lk ridge; and when the
great lords under the Conqueror and Rufus, Richard de Tonebrige and
William de Warenne, built their rival castles, they built them to
command the highway; so did Henry of Blois build his castle at Farnham;
and so was Guildford Castle built. Of warfare later than Norman days,
the Way saw nearly all that went through Surrey. Simon de Montfort and
his barons rode fast by the ridge the year before Lewes; they lay at
Reading on the twenty-ninth of June, and on the first of July at
Reigate. In the wars of the Parliament, Farnham west of the Way saw the
siege of an hour; Lord Holland led his little band from Dorking to
Reigate and fled back again. Last of the echoes of Stuart battles,
Monmouth, after Sedgmoor, was driven through Farnham to lodge for one
night of misery and fear at Abbot's Hospital in Guildford.

But the Way has another meaning and other memories. It is as the
Pilgrims' Way that it is best known, and as the Pilgrims' Way that it
has been written about and tracked and traced and surrounded with legend
and story and the haunting melancholy of an old road once used and now
half forgotten. The Pilgrims' Way is more than the old Way, for it runs
by more than one road. The old Way took its followers along the ridge or
just under it, high in the sun and wind where the traders and fighters
could see their route clear above the thick woods of the Weald. The
Pilgrims' Way lies as often on the low ground as on the hill. But it
follows the line of the chalk ridge, and the parallel roads, though here
and there it would be difficult to choose between them as to which was
most used by travellers, have become vaguely named the Pilgrims' Way,
and as the Pilgrims' Way they remain.

[Illustration: _Along the Chalk Ridge.--Leith Hill in the Distance._]

The Way became the Pilgrims' Way in 1174, four years after Thomas a
Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. His tomb in the Cathedral
became the second shrine in Christendom, and pilgrims came to it along
the old trackway through Surrey, from Farnham east of the Hog's Back
along the hills to Canterbury in Kent. Henry the Second, one of the
earliest pilgrims of all, made his act of repentance a few days after
landing at Southampton from France, on February 8, 1174. Or so legend
relates, and adds that he swore to walk barefoot; history is less
precise. After Henry the stream of devotees multiplied. Pilgrims
landed, like Henry, at Southampton, or between