Not only was Boxley, next to Waverley Abbey, the oldest Cistercian house founded on this side of the Channel, the filia propria of the great house of Clairvaux, but the convent church rejoiced in the possession of two of the most celebrated wonder-working relics in all England. There was the image of St. Rumbold, that infant child of a Saxon prince who proclaimed himself a Christian the moment of his birth, and after three days spent in edifying his pagan hearers,{148} departed this life. This image could only be lifted by the pure and good, and having a hidden spring, which could be worked by the hands or feet of the monks, was chiefly influenced by the amount of the coin that was paid into their hands. And there was that still greater marvel, the miraculous Rood, or winking image, a wooden crucifix which rolled its eyes and moved its lips in response to the devotees who crowded from all parts of England to see the wondrous sight. The clever mechanism of this image, said to have been invented by an English prisoner during his captivity in France, was exposed by Henry VIII.’s commissioners in 1538, who discovered “certayn ingyns of old wyer with olde roten stykkes in the back of the same,” and showed them to the people of Maidstone on market-day, after which the Rood of Grace was taken to London and solemnly broken in pieces at Paul’s Cross. The Abbey of Boxley owned vast lands, and the Abbots were frequently summoned to Parliament, and lived in great state. Among the royal guests whom they entertained was King Edward II., whose visit was made memorable by the letter which{149} he addressed from Boxley Abbey to the Aldermen of the City of London, granting them the right of electing a Lord Mayor. At one time their extravagance brought them to the verge of ruin, as we learn from a letter which Archbishop Warham addressed to Cardinal Wolsey; but at the dissolution the Commissioners could find no cause of complaint against the monks, excepting the profusion of flowers in the convent garden, which made them comment on the waste of turning “the rents of the monastery into gillyflowers{150} and roses.” The foundations of the church where the Cistercians showed off their “sotelties” may still be traced in the gardens of the house built by Sir Thomas Wyatt on the site of the abbey. Here some precious fragments of the ruins are still preserved. The chapel of St. Andrew, which stood near the great gateway, has been turned into cottages, and the noble “guesten-house,” where strangers were lodged, is now a barn. The old wall remains to show the once vast extent of the Abbey precincts. Now these grey stones are mantled with thick bushes of ivy, and a fine clump of elm trees overshadows the red-tiled roof of the ancient guest-house in the meadows, but we look in vain for poor Abbot John’s gillyflowers and roses.
Between Boxley Abbey and Maidstone stretches the wide common of Penenden Heath, famous from time immemorial as the place where all great county meetings were held. Here the Saxons held their “gemotes,” and here in 1076, was that memorable assembly before which Lanfranc pleaded the cause of the Church of Canterbury against Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, Earl{151} of Kent, the Conqueror’s half-brother, who had defrauded Christ Church of her rights, and laid violent hands on many of her manors and lands. Not only were the Kentish nobles and bishops summoned to try the cause, but barons and distinguished ecclesiastics, and many men “of great and good account,” from all parts of England and Normandy, were present that day. Godfrey, Bishop of Coutances, represented the King, and Agelric, the aged Bishop of Chester, “an ancient man well versed in the laws and customs of the realm,” was brought there in a chariot by the King’s express command. Three days the trial lasted, during which Lanfranc pleaded his cause so well against the rapacious Norman that the see of Canterbury recovered its former possessions, and saw its liberties firmly established.
The village and church of Boxley (Bose-leu in Domesday), so called from the box trees that grow freely along the downs, as at Box Hill, are about a mile and a half beyond the Abbey, and lie on the sloping ground at the foot of the hills, close to the Pilgrims’ Way. Old houses and timbered barns, with lofty gables and irregular{152} roofs, are grouped round the church, which is itself as picturesque an object as any, with its massive towers and curious old red-tiled Galilee porch. Next we reach Detling, a small village, prettily situated on the slope of the hills, with a church containing a rare specimen of mediæval wood-work in the shape of a carved oak reading-desk, enriched with pierced tracery of the Decorated period. We pass Thurnham, with the foundations of its Saxon castle high up on the downs, and then enter Hollingbourne. As Boxley reminds us of the box trees on the hill-side, and Thurnham of the thorn trees in the wood, so Hollingbourne owes its name to the hollies on the burn or stream which runs through the parish. William Cobbett, whose memory has followed us all the way from the Itchen valley, describes how he rode over Hollingbourne Hill on his return from Dover to the Wen, and from the summit of that down, one of the highest in this neighbourhood, looked down over the fair Kentish land, which in its richness and beauty seemed to him another Garden of Eden.{153}