ut St. Mary's Chapel fell in
1730. It was moved to the Market Place; afterwards in 1854, to the open
space where it now stands opposite the Court-house; on the very spot,
they say, where there was once an Anglo-Saxon palace. The railing which
surrounds it has been described as "of Saxon-like design," and perhaps
that should suffice. On the pedestal which bears up the Stone are the
names of the kings who were crowned on it: Edward the Elder, Ethelstan,
Edmund, Edred, Edwig, Edward the Martyr, and Ethelred the Unready. What
is the Kings' Stone? A morasteen, the archaeologists tell you; one of a
circle of stones, on which the chief sat in council with his great men;
the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs would have been Arch-Druids,
perhaps, or pontiff kings, acclaimed by ancient Britons centuries before
the Romans set foot in Kent.

[Illustration: _Kingston Bridge._]

Kingston church, if its architecture is confused and much of it modern,
has an imposing solemnity about it, and it contains some strange
memorials. One is a stone fragment, on which the grateful survivor of an
accident and a ruin has painted the words "Life Preserved." She was
Hester Hammerton, daughter of Abram Hammerton, sexton of the church, and
in 1729 she was helping her father to dig a grave in the churchyard
near the Saxon chapel of St. Mary. They dug too near the chapel
foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed,
almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a
piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another
memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally
enough--"Ten children in one grave--a dreadful sight"; but the verse is
unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his
wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice
Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the
chancel (but I did not find it), praises Mrs. Mary Morton, daughter of
the wife of Robert Honeywood, of Charinge, Kent; she was "the Wonder of
her Sex and this Age, for she liv'd to see near 400 issued from her
Loynes." So Aubrey describes it, and so, with variations, the local
historian. Mrs. Mary Morton died in 1620.

Aubrey has another record of the giants of those days. He had heard of
one Wiltshire of the Feathers Inn at Kingston, who was a great thrower.
He would stand in the churchyard and throw a stone over the weathercoc