a tongue of land thrust out
+south into the water with the estuary of the Itchen upon the east, and
+Southampton Water upon the west, upon the south were the vast mud-flats
+swept by every tide which the great modern docks now occupy. The town
+was, as we have seen, enclosed by walls, perhaps by Canute, certainly
+by the Normans, and these seem to have been enlarged by King John, and
+rebuilt and repaired after the French raid of 1338. They formed a rude
+quadrilateral, roughly seven hundred yards from north to south, and
+three hundred from east to west, were from twenty-five to thirty feet
+high and of varying thickness. Something of them still remains,
+especially upon the west of the town over the quays. Here we have two
+great portions of the old wall which is practically continuous from the
+site of the Bugle Tower upon the south, to the site of the Bigglesgate
+about half-way up this western side. This portion includes two of the
+old gates, the West Gate and the Blue Anchor Postern. Beyond the site
+of the Bigglesgate the old wall has been destroyed as far as the
+Castle, but from there it still stands all the way to the Arundel Tower
+at the north-west corner of the town. So much for the western front.
+Upon the north the wall is broken down at the western end, the Bargate,
+which still stands, being isolated, but beyond two portions remain
+complete as far as the Polymond Tower at the north-east angle. Upon the
+east of the town there is very little standing until we come to the
+southern corner, where God's House Tower and the South-East Gate
+remain. Upon the south almost nothing is left.
+
+Southampton in its mediaeval greatness had eight gates, of which, as we
+see, four remain: two upon the west, the West Gate and the Blue Anchor
+Postern; one upon the north, the Bargate; upon the east, or rather at
+the south-eastern angle of the walls, God's House or South-East Gate;
+upon the south none at all.
+
+The West Gate is a plain but beautiful work of the fourteenth century,
+a great square tower over a pointed arch, under which is the entry. The
+tower within consists of three stages, the last being embattled and
+now roofed, while the first is reached by a picturesque outside
+stairway of stone, which served both it and the ramparts. Close by,
+against the wall, is a timber building upon a stone basement, called
+the guard-room, dating from the fifteenth century.
+
+The best portions of the old wall run northward from the West Gate over
+the western shore road. This is Norman work added to in the fourteenth
+century. Here is the Blue Anchor Postern, or as it is more properly
+called, simply the Postern, little more than a round archway within the
+great arcading and the wall itself. Just to the south of this gate is
+the twelfth-century building known as King John's Palace. We follow the
+grand old wall till it ends upon the site of the Bigglesgate, where we
+turn eastward a little into the town and come to the Castle, of which,
+unhappily, almost nothing remains. It consisted of a great Keep in the
+midst of an enclosure, entered by two gates, the Castle Gate upon the
+north-east where now is Castle Lane, and the Postern over the site of
+which we have entered the Castle Green. The decay of this fortress
+dates, at least, from the sixteenth century, and apparently before the
+Civil War it had been pulled down.
+
+The walls still enclose the Bailey of the Castle upon the west. There,
+in some sort, still stands the Castle Water Gate, a mere fragment,
+within which is a great vaulted chamber some fifty feet long and
+twenty-five feet high, with only one small window. From this
+fragmentary gate the wall sweeps away to the salient, for the most
+part Norman; but beyond the salient its character changes, two towers
+appear--the Catchcold Tower of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
+century, and the fine Arundel Tower, now only a curtain of fourteenth-
+century work in the Decorated style.
+
+It is in these western walls of the town that we shall get our best
+idea of what mediaeval Southampton was, and if we add to our impression
+by an examination of the two remaining gates, one upon the north and
+the other at the south-east angle, we may perhaps understand how
+formidable it must have appeared standing up out of the sea armed at
+all points.
+
+Mediaeval Southampton had eight gates, of these, as I have said, but
+four remain, the most notable of which is undoubtedly the Bargate, upon
+the north. This is a fine work of various periods in two stages, the
+lower consisting of a vaulted passage-way of fine proportions, a work
+of the fourteenth century and the upper of a great hall, the Guildhall
+now used as a court room. The original gate, of course, was Norman, and
+this seems to have endured until about 1330 two towers were built on
+either side, without the gate, and a new south front added. In the
+first years of the fifteenth century a new north front was contrived,
+and this remains more or less as we see it. Of old the gate was reached
+by a drawbridge across a wide moat.
+
+Beyond the Bargate we come to the Polymond Tower or the Tower of St
+Denys, beautiful with creepers. This would seem to be in some way
+connected with the Priory of St Denys which held all the churches in
+the town, as we shall see. As for its other name of Polymond, it would
+seem to get it from that John Polymond, who, in the fourteenth century,
+from which time the tower, as we see it, dates, was nine times mayor of
+Southampton.
+
+As for the God's House Gateway, to reach it we must cross the town. It
+is a plain but charming work of two periods, the gate proper being of
+the thirteenth century, while the tower with the two-storied building
+attached to it is of the fourteenth. From the beginning of the
+eighteenth century until 1855 it was used as the town gaol.
+
+The old town of Southampton, a town within a town, is a fascinating
+study, the interest of its gates and old walls is inexhaustible, but
+apart from these it has little architectural beauty to boast of. For
+all that it is amusing to linger there, if only to solve the problems
+that time has contrived for us. Among these not the least is that of
+the first site of the town. Not one of the churches in Southampton is
+of any great beauty or interest, but it is astonishing to find that the
+mother church is not in the town at all, but at least half a mile
+outside it upon the north. Leland, as I have already said, was told,
+when he was in Southampton in 1546, that the first town did not occupy
+the site of that we see but was further to the north, where St Mary's
+stands. The fact that St Mary's is the mother church would seen to
+confirm this. Moreover, there is no mention in the Domesday Survey of
+any church at all within the borough of "Hantune," and though we may
+think that the church of St John then existed, St John's was never the
+mother church; this was St Mary's which possessed all the tithes of the
+town. In the time of Henry II. we find the King granting to the Priory
+of St Denys, founded in 1124 by Henry I., a Priory of Austin Canons,
+his "chapels" of St Michael, the Holy Rood, St Laurence and All Saints,
+that is all the churches save St John's already granted to the Abbey of
+St Mary of Lire, in Southampton. But that these chapels had some
+relation to the mother church of St Mary might seem certain. Indeed the
+rector of St Mary's was continually in controversy with the canons as
+to his rights, and eventually, in the thirteenth century, he won the
+day. In any case the mother church of Southampton was St Mary's,
+outside the walls of the town. That a Saxon church stood upon this site
+is certain, and this was possibly represented in Leland's time by the
+chapel of St Nicholas, "a poor and small thing," which then stood to
+the East of "the great church of Our Lady," which he saw and which
+probably dated from the time of Henry I. This church was, alas,
+destroyed by the town only a few years later because its spire was said
+to guide the French cruisers into Southampton Water, and the stones
+were used to mend the roads. It may be that the chancel escaped, or it
+may be that a new and much smaller church was erected in 1579. This,
+whichever it was, was much neglected till in 1711 a nave was built on
+to it. Then in 1723 the chancel was destroyed, and a new one built. In
+1833 this was rebuilt, and then in 1878 a new church was built, in
+place of the old which was pulled down, by Street. Thus in St Mary's
+church, the mother church of Southampton to-day, we have only a
+lifeless modern building.
+
+Much the same fate has befallen the churches within the walls of
+Southampton. The oldest, that of St John, was pulled down in the
+seventeenth century, that of Holy Rood, in the High Street, was rebuilt
+about fifty years ago, so was St Laurence, while All Saints was
+destroyed in the eighteenth century. The only ancient church remaining
+is that of St Michael, which, though not destroyed, was ruined in 1826.
+It remains, however, in part, a Norman building, with an interesting
+font of the twelfth century, a lectern of the fifteenth century, and a
+fine tomb with the effigy of a priest in mass vestments.
+
+The same fate which has so brutally overtaken the churches of
+Southampton has, with perhaps more excuse, fallen upon the old
+religious houses. The Priory of St Denys, founded by Henry I., upon
+which all these churches within the walls were in a sense dependent,
+has been totally destroyed, a piece of ruined wall alone remaining,
+the present church of St Denys dating from 1868.
+
+Nor does much remain of the Hospital of St Julian or God's House,
+founded for the poor in the town, by Gervase le Riche, in 1197. It was
+one of the most important hospitals in the diocese of Winchester, and
+in 1343 the King, its protector, gave it to Queen's College, Oxford,
+just founded by Queen Philippa. As the possession of this college it
+survived the suppression, and was still carrying on its good work in
+1560. About 1567, however, certain Walloons, refugees from the Low
+Countries, settled in Southampton, and these were granted the use of St
+Julian's Chapel by Queen's College.
+
+The house should have remained to us, but that in 1861, by as black an
+act of vandalism as was ever perpetrated, this seat of learning swept
+away all the old domestic buildings of the hospital, which dated from
+its foundation, and in their place erected what we might expect, at the
+same time "restoring" the chapel of St Julian, of course, out of all
+recognition. May St Julian forget Queen's College, Oxford, for ever and
+ever.
+
+[Illustration: THE TUDOR HOUSE, OPPOSITE ST MICHAEL'S CHURCH, SOUTHAMPTON]
+
+Not far from this hospital for the poor the Grey Friars built their
+house in 1237, or rather the burgesses of Southampton built it for
+them, including a cloister of stone, but nothing remains at all of this
+house.
+
+For the most part, too, the great houses that of old filled
+Southampton, and helped to glorify it, are gone. "The chiefest house,"
+writes Leland, "is the house that Huttoft, late customer of
+Southampton, builded on the west side of the town. The house that
+Master Lightster, chief baron of the King's exchequer, dwelleth in, is
+very fair; the house that Master Mylles, the recorder, dwelleth in, is
+fair, and so be the houses of Niccotine and Guidote, Italians." Of
+these, what remains? Nothing. The only noble dwelling is that called
+Tudor House, in St Michael's Square, a fine half-timbered building,
+and of this nothing is known.
+
+No, the only thing to be enjoyed in Southampton to-day is the old wall
+with its gateways, that upon the west still valiantly outfaces the
+modern world and recalls for us all that noble great past out of which
+we are come. And yet I suppose Southampton is fulfilling its purpose
+to-day more wonderfully than ever before. It was once the port of
+England for those dominions oversea we held in France. They are gone,
+but others we have since acquired, though less fair by far, remain. It
+is to these Southampton looks to-day, south and east, as of old over
+how many thousand miles of blue water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+BEAULIEU AND CHRISTCHURCH
+
+
+While I was in Southampton, I made up my mind to visit a place which I
+had all my life desired to see, but which I had never yet set eyes
+upon, I mean Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest. To this end I set out
+early one morning, by steamboat, across Southampton Water, and landed
+at Hythe, whence I had only to cross the eastern part of Beaulieu
+Heath, a walk of some five miles, to find myself where I would be.
+
+The day was fair, the tide at the flood; in the woods, across the
+water, I could see where Netley Abbey, another Cistercian house,
+younger than Beaulieu, once lifted up its voice in ceaseless praise of
+God, the Maker of all that beauty in which it stood, scarcely spoiled
+even now by the amazing energy of the modern world. It was then with a
+light heart that I set out by a byway under Furze Down, and so across
+the open heath, coming down at last through the woods to the ruins of
+the abbey and the river of Beaulieu.
+
+There can be no more delicious spot in the world. St Bernard loved the
+valleys as St Benedict the hills, and as St Bernard was the refounder
+of the Cistercian Order to which Beaulieu belonged, it, like Waverley,
+Tintern, Netley, and a hundred others in England, was set in one of
+those delicious vales in which I think England is richer than any other
+country, and which here, in England of my heart, seem to demand rather
+our worship than our praise.
+
+Beaulieu Abbey had always interested me. In the first place it was one
+of the greatest, though not the earliest, houses in England of the
+Cistercian Order, that reform of the Benedictines begun as William of
+Malmesbury bears witness by an Englishman, Stephen Harding, sometime a
+monk of Sherborne. And then it was the only religious house within the
+confines of the New Forest. It seems that in the year 1204, just a year
+after he had given the manor of Faringdon in Berkshire to St Mary of
+Citeaux, and established there a small house of Cistercian monks, King
+John founded this great monastery of St Mary of Beaulieu for the same
+Order, making provision for not less than thirty brethren, and giving
+it Faringdon for a cell. John endowed the house with some six manors
+and several churches, gave it a golden chalice, and many cattle, as
+well as corn and wine and money, and besought the aid of the abbots of
+the Order on behalf of the new house. To such good purpose, indeed, did
+he support Beaulieu, that Hugh, the first abbot, was alone his friend,
+when Innocent III., in the spring of 1208 placed England under an
+interdict. This Hugh went as the King's ambassador to Rome, and having
+received promises of submission from the King, who awaited his return
+in the mother house of the Order in England, at Waverley,
+was successful in reconciling him with the Pope. In return
+the King gave him a palfrey among other presents, and the
+interdict being lifted, contributed nine hundred marks towards
+the building of Beaulieu, to be followed by other even more generous
+offerings. Nor was Henry III. neglectful of the place, so that in 1227
+upon the vigil of the Assumption, the monks were able to use their
+church, though it was not till nineteen years later that the monastery
+was completed, and dedicated in the presence of the King and Queen,
+Prince Edward and a vast concourse of bishops, nobles, and common
+folk, by the Bishop of Winchester. Upon that occasion, Prince Edward
+was seized with illness, and, strange as it may seem, we are told that
+the Queen remained in the abbey, to nurse him, for three weeks. But the
+house was always under the royal protection. Edward I. constantly
+stayed there, and the abbots were continually employed upon diplomatic
+business. From 1260 to 1341, when he asked to be freed from the duty,
+the abbot of Beaulieu sat in Parliament, and in 1368 Edward III.
