Twice a year, we know, at the summer festival of the Translation of St. Thomas, on the 7th of July, and at the winter festival of the Martyrdom, on the 29th of December, Canterbury was crowded{198} with pilgrims, and a notice was placed in the High Street ordering the due provision of beds and entertainment for strangers. The concourse was still greater on the jubilees of the Translation, when indulgences were showered freely on all who visited the shrine, and the festival lasted for a whole fortnight. At the jubilee of the year 1420, just after the victory of Agincourt, no less than a hundred thousand pilgrims are said to have been present. On such occasions every available corner was occupied; the inns, which were exceedingly numerous, the hospitals, and, above all, the religious houses, were thronged with strangers. The most favourite, the most renowned, of all the hostelries was the Chequers of the Hope, the inn where Chaucer’s twenty-nine pilgrims took up their quarters.
“At Chekers of the Hope that every man doth know.”
This ancient inn, which Prior Chillenden rebuilt about 1400, stood at the corner of High Street and Mercery Lane, the old Merceria, which was formerly lined with rows of booths and stalls for the sale of pilgrimage tokens, such as are to be{199} found in the neighbourhood of all famous shrines. Both ampullas, small leaden bottles containing a drop of the martyr’s blood, which flowed perennially from a well in the precincts, and Caput Thomæ, or brooches bearing the saint’s mitred head, were eagerly sought after by all Canterbury pilgrims. So too were the small metal bells which are said to have given their name to the favourite Kentish flower, the Canterbury bell. And we read that the French king, John, stopped at the Mercery stalls to buy a knife for the Count of Auxerre. The position of the inn close to the great gate of Christ Church naturally attracted many visitors, and the spacious cellars with vaulted roofs, which once belonged to the inn, may still be seen, although the inner courtyard and the great chamber upstairs occupied by the pilgrims, and known as the Dormitory of Hundred Beds, were burnt down forty years ago. But the old street front, with its broad eaves overhanging the narrow lane leading up to the great gateway at the other end, still remains, and renders Mercery Lane the most picturesque and interesting corner of the Cathedral city.{200}
The religious houses were open to all comers, and while royal visitors were lodged in St. Augustine’s Abbey, the convents of the Mendicant orders were largely frequented by the poorer classes. There was also the house of the Whitefriars or Augustinians in the eastern part of the town, close to St. George’s Gate, and the hospital of St. John in the populous Northgate, “that faire and large house of stone,” built and endowed by Lanfranc in the eleventh century, besides that of Eastbridge, which has been already mentioned, and many other smaller foundations.
But it was in the great Priory of Christ Church that by far the largest number of pilgrims found hospitable welcome. A considerable part of the convent buildings was set aside for their reception. The Prior himself entertained distinguished strangers, and lodged them in the splendid suite of rooms overlooking the convent garden, known as the Omers or Homers—Les Ormeaux—from a neighbouring grove of elms. This range of buildings, including the banqueting-hall, generally known as “Meister Omers,” was broken up into prebendal houses after the Dissolution,{201} and supplied three separate residences for members of the new Chapter, which gives us some idea of the size of these lodgings. For ordinary strangers there was the Guest Hall, near the kitchen, on the west side of the Prior’s Court, which was under the especial charge of a cellarer appointed to provide for the needs of the guests. Prior Chillenden, whom Leland describes as “the greatest builder of a Prior that ever was in Christ Church,” repaired and enlarged this Strangers’ Hall early in the fifteenth century, and added a new chamber for hospitality, which bore the name of Chillenden’s Guest Chamber, and now forms part of the Bishop of Dover’s house. Finally, without the convent precincts, close to the court gateway, where the beautiful Norman stairway leads up to the Great Hall, or Aula Nova, was the Almonry. Here the statutes of Archbishop Winchelsea—he who had known what it was to hunger and thirst in his boyhood, and who remained all through his greatness the friend of the poor—provided that poor pilgrims and beggars should be fed daily with the fragments of bread and meat, “which were many and great,” left on{202} the monks’ tables, and brought here by the wooden pentise or covered passage leading from the kitchen. This Almonry became richly endowed by wealthy pilgrims in course of years, and early in the fourteenth century Prior Henry of Estria built a chapel close by, which was dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr, and much frequented by pilgrims. The Almony was turned into a mint-yard at the Dissolution, and the chapel and priests’ lodgings attached to it, now belong to the King’s School. Another privilege freely conceded by the prior and monks of this great community to pilgrims of all ranks and nationality who might die at Canterbury, was that of burial within the precincts of Christ Church, close to the blessed martyr’s shrine, and under the shadow of the Cathedral walls.{203}
