The older part of the parish of Boughton is South Street, where, however, nothing now remains older than the sixteenth century at the earliest.  Here, however, was anciently a wayside chapel to the south of the road where now Holy Lane turns out of it.  About a mile, or rather less, to the south, and clean off the road, stands on the crest of a steep, though not a high hill, the lovely village of Boughton under Blee, which, curiously enough, if we consider what is omitted, is mentioned by Chaucer,

When ended was the lyf of seint Cecyle,
Er we had riden fully fyve myle,
At Boghton under Blee us gan atake
A man, that clothed was in clothes blake,
And undernethe he hadde a whyt surplys.... 
It semed he had priked myles three.

This man who, with his yeoman, overtakes the pilgrims, is the rich canon, the alchemist who could pave with gold “all the road to Canterbury town.”  He is said to have already ridden three miles, but whence he had come it is impossible to say.  That the pilgrims who had ridden not quite five miles had come from Ospringe might seem certain, and since they were overtaken by the Canon it is possible that he was coming from Faversham.  It is, however, more important to explain, if we can, what the pilgrims were doing more than a mile off the true Way at Boughton under Blean.  The church of SS.  Peter and Paul is of some interest and of considerable beauty it is true, but so far as we may know there was no shrine there of sufficient importance to draw the pilgrims from the road, as at Faversham, nor one might think would they be easily diverted from the goal of their journey almost within reach.  All sorts of routes have been given here, one going so far as to lead the pilgrims south and east quite off the Watling Street and across the old green road, the Pilgrims Way from Winchester, to enter Canterbury at last by the South Gate.  This is absurd.  No good explanation has yet been offered, but perhaps we may be near the truth if we suggest that Chaucer and his pilgrims never visited Boughton under Blean and the church of SS.  Peter and Paul at all.  After all we have in Chaucer’s text (Frag.  G. Canon’s Yeoman Prologue) merely the name, and that in the old form, Boghton under Blee.  All this wild woodland and forest country which lies on a great piece of high ground stretching north-east and south-west across the Way parallel with the valley of the Great Stour, between Faversham and Canterbury, hiding the one from the other, was known as the Blean.  It is equally certain that the village of Dunkirk was known as Boughton until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a set of squatters took possession of the ground, then extra parochial as of a “free-port” from which no one could dislodge them.  The district including the greater part of the forest was afterwards erected into a separate villa called the “villa of Dunkirk.”  Now Boughton Hill rises abruptly beyond the village of Dunkirk, and it may well be that this and not the tiny hamlet nearly a mile to the south of the great Way, was Chaucer’s Boghton under Blee, where the Canon and his yeoman overtook the “joly companye,” and rode in with them to Canterbury.  And it is there at Mad Tom’s corner that we first catch sight of the glorious city of St Thomas.