No one can ever have come, whether by the Pilgrims’ Road or another, into the little hill-village of Chilham, into the piazza there, which is an acropolis, without delight.  It is one of the surprises of England, a place at once so little, so charming and so unexpected that it is extraordinary it is not more famous.  It stands at a point where more than one little valley breaks down into the steep valley of the Stour and every way to it is up hill, under what might seem to be old ramparts crowned now with cottages and houses, till suddenly you find yourself at the top in a large piazza or square closed at the end by the church, at the other by the castle, and on both sides by old lines of houses; really a walled place.

The church dedicated in honour of Our Lady is of some antiquity in the main and older parts, a work of the fourteenth century replacing doubtless Roman, Saxon and Norman buildings, but with later additions, too, of the Perpendicular time in the clerestory, for instance, and with much modern work in the chancel.  Of old the place belonged to the alien Priory of Throwley in this county, itself a cell of the Abbey of St Omer, in Artois; but when these alien houses were suppressed, Chilham like Throwley itself went to the new house of Syon, founded by the King.  To-day, apart from the English beauty of the church, not a work of art but of history, its chief interest lies in its monuments, some strangely monstrous, of the Digges family—­Sir Dudley Digges bought Chilham at the beginning of the seventeenth century—­the Colebrooks, who followed the Digges in 1751 and a Fogg and a Woldman, the latter holding Chilham until 1860.  There is little to be said of these monuments save that they are none of them in very good taste, the more interesting being those to Lady Digges, and a member of the Fogg family, both of the early seventeenth century, in which the Purbeck has been covered with a charming arabesque and diapered pattern in relief.

[Illustration:  CHILHAM]

But it was not the church, beautiful though I found it on that afternoon of spring, that made me linger in Chilham, but rather the castle, which occupies the site of a Roman camp; and perhaps of what a camp?  It may be that it was here Caesar lay on the first night of his resumed march after the disaster of the ships.  It may be that it was here, after all, that Quintus Laberius fell, and that here he was buried so that the ancient earthwork known as Julaber’s Grave, though certainly far older than Caesar, was in fact used as the tomb of the hero whose immortality Caesar insured by naming him in his Commentaries.  Who knows?  If Julaber is not a corruption of Laberius as the old antiquaries asserted, and as the people here about believe, one likes to think it might be, for no other explanation of this strange name is forthcoming.