road is a hospital of a few old men, one of whom runs out as soon as
they perceive any horseman approaching; he sprinkles his holy water
and presently offers the upper part of a shoe bound with an iron hoof
on which is a piece of glass resembling a precious stone. Those that
kiss it give some small coin.... Gratian rode on my left hand, next to
the hospital, he was covered with water; however he endured that. When
the shoe was stretched out, he asked the man what he wanted. He said
that it was the shoe of St Thomas. On that my friend was angered and
turning to me he said, 'What, do these brutes imagine that we must
kiss every good man's shoe? Why, by the same rule, they would offer
his spittle to be kissed or other bodily excrements.' I pitied the old
man, and by the gift of a small coin I comforted his trouble."

It is easy to see that we are there in the modern world on the very
eve of the Reformation. The unmannerly Gratian was John Colet to be
the Dean of St Paul's, hardly defended from the charge of heresy by
old Archbishop Wareham. And like so many of his kidney he seems to
have forgotten the scripture upon which, as he would have asserted,
his whole philosophy and action was based,--the scripture I mean which
speaks of One, "the lachet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop
down and unloose." We shall not have the opportunity of being so
proud and impatient as Dean Colet of unhappy memory, for no shoe,
alas, of St Thomas or any other saint will be offered for our
veneration in the Hospital of St Nicholas at Harbledown to-day. Yet
not for this should we pass it by, for of all places upon the road, it
best of all conserves the memory of those far away days when Chaucer
came by, and half-way up the hill rested awhile and prayed, e'er from
the summit he looked down upon Canterbury.

The Hospital of the Forest or Wood of Blean, dedicated in honour of St