road is a hospital of a few old men, one of whom runs out as soon as they perceive any horseman approaching; he sprinkles his holy water and presently offers the upper part of a shoe bound with an iron hoof on which is a piece of glass resembling a precious stone.  Those that kiss it give some small coin....  Gratian rode on my left hand, next to the hospital, he was covered with water; however he endured that.  When the shoe was stretched out, he asked the man what he wanted.  He said that it was the shoe of St Thomas.  On that my friend was angered and turning to me he said, ’What, do these brutes imagine that we must kiss every good man’s shoe?  Why, by the same rule, they would offer his spittle to be kissed or other bodily excrements.’  I pitied the old man, and by the gift of a small coin I comforted his trouble.”

It is easy to see that we are there in the modern world on the very eve of the Reformation.  The unmannerly Gratian was John Colet to be the Dean of St Paul’s, hardly defended from the charge of heresy by old Archbishop Wareham.  And like so many of his kidney he seems to have forgotten the scripture upon which, as he would have asserted, his whole philosophy and action was based,—­the scripture I mean which speaks of One, “the lachet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.”  We shall not have the opportunity of being so proud and impatient as Dean Colet of unhappy memory, for no shoe, alas, of St Thomas or any other saint will be offered for our veneration in the Hospital of St Nicholas at Harbledown to-day.  Yet not for this should we pass it by, for of all places upon the road, it best of all conserves the memory of those far away days when Chaucer came by, and half-way up the hill rested awhile and prayed, e’er from the summit he looked down upon Canterbury.

The Hospital of the Forest or Wood of Blean, dedicated in honour of St Nicholas, lies upon the southern and western side of the last hill before the western gate of the city.  It was founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc, and no doubt for a time served as a hospital for Lepers, but it was soon appropriated for the use of the sick and wayfarers generally, and though nothing save the chapel remains to us from Lanfranc’s day, the whole place is so full of interest that no one should pass it by.

The chapel became in time the parish church of this little place on the hillside which grew up about the hospital which itself was probably placed here on account of the spring of water known as St Thomas’s or the Black Prince’s well, south and west of the building.  Most of the chapel is of Norman building, the western doorway for instance, the pillars and round arches on the north of the nave dating from Lanfranc’s time.  But the south side is later, of the thirteenth century, and the font and choir are later still, being Perpendicular fifteenth century work.

The hospital, however, as we see it, is a rebuilding of the seventeenth century, but it was fundamentally restored in the nineteenth.  In the “Frater Hall,” however, are some interesting remains of the old house, among them a fine collection of mazers and two bowls of maple wood, in one of which lies perhaps the very crystal which Erasmus saw, and which was set in the upper leather of the shoe of St Thomas.