new front, and the business label of Achille Serre. This is the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe, one of the nest of Elizabethan singing-birds—

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":

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:—

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.

MERCERY LANE (Page 21)

The walls, of course, have been patched and repaired many times, but are, especially in the chancel, full of Roman bricks and Saxon workmanship. There are indications that some of the courses were actually laid by Roman hands; and, if this be so, imagination may carry us back far earlier than Augustine, to the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Gospel to Britain within a generation of the death of Our Lord.

On our way back to the town, if we step inside the Infirmary grounds, we shall see the ruins of St. Pancras, built, it is said, by Augustine on the foundations of an "Idol-temple" where Ethelbert worshipped before his conversion. Roman bricks abound, Roman pillars are built into the wall, and there are still the remains of an altar in a tiny chapel where probably Augustine officiated.

Now we may return to the "Chequers of the Hope", but not to its dormitory of a hundred beds. There is a fine frankness, far removed from modern municipal ambition, in the names of these old streets. Mercery Lane, Butchery Lane, Wincheap (Wine Market), and Beer-Cart Lane tell their own story. As we look down narrow, crooked Mercery Lane, with its overhanging fronts, struggling to survive "improvements", we not only recognize "the last enchantments of the Middle Age", but we ask what kind of mercery used to stock the stalls under the arcades which once sheltered the sidewalks? Chiefly, no doubt, cheap memorials or "signs" of the accomplished pilgrimage; the little leaden bottles or "ampulles", containing water from the well near Becket's tomb in the crypt, and the infinitesimal tincture therein of the martyr's blood; also leaden brooches representing his mitred head. "These signs", says Dean Stanley, "they fastened on their hats or caps, or hung from their necks, and thus were henceforth distinguished. As the pilgrims from Compostella brought home the scallop-shells which still lie on the seashores of Gallicia—as the 'Palmers' from Palestine brought the palm-branches still given at the Easter Pilgrimage—as the 'roamers' from Rome brought models of St. Peter's keys, or a 'Vernicle'—that is a pattern of Veronica's handkerchief—sewed on their caps—so the Canterbury Pilgrim had his hat thickset with a 'hundred ampulles' or with leaden brooches. Many of these are said to have been found in the beds of the Stour and the Thames, dropped as the vast concourse departed from Canterbury or reached London."

What processions, triumphal or funereal, have passed along Mercery Lane and crossed the little open space before the gateway to the Precincts! Two French kings, and nearly every English sovereign till Queen Anne, have been here. Louis VII of France as a pilgrim, John of France as the captive of the Black Prince, Henry II on his bitter pilgrimage of penance in 1174; Richard Cœur de Lion with his captive, William the Lion of Scotland, in 1189; Henry III with the Magna Carta Archbishop Stephen Langton at the Great Pardon of 1220. Here before the Cathedral gate halted for a moment the weeping cavalcade when they buried the Black Prince, in 1376—

No man bearing weapons was admitted to the Precincts after the murder of Becket; therefore the two emblematic riders who had accompanied the bier from Westgate, "one bearing the Prince's arms of England and France, the other the ostrich feathers—one to represent the Prince in his splendid suite as he rode in war, the other to represent him in black as he rode to tournaments"—had here to fall out of rank. Here were borne to their grave Henry IV and his Queen Joan of Navarre. Dean Stanley remarks that Henry IV as a child of ten was perhaps present as a mourner at the Black Prince's funeral, unknowing that he