“Mad Tom’s corner!” That name, it is needless to say I hope, has no reference to the great archbishop or the pilgrimage.  Mad Tom’s corner, whence we get our first view of Canterbury, is intimately connected with the gate close by, called Courtenay’s gate, and refers to the exploits of a mad Cornishman who came to Kent and especially to Canterbury about 1832, and presently proclaimed himself to be the New Messiah and showed to his deluded disciples the sacred stigmata in his hands and feet.  It was the custom of these unhappy people to meet in the woods of the Blean, and it is said one may still see their names cut upon the trees.  Mad Tom, who, besides proclaiming himself to be the Messiah, claimed also to be the heir to the earldom of Devon, and called himself Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, the Hon. Sydney Percy, Count Moses Rothschild and Squire Thompson, to say nothing of Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem, was a madman, with a method in his madness and a certain reasonable truth behind his absurdities.  His mission was, he said, to restore the land to the people, to take it away, that is to say, from the great rascal families of the sixteenth century, the Russells, Cavendishes and so forth, who had appeared like vermin to feed upon the dead body of the Church, to gorge themselves upon her lands and to lord it in her Abbeys and Priories.  In the minds of these people Tom was not only mad but dangerous.  Mad he certainly was, for all his dreams.  Nevertheless he stood for Canterbury in the year of the Reform Bill and polled 275 votes, and in the following year he started a paper called the Lion which ran to eighteen numbers.  Five years later, however, he had become such a nuisance that a warrant was safely issued against him “on the charge of enticing away the labourers of a farmer.”  Tom shot one of the constables who served the warrant, and on the afternoon of the last morning of May in 1838, two companies of the 45th regiment were marched out of Canterbury to take him.  They found him here in Blean Wood, surrounded by his followers.  He, however, was a man of action, and he promptly shot the officer in command.  The soldiers then began to fire, and next minute were charging with fixed bayonets.  Tom and eight of his followers were killed, and three more died a few days later.

One may well ask what can have induced the stolid Kentish folk to follow so wild a Celt as this.  We shall probably find the answer in the fact that Tom was exceedingly handsome in an Italian way, having “an extraordinary resemblance to the usual Italian type of the Saviour.”  Also, without doubt, he voiced, though inanely, the innate resentment of the English peasant against the great sixteenth century robber families and their sycophants.  These great families, now on their last legs and about to be torn in pieces by a host, financial and disgusting, without creed or nationality, seven times worse than they, laughed at Tom.  They do not laugh at those who,