Thomas of Canterbury was to be a saint no longer, and his name and
memory were to be wiped out. The remains were not burned, but
throughout the land every statue, wall-painting, and window to the
said Thomas Becket was rigorously searched out and destroyed, and from
every record his name was carefully erased. And so it came about that
the year 1538 saw the last pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas the
Martyr.

A growing incredulity had prepared the way for this wave of
iconoclasm, and the shrine once destroyed ended for ever this first
phase of the Canterbury pilgrimages. It might have been truly thought,
if anyone ever gave a moment to such speculations a century ago, when
Englishmen cared little for the landmarks of their island story, that
the last pilgrim who would ever wend his way along the old road to
Canterbury had died in the sixteenth century, and yet how profoundly
untrue would that impression have been in the light of the new
enthusiasm for the site of the shrine! A considerable literature on
the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester has already sprung up, and this
little book is itself a souvenir for the pilgrim to carry away as
evidence of the journey he has made, provided he cares to write
inside the cover his name, the date of his visit, and the two words
"at Canterbury."

Now, I do not disguise the fact that many of the twentieth-century
pilgrims are not possessed of the true spirit of the devotee, and
instead of approaching the object of their journey by the old-time
way, along the beautiful hills of Surrey and Kent, they use the iron
road which rushes them all unprepared into the city of the
saint-martyr. But who will maintain that all those who formed the
motley throng of the medieval pilgrimages came with their minds