+granted the monks a weekly market within the precincts. One other
+privilege, unique in southern England, Beaulieu had, the right to
+perpetual sanctuary granted by Innocent III., and this seems to have
+been used to the full in the Wars of the Roses, at least we find
+Richard III. inquiring into the matter in 1463. There it seems Perkin
+Warbeck had found safety, as had Lady Warwick after Barnet, and at the
+time of the Suppression there were thirty men in sanctuary in the
+"Great Close of Beaulieu," which seems to have included all the
+original grant of land made to the abbey by King John. Beaulieu
+evidently very greatly increased in honour, for in 1509 its abbot was
+made Bishop of Bangor but continued to hold the abbey, and when he died
+the abbot of Waverley, the oldest house of the Order in England,
+succeeded him, the post being greatly sought after. The Act of 1526
+suppressing the lesser monasteries, in which so many Cistercian houses
+perished, did not touch Beaulieu, but Netley fell early in the
+following year, and the monks were sent to Beaulieu. Many then looked
+for the spoil of the great abbey, among them Lord Lisle who besought
+Thomas Cromwell for it, but he was denied. Indeed there seems to have
+been no idea of suppressing the house at that time. But the Abbot
+Stevens was a traitor. In 1538 he eagerly signed the surrender demanded
+by the infamous Layton and Petre, and the site was granted to Thomas
+Wriothesley, afterwards Earl of Southampton, from whose family it came
+in the time of William III. to Lord Montagu, and so to the Dukes of
+Buccleuch, who still hold it.
+
+Nothing can exceed the beauty of the remains of the house there by the
+river, in perhaps the loveliest corner of southern England. The great
+abbey church has gone, destroyed at the Suppression, but not a little
+of the monastery remains. The great Gate House called the abbot's
+lodging and now the Palace House, the seat of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu,
+a fine Decorated building with a beautiful entrance hall, may sometimes
+be seen. From this one passes across the grass to the old Refectory,
+now fitted up as the parish church, a noble work of the Early English
+style of the thirteenth century, as is the fine pulpit with its arcade
+in the thickness of the wall. Here of old the monk read aloud while his
+brethren took their meagre repast.
+
+From the Refectory one comes into the ruined cloisters, lovely with all
+manner of flowers, and so to the site of the old Chapter House, of the
+sacristy and the monastic buildings. All that remains is in the early
+Decorated style of the end of the thirteenth century. Here, too, upon
+the north stood the great abbey church, three hundred and thirty-five
+feet long, a cruciform building consisting of nave with two aisles,
+central tower, transepts with aisles, chancel with circular apse and
+chapels, now marked out in chalk upon the grass. All about are the
+woods, meadows, fishponds and greens of the monks who are gone.
+
+I do not know how this strikes another who shall see it to-day, in all
+its useless beauty, in the midst of our restless and unhappy England;
+but what I felt has already been expressed and by so good an Englishman
+as William Cobbett.
+
+"Now ... I daresay," he writes, "that you are a very good Protestant;
+and I am a monstrous good Protestant too. We cannot bear the Pope, nor
+"they there priests that makes men confess there sins and go down upon
+their marrow-bones before them." But let us give the devil his due; and
+let us not act worse by these Roman Catholics (who by the by were our
+forefathers) than we are willing to act by the devil himself. Now then
+here were a set of monks. None of them could marry, of course none of
+them could have wives and families. They could possess no private
+property; they could bequeath nothing; they could own nothing but that
+which they owned in common with the rest of their body. They could
+hoard no money; they could save nothing. Whatever they received as rent
+for their lands, they must necessarily spend upon the spot, for they
+never could quit that spot. They did spend it all upon the spot; they
+kept all the poor. Beaulieu and all round about Beaulieu saw no misery,
+and had never heard the damned name of pauper pronounced as long as
+those Monks continued.
+
+"You and I are excellent Protestants; you and I have often assisted on
+the 5th of November to burn Guy Fawkes, the Pope and the Devil. But you
+and I would much rather be life holders under Monks than
+rackrenters...."
+
+St Thomas Aquinas has told us that there were three things for a sight
+of which he would have endured a year in Purgatory, not unwillingly:
+Christ in the flesh, Rome in her flower, and an Apostle disputing.
+Christ in the flesh, I would indeed I might have seen, and Rome in her
+flower were worth even such a price, but for me an Apostle disputing
+would, let me confess it, have little attraction. Instead I would that
+I might see England before the fall, England of the thirteenth,
+fourteenth or fifteenth century, England of my heart, with all her
+great cathedrals still alive, with all her great monasteries still in
+being, those more than six hundred houses destroyed by Henry, and not
+least this house of the Cistercians in Beaulieu. And if I might see
+that, I should have seen one of the fairest things and the noblest that
+ever were in the world.
+
+From Beaulieu I set out in the afternoon across the Forest, and at
+first over the western part of Beaulieu Heath for Brockenhurst. The
+road across the heath is not in itself of much beauty, but it affords
+some glorious views both of the Forest and the sea. As I drew nearer to
+Brockenhurst, however, I came into the woods, and the sylvan beauty of
+the vale, through which the Lymington River flows southward, was
+delicious. Brockenhurst itself is charmingly embowered and is
+surrounded by some of the loveliest of the woodlands. The church stands
+high, perhaps as a guide, over a woodland churchyard, and is the
+evident successor of a Norman building, as its south doorway and font
+of Purbeck bear witness and the chancel arch too, unless indeed this be
+earlier still. The chancel, however, dates from the fourteenth
+century, a good example in its littleness of the Decorated style, but
+it is half spoiled by the enormous pew which blocks the entrance. The
+tower and spire and a good part of the nave are completely modern. The
+great yew in the churchyard must date at least from Edward I.'s time,
+and perhaps may have seen the day on which Red William fell.
+
+
+
+From Brockenhurst, on the following morning, I set out again over the
+open heath for Boldre southward. Many a fine view over the woods I had,
+and once, as I came down Sandy Down, I caught sight of the Isle of
+Wight. Then the scene changed, and I came through meadows, and past
+coppices into Boldre. In the midst of a wood, as it were, I suddenly
+found the church, and this interested me more than I can well say, for
+here again I found what at one time must have been a complete Norman
+building. Surely if the history-books are right this is an astonishing
+thing; but then, as I have long since learned, the history one is
+taught at school is a mere falsehood from start to finish. There is
+probably no schoolboy in England who has not read of the awful cruelty
+and devastation that went with the formation of the New Forest, by the
+Conqueror in 1079. It is generally spoken of as only less appalling
+than the burning of Northumberland. It is said that more than fifty-two
+parish churches within the new bounds of the New Forest were destroyed,
+and a fertile district of a hundred square miles laid waste and
+depopulated to provide William with a hunting-ground. Now if this be
+true how does it come that upon my first day in the Forest I find a
+Norman church at Brockenhurst with something very like a Saxon chancel
+arch, and that upon my second day I walk right into another church in
+part Norman too? This is surely an astonishing thing. It is also, I
+find, a fact that much of the New Forest had been a royal hunting-
+ground in the Saxon times, and that the afforestation of William is not
+so much as mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle. The whole story of the
+devastation of this great country would seem to rest upon the writings
+of William of Jumièges or Ordericus Vitalis, neither of whom was alive
+at the time of the afforestation. This must have been known surely to
+our modern historians; but so is the history of England written. Our
+real grievance against William was not his afforestation, but his cruel
+Forest Law, which demanded the limb of a man for the life of a beast, a
+thing I think unknown in England before his advent. It was this harsh
+law, so bitterly resented, which at last, as we may think, cost William
+Rufus his life. But the old tale remains, and therefore I was greatly
+astonished in Boldre Church.
+
+Doubtless the original Norman church consisted of a nave, chancel and
+north and south aisles. The south aisle remains, as does the arcade
+which separates it from the nave. In the Early English time the north
+aisle was rebuilt or added, perhaps, for the first time, and the
+chancel rebuilt. Later the church was lengthened westward, and the
+tower built at the eastern end of the Norman aisle. In that aisle there
+is a tablet to William Gilpin, the author of "Forest Scenery," who was
+vicar of Boldre for a generation, dying in 1804 aged eighty years. He
+is buried in the churchyard.
+
+Boldre is certainly a place to linger in, a place that one is sorry to
+leave, but I could not stay, being intent on Lymington. Therefore I
+went down through the oak woods, over Boldre Bridge, to find the high
+road, which presently brought me past St Austin's once belonging to
+the Priory of Christchurch, under Buckland Rings to the very ancient
+borough of Lymington, with its charming old ivy-clad church tower at
+the end of the High Street. The church, in so far as it is old of the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has little to boast of, for it has
+been quite horribly restored. In the long street of Lymington I slept.
+
+There seemed to be nothing to keep me in Lymington, and therefore,
+early upon the following morning, I set out for Milford, five miles
+away by the sea, and there I wonderfully saw the Needles and the great
+Island and found another Norman church, Norman that is to say in its
+foundations. All Saints, Milford, consists to-day of chancel with north
+and south chapels west of it, transepts, nave with north and south
+aisles, and a western chapel on either side the western tower, and a
+south porch. It is a most beautiful and interesting building. Doubtless
+there originally stood here a twelfth-century Norman church, consisting
+of nave with aisles and chancel, of which two arches remain in the
+south arcade of the nave. Then in the thirteenth century the church was
+rebuilt, as we see it, and very beautiful it is, in its Early English
+dress, passing into Decorated, in the chancel and transepts.
+
+From Milford, through a whole spring day, I went on by the coast as far
+I could, westward to Christchurch. All the way, the sea, the sky, and
+the view of the island and of Christchurch bay closed by Hengistbury
+Head in the west, and the long bar on which Hurst Castle stands in the
+east were worth a king's ransom. They say all this coast has strong
+attractions for the geologist; but what of the poet and painter? Surely
+here, when the wind comes over the sea and the Island, showing his
+teeth, to possess the leaning coast, one may see and understand why
+England is the England of my heart. At least I thought so, and lingered
+there so long that twilight had fallen before I found myself under the
+darkness of the great Priory of Christchurch, the goal of my desire.
+
+It was not without due cause and reason that I wished to see, instead
+of an Apostle disputing, England before the fall. Indeed I am sure that
+I should not have been unwise to exchange "Rome in her flower" for such
+a sight as that; Christchurch proves it.
+
+We march up and down England and count up our treasures, of which this
+Priory of Christchurch is not the least; but we never pause perhaps to
+remember what, through the damnable act of Thomas Cromwell and Henry
+Tudor, we have lost. What we have lost! hundreds of churches, hundreds
+of monasteries as fine as Christchurch, and hundreds far more solemn
+and reverent. Reading, which now gives a title to an Isaacs, (God save
+us all!) was, before the fall, just a great monastery, a Norman pile as
+grand as Durham or Ely. What of Glastonbury and Amesbury, older far,
+and of those many hundred others which stood up strong before God for
+our souls--without avail? They are gone; Christchurch in some sort
+remains.
+
+
+
+Christchurch stands in the angle where the rivers Avon and Stour meet,
+and it is thus secured upon the north, east, and south; its great and
+perhaps its only attraction is the great Priory church in whose name
+that of the town, Twyneham, has long been lost; but there are beside a
+ruined Norman house, and a pretty mediaeval bridge over the Avon, from
+which a most noble view of the great church may be had. This, which
+dates in its foundation from long before the Conquest, is to-day a
+great cruciform building consisting roughly of Norman nave and
+transepts, the nave buttressed on the north in the thirteenth century,
+fifteenth-century chancel and western tower, and thirteenth-century
+north porch--altogether one of the most glorious churches left to us
+in England.
+
+Its history, as I say, goes back far beyond the Conquest, when it was
+served by secular canons, as it was at the time of the Domesday Survey,
+when we find that twenty-four were in residence. But in the time of
+William Rufus, Ranulph Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, his chief
+minister, obtained a grant of the church and town of Christchurch, and
+soon had suppressed all the canonries save five, and would have
+suppressed them all but for the timely death of the Red King, which
+involved the fall and imprisonment of his rascal minister. After an
+interval, in which the church was governed by Gilbert de Dousgunels,
+who set out for Rome to get the Pope's leave to refound the house, but
+died upon the journey, Henry I. gave manor, town and church to his cousin,
+Richard de Redvers, who proved a great benefactor to the Priory, and
+established a Dean over the canons, one Peter, who was succeeded by
+Dean Ralph. Then in 1150 came Dean Hilary, who as Bishop of Chichester,
+petitioned Richard de Redvers to establish Christchurch as a Priory of
+Canons Regular of St Austin. This was done; a certain Reginald was
+appointed first prior, and he ruled Christchurch for thirty-six years
+till, in 1186, he was succeeded by Ralph. It was not, however, till the
+time of the third Prior that the high altar of the new church begun by
+Gilbert and continued by Richard de Redvers and his priors was
+dedicated upon the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, 1195. This would
+seem to prove that the Norman choir was not finished until then;
+similar consecration of other altars would lead us to believe that
+perhaps the vault and the clerestory of the nave were completed in
+1234. At the same time the beautiful north porch was built and the
+north aisle was buttressed. To the fourteenth century we owe the fine
+rood screen restored in 1848, but the next great period of building was
+the fifteenth century, when the Lady Chapel, with the chapels north and
+south of it, were built, and later in the same century the great choir
+was entirely re-erected.
+
+Thus Christchurch Priory grew until the Reformation. It escaped the
+first raid of Cromwell in 1536, but in spite of the petition of John
+Draper, the last Prior, in 1539 the house was demanded of him and he
+surrendered it. The report of the vandals and sacrilegious persons who
+received it is worth copying, if only to show their character. "We
+found," they wrote, "the Prior a very honest, conformable person, and
+the house well furnished with jewels and plate, whereof some be meet
+for the king's majesty in use as a little chalice of gold, a goodly
+large cross, double gilt with the foot garnished, and with stone and
+pearl; two goodly basons double gilt. And there be other things of
+silver.... In thy church we find a chapel and monument curiously made
+of Caen stone, prepared by the late mother of Reginald Pole for her
+burial, which we have caused to be defaced, and all the arms and badges
+to be delete." It is consoling to note that one of the rascals that
+signed that report, Dr London, was shortly afterwards exposed in his
+true colours and openly put to penance for adultery before he died in
+prison, where he lay for perjury.
