interested in the
Muscovy trade, and treasurer of the Virginia Company (1625). So I came
back to Dartford and on the next day set out once more for Canterbury.

One leaves Dartford, on the Pilgrim's Road, with a certain regret, to
find oneself, at the top of the East Hill, face to face with a problem
of the road. For there on the hill-top the road forks; to the left
runs the greater way of the two, into Gravesend; straight on lies a
lane which after a couple of miles suddenly turns southward to
Betsham, where the direct way is continued by a footpath across
Swanscombe Park. Which of these ways was I to follow? That question
was hard to answer, because the road through Gravesend is full of
interest, while the direct way is almost barren all the way to
Rochester. There can be little doubt, too, that many of the pilgrims
on the way to Canterbury did pass through Gravesend, to which town
doubtless many also travelled from London by water, while others
landed there from Essex and East Anglia. But the lane which is the
straight way and its continuation in the footpath across Swanscombe
Park is undoubtedly the line of the Roman road and in all probability
the route of Chaucer.

Face to face with these considerations, being English, I decided upon
a compromise. I determined to follow the Gravesend road so far as
Northfleet, chiefly for the sake of Stone, and there by a road running
south-east to come into the Roman highway again, two miles or so east
of Swanscombe Park, whence I should have a practically straight road
into Rochester.

I say I chose this route chiefly for the sake of seeing Stone. This
little place, some two miles and a half from Dartford, has one of the
loveliest churches in all England, to say nothing of a castellated
manor house known as Stone Castle. "It is a common jest," says
Reginald Scot, writing in the time of Elizabeth, "It is a common jest
among the watermen of the Thames to show the parish church of Stone to
their passengers, calling the same by the name of the 'Lanterne of
Kent'; affirming, and that not untruly, that the said church is as
light (meaning in weight not in brightness) at midnight as at
noonday." The church, indeed, dedicated in honour of Our Lady is a
very beautiful and extraordinarily interesting building of the end of
the thirteenth century, in the same style as the practically
contemporary work in Westminster Abbey and, according to the architect
and historian, G.E. Street, who