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 was that St Justus who had come with St Augustine from the monastery of St Andrew on the Coelian Hill in Rome, the monastery we now know by the name of the man who sent them, St Gregory the Great.  St Augustine and St Justus were not, however, at first received with enthusiasm in Rochester.  Indeed, it is said that fish tails were hung to their habits as they went through the city and that in consequence the people of the diocese of Rochester were ever after born with tails, and were thus known as caudati or caudiferi, while upon the Continent this beastly appellation was even till our fathers’ time applied to all English people.

What the Cathedral suffered in the centuries between its foundation and the Norman Conquest, we shall never rightly know.  That it was ravaged, burnt and sacked by the Danes is certain and it seems even at the time of the Norman Conquest to have scarcely recovered itself.  Indeed, Pepys, who was in Rochester in 1661, tells us that he found the western doors of the church still “covered with the skins of Danes.”  Nor did it fare much better when Odo of Bayeaux was lord.  But when Gundulph, the associate of the good and great Lanfranc, became bishop in 1077, the Cathedral was almost entirely re-established and the Priory which served it rebuilt.  Gundulph, however, would have nothing to do with the seculars who had hitherto served the great church.  He established Benedictine monks in their place and Ernulph, Prior of Canterbury, where Lanfranc had done the same, succeeded him.

Of the Saxon church which St Justus built, he and his successors, nothing remains but the foundations discovered in 1888.  This church, which was very small, about forty-two feet long by twenty-eight feet in breadth, was furnished with an apse, but had neither aisles nor transepts.