"With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes",
who, perhaps, had a hand in Shakespeare's Henry VI. He was born in the same year as Shakespeare, and, in spite of a reckless life and early death, came nearer to him in power than any other dramatist of the day. He was killed in a tavern brawl before he was thirty, but found time to write immortal things, amongst them "The Passionate Pilgrim":
"Come live with me and be my love",
a quite other sort of pilgrim than those who sought Becket's shrine.
It is said that he was an "atheist", and that the tavern dagger was just in time to save him from imminent risk of stake and faggot. This naturally leads us from his birthplace, along St. George's Terrace, which is really the old earthwork faced with mediæval stone, to the spot where atheists, heretics, traitors, and witches used to meet their fate. This is the Dane John already mentioned as a pre-historic mound. Dr. Cox, in his volume on Canterbury in the "Ancient Cities" series, gives the following extract from the city accounts touching the death on the Dane John of one John Stone, an Austin friar, who denied that the Sovereign was Supreme Head of the Church:—
"Paid for half a tonne of tymber to make a payre of Gallaces to hang Fryer Stone. For a Carpenter for making the same Gallaces and the dray. For a labourer who digged the holes. To iiij men who holp set up the Gallaces. For drynk to them. For carriage of tymber from Stablegate to the Dongeon. For ij men that sett the Ketyl and parboyled hym. To ij men that caryed his quarters to the gate and set them up. For a halter to hang hym. For two halfpenny halters. For Sandwich cord. For Strawe. To the woman that scowred the Ketyll. To hym that dyd execucion iiijs viijd."
Friar Stone, it is to be feared, is only one of a long procession of tortured ghosts who might meet us where the children play on the Dane John. But it was not always the place of execution, it came to be a coign of vantage from which the orthodox (for the time being) could comfortably view, not without lunch-baskets, what went on in Martyr's Field, now marked with an obelisk a little to the south-west of the mound. Here were forty, men, women, and children, "brent" or burnt at the stake in the reign of Queen Mary for asserting what Friar Stone denied. Their names are carved in granite on the spot where they died, and the motto on the monument is: "Lest We Forget".
From the Dane John we may return along the earthen rampart by the city wall to St. George's Street, and ask our way to St. Martin's, believed by competent enquirers to be the oldest church not only in England, but in Europe. It certainly existed in the sixth century, when Queen Bertha came to its services through the postern still known as Quenengate. Bede, the father of English history and the most learned man of the seventh century, says that there was a Christian church here during the Roman occupation. As the Romans left in 410, this gives a record of fifteen centuries of worship on this site. Here King Ethelbert was baptized by Augustine, and a representation of this event graven on an ancient seal gives a font much resembling the one still in use.