+
+The report stated that the church was superfluous. It was the only true
+word written there. When a religion is destroyed, its temples are
+certainly superfluous. However, there was a considerable influence
+brought to bear by the people of the neighbourhood, and the church
+itself was granted them for their use. The Priory, which stood to the
+south of the church, was, of course, destroyed.
+
+One might stand a whole month in that glorious building with this only
+regret, that it is in the hands of strangers. The use to which it is
+put is not that for which it was intended, and half the delight of the
+place is thus lost to us. But no one can pass down that great avenue of
+elms to the glorious north porch, a master-work of the thirteenth
+century, without rejoicing that when all is said the church was saved
+to us. The great Norman nave, with its thirteenth-century clerestory,
+and alas, modern stucco vaulting, the Norman aisles and north transept,
+are too reverent for destruction, the fifteenth-century choir and
+eastern chapels too lovely.
+
+A certain amount of the old furniture remains to the church in the
+restored screen of the fourteenth century, and the reredos over the
+communion table and another in the Lady Chapel; here, too, is the old
+altar stone of Purbeck. The chantry of the poor Countess of Salisbury,
+who was beheaded for high treason in 1541, so brutally defaced by Dr
+London and his infamous colleagues, stands there too upon the north;
+and close by in the north chapel is the tomb with fine alabaster
+effigies of Sir John and Lady Chydroke (d. 1455), removed from the
+nave, and in the Lady Chapel lie its founders, Sir Thomas and Lady
+West. Of the modern restorations and additions I have nothing to say,
+and more especially of the monument to Shelley; a parody of a Pietà
+merely blasphemous, beneath the tower.
+
+Now when I had seen all this, to say nothing of the old school-room
+over the Lady Chapel and the Norman house and castle mound of the De
+Redvers, somewhat sorrowful for many things, I began to think again of
+the Forest, and immediately set out where the road led to Lyndhurst,
+and this just before midday.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE NEW FOREST AND ROMSEY ABBEY
+
+
+All day I went through the Forest, sometimes by green rides, enchanted
+still, such as those down which Lancelot rode with Guinevere, talking
+of love, sometimes over heaths wild and desolate such as that which
+knew the bitterness of Lear, sometimes through the greenwood, ancient
+British woodland, silent now, where the hart was once at home in the
+shade, and where at every turn one might expect to come upon Rosalind
+in her boy's dress, and think to hear from some glade the words of
+Amiens' song:
+
+         Under the greenwood tree
+         Who loves to lie with me,
+         And turn his merry note
+         Unto the sweet bird's throat;
+         Come hither, come hither, come hither....
+
+
+There are days in life of which it can only be said, that they are
+blessed; golden days, upon which, looking back, the sun seems to shine;
+they dazzle in the memory. Such was the day I spent in the byways of
+Holmsley and Burley, in the upper valleys of Avon water, Ober water and
+Black water, forest streams; in the silent woods, where all day long
+the sun showered its gold, sprinkling the deep shade with flowers and
+blossoms of light, where there was no wind but only the sighing of the
+woods, no sound but the whisper of the leaves or the rare flutter of a
+bird's wings, no thoughts but joyful thoughts filling the heart with
+innocence.
+
+        Who doth ambition shun,
+        And loves to live i' the sun,
+        Seeking the food he eats
+        And pleased with what he gets;
+        Come hither, come hither, come hither....
+
+
+At evening I came to Lyndhurst.
+
+Lyndhurst is the capital of the Forest; as its name implies it was
+established in a wood of limes, a tree said to have been introduced
+into England only in the sixteenth century. It is already spoken of in
+the tenth century Anglo-Saxon ballad of the Battle of Brunanburh!
+
+          Athelstan king,
+         Lord among earls,
+         Bracelet bestower and
+         Baron of barons;
+         He with his brother
+         Edmund Atheling
+         Gaining a lifelong
+         Glory in battle.
+         Slew with the sword-edge,
+         There by Brunanburh,
+         Brake the shield wall,
+         _Hew'd the lindenwood_,
+         Hack'd the battleshield,
+         Sons of Edward with hammered brands.
+
+
+Oak, beech, and holly, which so largely make up the woodland of the New
+Forest we have always had in England, but the limes which named
+Lyndhurst it is said we owe to someone else, and if so it can only be
+to the Roman.
+
+What the Forest was when the Romans administered the land we know not;
+but in Anglo-Saxon times it was doubtless a royal hunting ground,
+_terra regis_ and _silva regis_, for spoiling which by fire as for
+killing the game therein fines must be paid. These royal hunting
+grounds, of which the great Forest in Hampshire was certainly not the
+least, only became legal "forests" with the Conquest, when they were
+placed under a new Forest law of extraordinary harshness, which even in
+the Conqueror's time indeed demanded an eye or a hand for the taking
+of game, and in the days of the Red King the life of a man for the life
+of a beast.
+
+The Conqueror, as we know, greatly enlarged the old "royal hunting
+ground" here in Hampshire when he made the New Forest, and that act of
+his which brought an immensely larger area than of old under a new and
+incredibly harsher forest law gradually produced a legend of
+devastation and depopulation here which, as I have already said, can no
+longer be accepted as true. Henry of Huntingdon (1084?-1155) asserts
+that "to form the hunting ground of the New Forest he (William) caused
+churches and villages to be destroyed, and, driving out the people,
+made it a habitation for deer." It is true that the Conqueror forged a
+charter purporting to date from Canute in which the king's sole right
+to take beasts of chase was asserted, and to this he appealed as
+justifying his harsh new laws; but it is untrue that he depopulated
+and destroyed a thriving district to make a wilderness for the red
+deer. "We shall find," says Warner, "that the lands comprised in this
+tract (the New Forest) appear from their low valuation in the time of
+the Confessor to have been always unproductive in comparison with
+other parts of the kingdom; and that notwithstanding this pretended
+devastation they sunk (in many instances) but little in their value
+after their afforestment. So that the fact seems to have been, William,
+finding this tract in a barren state and yielding but little profit,
+and being strongly attached to the pleasures of the chase, converted it
+into a royal forest, without being guilty of those violences to the
+inhabitants of which Henry of Huntingdon, Malmesbury, Walter Mapes, and
+others complain."
+
+Of this great New Forest, Lyndhurst was made the capital and the
+administrative centre, and such it is still. In Domesday Book we read:
+"The King himself holds Lyndhurst, which appertained to Amesbury,
+which is of the King's farm."
+
+The King granted a small part, namely, one virgate to "Herbert the
+Forester," before 1086, and this Herbert is generally supposed to have
+been the ancestor of those Lyndhursts who for so long held the
+wardenship of the Forest. The King's house, a fine building of Queen
+Anne's time, is the successor of the old royal lodge at least as old as
+the fourteenth century, and is now occupied by the Deputy Surveyor of
+the Forest. In the Verderers' Hall close by, the forest courts of the
+verderers are still held. There, too, may be seen the old dock, certain
+trophies of the chase and "the stirrup-iron of William Rufus," really
+the seventeenth century gauge "for the dogs allowed to be kept in the
+forest without expeditation, the 'lawing' being carried out on all
+'great dogs' that could not pass through the stirrup."
+
+Lyndhurst itself, as we see it to-day, is devoid of interest; even the
+church dates but from 1863, and its greatest treasure is the wall-
+painting by Lord Leighton of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the
+chancel. A church, a chapelry of Minstead, certainly stood here in the
+thirteenth century, but was destroyed, and a Georgian building erected
+--in its turn to give place to the church we see.
+
+Lyndhurst, though almost without interest itself, is undoubtedly the
+best centre for exploring the Forest, or, at any rate, perhaps the most
+beautiful and certainly the most interesting parts of it. So by many a
+byway I went northward to Minstead in Malwood, where I found a most
+curious church, rather indeed a house than a church, with dormer
+windows in the roof, an enormous three-decker pulpit within, galleries,
+and two great pews, one with a fireplace, and I know not what other
+quaint rubbish of the eighteenth century. All this I found enchanting,
+and more especially because the nave and chancel seemed to me to be
+originally of the thirteenth century, and certainly the font is Norman.
+But the church with its eighteenth-century tower is perhaps the most
+amazing conglomeration of the work of all periods since the twelfth
+century to be found in southern England.
+
+From Minstead I went on up the Bartley water to Stone Cross, nearly
+four hundred feet over the Forest, from which by good fortune I saw the
+mighty Abbey of Romsey in the valley of the Test, where I intended to
+sleep. Then I went down past Castle Malwood to where stands Rufus'
+Stone. There I read:
+
+   "Here stood the oak-tree on which an arrow shot by Sir
+   Walter Tyrrell at a stag glanced and struck King William II.,
+   surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which stroke he instantly
+   died on the 2nd August 1100.
+
+   "King William II., surnamed Rufus, being slain as before related,
+   was laid in a cart belonging to one Purkess and drawn
+   from hence to Winchester and buried in the cathedral church
+   of that city.
+
+   "That where an event so memorable had happened might
+   not hereafter be unknown this stone was set up by John Lord
+   Delaware who had seen the tree growing in this place anno
+   1745.
+
+   "This stone having been much mutilated and the inscriptions
+   on the three sides defaced, this more durable memorial
+   with the original inscription was erected in the year 1841 by
+   him. Sturges Bourne, warden."
+
+The memorial and inscription are of iron.
+
+The most famous thing that ever befell in the New Forest was this
+strange murder or misfortune which cost the Red King his life. It
+haunts the whole forest, and rightly understood fills it with meaning
+and can never have been or be far from the thoughts of anyone who
+wanders there, even as I have done in the excellent days of Spring.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE NEW FOREST]
+
+No less than three members of the Conqueror's family were killed in the
+New Forest; first Richard, one of his sons, then another Richard,
+bastard son of Duke Robert of Normandy, this in May 1100; and in August
+of the same year, his son and successor William, surnamed Rufus. All
+these deaths are said to have been caused by accidents, all were caused
+by arrows; it is a strange thing.
+
+
+
+All we really know about the death of William Rufus may be found in the
+English "Chronicle." "On the morrow was the King William shot off with
+an arrow from his own men in hunting." Whether the arrow, as tradition
+has it, was shot by Walter Tyrrel or no, whether it was aimed at the
+King or no, can never now be known. The most graphic account of the
+affair is given to us by Ordericus Vitalis, who, however, was not only
+not present, but at best can have been but a child at the time, for he
+died in 1150. For all that he doubtless had access to sources of which
+we now know nothing, and the whole atmosphere of his story suggests
+that, as we might expect, the King was murdered because of his general
+harshness and oppression, perhaps especially exemplified in his Forest
+Law. It was he and not the Conqueror who demanded the life of a man for
+that of a beast; his father had been content with an eye or a limb.
+
+It would seem, according to Ordericus, that the whole country was full
+of stories of terrible visions concerning the end of the King long
+before his sudden death. Henry of Huntingdon, for instance, tells us
+that "blood had been seen to spring from the ground in Berkshire," and
+adds that "the King was rightly cut off in the midst of his injustice,"
+for "England could not breathe under the burdens laid upon it."
+Ordericus himself says that "terrible visions respecting him were seen
+in the monasteries and cathedrals by the clergy of both classes, and
+becoming the talk of the vulgar in the market-places and churchyards,
+could not escape the notice of the King."
+
+He then gives a particular instance: "A certain monk of good
+repute and still better life, who belonged to the Abbey of St Peter at
+Gloucester, related that he had a dream in the visions of the night to
+this effect: 'I saw,' he said, 'the Lord Jesus seated on a lofty
+throne, and the glorious host of heaven, with the company of the
+saints, standing round. But while, in my ecstasy, I was lost in wonder,
+and my attention deeply fixed on such an extraordinary spectacle, I
+beheld a virgin resplendent with light cast herself at the feet of the
+Lord Jesus, and humbly address to Him this petition, "O Lord Jesus
+Christ, the Saviour of mankind, for which Thou didst shed Thy precious
+blood when hanging on the Cross, look with an eye of compassion on Thy
+people, which now groan under the yoke of William. Thou avenger of
+wickedness, and most just judge of all men, take vengeance I beseech
+Thee on my behalf of this William and deliver me out of his hands, for
+as far as lies in his power he hath polluted and grievously afflicted
+me." The Lord replied, "Be patient and wait awhile, and soon thou wilt
+be fully avenged of him." I trembled at hearing this and doubt not that
+the divine anger presently threatens the King; for I understood that
+the cries of the holy virgin, our mother the Church, had reached the
+ears of the Almighty by reason of the robberies, the foul adulteries
+and the heinous crimes of all sorts which the King and his courtiers
+cease not daily of committing against the divine law.'"
+
+On being informed of this, the venerable Abbot Serle wrote letters
+which he despatched in a friendly spirit from Gloucester informing the
+King very distinctly of all the monk had seen in his vision.
+
+William of Malmesbury also records that the King himself the day before
+he died, dreamed that he was let blood by a surgeon, and that the
+stream, reaching to heaven, clouded the light and intercepted the day.
