The situation of Dartford is thus very picturesque, and as we might suppose its main street is the old Roman highway that the pilgrims used.  This descends the West Hill steeply after passing the Priory, or as it is now called the Place House, the first religious house which Dartford could boast that the pilgrims would see.  In Chaucer’s day this was a new foundation, Edward III., in 1355, having established here a convent of Augustinian nuns dedicated in honour of Our Lady and St Margaret.  The house became extremely popular with the great Kentish families, for it was not only very richly endowed, but always governed by a prioress of noble birth, Princess Bridget, youngest daughter of Edward IV., at one time holding the office, as later did Lady Jane Scrope and Lady Margaret Beaumont:  all are buried within.  In the miserable time of Henry VIII., when it was suppressed, its revenues amounted to nearly four hundred pounds a year.  The king immediately seized the house for his own pleasure, but later gave it to Anne of Cleves.  On her death it came back to the Crown, but James I. exchanged it with the Cecil family for their mansion of Theobalds.  They in their turn parted with it to Sir Edward Darcy.  Little remains of the old house to-day, a gate-house of the time of Henry VII., and a wing of the convent, now a farm-house; but considerable parts of the extensive walls may be seen.

It may well have been when the bell of that convent was ringing the Angelus that Chaucer and his pilgrims entered Dartford on that April evening so long ago.  As they came down the steep hill, before they entered the town, they would pass an almshouse or hospital, midway upon the hill, a leper-house in all likelihood, dedicated in honour of St Mary Magdalen.  Something of this remains to us in the building we see, which, however, is later than the Reformation.

Nothing I think actually in the town can, as we see it, be said to have been there when Chaucer went by except the very noble church.  He and his pilgrims looked and wondered, as we do still, upon the great tower said to have been built by Gundulph as a fortress to hold the ford, which, altered though it has been more than once, is still something at which one can only admire.  The upper part, however, dates from the fifteenth century.  Then there is the chancel restored in 1863, the north part of which is supposed to have been built in the thirteenth century in honour of St Thomas himself, no doubt by the pilgrims who, passing by on their way to Canterbury, were wont to spend a night in Dartford town, and certainly to hear Mass in the place of their sojourn e’er they set out in the earliest morning.  The screen is of the fourteenth century, as are the arcades of the nave and the windows on the north, and these too Chaucer may have seen; but all the monuments, some of them interesting and charming, are much later, dating from Protestant days.  Certain brasses, however, remain from the fifteenth century, notably that of Richard Martyn and his wife (1402), that of Agnes Molyngton (1454), and that of Joan Rothele (1464).  There is, too, a painting of St George and the Dragon at the end of the south chancel chapel, behind the organ.