the village of Dunkirk, and it may well be that this and not
the tiny hamlet nearly a mile to the south of the great Way, was
Chaucer's Boghton under Blee, where the Canon and his yeoman overtook
the "joly companye," and rode in with them to Canterbury. And it is
there at Mad Tom's corner that we first catch sight of the glorious
city of St Thomas.

"Mad Tom's corner!" That name, it is needless to say I hope, has no
reference to the great archbishop or the pilgrimage. Mad Tom's corner,
whence we get our first view of Canterbury, is intimately connected
with the gate close by, called Courtenay's gate, and refers to the
exploits of a mad Cornishman who came to Kent and especially to
Canterbury about 1832, and presently proclaimed himself to be the New
Messiah and showed to his deluded disciples the sacred stigmata in his
hands and feet. It was the custom of these unhappy people to meet in
the woods of the Blean, and it is said one may still see their names
cut upon the trees. Mad Tom, who, besides proclaiming himself to be
the Messiah, claimed also to be the heir to the earldom of Devon, and
called himself Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, the Hon. Sydney
Percy, Count Moses Rothschild and Squire Thompson, to say nothing of
Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem, was a madman, with a method in
his madness and a certain reasonable truth behind his absurdities. His
mission was, he said, to restore the land to the people, to take it
away, that is to say, from the great rascal families of the sixteenth
century, the Russells, Cavendishes and so forth, who had appeared like
vermin to feed upon the dead body of the Church, to gorge themselves
upon her lands and to lord it in her Abbeys and Priories. In the minds
of these people Tom was not only mad but dangerous. Mad he certainly
was, for all his dreams. Nevertheless he stood for Canterbury in the
year of the Reform Bill and polled 275 votes, and in the following
year he started a paper called the _Lion_ which ran to eighteen
numbers. Five years later, however, he had become such a nuisance
that a warrant was safely issued against him "on the charge of
enticing away the labourers of a farmer." Tom shot one of the
constables who served the warrant, and on the afternoon of the last
morning of May in 1838, two companies of the 45th regiment were
marched out of Canterbury to take him. They found him here in Blean
Wood, surrounded by his followers. He, however, was a man of actio