+Calling on St Mary for protection he suddenly awoke, commanded a light
+to be brought and forbade his attendants to leave him. They then
+watched with him several hours until daylight. Shortly after, just as
+the day began to dawn, a certain foreign monk told Robert Fitz Haman
+one of the principal nobility that he had that night dreamed a strange
+and fearful dream about the King: "That he had come into a certain
+church, with menacing and insolent gesture as was his custom, looking
+contemptuously on the standers by. Then violently seizing the Crucifix
+he gnawed the arms and almost tore away the legs; that the image
+endured this for a long time, but at length struck the King with its
+foot, in such a manner that he fell backwards; from his mouth as he lay
+prostrate issued so copious a flame that the volumes of smoke touched
+the very stars. Robert, thinking that this dream ought not to be
+neglected as he was intimate with him, immediately related it to the
+King. William, repeatedly laughing, exclaimed, 'He is a monk and dreams
+for money like a monk; give him a hundred shillings.'"
+
+"Nevertheless," adds William of Malmesbury, "being greatly moved, the
+King hesitated a long while whether he should go out to hunt as he
+designed; his friends persuading him not to suffer the truth of the
+dreams to be tried at his personal risk. In consequence he abstained
+from the chase before dinner, dispelling the uneasiness of his
+unregulated mind by serious business. They relate that having
+plentifully regaled that day, he soothed his cares with a more than
+usual quantity of wine."
+
+All this, I suppose, befell in the Castle of Malwood.
+
+After dinner the King prepared to hunt. "Being in great spirits," says
+Ordericus, "he was joking with his attendants while his boots were
+being laced, when an armourer came and presented him six arrows. The
+King immediately took them with great satisfaction, praising the work,
+and unconscious of what was to happen, kept four of them himself and
+held out the other two to Walter Tyrrel. "It is but right," said he,
+"that the sharpest arrows should be given to him who knows best how to
+inflict mortal wounds with them." This Tyrrel was a French knight of
+good extraction, the wealthy lord of the castles of Poix and Pontoise,
+filling a high place among the nobles, and a gallant soldier; he was
+therefore admitted to familiar intimacy with the King and became his
+constant companion. Meanwhile as they were idly talking and the King's
+household attendants were assembled about him, a monk of Gloucester
+presented himself and delivered to the King a letter from his abbot.
+Having read it, the King burst out laughing and said merrily to the
+knight just mentioned, "Walter, do what I told you." The knight
+replied, "I will, my lord." Slighting then the warnings of the elders,
+and forgetting that the heart is lifted up before a fall, he said
+respecting the letter he had received, "I wonder what has induced my
+lord Serlo to write me in this strain, for I really believe he is a
+worthy abbot and respectable old man. In the simplicity of his heart he
+transmits to me, who have enough besides to attend to, the dreams of
+his snoring monks and even takes the trouble to commit them to writing
+and send them a long distance. Does he think that I follow the example
+of the English, who will defer their journey or their business on
+account of the dreams of a parcel of wheezing old women?
+
+"Thus speaking, he hastily rose and mounting his horse rode at full
+speed to the forest. His brother, Count Henry with William de Bretanel,
+and other distinguished persons, followed him, and having penetrated
+into the woods the hunters dispersed themselves in various directions
+according to custom. The King and Walter Tyrrel posted themselves with
+a few others in one part of the forest and stood with their weapons in
+their hands eagerly watching for the coming of the game, when a stag
+suddenly running between them the King quitted his station and Walter
+shot an arrow. It grazed the beast's grizzly back, but glancing from
+it mortally wounded the king, who stood within its range. He
+immediately fell to the ground, and, alas! suddenly expired."
+
+William of Malmesbury gives a somewhat different account of the King's
+death. "The sun was declining when the King, drawing his bow and
+letting fly an arrow; slightly wounded a stag which passed before him;
+and keenly gazing followed it still running a long time with his eyes,
+holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun's rays. At this
+instant, Walter, conceiving a noble exploit, which was, while the
+King's attention was otherwise occupied, to transfix another stag
+which by chance came near him, unknowingly and without power to prevent
+it--oh gracious God!--pierced his breast with a fatal arrow. On
+receiving the wound the King uttered not a word; but breaking off the
+shaft of the weapon where it projected from his body, fell upon the
+wound by which he accelerated his death. Walter immediately ran up, but
+as he found him senseless and speechless he leaped swiftly upon his
+horse, and escaped by spurring him to his utmost speed. Indeed, there
+was none to pursue him; some consented in his flight, and others pitied
+him, and all were intent on other matters. Some began to fortify their
+dwellings; others to plunder, and the rest to look out for a new king.
+A few countrymen conveyed the body, placed on a cart, to the cathedral
+at Winchester, the blood dripping from it all the way. Here it was
+committed to the ground within the tower, attended by many of the
+nobility though lamented by few. Next year [really in 1107] the tower
+fell; though I forbear to mention the different opinions on this
+subject, lest I should seem to assent too readily to unsupported
+trifles, more especially as the building might have fallen through
+imperfect construction even though he had never been buried there. He
+died in the year of our Lord's Incarnation, 1100, of his reign the
+thirteenth, on the fourth before the nones of August, aged above forty
+years."
+
+So died the Red King. Whose arrow it was that slew him, whether it came
+aforethought from an English bow or by chance from that of Walter
+Tyrrel, we shall never know. The Red King fell in the New Forest and
+there was no one in all broad England to mourn him. William of
+Malmesbury says that a few countrymen carried his body to Winchester.
+We may well ask why not to Malwood Castle, which was close by? We may
+ask, but we shall get no answer. According to a local legend it was a
+charcoal burner of Minstead, Purkess by name, who found the King's body
+and bore it away, and ever after his descendants have remained in
+Minstead, neither richer nor poorer than their ancestor. As for Sir
+Walter, he is said to have sworn to the Prior of St Denys de Poix, a
+monastery of his foundation, that he knew nothing of the King's death.
+Leland tells us that in his day not only did the tree still exist
+against which, according to him, the arrow glanced off and struck the
+King, but a little chapel remained there then very old, in which Mass
+was wont to be offered for the repose of the King's soul. I wish that I
+might have seen it, for it would have pleased me.
+
+Now when I had well considered all this, not without an orison for that
+misguided King, I set off for Cadnam, and holding now only to the road,
+marching fast, for it was late, I came over the ridge beyond Black
+water into the valley of the Test, and so entered Romsey a little after
+it was dark.
+
+[Illustration: ROMSEY ABBEY]
+
+Romsey, as I soon found on the following morning, has nothing at all to
+offer the traveller except one of the most solemn and noble Norman
+churches in all England, monastic too, for it was the church of the
+great Benedictine Nunnery of Our Lady of Romsey. It is impossible to
+exaggerate the impression this astonishing Norman pile, of vast size
+and unsurpassed age and reverence, makes upon the traveller. One seems
+in looking upon it to see before his eyes the foundation of England. I
+cannot hope to describe it or to convey to another what it meant to me.
+It is at once grandiose and reverent, of enormous, almost incredible
+size and weight and strength larger than many a cathedral, heavy as a
+kingdom, stronger than a thousand years. It seems to have been hewn
+bodily out of the cliffs or the great hills.
+
+It is enormously old. The house was founded or perhaps refounded more
+than a millennium ago by Edward the Elder in 907; his daughter was
+abbess here, and here was buried. In 967 Edgar his grandson gave the
+house to the Benedictines. It remained English after the Conquest, for
+William seems not to have dealt with it and in 1086 the sister of Edgar
+Atheling became abbess. Out of it Henry I. chose his bride that
+Abbess's niece Maud a novice of Our Lady of Romsey. Said I not well
+that it was as the foundation of England?
+
+We know little of the Abbey for near a hundred years after that, and
+then in 1160 the daughter of King Stephen, Mary, whose uncle, Henry of
+Blois, was Bishop of Winchester, became abbess, and it was decided to
+rebuild the place. Thus the great Norman church we have, arose in the
+new England of the twelfth century. Mary, princess and abbess, was,
+however, false to her vows. How long she was abbess we do not know,
+perhaps only a few months or even days. At any rate, in the very year
+she became abbess, the year of her mother's death,[Footnote: See supra
+under Faversham.] she forsook her trust and married the son of the Earl
+of Flanders, and by him she had two daughters. Then came repentance;
+she separated from her husband and returned to Romsey as a penitent.
+
+The great religious house which had grown up thus with England,
+continued its great career right through the Middle Ages, about forty
+nuns serving there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though
+this number had dwindled to twenty-three at the time of the Surrender
+in 1539. How this surrender was made we do not know; but whether with
+or without trouble the result was the same, the great convent was
+utterly destroyed. Many of the lands passed to Sir Thomas Seymour, and
+the people of Romsey, who had always had a right to the north aisle of
+the church, which indeed they enlarged at their own expense in 1403,
+bought the whole from the Crown, for one hundred pounds, in 1554.
+
+I have said that there was undoubtedly a great Saxon church here, where
+the Norman Abbey of Romsey now stands, and part of the foundations of
+this great building were discovered in 1900. That building, founded by
+Edward the Elder, rebuilt by Edgar and restored by Canute, stood till
+the building of the present church in 1125. The older part of this
+building (1125-1150) is to the east of the nave, and consists of
+sanctuary and transepts: the nave was begun towards the end of the
+twelfth century, the church being finished in the beginning of the
+thirteenth. The church is cruciform, two hundred and sixty-three feet
+long and one hundred and thirty-one wide; it consists of a great
+sanctuary with aisles ending in chapels, square without, apsidal
+within, wide transepts each having an eastern apsidal chapel, nave with
+aisles, and over the crossing a low tower which was once higher, having
+now a seventeenth century polygonal belfry. To the east of the
+sanctuary stood two long chapels destroyed since the Suppression. We
+have here, as I have said, one of the most glorious Norman buildings in
+the world, Norman work which at the western end passes into the most
+delightful Early English. The cloister stood to the south of the nave,
+to the north stood of old the parish church, growing out of the north
+aisle as it were, built so in 1403. This has been destroyed and the
+north aisle wall has been rebuilt as in 1150.
+
+The church possesses more than one thing of great interest. The old
+high-altar stone is still in existence, and is now used as the
+communion table. In the south transept is a fine thirteenth century
+effigy of a lady, carved in purbeck. At the end of the south aisle of
+the choir is a remarkable stone Crucifix that evidently belonged to
+the old Saxon church; about the Cross stand Our Lady, St John and the
+Roman soldiers, above are angels. A later Rood is to be seen in the
+eastern wall of the old cloister which abutted on to the transept; this
+dates from the twelfth century. In the north aisle of the choir is a
+very fine painting which used to stand above the high altar in Catholic
+times. There we see still the Resurrection of Our Lord with two angels,
+above are ten saints, among them St Benedict and St Scholastica, St
+Gregory, St Augustine of Canterbury, St Francis and St Clare.
+This fine work, which of old showed, above, Christ in Glory, is
+of the end of the fourteenth century.
+
+Now when you have seen Romsey Abbey thus as it were with the head; then
+is the time to begin to get it by heart. In all South England you may
+find no greater glory than this, nor one more entirely our very own, at
+least our own as we were but yesterday. It may be that such a place as
+Romsey Abbey means nothing to us and can never mean anything again. But
+I'll not believe it. For to think so is to despair of England, to
+realise that England of my heart has really passed away.
+
+There are two ways by which a man may go from Romsey, in the valley of
+the Test to Winchester, in the valley of the Itchen. The more
+beautiful, for it gives you, if you will, not only Otterbourne,
+Shawford and Compton to the west of the stream, but Twyford to the
+east, the Queen of Hampshire villages, is that which makes for the
+Roman road between Winchester and Southampton, and following up the
+valley of the Itchen enters Winchester at last, by the South Gate,
+after passing St Cross in the meads. The shorter road, though far less
+lovely, is in some ways the more interesting; for it passes Merdon
+Castle and Hursley, where the son of Oliver Cromwell lies, and for this
+cause I preferred it.
+
+Merdon Castle, of which some few scanty ruins remain, was built by the
+Bishop Henry of Blois about 1138, and no doubt it served its purpose in
+the anarchy of Stephen's time, but thereafter it seems to have become
+rather a palace than a fortress. The manor of Merdon had always
+belonged to the See of Winchester, it is said, since 636, when it was
+granted to the Bishop by King Kinegils. It remained with the Bishopric
+until the Reformation, when it was granted to Sir Philip Hoby to be
+restored to the Church by Queen Mary, and then again regranted to the
+Hoby family about 1559. The manor had passed, however, by 1638 to
+Richard Major, a miser and a tyrant, who "usurped authority over his
+tentant" and more especially, for he was a fanatic Roundhead, "when
+King Charles was put to death and Oliver Cromwell was Protector of
+England and Richard Major of his Privy Council, and Noll's eldest son,
+Richard, was married to Mr Major's Doll." Thus Merdon came into the
+Cromwell family, another piece of Church property upon which that very
+typical sixteenth-century family had already grown exceedingly wealthy.
+Richard Cromwell (as he called himself) lived at Merdon a good deal,
+till he succeeded his father in the usurped governance of England. But
+when he was turned out in 1660 he found it safer to return to Merdon,
+but only for a little while, France offering him, as he wisely thought,
+a more secure asylum, not only from a charge of High Treason, but from
+his creditors. While he was abroad, we learn he went under another
+name; not a new experience for one of his family, which seems to have
+had no legitimate name of its own, its members, Oliver amongst them,
+signing in important personal matters such as getting hold of the
+dowries of their wives, "Williams _alias_ Cromwell." It would,
+therefore, be interesting to know under what alias this latest
+descendant of the infamous minister of Henry VIII. corresponded with
+the wife and family he had left at Merdon. He did not return to Merdon
+till 1705, upon the death of his son Oliver. His wife had died in 1676,
+and his time was soon to come. He died at Cheshunt in 1712, and was
+buried with considerable pomp in Hursley church, where we may still see
+his monument, moved from the old church and re-erected in that built by
+the efforts of John Keble, vicar of this parish for thirty years, from
+1836 to 1866.
