It is meet and right that this pilgrimage should be begun with thoughts
of St Thomas, and especially of what we owe to him, for the first few
miles of the way upon what we need not doubt was of old the Pilgrims'
road, is anything but uplifting, crowded though it be with memories,
most of them of course far later than the Canterbury pilgrimage. As you
go down the Borough High Street, for Southwark is of course the old
_borgo_ of London, and all the depressing ugliness of modern life, it
is not of anything so serene as that great poet of the fourteenth
century, the father of English poetry, that you think, but of one who
nevertheless, in the characteristic nationalism of his art, in his
humanity and love of his fellow-men, was only second to Chaucer, and in
his compassion for the poor and lowly only second to St Thomas: I mean
Charles Dickens. No one certainly can pass the site of the Marshalsea
Prison without recalling that solemn and haunting description in the
preface to "Little Dorrit": "Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place,
turning out of Angel Court leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on
the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its
narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at
all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will
look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the
crowding ghosts of many miserable years."

It is still of Dickens most of us will think in passing St George's
Church, for was it not there that Little Dorrit was christened and
married, and was it not in the vestry there she slept with the burial-
book for a pillow? But St George's has other memories too, for it was
there that Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who staunchly refused the
oath of supremacy to Elizabeth, was buried at midnight after his death
in the Marshalsea, on September 5th, 1569. There too General Monk was
married to Anne Clarges.

These memories, for the most part so unhappy, have, however, nothing to
do with the Pilgrims' Way. No memory of that remains at all amid all
the dismal wretchedness of to-day, until one comes to the "Thomas a
Becket" public-house at the corner of Albany Road. This was the site of
the "watering of Saint Thomas":

A-morwe, whan that day bigan to springe,
Up roes our host, and was our aller cok,
And gadrede us togirde, alle in a flok,
And forth we riden, a litel more than