ivered annually at Poissy, also ordaining that
they should be exempt from "toll, tax, and tallage" when journeying in his
realm. He himself was made a member of the brotherhood, after duly
spending a night in prayer at the tomb. It is said that, "because he was
very fearful of the water," the French king received a promise from the
Saint that neither he nor any other that crossed over from Dover to
Whitsand, should suffer any manner of loss or shipwreck. We are told that
Louis's piety was afterwards rewarded by the miraculous recovery, through
St. Thomas's intercession, of his son from a dangerous illness. Louis was
the first of a series of royal pilgrims to the shrine. Richard the Lion
Heart, set free from durance in Austria, walked thither from Sandwich to
return thanks to God and St. Thomas. After him all the English kings and
all the Continental potentates who visited the shores of Britain, paid due
homage, and doubtless made due offering, at the shrine of the sainted
archbishop. The crown of Scotland was presented in A.D. 1299 by Edward
Longshanks, and Henry V. gave thanks here after his victory over the
French at Agincourt. Emperors, both of the east and west, humbled
themselves before the relics of the famous English martyr. Henry VIII. and
the Emperor Charles V. came together at Whitsuntide, A.D. 1520, in more
than royal splendour, and with a great retinue of English and Spanish
noblemen, and worshipped at the shrine which had then reached the zenith
of its glory.

But though the stately stories of these royal progresses to the tomb of
the martyred archbishop strike the imagination vividly, yet the picture
presented by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" is in reality much more
impressive. For we find there all ranks of society alike making the
pilgrimage--the knight, the yeoman, the prioress, the monk, the friar, the
merchant, the scholar from Oxford, the lawyer, the squire, the tradesman,
the cook, the shipman, the physician, the clothier from Bath, the priest,
the miller, the reeve, the manciple, the seller of indulgences, and,
lastly, the poet himself--all these various sorts and conditions of men
and women we find journeying down to Canterbury in a sort of motley
caravan. Foreign pilgrims also came to the sacred shrine in great numbers.
A curious record, preserved in a Latin translation, of the journey of a
Bohemian noble, Leo von Rotzmital, who visited England in 1446, gives a
quaint description of Canterbury and