+
+And so considering all these strange things I went on to Winchester.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+WINCHESTER
+
+
+I do not know what it is that moves me so deeply in the old cities of
+Southern England, in Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, most of all,
+perhaps, in Winchester, unless it be that they sum up in a way nothing
+else can do the England that is surely and irrevocably passing away.
+How reverently we approach them, with what hesitation and misgiving we
+try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries
+of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult,
+since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us
+with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia
+which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to
+us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which
+she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so
+unquiet, so meanly wretched and hopeless, that no one has ever thought
+of them without a kind of fear and misery. Alas, they are the reality,
+while Winchester gradually fades year by year into a mere dream city,
+as it were Camelot indeed, too good to be true, established, if at all,
+rather in the clouds, or in our hearts, than upon the earth we tread.
+And if in truth she stands for something that was once our own, it is
+for something we are gradually leaving behind us, discarding and
+forgetting, something that after four centuries of disputation and
+anarchy no man any longer believes capable of realisation here and now.
+Yet Winchester endures in her beauty, her now so precarious
+loveliness, and while she endures it is still possible to refuse to
+despair of England. For she is co-eval with us; before we knew
+ourselves or were aware of our destiny she stood beside the Itchen
+within the shadow of her hills east and west, in the meads and the
+water meadows. She saw the advent of the Roman, she claims to be
+Arthur's chief city, as later she was the throne of the Saxon kings; in
+her council chamber England was first named England.
+
+Of what indeed she was before the Romans came and drew us within their
+great administration, we are largely ignorant; but we know that they
+established here a town of considerable importance, which they called
+Venta Belgarum, larger than Silchester, if we may believe that the
+mediaeval walls stand upon Roman foundations, and certainly a centre of
+Roman administrative life. Four Roman roads undoubtedly found in her
+their goal and terminus, coming into her Forum from Sorbiodunum (Old
+Sarum) upon the west, from Calleva (Silchester) upon the north, from
+Porchester upon the south, and from Clausentum upon the south-west. Her
+chief Temple in Roman times, before the advent of Christianity, was
+that of Apollo, which is said to have occupied the site of the
+Cathedral, close by was the Temple of Concord, while it is impossible
+to believe that a town so plentifully supplied by nature with water
+was without considerable baths. Legend has it indeed that Winchester
+was the capital of the King Lucius, who is said in the second century
+to have introduced Christianity into Britain. The first Christian
+church, which he erected, traditionally stood upon the site of the
+Cathedral. But alas, Lucius is a myth, his cathedral a church never
+built with hands. We know nothing of any Christian church in Roman
+Winchester, and though we may be sure that such a building certainly
+existed, no excavation has so far laid bare its foundations. Indeed we
+are almost as ignorant of Roman as we are of Celtic Winchester. Even
+the lines of its walls are conjectural, we suppose them to be the same
+as those of the Middle Age, yet such foundations of Roman buildings as
+have been discovered, lie not only within an area much more restricted
+than that which the mediaeval walls enclosed, but in certain instances
+outside them. No discoveries of Roman foundations have been made to the
+north of the High Street. This fact, however, formidable though it be,
+does not of itself prove that the Roman walls did not coincide with the
+mediaeval fortifications; it is even probable that they did, except at
+the south-west corner, where stood the mediaeval castle. In any case,
+the Roman walls, built we may think in the fourth century, enclosed an
+irregular quadrilateral, and possessed four gates out of which issued
+those four roads to Old Sarum, to Silchester, to Clausentum and to
+Porchester.
+
+In the beginning of the fifth century the Roman administration which
+had long been failing, to which one may think the building of those
+walls bears witness, collapsed altogether, and with the final departure
+of the Legions full of our youth and strength, Britain was left
+defenceless. What happened to Winchester in the appalling confusion
+which followed, we shall never know. It is said that in 495, three
+generations that is to say after the departure of the Legions for the
+defence of Rome, Cerdic and his son, Cymric, landed upon the southern
+coast, and presently seized Winchester within whose broken walls they
+established themselves. In the year 519, according to the "Saxon
+Chronicle," "Cerdic and Cymric obtained the kingdom of the West Saxons;
+and the same year they fought against the Britons where it is now named
+Cerdicsford. And from that time forth the royal offspring of the West
+Saxons reigned." That is all we know about it, and it is not enough
+upon which to build an historical narrative or from which to draw any
+clear idea even of what befell. All we can say with any sort of
+certainty is that the Saxons, through long years of probably spasmodic
+fighting, very gradually established themselves in southern England,
+and out of it carved a dominion, the kingdom of Wessex, whose capital
+was Winchester. Until the year 635 this kingdom, such as it was, was
+pagan. In that year St Birinus converted the West Saxons and their King
+Kynegils to Christianity. Though Kynegils seems immediately
+to have begun to build a church in Winchester in which he
+established monks and endowed it with the whole of the land
+for a space of seven miles round the city, Winchester did
+not become an episcopal See until the year 662. Till then,
+Dorchester in the Thames Valley had been the seat of the Bishop
+of Wessex, but in that year Kynewalch, the son and successor of
+Kynegils, completed the church of Winchester, in which he had been
+crowned, and his father buried, as for the most part were their
+successors, and there he established a bishop.
+
+It was now that Winchester began her great career. She rose with the
+fortunes of the Wessex kingdom until, in the time of Egbert, she
+appears as the capital of the new kingdom of England which is so named,
+and for the first time in her witan.
+
+        The com kyng Egbryth
+        Ant wyth batyle ant fyht
+        Made al Englond yhol
+        Falle to ys oune dol;
+        Ant sethe he reignede her
+        Ahte ant tuenti folle yer:
+        At Wynchestre lyggeth ys bon,
+        Buried in a marble-ston.
+
+Egbert triumphed and established England none too soon. As early as
+the year 787, according to the "Saxon Chronicle," "ships of the
+Northmen" had reached our southern coasts, and Egbert had scarcely
+named his new kingdom when they imperilled it. His son, Ethelwulf, who
+came to his throne in 836, was to see Winchester itself stormed before
+the invaders were beaten off; but beaten off they were, and it was in
+Winchester that Alfred was to reign, to give forth his laws and to plan
+his campaigns against the same enemy. He was victorious, as we know,
+and at Ethandune not only broke his pagan foes, but dragged Guthrum,
+their leader, to baptism. And in his capital he made and kept the only
+record we have of the Dark Ages in England, the "Saxon Chronicle,"
+begun in Wolvesey Palace; founded the famous nunnery of St Mary to the
+north-east of the Cathedral in the meads; and provided for the
+foundation, by Edward his son, of the great New Minster close by, where
+his bones at last were to be laid. The three great churches with their
+attendant buildings must have been the noblest group to be seen in the
+England of that day. Thus Winchester flourished more than ever secure
+in its position as capital, so that Athelstan, we read, established
+there six mints, and Edgar, reigning there, made "Winchester measure"
+the standard for the whole kingdom: "and let one money pass throughout
+the king's dominions, and let no man refuse; and let one measure and
+one weight pass, such as is observed at London and Winchester."
+
+Such was Winchester at the beginning of the ninth century; before the
+end of that century she was to suffer violence from the Danes; and in
+the first years of the tenth century to fall with the rest of England
+into their absolute power, and to see a Danish king, Canute, crowned in
+her Cathedral. There, too, at last, that Danish king was buried. He was
+a generous conqueror, and a great benefactor to his capital, and
+with him passes much of the splendour of Winchester. Edward the
+Confessor, though hallowed at Winchester, looked upon London
+as his capital and there built the great abbey which was thenceforth
+to see the crowning of England's kings. For St Edward was at
+heart a Norman, and Winchester, beside summing up in itself all the
+splendour of pre-Norman England, had been given by Ethelred to the
+widow of Canute, Emma, the mother of St Edward. She allied herself with
+the great Earl Godwin to oppose the Norman influence which St Edward
+had brought into England, and it was only when she died that the king
+came again into Winchester for Easter, and to hold a solemn court.
+During that Easter week Earl Godwin died, and was buried in the
+Cathedral. He was the last champion of Saxon England to lie there.
+
+Nothing marks the change that England had passed through during the
+first half of the eleventh century more certainly than the fact that
+William Duke of Normandy was crowned King of England, not in the old
+Minster of Winchester but in that of St Peter, Westminster, which Pope
+Nicholas II. in King Edward's time had constituted as the place of the
+inauguration of the kings of England. It is true that William was later
+crowned again in Winchester, as were Stephen and Coeur de Lion, but the
+fact remains that from the time of William the Conqueror down to our
+own day, as the Papal Bull had ordered, Westminster and not Winchester
+has been the coronation church of our kings. This Bull marks, as it
+were, the beginning of the decline of Winchester. Little by little, in
+the following centuries, it was to cease to be the capital of England.
+Little by little London was to take its place, a thing finally achieved
+by Edward I., when he removed the royal residence from Winchester.
+
+Norman Winchester was, however, by no means less splendid than had been
+the old capital of the Saxon kings. There Domesday Book was compiled,
+and there it was kept in the Treasury of the Norman kings, and the only
+name which it gives itself is that of the "Book of Winchester." There
+the great Fair of St Giles was established by the Conqueror, which
+attracted merchants from every part of Europe, and there in 1079 Bishop
+Walkelin began, from the foundations, a new cathedral church completed
+in 1093, of which the mighty transepts still remain. In 1109 the monks
+of New Minster, which had suffered greatly from fire and mismanagement,
+removed to a great new house without the walls upon the north, and
+since this new site was called Hyde Meads, New Minster was thenceforth
+known as the Abbey of Hyde; and certainly after the fire in 1141, if
+not before, the great Benedictine Nunnery of St Mary was rebuilt.
+
+As for the Castle of Wolvesey, Bishop Henry of Blois rebuilt it in
+1138. It was indeed in his time that Winchester suffered the most
+disastrous of all its sieges, as we may believe, and this at the hands
+of the Empress Matilda in 1141. The greater part of the city is then
+said to have been destroyed; the new Abbey of Hyde was burned down not
+to be rebuilt till 1182; the old Nunnery of St Mary was destroyed also
+by fire; and we are told of more than forty churches which then
+perished. "Combustibles were hurled from the Bishop's Castle," William
+of Malmesbury tells us, "in the houses of the townspeople, who, as I
+have said, rather wished success to the empress than to the bishop,
+which caught and burned the whole abbey of nuns within the city and the
+monastery which is called Hyde without the walls. Here was an image of
+Our Lord crucified, wrought with a profusion of gold and silver and
+precious stones, through the pious solicitude of Canute, who was
+formerly king and presented it. This being seized by the flames and
+thrown to the ground was afterwards stripped of its ornaments at the
+command of the Legate himself; more than five hundred marks of silver
+and thirty of gold, which were found in it, served for a largess to the
+soldiers."
+
+It would, perhaps, be untrue to say that Winchester never really
+recovered from the appalling sack and pillage which followed the flight
+of Matilda; but it is true to assert that time was fighting against
+her, and that the thirteenth century did not bring the splendid gifts
+to her that it brought to so many of our cities. One great ceremony,
+the last of its kind, however, took place in her Cathedral in 1194; the
+second coronation of Coeur de Lion. "Then King Richard," we read,
+"being clothed in his royal robes, with the crown upon his head,
+holding in his right hand a royal sceptre which terminated in a cross,
+and in his left hand a golden wand with the figure of a dove at the top
+of it, came forth from his apartment in the priory, being conducted on
+the right hand by the Bishop of Ely, his Chancellor, and on the left by
+the Bishop of London. ... The silken canopy was held on four lances
+over the King by four Earls. ... The King being thus conducted into the
+Cathedral and up to the High Altar, there fell upon his knees, and
+devoutly received the archbishop's solemn benediction. He was then led
+to the throne, which was prepared for him, on the south side of the
+choir. ... When Mass was finished the King was led back to his
+apartments with the solemnities aforesaid. He then laid aside his robes
+and crown, put on other robes and a crown that were much lighter, and
+so proceeded to dinner, which was served in the monks' refectory."
+
+Winchester's next glory was the birth of Henry III., known to the day
+of his death as Henry of Winchester--this in 1207. In 1213 the city was
+the scene of the reconciliation of King John and Archbishop Stephen,
+but in 1265 she was sacked by the younger de Montfort, and this seems
+finally to have achieved her overthrow. When Edward I. came to the
+throne in 1272 he abandoned Winchester. The city never regained its
+place, London was too strong for it both geographically and
+economically. Its trade, which remained very considerable until the
+latter part of the fourteenth century, chiefly owing to its wool and
+cloth, was, however, slowly declining, and politically the history of
+the city becomes a mere series of incidents, among the more splendid of
+which were the marriage of Henry IV. with Joan of Navarre in 1403; the
+reception of the French ambassadors by Henry V. before Agincourt in
+1415; the rejoicings for the birth in Winchester of Arthur Tudor the
+son of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York in 1457; the meeting of the
+Emperor Charles V. and Henry VIII. in 1522; and the marriage of Mary
+Tudor to Philip of Spain in 1554. At that great ceremony, the last
+Catholic rite the old Cathedral was to witness, there were present,
+according to the Venetian Envoy, "the ambassadors from the Emperor,
+from the Kings of the Romans and Bohemia, from your Serenity, from
+Savoy, Florence, and Ferrara and many agents of sovereign princes. The
+proclamation was entitled thus: Philip and Mary, by the grace of God,
+King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, Ireland, Defender
+of the Faith, Prince of Spain, Archduke of Austria, etc."
