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,
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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.