Pilgrims to shrines beyond sea were not forgotten. At Dover the Maison Dieu was built and endowed by Hubert de Burgh, the great Justiciary, in the reign of Edward III; and on crossing to Calais the adventurer found another Maison Dieu, the first of a long chain of resting-places on the way to Rome, the Three Kings at Cologne, or Rocamadour, in Guyenne, according as his fancy or devotion might direct him.
CHAPTER IV
THE RISE OF THE TOWNS
Every high road leads sooner or later to a market town, and in that town the tourist may be sure of finding a White Hart Inn. The White Hart is the commonest of signs all through England. Half-timbered and rambling, with the marks of decrepit old age and long service writ large all over it, this inn is in evidence near the market-place, often in a street of the same name, to remind us of its importance in the days gone by. Sometimes, as at Guildford and Brentwood, the old building lies hidden behind a more modern front. When the builder has laid violent hands on a White Hart, title-deeds or other authentic records of its antiquity are in nearly every case available.
The White Hart, Brentwood
A vague tradition attempts to explain these inns as royal posting-houses, it being supposed that stations to supply fresh horses for the royal journeys were first established during the last years of Edward III. Undoubtedly the White Hart inns all date from the beginning of the reign of Richard II. After the scandals and misrule during the long dotage of his father, the nation centred all their hopes in the young king who showed promise of becoming a wise and able ruler. The policy of the good Parliament would once more govern in the council, and it seemed a happy omen when he took for his badge the white stag with a collar of gold around his neck. This legend, portrayed on so many signboards, was a delight of the mediæval romantic writers: the white hart was never to be taken alive except by one who had conquered the whole world. Its oldest form appears in the pages of Aristotle who relates how Diomedes consecrated a white stag to Diana; and how it lived for a thousand years before it was killed by Agathocles, King of Sicily. Pliny gives Alexander the Great, and later writers Julius Cæsar and Charlemagne, as the Emperors who captured the young white stag and released it after decorating it with the golden band. On the Dorchester road, near Stowminster, there used to be an inn with this kingly stag painted for a sign, and underneath the following lines translated from a mediæval quatrain by some not very conscientious scholar who has imported Cæsar, stag and all, into the West of England: