His shoes were cornèd broad before;
His ink-horn at his side he wore,
And in his hand he bore a book;--
Thus did this ancient poet look.


There is one other personage upon whom indeed the whole pilgrimage
depended of whom Chaucer says next to nothing, but we should do wrong
to forget him: I mean the "blissful martyr" himself--St Thomas of
Canterbury. In old days, certainly in Chaucer's, we should have been
reminded of him more than once on our way e'er we gained the Tabard.
For upon old London Bridge, the first stone bridge, built in the end of
the twelfth century, there stood in the very midst of it a chapel of
marvellous beauty with a crypt, from which by a flight of steps one
might reach the river, dedicated in honour of St Thomas Becket. This
chapel was built in memory of St Thomas by one Peter, priest of St Mary
Colechurch, where the martyr had been christened. It was this same
Peter who began to build the great bridge of stone, and when he died he
was buried in the chapel he had erected in the midst of it.

Such a wonder was, however, by no means the only memorial here, at the
very opening of the way, of the great and holy end and purpose of it.

Every schoolboy knows St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, but not all know
that the saint whose name that hospital bears is not the Apostle, but
England's Martyr. Now, until 1868 St Thomas's Hospital stood not in
Lambeth but in Southwark, upon the site of London Bridge Station.
[Footnote: The fact is still remembered in the name of St Thomas
Street, leading out of the Borough High Street on the east.] It seems
that within the precincts of St Mary Overy a house of Austin Canons,