At Ospringe I left the great road to visit Davington and to sleep at Faversham.  The long spring day was already drawing in when I came into Davington, as delightful and charming a little place as is to be found anywhere along the great road.  Upon a hill-top there perhaps the Romans had a temple or a villa, at any rate they called the place Durolevum, and so it stands in the Antonine Itinerary.  There is evidence, too, that the site was not abandoned when with the failure of their administration and the final departure of the Legions, there went down the long roads, our youth and hope.  Where the present church stands, in part a Norman building, there was probably a Saxon Chapel.  Then in 1153 came Fulke de Newenham and founded here and built a Benedictine nunnery in honour of St Mary Magdalen.  That the house was never richly endowed nor large at all, we may know from that name it had—­the house of the poor nuns of Davington.  We know, however, very little about them or it, but its poverty did not save it of course at the dissolution.  The Priory was then turned into a manor house, and this in part remains so that we find there a part of the cloisters of the time of Edward I., and other remains of Edward III.’s time.  Then in Elizabeth’s day the house seems to have been practically rebuilt.  As for the little church, it owes all it is to-day to its late owner and historian, Mr Willement, and though it is not in itself of very great interest it serves as a memorial of his enthusiasm and love.

Davington is less than a mile out of the town of Faversham, and therefore it was not quite dark when I made my way into that famous place.  Faversham must always have been an important place from its position with regard to the great road.  We have seen how the source of the greatness of Rochester lay in its position upon the Watling Street where that great highway crossed the Medway.  Faversham has half Rochester’s fortune, for it stands where the road touches an arm or creek of the Swale, that important navigable waterway, an arm of the sea which separates Sheppey from the mainland.

The Swale there served the road and made of Faversham a port, but the road did not cross it and therefore the Swale, unlike the Medway, was never an obstacle or a defence.  Thus Faversham never became a great fortress like Rochester; it was a port, and as it happened a Royal Villa, where so long ago as 930 Athelstan held his witan.  Its fate, however, after the Conquest, was to be more glorious.  In 1147 Stephen and his wife, Matilda, founded an abbey of Benedictine monks here at Faversham in honour of Our Lord, and known as St Saviours, upon land she had obtained from William of Ypres, Stephen’s favourite captain, in exchange for her manor of Littlechurch in this county.  At the end of April 1152 she fell sick at Hedingham Castle in Essex, and dying there three days later, was buried in the abbey church at Faversham.  In August of the following year her eldest son, Eustace,