Back Aa

Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury

<h2>CHAPTER XII CHILHAM TO HARBLEDOWN</h2> THE Pilgrims’ Way skirted the wooded slopes of Godmersham Park for about a mile, and then entered Chilham Park. The park is now closed, but the old track lay right across the park, and in front of Chilham Castle. The position of this fortress, overlooking the valley of the Stour, has made it memorable in English history. Chilham has been in turn a Roman camp, a Saxon castle, and a Norman keep, and has played an eventful{183} part in some of the fiercest struggles of those days. According to a generally received tradition recorded by Camden, Chilham was the scene of the battle on the river in Cæsar’s second expedition; and the British barrow near the Stour, popularly known as Julaber’s Grave, was believed to be the tomb of the Roman tribune, Julius Laberius, although, as a matter of fact, it contains no sepulchral remains. In the second century Chilham is said to have been the home of that traditional personage, the Christian King Lucius, and in Saxon days of the chief Cilla. The castle was strongly fortified to resist the invasion of the Danes, by whom it was repeatedly attacked. After the Norman Conquest it belonged to Fulbert de Dover, whose last descendant, Isabel, Countess of Atholl, died here in 1292, and is buried in the under-croft at Canterbury. Then it passed into the hands of the great Lord Badlesmere, of Leeds, who on one occasion gave Queen Isabel, the wife of Edward II., a splendid reception here, and afterwards astonished the peaceful citizens and monks of Canterbury by appearing at their gates, followed by nineteen armed knights, each with a{184} drawn sword in his hand, to pay his devotions at the shrine of St. Thomas. As late as the sixteenth century Leland describes Chilham Castle as beautiful for pleasure, commodious for use, and strong for defence; but soon after he wrote these words, the greater part of the old house was pulled down by its owner, Sir Thomas Cheney, Warden of the Cinque Ports under Edward VI., to complete his new mansion in the Isle of Sheppey. The Norman keep, an octagonal fortress three stories high, is the only part of the mediæval structure that now remains, and can still be seen in the gardens of the new house built in 1616 by Sir Dudley Digges, Master of the Rolls in the reign of James I. This fine Jacobean manor-house stands well on the rising ground above the river, and both the garden terrace and the top of the old keep afford beautiful views of the vale of Ashford and the downs beyond the Wye. Still more picturesque is the market-place of Chilham itself. On one side we have the red brick walls and white stone doorway of the castle, seen at the end of its short avenue of tall lime trees on the other the quaint red roofs and timbered houses{185} of the charming old square, with the grey church tower surrounded by the brilliant green of sycamores and beeches. On a bright spring morning, when the leaves are young and the meadows along the river-side are golden with buttercups, there can be no prettier picture than this of the old market square of Cilla’s home. From the heights of Chilham the Pilgrims’ Way descends into the valley of the Stour, and after following the course of the river for a short time, climbs the opposite hill and strikes into Bigberry Wood. Here we come suddenly upon the most ancient earthwork along the whole line of the road, an entrenchment which Professor Boyd Dawkins, who explored it thoroughly some years ago, has ascribed to the prehistoric Iron Age. For most of us, perhaps, Bigberry Camp has a still greater interest as the fort which the Britons held against the assault of the Roman invaders, and which was stormed and carried by Cæsar’s legions. The memory of that desperate fight, which sealed the fate of Britain and her conquest by the great Proconsul, still lingers in the popular mind, and the shepherd who follows his flock and{186} the waggoner who drives his team along the road, still talk of the famous battle that was fought here two thousand years ago. After this the path crosses the valley and runs through the hop-gardens to join Watling Street—the road by which Chaucer’s pilgrims came to Canterbury—at Harbledown. This is the little village on the edge of the forest of Blean, which has been immortalised by Chaucer’s lines— <div class="poetry"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> “Wist ye not where standeth a little toun Which that ycleped is Bob-up-and-down, Under the Blee in Canterbury way.” </div> </div></div> <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_187_sml.png" width-obs="296" height-obs="197" alt="ON THE VILLAGE GREEN, CHARTHAM" title="ON THE VILLAGE GREEN, CHARTHAM" /> ON THE VILLAGE GREEN, CHARTHAM And Bob-up-and-down is to this day a true and characteristic description of the rolling ground by which we approach Harbledown. Here the Pilgrims’ Road, along which we have journeyed over hill and dale, fails to rise again. We climb the last hill, and on the summit of the rising ground we find ourselves close to the lazar-house founded at Harbledown by Lanfranc in 1084. The wooden houses built by the Norman Archbishop for the reception of ten brothers and seven sisters have been replaced by a row of modern{187} almshouses; but the chapel still preserves its old Norman doorway, and the round arches and pillars of an arcade to the north of the nave, which formed part of the hospital church dedicated by Lanfranc to St. Nicholas. The devout pilgrim to St. Thomas’s shrine never failed to visit this ancient leper-house. Not only did the antiquity of the charitable foundation and its nearness to the road attract him, but in the common hall of the hospital a precious