+
+But when Queen Elizabeth visited the city in 1560 (she was there four
+times during her reign), she said to the mayor, "Yours Mr Mayor is a
+very ancient city"; and he answered, "It has abeen, your Majesty, it
+has abeen," and in spite of bad grammar he spoke but the truth,
+Winchester's great days were over. Yet it saw the trial of Sir Walter
+Raleigh in 1603, and the town having been taken by Waller in 1644 the
+Castle was besieged by Cromwell himself in 1645. "I came to
+Winchester," he writes, "on the Lord's Day the 28th of September. After
+some disputes with the Governour we entered the town. I summoned the
+Castle; was denied; whereupon we fell to prepare batteries, which we
+could not perfect until Friday following. Our battery was six guns;
+which being finished, after firing one round, I sent in a second
+summons for a treaty; which they refused, whereupon we went on with our
+work and made a breach in the wall near the Black Tower; which after
+about two hundred shot we thought stormable; and purposed on Monday
+morning to attempt it. On Sunday morning about ten of the clock the
+Governour beat a parley, desiring to treat, I agreed unto it, and sent
+Colonel Hammond and Major Harrison in to him, who agreed upon these
+enclosed articles."
+
+Cromwell presently departed and the city caught a glimpse of the Royal
+Martyr, the victim of the great families, as he passed from Hurst
+Castle to Windsor and the scaffold in Whitehall. With the Restoration,
+which was most gallantly welcomed in the old royal city, Charles II.
+came to Winchester, and having been burnt out at Newmarket was,
+according to Evelyn, "all the more earnest to render Winchester the
+seat of his autumnal diversions for the future, designing a palace
+there where the ancient castle stood.... The surveyor has already begun
+the foundation for a palace estimated to cost £35,000...." But Charles
+died too soon to finish this new house, which, it is said, Queen Anne
+wished to complete, liking Winton well, but again death intervened.
+
+In spite of these royal fancies, however, Winchester, which had
+suffered badly in the plague of 1667, continued to decline in
+importance and in population, and to depend more and more upon the two
+great establishments which remained to it, the Cathedral, founded by
+Kynegils in 635 and re-established under a new Protestant
+administration in the sixteenth century, and the College of St Mary of
+Winchester founded by William of Wykeham in connection with the College
+of St Mary, Winton, in Oxford, called New College, for the education of
+youth and the advancement of learning. Winchester is, of course, as it
+ever has been, the county-town of Hampshire, but it still maintains
+itself as it has done now these many years chiefly by reason of these
+two great establishments.
+
+Certainly to-day the traveller's earliest steps are turned towards
+these two buildings, and first to that which is in its foundation near
+eight hundred years the older--the Cathedral church once of St Swithin,
+the Bishop and Confessor (852-863) and now since the Reformation of the
+Holy Trinity.
+
+To come out of the sloping High Street past the ancient city Cross,
+through the narrow passage-way into the precincts, and to pass down
+that great avenue of secular limes across the Close to the great porch
+of the Cathedral, is to come by an incomparable approach to perhaps the
+most noble and most venerable church left to us in England. The most
+venerable--not I think the most beautiful. No one remembering the Abbey
+of Westminster can claim that for it, and then, though it possesses the
+noblest Norman work in England and the utmost splendour of the
+Perpendicular, it lacks almost entirely and certainly the best of the
+Early English. Its wonder lies in its size and its antiquity. It is now
+the longest mediaeval church not only in England, but in Europe, though
+once it was surpassed by old St Paul's. It is five hundred and twenty-
+six feet long, but it lacks height, and perhaps rightly, at least I
+would not have it other than it is, its greatness lying in its
+monotonous depressed length and weight, an enormous primeval thing
+lying there in the meads beside the river. Winchester itself might seem
+indeed to know nothing of it. The city does not rejoice in it as do
+Lincoln and York in their great churches; here is nothing of the sheer
+joy of Salisbury, a Magnificat by Palestrina; the church of Winchester
+is without delight, it has supremely the mystery and monotony of the
+plainsong, the true chant of the monks, the chorus of an army, with all
+the appeal of just that, its immense age and half plaintive glory,
+which yet never really becomes music.
+
+And Winchester, too, has all and more than all, the surprise of the
+plainsong; the better you know it the more you are impressed. No one
+certainly has ever come by the narrow way out of the High Street, down
+the avenue of limes to the West Front without being disappointed; but
+no one thus disappointed has ever entered into the church without
+astonishment, wonder and complete satisfaction. It was not always so.
+That long nave was once forty feet longer and was flanked upon either
+side by a Norman tower as at Ely. Must one regret their loss? No, the
+astonishment of the nave within makes up for everything; there is no
+grander interior in the world, nor anywhere anything at all like it. Up
+that vast Perpendicular nave one looks far and far away into the
+height, majesty and dominion of the glorious Norman transept, and
+beyond into the light of the sanctuary. It has not the beauty of
+Westminster Abbey, nor the exquisite charm of Wells, but it has a
+majesty and venerable nobility all its own that I think no other church
+in England can match.
+
+Of the old Saxon church, so far as we really know, the only predecessor
+of the present church, nothing really remains. This, as I have said,
+had been founded by King Kynegils upon his conversion, by St Birinus in
+635. We know very little about it, except that it was enlarged or
+rebuilt in the middle of the tenth century by St Aethwold, and if we
+may believe the poetical description of Wolstan, we shall be inclined
+to believe the church was enlarged, for it appears to have been a very
+complex building with a lofty central tower, having a spire and
+weathercock, in accordance with the Bull of Pope Urban, and a crypt,
+both the work of St Elphege. This church, which, like its successor
+until the Reformation, was served by monks, stood till the year 1093,
+when it was destroyed as useless, for the new Norman church of Bishop
+Walkelin begun in 1079 was then far enough advanced to be used. It is
+thus practically certain that the two churches did not stand on the
+same site, the newer, it would seem, rising to the south of the older
+building. But the sacred spot which, it would seem, every church, that
+may ever have stood in this place, must have covered is the holy well,
+immediately beneath the present high altar in the crypt of the Norman
+building. This surely was within the Saxon building as it must have
+been within any church that may have stood here in Roman times?
+
+The two great shrines of the Saxon church were, however, those of St
+Birinus, the Apostle of Wessex, and of St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester
+in the ninth century, the day of whose translation, July 15th, was,
+till the Reformation, a universal festival throughout England. In his
+honour the Saxon church, till then known as the church of SS. Peter and
+Paul, was rededicated in 964.
+
+The great Norman church which Bishop Walkelin built to take the place
+of the Saxon minster cannot fundamentally have differed very much from
+the church we see, at any rate so far as its nave and transepts were
+concerned. The eastern arm was, however, different. It consisted of
+four bays, with north and south aisles at the end of which were
+rectangular chapels, an apse about which the aisles ran as an
+ambulatory, and beyond the apse an eastern apsidal chapel. Of this
+church all that really remains to us is the crypt and the transept. In
+the crypt we divine the old eastern limb of the church, and are
+doubtless in the presence of the earliest work in the Cathedral. It is,
+however, in the double aisled transepts that we can best appreciate how
+very glorious that first Norman church must have been; there is nothing
+in England more wonderful; and so far as I know there is nothing in
+Europe quite to put beside them. If only the whole mighty church could
+have remained to us!
+
+The first disaster that befell Bishop Walkelin's building was the fall
+of the central tower in 1107, which all England, at the time,
+attributed to the burial beneath it of William Rufus. The tower was
+rebuilt, though not to its original height, but in the reconstruction,
+the parts of the transept nearest to the tower were also rebuilt, and
+thus we have here two periods of Norman work; the main building of 1107
+and the reconstruction after that date.
+
+Of the Transitional work of the second half of the twelfth century very
+little is to be seen at Winchester. It was for the most part the period
+of that great Bishop Henry of Blois, and he was probably too much
+immersed in the brutal politics of his time, too busy building and
+holding his castle to give much thought to the Cathedral. The font,
+however, dates from his time, and perhaps a door in the north-western
+bay of the south transept.
+
+The earliest Gothic work in the Cathedral is the chapel of St
+Sepulchre, which was built upon the northern wall of the choir before
+the north transept. There we may still see wall paintings of the
+Passion of Our Lord. Not much later is the retro-choir. This consists
+of three bays, and is the largest in England. It was begun in 1189 by
+Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, and we must admit at once that it is wholly
+without delight, and yet to build it the Norman apse was sacrificed.
+According to Mr Bond, this was probably a very popular destruction. The
+reversion, says he, "to the favourite square east end of English church
+architecture was popular in itself. Almost every Norman cathedral ended in
+an apse; and in the apse, high raised behind the high altar, sat the
+Norman bishop facing the congregation; the hateful symbol of Norman
+domination." This may have been so, but considering that the monastic
+choir of Winchester occupied not one, as the choir does to-day, but
+three bays of the nave from which it was separated by a vast rood
+screen, though the Bishop had been as high as Haman, he would have been
+scarcely visible to the populace in the western part of the nave.
+Popular or no, however, the apse was sacrificed and the low retro-choir
+built with the Lady Chapel in the Early English style.
+
+The next thing undertaken was to place in the old Norman choir the
+magically lovely choir stalls (1245-1315) which happily still remain
+to us. Perhaps it was their enthusiastic loveliness which led about
+1320 to the rebuilding of the Presbytery and the lovely tabernacle in
+the back of the wall of the Feretory. When all this was done there
+remained of the old Norman church only the transepts and the nave. The
+transepts remain to us still, but the nave was transformed, in the very
+beginning of the Perpendicular time. It was transformed not rebuilt.
+Bishop William of Wykeham has obliterated Bishop Walkelin, but
+fundamentally the nave of Winchester remains Norman still. The
+Perpendicular work is only a lovely mask, or rather just the sunlight
+of the fourteenth century which has come into the dark old Norman
+building. The most notable change is the roof, in Norman times a flat
+ceiling, now a magnificent vault. But that century was not
+content with transforming the nave, it littered it with the first of
+its various delights, those chantries which are among the greatest
+splendours of this Cathedral, and which still, in some sort,
+commemorate Bishop Edingdon (1366), Bishop Wykeham (1404),
+Bishop Beaufort (1447), Bishop Waynflete (1416), Bishop Fox (1528) and
+Bishop Gardiner (1555) the last Catholic Bishop to fill the See.
+
+[Illustration: NORTH TRANSEPT, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
+
+The transformation of the nave, which occupied full an hundred years,
+was not, however, the last work undertaken in the Cathedral before the
+change of religion. Bishop Courtenay, in the last years of the
+fifteenth century, lengthened the Lady Chapel, and finally Bishop Fox
+in the very beginning of the sixteenth century began the transformation
+of the early fourteenth century Presbytery, but got little further
+than the insertion of the Perpendicular windows. He did, however,
+transform the Norman aisles there, and screened them, and upon the
+screens in six fine Renaissance chests he gathered the dust of the old
+Saxon saints and kings.
+
+But apart from its architecture the church is full of interest. Where
+can we find anything to match the exquisite iron screen of the eleventh
+century which used to guard St Swithin's shrine but which, now that is
+gone, covers the north-west doorway of the nave? Is there another font
+in England more wonderful than that square black marble basin
+sculptured in the twelfth century with the story of St Nicholas? Is
+there any series of chantries in England more complete or more lovely
+than these at Winchester, or anywhere a finer fourteenth century
+monument than that of Bishop Wykeham? Nowhere in England certainly can
+the glorious choir stalls be matched, nor shall we easily find a pulpit
+to surpass that in the choir here dating from 1520. If the restored
+retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication,
+we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous
+fragments of the original reredos which are so beautiful that they take
+away our breath--that broken statue of the Madonna and Child, for
+instance, perhaps the loveliest piece of fourteenth century sculpture
+to be found in England. No, however we consider the great church of
+Winchester, it stands alone. As a mere building it is more tremendous
+and more venerable than anything now left to us upon English soil; as a
+burial place it possesses the dust not only of the Apostle of the heart
+of England but of the greatest of the Saxon kings, while beneath its
+mighty vault William Rufus sleeps, the only Norman king that lies in
+England. And as a shrine of art it still possesses incomparable things.
+It stands there as the Pyramids stand in the desert, a relic of a lost
+civilisation; but by it we may measure the modern world.
+
+It is, too, when you consider it, utterly lonely. The revolution we
+call the Reformation upon which the modern world turns and turns as
+upon a pivot, while it spared Winchester Cathedral, though reluctantly,
+swept away all the buildings which surrounded it. The great monastery
+is gone, scarcely a sign of it remains. Nothing at all is left of the
+famous nunnery of St Mary. Of Wolvesey Castle there are a few beautiful
+ruins, of Hyde Abbey, all has been swept away, even the stones, even
+the bones of Alfred. Nor have the other and later religious houses,
+with which Winchester was full, fared better. It is difficult to find
+even the sites of the houses of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the
+Austin Friars, the Carmelites. And what remains of the College of St
+Elizabeth, and, but for a Norman doorway, now in Catholic hands, of the
+Hospital of St Mary Magdalen? Only the Hospital of St John remains at
+the east end of the High Street, still in possession of its fine Hall and
+Chapel, and the great school founded by William of Wykeham in 1382,
+"for seventy poor and needy scholars and clerks living college-wise in
+the same, studying and becoming proficient in grammaticals or the art
+and science of grammar." It remains without compare, the oldest and the
+greatest school in England, whose daughter is Eton and whose late
+descendant is Harrow.
+
+To say that the Cathedral, the College and the Hospital of St John are
+all that remains of mediaeval Winchester would not, perhaps, be
+strictly true; but it is so near the truth that one might say it
+without fear of contradiction. Most of the old churches even have
+perished. There remain St John Baptist, which can boast of Transitional
+arcades, and fifteenth century screen and pulpit; St Maurice with a
+Norman doorway; St Peter with its twelfth and thirteenth century work;
+St Bartholomew with some Norman remains near the site of Hyde Abbey;
+and in the High Street there is more than one fine old house. The fact
+that so little remains cannot altogether be placed to the discredit of
+the Reformation and the Puritan fanatics. Until the eighteenth century
+something remained of Hyde Abbey, much of the Hospital of St Mary
+Magdalen; the city walls were then practically perfect, having all
+their five gates, north, south, east and west, and King's gate; now of
+all these only the Westgate of the thirteenth century remains to us
+with the King's gate over which is the little church of St Swithin.
