now the Anglican Cathedral of St Saviour, Southwark, was a hospital for
the sick and poor founded by St Thomas, which after his beatification
was dedicated in his honour. But in the first years of the thirteenth
century, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, rebuilt the little
house in a healthier situation--_ubi aqua est uberior et aer est
melior_--where the water was purer and the air better, and this new
house, finished in 1215, of course also bore the name of St Thomas of
Canterbury. That the hospital fulfilled its useful purpose we know from
a petition which it presented to Pope Innocent VI., in 1357, wherein it
was stated that so many sick and poor resorted to it that it could not
support its charges. Not quite two hundred years later, in 1539, a few
days before the feast of St Thomas upon December 29, it was surrendered
to King Henry VIII., the infamous Layton having been its visitor. From
the king it was bought by the City of London, a rare comment upon its
suppression, and so notoriously useful was it that Edward VI. was
compelled to refound it, and therefore in some sort it still remains to
us. It is curious to note that, ages before the hospital came to
Lambeth, St Thomas was at home there, for he had a statue upon the
Lollards' Tower, and it was the custom of the watermen to doff their
caps to it as they rowed by.

It is meet and right that this pilgrimage should be begun with thoughts
of St Thomas, and especially of what we owe to him, for the first few
miles of the way upon what we need not doubt was of old the Pilgrims'
road, is anything but uplifting, crowded though it be with memories,
most of them of course far later than the Canterbury pilgrimage. As you
go down the Borough High Street, for Southwark is of course the old
_borgo_ of London, and all the depressing ugliness of modern life, it
is not of anything so serene as that great poet of the fourteenth
century, the father of English poetry, that you think, but of one who