meek and Christian-like deportment, and he is in truth a very perfect, gentle knight. With him is his son, the squire, a boy of twenty, who had already made one campaign against the French, and had borne himself well, both in battle and in the tourney. Love deprives him of his sleep, and for love he writes sonnets and attires himself in smart clothes, broidered over with flowers like a May meadow. In attendance on this love-lorn swain is a yeoman clad in Lincoln green and bristling with arms. Sword and buckler, a dagger in his belt, with bow and arrows complete his equipment. Following upon these comes firstly Madame Eglantine, a lady prioress whose noble birth is seen both in her appearance and in the nicety with which she eats and drinks. With a sweet, if rather nasal, tone she chants portions of the Liturgy, and speaks French by preference; but it is the French, not of Paris, but of “Stratford-atte-Bow.” So high-strung is her sensibility that she would weep if she was shown a mouse in a trap, or if her little dog was beaten with a stick. She wears—somewhat inconsistently, considering her religious profession—a brooch bearing the inscription, Amor vincit omnia.

THE “SPUR” INN.

Next this dainty lady comes a fat monk of the Benedictine Order, whose shaven crown and red cheeks are as smooth as glass, and whose eyes shine like burning coals, both by reason of lust and good living. He is dressed in a fashion no holy monk should affect, for the sleeves of his robe are trimmed with the finest fur, and a golden love-knot pin holds his hood in place. Clearly ring the bells on his horse’s bridle; hare-hunting and a feast off a fat swan are more to him than the rule of St. Benedict and all the holy books in his cell. Beside this disgrace to his religious profession is a mendicant friar who is no whit better than his fellow, for he can sing tender songs to his harp, treats the country-folk in the taverns, and knows well how to please the women with timely gifts of needles and knives. Follow these a merchant and two learned men. Well does the merchant know the rate of exchange, and better still does he know how to secure his own interest. Not so the clerk of Oxenford, hollow-cheeked and lean, dressed in threadbare clothes and riding a bare-ribbed horse. As yet he is unbeneficed; but his books are his only joy. His fellow is a law serjeant in good practice, and at his heels comes the Franklin, a representative of a very large class who held land of their own, but were not of gentle birth.

A lower social stratum is represented by a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, and a tapster; all of consideration in their own grade, and likely to become aldermen some day. As wealthy as any is the miller, a big-bodied fellow, with a spade beard, red, like a fox, and as cunning. He well knows how to take a share of the corn his customers bring him to grind. He wears a white coat and a blue hood; plays on the bagpipes, and tells stories fitted to make the young and innocent blush. The wife of Bath is every whit as indelicate. She has been married five times, and of love, says Chaucer, “she knew the oldè dance.” Therefore she is privileged. A shipman from Dartmouth has with him a bottle of Burgundy stolen from his captain’s cabin, from which he thinks it no sin to drink when on pious pilgrimage. A doctor of physic, a cook, a poor parson, a ploughman, a reeve, or estate agent, a manciple, and two disgraceful characters—a summoner and a pardoner—make up the total of the company. The summoner has a fiery face, which nothing but abstinence from drink will assuage; and the pardoner is totally without conscience or morals of any kind. He makes a good living by selling pardons from the Pope, and gets more by the sale of relics in one day than the parson can earn in two months.

When these pilgrims rode forth on that April morning—nine and twenty of them—from the “Tabard,” to seek Becket’s shrine, they started from the ultimate suburb of London. Picture that, Londoners of to-day, who find streets unceasing until Blackheath is gained, and no true roadside country this side of Gravesend! The thymy air then blew in at the casements of the many inns of Southwark, and the views thence extended over fields and meadows where countless chimneys now pollute the sky. Some way down the Kent Road ran a little stream across the highway—“Saint Thomas à Watering” the ford was called, and here the pilgrims made their first halt—

And forth we riden a litel more than pas,
Unto the watering of Saint Thomàs,
And then our host began his hors arrest.

Saint Thomas’s Road marks the site of this stream, and the “Thomas à Becket” inn perpetuates a house of call for wayfarers; but the fame of all these things—of the heretics, the cutpurses, the varied thieves and beggars who were executed here, with their quarters stuck on poles by the ford by way of warning, is lost in the latter-day commonplace of the Old Kent Road.

Yet, at this place, which was something more than a mere water-splash, and the Golgotha of this road out of London, many met their end through being born a little in advance of their time. This was, and is yet, a criminal offence; but it is no longer capital. If, for example, the unfortunate John Penry, Welsh scholar and graduate alike of Oxford and Cambridge, religious reformer and prime mover in the “Martin Marprelate” tracts, directed against the Episcopal bench, had but been born fifty years later, he would have been honoured, instead of meeting here an ignominious end. He was hanged at St. Thomas à Watering, May 29, 1593, and was a victim to the vengeance of my lords spiritual in general, and of Archbishop Whitgift in particular.

V