+
+But in spite of vandalism, forgetfulness and barbarism, often of the
+worst description as in the mere indifference and ignorance that
+scattered Alfred's bones, no one has ever come to Winchester without
+loving it, no one has ever been glad to get away. Its innumerable
+visitors are all its lovers and the most opposite temperaments find
+here common ground at last. Walpole praises it, and so does Keats. "We
+removed here," writes the latter in 1819 to Bailey, "for the
+convenience of a library, and find it an exceedingly pleasant town,
+enriched with a beautiful cathedral and surrounded by fresh-looking
+country.... Within these two months I have written fifteen hundred
+lines, most of which, besides many more of prior composition, you will
+probably see next winter. I have written two tales, one from Boccaccio
+called the 'Pot of Basil' and another called 'St Agnes Eve' on a
+popular superstition, and a third called 'Lamia' (half-finished). I
+have also been writing parts of my 'Hyperion,' and completed four acts
+of a tragedy."
+
+"This Winchester," he writes again, "is a place tolerably well suited
+to me. There is a fine cathedral, a college, a Roman Catholic chapel
+... and there is not one loom or anything like manufacturing beyond
+bread and butter in the whole city. There are a number of rich
+Catholics in the place. It is a respectable, ancient, aristocratic
+place, and moreover it contains a nunnery." "I take a walk," he writes
+to his family, "every day for an hour before dinner, and this is
+generally my walk; I go out the back gate, across one street into the
+cathedral yard, which is always interesting; there I pass under the
+trees along a paved path, pass the beautiful front of the cathedral,
+turn to the left under a stone doorway--then I am on the other side of
+the building--which, leaving behind me, I pass on through two college-
+like squares, seemingly built for the dwelling-place of dean and
+prebendaries, garnished with grass and shaded with trees; then I pass
+through one of the old city gates and then you are in College Street,
+through which I pass, and at the end thereof, crossing some meadows,
+and at last a country of alley gardens I arrive, that is my worship
+arrives, at the foundation of St Cross, which is a very interesting old
+place.... Then I pass across St Cross meadows till I come to the most
+beautiful clear river."
+
+That walk, or rather that over the meads to St Cross, is for every
+lover of Winchester that which he takes most often I think, that which
+comes to him first in every memory of the city. Its beauty makes it
+sacred and its reward is an hour or more in what, when all is said, is
+one of the loveliest relics of the Middle Age anywhere left to us in
+England, I mean the hospital and church of St Cross in the meads of the
+Itchen.
+
+Doubtless we are the heirs of the Ages, into our hearts and minds the
+Empire, the Middle Age and the Renaissance have poured their riches.
+Doubtless we are the flower of Time and our Age, the rose of all the
+Ages. That is why, in our wisdom, we have superseded such places as St
+Cross by our modern workhouses.
+
+St Cross was founded by the great Henry of Blois in 1133 for the
+reception, the clothing and the entertainment of thirteen poor men,
+decayed or past their strength, and the relief of an hundred others; it
+was a mediaeval workhouse, called a hospital in those days, and in its
+beauty and its humanity and its success it cannot, of course, compare
+with the institutions which, since we have not been able to abolish
+poverty altogether, we have everywhere established for the reception of
+our unfortunate brethren. It would be odd indeed if eight hundred
+years of Christian government, four hundred of them enjoying the
+infinite blessings bestowed by the Reformation and the Protestant
+religion, had not vastly improved these institutions for the reception
+of the very poor. It is, in fact, in such establishments as our
+workhouses that our "progress" is to be seen most clearly.
+
+[Illustration: ST CROSS, WINCHESTER]
+
+Well, it is something to be assured of that; and yet, let me confess
+it, St Cross has a curious fascination for me. I feel there, it is
+true, that I am in a world different from that in which we do so well
+to rejoice, but such is my perversity I cannot help preferring the old
+to the new. This is a mere prejudice, quite personal to myself, and
+comes perhaps of being a Christian. When I look at St Cross I am
+vividly reminded that this was once a Christian country with a
+Christian civilisation; when I look at one of our great workhouses I
+know that all that has passed away and that we have "progressed" so
+fast and so far that Christianity has been left some four hundred years
+behind us. St Cross is, as it were, a rock of the old Christian time
+still emerging from the grey sea of the modern world.
+
+Bishop Henry de Blois intended, as I have said, to provide, by the
+foundation of the Hospital of St Cross, for the maintenance of thirteen
+poor men and the relief of an hundred others. His design was perverted
+in the thirteenth century, but gloriously restored by the founder of
+Winchester College and his successor in the Bishopric, Cardinal
+Beaufort, who added to the original foundation the almshouse of Noble
+Poverty, in which he hoped to support thirty-five brethren with two
+priests and three nuns to minister to the inmates. The hospital, by the
+merest good fortune, escaped suppression at the Reformation, but during
+most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and through
+many years of the nineteenth its revenues were enjoyed by men
+who, as often as not, had never seen the place, and so the poor
+were robbed. Perhaps the most insolent abuse of the kind occurred
+between 1808 and 1815. In the former year Bishop Brownlow North,
+of Winchester, appointed his son Francis, later Earl of Guildford,
+to be master. This man appropriated the revenues of the place
+to the tune of fourteen hundred pounds a year, and when at last
+the scandal was exposed, it was discovered that between 1818 and 1838
+he had taken not less than fifty-three thousand pounds in fines on
+renewing leases, a manifest and probably wilful breach of trust, that
+ought, one may think, to have brought him to the Old Bailey. The
+exposure of this rascal led to a reformation of the administration,
+which is now in the hands of trustees who elect thirteen brethren
+provided for by Bishop Henry of Blois. These wear a black gown with a
+silver cross. St Cross also still maintains certain brethren of Noble
+Poverty, and these wear a red gown, and not less than fifty poor folk,
+who do not live within its walls, while a very meagre wayfarer's dole
+is still distributed to all who pass by so far as a horn of beer and
+two loaves of bread will go. Each of the Brethren of St Cross beside a
+little house and maintenance receives five shillings a week.
+
+All this sounds, if you be poor, too good to be true. It is too good to
+owe its origin to the modern world, but not extraordinary for the
+Middle Age, which was eagerly and even violently Christian. And just as
+the institution seems in itself wonderful to us in our day, so do the
+buildings, which, if one would really understand how gloriously strange
+they are, should be carefully compared with the county workhouse.
+
+One enters the Hospital by a gate, and, passing through a small court,
+comes to the great gatehouse of Cardinal Beaufort, consisting of
+gateway, porter's lodge and great square tower. Here and there we still
+see Cardinal Beaufort's arms and devices, while over the gate itself
+are three niches, in one of which a kneeling figure of the Cardinal
+remains. Within this gatehouse is a large quadrangle, about three sides
+of which the hospital is set with the church upon the south, between
+which and the gatehouse runs a sixteenth century cloister. The whole is
+wonderfully quiet and peaceful, a corner of that old England, England
+of my heart, which is so fast vanishing away.
+
+The noblest building of this most noble place, and the only one now
+left to us which dates from its foundation by Bishop Henry of Blois is
+the church. This is a great Transitional building, one of the finest
+examples of that style in England, and dates from about 1160 to 1292.
+It is a cruciform building with central tower, the nave and chancel
+being aisled, the transepts, aisles and all, vaulted in stone in the
+fourteenth century. The earliest part of the church is the chancel,
+which has a square eastern end, and the lower parts of the transepts
+probably date from the same time. These transepts were finished a
+little later, when the nave was begun and finished, and the north porch
+built in the thirteenth century. The clerestory of the nave dates from
+the first half of the fourteenth century, and so does the great western
+window. Much of the furniture of the church is interesting, such as the
+fourteenth century tiles, the curious Norman bowl that does duty as a
+font, the fourteenth century glass in the clerestory window of the
+nave, and that, little though it be, of the fifteenth century in the
+north transept, the fine fifteenth century screen between the north-
+choir aisle and the chancel, the foreign sixteenth century woodwork in
+the south-choir aisle, the curious wall painting of the Martyrdom of
+St Thomas in the south transept, and the old Purbeck altar stone that
+now serves as the communion table. Here, before the altar, lies John de
+Campeden, appointed Master of St Cross by Bishop William of Wykeham in
+1383, his grave marked by a good brass.
+
+Much, too, within the hospital is interesting, and the old men who
+eagerly show one all these strange and beautiful things are most human
+and delightful. Nevertheless, though the church would anywhere else
+claim all our attention for a whole morning, and an afternoon is easily
+spent poking about the hospital, it is not of the mere architecture,
+beautiful though it be, that one thinks on the way back into
+Winchester, across the meads beside the river which has seen and known
+both the Middle Age and this sorrowful time of to-day, but of that
+wondrous institution where poverty was considered honourable and
+destitution not an offence or even perhaps a misfortune, where it was
+still remembered that we are all brethren, and that Christ, too, had
+not where to lay His head. All of which seems nothing less than marvellous
+to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SELBORNE
+
+
+I set out from Winchester early one June morning by Jewry Street, as it
+were out of the old North Gate to follow, perhaps, the oldest road in
+old England towards Alton, intending to reach Selborne more than twenty
+miles away eastward on the tumble of hills where the North Downs meet
+the South, before night.
+
+I say the road by which I went out of Winchester and followed for so
+many miles, through King's Worthy and Martyr Worthy, Itchen Abbas, New
+Alresford and Bishops Sutton, is perhaps the oldest in England; in fact
+it is the old British trackway from the ports of the Straights and
+Canterbury to Winchester and Old Sarum, the western end, indeed, of the
+way I had already followed from Canterbury to Boughton Aluph up the
+valley of the Great Stour, known to us all as the Pilgrim's Way. For
+though it is older than any written history, it was preserved from
+neglect and death when the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were making
+all new, here as elsewhere, by the pilgrims, who, coming from Western
+England, from Brittany and Spain to visit St Thomas' shrine, used it as
+their road across Southern England from Winchester to Canterbury.
+
+Now, though for any man who follows that road to-day it is filled with
+these great companies of pilgrims, there are older memories, too, which
+it evokes and which, if the history of England is precious to him, he
+cannot ignore.
+
+To begin with the exit from Winchester: there in Jewry Street a Roman
+road overlies the older British way, not indeed exactly, but roughly,
+certainly as far as King's Worthy, whence it still shoots forth
+straight as an arrow's flight over hill over dale to Silchester. The
+very street by which he leaves the city, as it were, by the now
+destroyed North Gate, is Roman, one of the four roads which met in the
+Forum of Venta Belgarum and divided Roman Winchester into four
+quarters, though, perhaps because of the marshes of the Itchen, not
+into four equal parts as in Chichester. The present name of this road,
+Jewry Street, indicates its character all through the Middle Ages, when
+here by the North Gate, upon the road to London, the Jews had their
+booths, and the quarter of Winchester which this road served was
+doubtless their ghetto, the richest quarter of the city.
+
+It was not, however, of the Middle Age, but of the Dark Age I thought
+as I issued out of Winchester where, not much more than a hundred years
+ago, the old North Gate still held the way. In the year 1001, after the
+battle of Alton, in which the men of Hampshire were utterly broken by
+Sweyn and his Danes, this road was filled with the routed Saxons in
+flight pouring into the city of Winchester. The record of that
+appalling business is very brief in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," a few
+lines under the date 1001. "A. 1001. In this year was much fighting in
+the land of the English, and well nigh everywhere they (the
+Danes) ravaged and burned so that they advanced on one course
+until they came to the town of Alton; and then there came
+against them the men of Hampshire and fought against them.
+And there was Ethelward the King's high-steward slain, and Leofric at
+Whitchurch and Leofwin the King's high-steward and Wulfhere the
+bishop's thane, and Godwin at Worthy, Bishop Elfry's son, and of all
+men one hundred and eighty; and there were of the Danish men many more
+slain, though they had possession of the place of slaughter." A mere
+plundering expedition, we may think, but it foretold with certainty the
+rule of the Danes in England, which as we know came to pass, and was
+not the catastrophe it might have been, because of the victory of
+Alfred at Ethandune, a century and a half before, when he had made
+Guthrum and his host Christians. Till the year 1788 Alfred's bones lay
+beside this very gate through which the beaten Saxons poured into his
+city in 1001. For though Hyde Abbey was destroyed at the Reformation
+his bones seem to have been forgotten, to be discovered in the end of
+the eighteenth century in their great leaden coffin and sold, I know
+not to whom, for the sum of two pounds.
+
+I considered these unfortunate and shameful things as I went on along
+this British, Roman, Saxon and English way, the way of armies and of
+pilgrims into Headbourne Worthy, whose church stands by the roadside on
+the north.
+
+This little church dedicated in honour of St Swithin is all of a piece
+with the road, and illustrates it very well. Its beauty alone would
+recommend it to the wayfarer, but it also possesses an antiquity so
+great that nothing left to us in Winchester itself can match it. For in
+plan, and largely in masonry too, it is a Saxon sanctuary, though a
+late one, dating as it would seem from the early part of the eleventh
+century. What we see is a beautiful little building consisting of nave
+with curious western chamber, chancel, south-western tower and modern
+south porch. The original church probably did not differ very much in
+plan from that we have, but only the north and west walls of the nave
+of the original building remain to us; the latter having the original
+doorway of Binstead stone. The south wall of the nave and the tower
+were rebuilt in the thirteenth century, as was the chancel, which is
+now a modern building so far as its north and eastern walls are
+concerned. In the late fifteenth century the western chamber was added
+to the nave as in our own day the south porch. The best treasure of the
+church is, however, the great spoilt Rood, with figures of our Lady and
+St John, upon the outside of the west wall of the Saxon nave, to
+preserve which, in the fifteenth century, the western chamber was
+built. The western chamber was originally in two stages, the lower
+acting as a porch to the church, the upper as a chapel with an altar
+under the Saxon rood. It is needless to say that the Reformers, Bishop
+Horne of Winchester it is said, the accursed miscreant who ordered the
+destruction of all crucifixes in his diocese, defaced this glorious
+work of art and religion, cutting the relief away to the face of the
+wall so that only the outline remains. Nevertheless it is still one of
+the most imposing and notable things left to us in southern England.
