in 1215, had taken Rochester and notably discomfited the rascal
Barony, they immediately invited Louis of France to assist them. He
set sail with some seven hundred vessels, landed at Sandwich, and
retook Rochester, which had been so badly damaged that it could not
defend itself. Forty-eight years later, in 1264, Henry III. being
king, Simon de Montfort coming into Kent, burnt the wooden bridge
over the Medway which was too strongly held by the loyal inhabitants
of Rochester for him to capture, took the city by storm, sacked the
Cathedral and the Priory, and laid siege to the Castle. He failed, and
Lewes could not give him what Rochester had denied.

Rochester Castle, which hitherto only famine had been able to open,
was to fall at last to Wat Tyler and his Peasants in 1381, with the
help of the people of the city. After that culminating misery of the
fourteenth century, which was so full of miseries, Rochester plays
little part in history for many years. She appears again to take part
in innumerable pageants, such as that in which Henry VIII. in 1540,
and on New Year's day, first saw Anne of Cleves and was astonished at
her little beauty, or that which greeted Elizabeth in 1573, or that
which greeted Charles I. and his bride after their wedding at
Canterbury, or that which shouted for the Merry Monarch, when Charles
II. rode down the High Street in 1660, after his landing at Dover. It
was his brother, unfortunate and unhappy, who came in without any
herald and stole away in the night of December 19, 1688, having
foregone a throne and lost a kingdom.

All these, sieges or pageants, however, what are they but a tale that
is told. There remains, in some sort at least, the Cathedral. This is
the oldest thing in Rochester and the most lasting. It was founded in
the end of the sixth century as we have seen, and its first Bishop