me of Henry VIII., when it was suppressed, its
revenues amounted to nearly four hundred pounds a year. The king
immediately seized the house for his own pleasure, but later gave it
to Anne of Cleves. On her death it came back to the Crown, but James
I. exchanged it with the Cecil family for their mansion of Theobalds.
They in their turn parted with it to Sir Edward Darcy. Little remains
of the old house to-day, a gate-house of the time of Henry VII., and a
wing of the convent, now a farm-house; but considerable parts of the
extensive walls may be seen.

It may well have been when the bell of that convent was ringing the
Angelus that Chaucer and his pilgrims entered Dartford on that April
evening so long ago. As they came down the steep hill, before they
entered the town, they would pass an almshouse or hospital, midway
upon the hill, a leper-house in all likelihood, dedicated in honour of
St Mary Magdalen. Something of this remains to us in the building we
see, which, however, is later than the Reformation.

Nothing I think actually in the town can, as we see it, be said to
have been there when Chaucer went by except the very noble church. He
and his pilgrims looked and wondered, as we do still, upon the great
tower said to have been built by Gundulph as a fortress to hold the
ford, which, altered though it has been more than once, is still
something at which one can only admire. The upper part, however, dates
from the fifteenth century. Then there is the chancel restored in
1863, the north part of which is supposed to have been built in the
thirteenth century in honour of St Thomas himself, no doubt by the
pilgrims who, passing by on their way to Canterbury, were wont to
spend a night in Dartford town, and certainly to hear Mass in the
place of their sojourn e'er they set out in the earliest morning. The
screen is of the fourteenth century, as are the arcades of the nave
and the windows on the north, and these too Chaucer may have seen; but
all the monuments, some of them interesting and charming, are much
later, dating from Protestant days. Certain brasses, however, remain
from the fifteenth century, notably that of Richard Martyn and his
wife (1402), that of Agnes Molyngton (1454), and that of Joan Rothele
(1464). There is, too, a painting of St George and the Dragon at the
end of the south chancel chapel, behind the organ.

Within the town one or two houses remain, perhaps in their
foundations, from the fifteenth