+
+Headbourne Worthy, granted to Mortimer after the Conquest, was the most
+important of the three little places grouped here in a bunch which bear
+that name. King's Worthy, where the road first turns eastward and where
+the church, curiously enough, stands to the south of the way,
+[Footnote: According to Mr Belloc (_The Old Road_) this modern road
+does not exactly represent the route of the Pilgrim's Way which ran to
+the south of King's Worthy church] was but a hamlet and of Martyr
+Worthy, Domesday knows nothing. Little that is notable remains to us
+in either place, only the charming fifteenth century tower of King's
+Worthy church and a fourteenth century font therein.
+
+Much the same must be said of Itchen Abbas, Itchen A Bas, where the
+road falls to the river, the small Norman church there having been both
+rebuilt and enlarged in or about 1863, while an even worse fate has
+befallen the church of Itchen Stoke, two miles further on, for it has
+disappeared altogether. Nor I fear can much be said for the church of
+New Alresford or the town either, for apparently, owing to a series of
+fires, it has nothing to show us but a seventeenth century tower, a
+poor example of the building of that time, the base of which may be
+Saxon, while the windows seem to be of the thirteenth century.
+
+New Alresford would seem only to have come into existence as a town in
+the end of the twelfth century, when it was re-established by Bishop
+Godfrey de Lucy (1189-1204). The old road did not pass through it as
+the modern road does; for as Mr Belloc seems to have proved the
+Pilgrim's Way, which descended to the river at Itchen A Bas as we have
+seen, crossed the ford at Itchen Stoke, Itchen Stakes that is, and
+proceeded east by south where the workhouse now stands, coming into the
+modern road again at Bishop Sutton. But though the Pilgrim's Way knew
+it not, New Alresford is of high antiquity. Local tradition has it that
+it owes its existence, as distinct from Old Alresford, "to a defeat
+inflicted by the Saxons on a party of Danes near the village of West
+Tisted about five miles (south) east of Alresford. The Saxons granted
+quarter to the defeated enemy on condition that they went to the ford
+over the River Alre [Footnote: It is curious that Guthrum was baptised
+at Aller and then his Danes in the Alre] to be baptised. In
+commemoration of the victory a statue of the Virgin was then erected in
+the churchyard of Old Alresford." [Footnote: V.C.H., Hampshire, vol. 3,
+p. 350.] Local tradition cannot, at any time, be put lightly aside, and
+when as here it preserves for us one of the great truths of the early
+history of modern Europe we should rejoice indeed. For here we have the
+obvious reality of the eighth century when Europe, slowly recovering
+itself and beginning to realise itself as Christendom, was everywhere
+attacked by hordes of pagans. The work of Charlemagne, of Offa and of
+Alfred was not merely the conquest of the barbarians, but really since
+they could not be wholly destroyed, their conversion, and thus alone
+could Christendom be certainly preserved. So after Ethandune Guthrum
+must be christened at Aller, and after the fight here on the Alre the
+defeated heathen must be christened at the ford. Since New Alresford
+has preserved for us a memory of this fundamental act we can easily
+forgive her lack of material antiquity.
+
+The little village thus founded, certainly still existed in the time of
+the Conquest, and such it would always have remained but for Godfrey de
+Lucy, Bishop of Winchester, who, among his many achievements, numbers
+this chiefly that he made the Itchen navigable not only from
+Southampton to Winchester but here also in its headwaters, and this by
+means of the great reservoir, known as Alresford Pond, into which he
+gathered the waters of many streams to supply his navigation. In
+return, King John not only gave him the royalty of the river, but a
+weekly market here for which he rebuilt the place and called it New
+Market a name which was soon lost, the people preferring their old name
+New Alresford. So the market town of New Alresford came into existence,
+and, but for the unfortunate fires of the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, would bear upon its face the marks it now lacks of
+antiquity.
+
+Bishop Godfrey de Lucy was constantly in residence at Bishop Sutton in
+the palace there. The road passes through this delightful village a
+mile or more to the east of New Alresford and something remains, the
+ruins of the kennels it is said, of the palace. This was doubtless "the
+manour-house ... a verie olde house somtyme walled round aboutte with
+stone now decaied well waterid with an olde ponde or moote adjoyning to
+it," of which we hear in the time of Edward VI. It seems to have been
+destroyed in the Civil war, but even in 1839 much remained of it.
+"Within the memory of many persons now living," writes Mr Duthy in
+1839, "considerable vestiges of a strong and extensive building stood
+in the meadows to the north of the church, which were the dilapidated
+remains of an ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester. The walls
+were of great thickness and composed of flints and mortar, but it was
+impossible to trace the disposition of the apartments or the form of
+the edifice." Bishop Sutton had belonged to the church of Winchester
+since King Ine's day, but in the early part of the eleventh century it
+was held by Harold, and after the Conquest by Eustace of Boulogne.
+Bishop Henry de Blois regained it for the church by exchange, in whose
+possession it has remained but for a few brief intervals in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in one of which John Evelyn
+bought it, until to-day.
+
+It is probably to this fact we owe the beauty and preservation of the
+church here, with its fine twelfth century nave, not fundamentally
+altered, and its chancel still largely of the thirteenth century.
+Especially notable are the two Norman doorways in the nave and curious
+supports of the belfry there, four naked and massive posts.
+
+[Illustration: SELBORNE FROM THE HANGER]
+
+Bishop Sutton was the last place I was to see upon the old road, for a
+mile beyond that village I left it where it turned northward, to go
+east into Ripley and so by the byways to climb into the hills, and
+crossing them to descend steeply at evening into the village of
+Selborne by the Oakhanger stream just before it enters that narrow
+brief pass into the Weald. There in the twilight I stayed for awhile
+under the yew tree in the churchyard to think of the writer, for love
+of whom I had made this journey all the way from Winchester.
+
+"In the churchyard of this village," writes Gilbert White in "The
+Antiquities of Selborne," "is a yew-tree whose aspect bespeaks it to be
+of great age; it seems to have seen several centuries and is probably
+co-eval with the church, and therefore may be deemed an antiquity; the
+body is squat, short and thick, and measures twenty-three feet in the
+girth, supporting a head of suitable extent to its bulk. This is a male
+tree, which in the spring sheds clouds of dust and fills the atmosphere
+around with its farina.... Antiquaries seem much at a loss to determine
+at what period this tree first obtained a place in churchyards. A
+statute was passed A.D. 1307 and 35 Edward I., the title of which is
+"Ne rector arbores in cemeterio prosternat." Now if it is recollected
+that we seldom see any other very large or ancient tree in a churchyard
+but yews, this statute must have principally related to this species of
+tree; and consequently their being planted in churchyards is of much
+more ancient date than the year 1307. As to the use of these trees,
+possibly the more respectable parishioners were buried under their
+shade before the improper custom was introduced of burying within the
+body of the church where the living are to assemble. Deborah, Rebekah's
+nurse, was buried under an oak--the most honourable place of interment
+--probably next to the cave of Machpelah, which seems to have been
+appropriated to the remains of the patriarchal family alone. The
+further use of yew trees might be as a screen to churches, by their
+thick foliage, from the violence of winds; perhaps also for the
+purpose of archery, the best long bows being made of that material, and
+we do not hear that they are planted in the churchyards of other parts
+of Europe, where long bows were not so much in use. They might also be
+placed as a shelter to the congregation assembling before the church
+doors were opened, and as an emblem of mortality by their funeral
+appearance. In the south of England every churchyard almost has its
+tree and some two; but in the north we understand few are to be found."
+
+Even in that passage, full as it is of all the quietness of the English
+countryside, something of the secret of Gilbert White, his ever living
+incommunicable charm may be found: his extraordinary and gentle gift of
+becoming, as it were, one with the things of which he writes, his
+wonderfully sympathetic approach to us, his so simple and so consummate
+manner. The man might stand in his writings for the countryside of
+England, incarnate and articulate. He not only leads you ever out of
+doors, but he is just that, the very spirit of the open air, the out-
+of-doors of a country where alone in Europe one can be in the lanes, in
+the meadows, on the hills under the low soft sky with delight every day
+of the year. He teaches, as Nature herself teaches; we seem to move in
+his books as though they were the fields and the woods, and there the
+flowers blow and the birds sing. It is not so much that his observation
+is extraordinarily wide and accurate, but that we see with his eyes,
+hear with his ears, and the phenomena, beautiful or wonderful, which he
+describes, we experience too, and because of him with something of his
+love, his interest and carefulness. What other book ever written upon
+Natural History can we read, who are not Naturalists, over and over and
+over again, and for its own sake, not for the myriad facts he gathered
+through a long lifetime, the acute observation and record of which have
+won him the homage of his fellow scientists, but for the pure human and
+literary pleasure we find there, a pleasure the like of which is to be
+found nowhere else in such books in the same satisfying quantity, and
+at all, only because of him.
+
+And so on the next morning the first place I went to see was The Wakes,
+the house where this great and dear lover of England of my heart lived,
+dying there in 1793, to lie in his own churchyard, his grave marked by
+a simple headstone bearing his initials "G.W." and the date. In the
+church is a tablet to him and his brother Benjamin, who has also placed
+there in memory of him the seventeenth century German triptych over
+the altar. But he needs no memorial from our hands; all he loved,
+Selborne itself in all its beauty, the exquisite country round it, the
+hills, the valleys, the woods and the streams are his monument, the
+very birds in their songs remind us of him, and there is not a walk
+that is not the lovelier because he has passed by. Do you climb up
+through the Hanger and admire the beeches there? It is he who has told
+us what to expect, loving the beech like a father, "the most lovely of
+all forest trees whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its
+glossy foliage or graceful pendulous boughs." Do you linger in the
+Plestor? It is he who tells you of the old oak that stood there, and
+was blown down in 1703 "to the infinite regret of the inhabitants and
+the vicar who bestowed several pounds in setting it in its place again;
+but all this care could not avail; the tree sprouted for a time then
+withered and died." Or who can pass by Long Lythe without remembering
+that it was a favourite with him too. For he loved this place so well,
+that as Jacob waited for Rachel so he for Selborne. He had been born
+there, where his grandfather being then vicar, aged seventy-two years
+and eleven months, he was to die in 1720. He went to school at Farnham
+and Basingstoke, and then in 1739 to Oriel College, Oxford, where in
+1744 he was elected to a Fellowship. Presently benefice after benefice
+was offered him but he refused them all, having made up his mind to
+live and die at Selborne. Selborne must then have been a very secluded
+place, the nearest town, Alton, often inaccessible in winter one may
+think, judging from the description Gilbert White gives of the "rocky
+hollow lane" that led thither, but it is perhaps to this very fact that
+we owe more than a few of those immortal pages ever living and ever
+new. Since he was cut off from men he was able to give himself wholly
+to nature. He is less a part of the mere England of his day than any
+man of that time; he belonged only to England of my heart. Yet the
+events of his time, though they touched him so little, were neither few
+nor unimportant. The year of his birth was the year of the South Sea
+Bubble. When he was a year old the great Duke of Marlborough died. His
+eighth birthday fell in the year which closed the eyes of Sir Isaac
+Newton. He was twenty-five in the "forty-five," when Prince Charles
+Edward held Edinburgh after Preston Pans. He saw the change in the
+calendar, the conquest of India by Clive, the victory and death of
+Wolfe at Quebec the annexation of Canada, the death of Chatham, the
+loss of the American Colonies, the French Revolution. And how little
+all this meant to him!
+
+But anything connected with Selborne interested him, and he wrote of
+and studied its "antiquities" as well as its "natural history." Nor
+were these antiquities so negligible as one might think. In his day the
+church was still an interesting building, and he has left us an
+interesting account of it. But he does not forget to tell us, too, of
+the Augustinian Priory of Selborne, that was founded in 1233 and stood
+to the east of the village, the way to it lying through his beloved
+Long Lythe, and the site of which is now occupied by Priory Farm, a few
+ruins remaining. Nothing, indeed, that concerned his beloved village
+was to him ungrateful. It is, without doubt, this careful love of his
+for the things that were his own, at his door, common things if you
+will, common only in England of my heart, that has endeared him to
+innumerable readers, many of whom have never set foot upon our shores
+and would only not be utter strangers here if they did, because of him.
+Such at least is the only explanation I can give of his immortality,
+his constant appeal to all sorts and conditions of men.
+
+Day by day as I wandered through the lanes and the woods that he had
+loved with so wonderful and unconscious an affection, in a repose that
+we have lost and a quietness we can only envy him, I tried to discover,
+I tried to make clear to myself, what it really is that on a dull
+evening at home, in a sleepless night in London, or in the long winter
+evenings anywhere, draws me back again and again to that curious book.
+But even there in Selborne the secret was hidden from me. In truth one
+might as well inquire of the birds why they delight us, or of the
+flowers why we love them so; for in some way I cannot understand
+Gilbert White was gently at one with these and spoke of them sweetly
+like a lover and a friend having a gift from God by which he makes us
+partakers of his pleasure.
+
+And so spring drew to a close as I lingered in Selborne, for I could
+not drag myself away. And when, at last, I determined to set out, the
+Feast of St John was already at hand, so that I made haste once more
+across the hills for Winchester on my way to Old Sarum and Stonehenge,
+where I would see the sunrise on midsummer morning.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's England of My Heart--Spring, by Edward Hutton
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