relic was preserved in the shape of a crystal which had once adorned{188} the leather of St. Thomas’s shoe. Many were the royal personages and distinguished strangers who paused before these old walls and dropped their alms into the poor leper’s outstretched hand. Here, we read in contemporary records, Henry II. came on his first memorable pilgrimage to the tomb of the martyred Archbishop, and Richard Cœur de Lion after his release from his long captivity. Edward I. stopped at Harbledown with his brave Queen, Eleanor of Castille, on their return from the Holy Land, and the Black Prince, accompanied by his royal captive, King John of France, and that monarch’s young son Philip, also visited the leper-house. And when the French king visited Canterbury for the second time, on his return to his own kingdom, he did not forget to stop at Lanfranc’s old lazar-house and leave ten gold crowns “pour les nonnains de Harbledoun.” But it is a later and more sceptical traveller, Erasmus, who has left us the most vivid description of Harbledown and of the feelings which the sight of the relic aroused in the heart of his companion, Dean Colet. “Not far from Canterbury, at the left-hand side of the road,”{189} he writes, in the record of his pilgrimage, “there is a small almshouse for old people, one of whom ran out, seeming to hear the steps of the horses. He first sprinkled us with holy water, and then offered us the upper leather of a shoe bound in a brass rim, with a crystal set in its centre like a jewel. Gration (Dean Colet) rode on my left hand, nearer to the beggar man, and was duly sprinkled, bearing it with a tolerable amount of equanimity. But when the shoe was handed up, he asked the old man what he wanted. ‘It is the shoe of St. Thomas,’ was the answer. Upon this he fired up, and turning to me, exclaimed indignantly, ‘What! do these cattle mean we should kiss the shoes of every good man?’” Erasmus, sorry for the old man’s feelings, dropped a small coin into his hand, which made him quite happy, and the two pilgrims rode on to London, discussing the question of the worship of relics as they went. To this day a maple bowl, bound with a brass rim, containing a piece of crystal, is preserved in the hospital at Harbledown, the self-same relic, it may be, which was shown to Erasmus and Colet, and{190} which Lambarde, writing half a century later, describes as “faire set in copper and chrystall”; while an old wooden box, with a slit in the lid for money, and a chain attached to it, is said to be the one into which Erasmus dropped his coin. Behind the ivy-mantled tower of Lanfranc’s chapel is a clear spring which was supposed to possess healing virtues, and is still believed by the country folks to be of great benefit to the eyes. This spring still goes by the name of the Black Prince’s Well, from an old tradition that the warrior of Crecy and Poitiers drank of its waters when he visited the hospital at Harbledown in 1357. Many, we know, are the memorials of this popular hero at Canterbury. Only three days after he landed at Sandwich he came, accompanied by his royal captive, to return thanks at St. Thomas’s shrine for his victories, and six years afterwards he founded and decorated the beautiful chantry in the Cathedral crypt, which still bears his name, on the occasion of his marriage with his cousin Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent. The old legend of the Black Prince’s{191} Well goes on to tell how, when he lay dying of the wasting disease which carried him off in the flower of his life, he thought of the wonder-working spring near Canterbury, and sent to Harbledown for a draught of its pure waters. But even that could not save him, and on the 29th of September, 1376, a stately funeral procession wound its way down the hill-side at Harbledown, bearing the Black Prince to the grave which he had chosen for himself in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Undercroft at Canterbury. At Harbledown the pilgrims caught their first sight of the Cathedral; here they fell on their knees when they saw the golden angel on the top of the central tower, and knew that the goal of their pilgrimage was almost reached. Here Chaucer’s goodly company made their last halt, and for the moment the noise of singing and piping and jingling of bells gave place to a graver and more solemn mood as the motley crowd of pilgrims pressed around, to hear this time not a Canterbury tale, but a sermon. Deep was the impression which that first sight of{192} Canterbury made upon Erasmus. The cold, critical scholar becomes eloquent as he describes the great church of St. Thomas rearing itself up into the sky with a majesty that strikes awe into every heart, and the clanging of bells which, thrilling through the air, salute the pilgrims from afar. To-day the great cross is gone from the Westgate, the shining archangel no longer blesses the kneeling pilgrim from the topmost steeple, but the same glorious vision of the great Cathedral rising with all its towers into the sky meets the eyes of the traveller who looks down on Canterbury from the hill of Harbledown.{193} <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_192fp_sml.jpg" width-obs="452" height-obs="305" alt="CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH-WEST" title="CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH-WEST" /> CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH-WEST <ANTIMG class="enlargeimage" src="images/enlarge-image.jpg" alt="" width-obs="18" height-obs="14" /> <ANTIMG src="images/i_b_193_sml.png" width-obs="297" height-obs="218" alt="ST. NICHOLAS’, HARBLEDOWN." title="ST. NICHOLAS’, HARBLEDOWN." /> ST. NICHOLAS’, HARBLEDOWN. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.