of the mean streets. For Deptford, which the pilgrims reached, after
their early start, at "half-way pryme"--any hour, I suppose, between
six and nine--lies at the foot of Blackheath Hill above Greenwich:

Lo, Greenwich, ther many a shrewe is inne.

Deptford Bridge, the only remaining landmark of old time, by which
we cross Deptford Creek, had in the fourteenth century a hermitage at
its eastern end dedicated in honour of St Catherine of Alexandria, and
Mass was said there continually from Chaucer's day down to the
suppression in 1531, the king, Henry VIII., having previously helped
to repair the chapel.

It is at Deptford, as I say, that we begin to leave the mean streets,
for at the cross-roads we turn up Blackheath Hill, and though this is
not in all probability the ancient way, it is as near it as modern
conditions have allowed us. The old road, as far as can be made out,
ran farther to the east, quite alongside Greenwich Park, and not over
the middle of the Heath, as the modern road does. Blackheath is not
alluded to in Chaucer's poem, though it must have been famous at the
time he was writing, for in 1381 Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and their
company were there gathered. Perhaps the most famous spectacle,
however, that Blackheath has witnessed was not this abortive revolt
of the peasants nor the rising of Jack Cade in 1450, but the meeting
here in 1400 of King Henry IV. and the Emperor of Constantinople, who
came to England to ask for assistance against the ever-encroaching
Turk, then at the gates of Constantinople, which some fifty years
later was to fall into his hands. Blackheath, indeed, has always played
a considerable part in the history of southern England, partly because
it was the last great open space on the southern confines of London,