n the end of
the twelfth century, there stood in the very midst of it a chapel of
marvellous beauty with a crypt, from which by a flight of steps one
might reach the river, dedicated in honour of St Thomas Becket. This
chapel was built in memory of St Thomas by one Peter, priest of St Mary
Colechurch, where the martyr had been christened. It was this same
Peter who began to build the great bridge of stone, and when he died he
was buried in the chapel he had erected in the midst of it.

Such a wonder was, however, by no means the only memorial here, at the
very opening of the way, of the great and holy end and purpose of it.

Every schoolboy knows St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, but not all know
that the saint whose name that hospital bears is not the Apostle, but
England's Martyr. Now, until 1868 St Thomas's Hospital stood not in
Lambeth but in Southwark, upon the site of London Bridge Station.
[Footnote: The fact is still remembered in the name of St Thomas
Street, leading out of the Borough High Street on the east.] It seems
that within the precincts of St Mary Overy a house of Austin Canons,
now the Anglican Cathedral of St Saviour, Southwark, was a hospital for
the sick and poor founded by St Thomas, which after his beatification
was dedicated in his honour. But in the first years of the thirteenth
century, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, rebuilt the little
house in a healthier situation--_ubi aqua est uberior et aer est
melior_--where the water was purer and the air better, and this new
house, finished in 1215, of course also bore the name of St Thomas of
Canterbury. That the hospital fulfilled its useful purpose we know from
a petition which it presented to Pope Innocent VI., in 1357, wherein it
was stated that so many sick and poor resorted to it that it could not
support its charges. Not quite two hundred years later, in 1539, a few
days before the feast of St Thomas upon December 29, it was surrendered
to King Henry VIII., the infamous Layton having been its visitor. From
the king it was bought by the City of London, a rare comment upon its
suppression, and so notoriously useful was it that Edward VI. was
compelled to refound it, and therefore in some sort it still remains to
us. It is curious to note that, ages before the hospital came to
Lambeth, St Thomas was at home there, for he had a statue upon the
Lollards' Tower, and it was the custom of the watermen to doff their
caps to it as they rowed by.