pas
Unto the watering of seint Thomas.

The "watering of St Thomas" was a spring dedicated to St Thomas, and
it came to be the first halting-place of the pilgrims. It is still
remembered in the name of St Thomas's Road close by, and not
inappropriately in the tavern which bears St Thomas's name. It was
here that the immortal tales were begun:

And there our host bigan his hors areste,
And seyde; Lordinges, herkneth, if yow leste.
Ye woot your forward, and it yow recorde
If even-song and morwe-song acorde,
Lat see now who shal telle the firste tale....

No memory of the pilgrims would seem to remain at all in the road
after St Thomas's watering until we come to Deptford. The "Knight's
Tale" and the "Miller's Tale" have filled, and one would think more
than filled that short three miles of road, till in the Reve's
Prologue the host began "to spake as loudly as a king...."

Sey forth thy tale and tarie nat the tyme,
Lo, Depeford! and it is half-way pryme.

Nothing more lugubrious is to be found to-day in the whole length of
the old road than Deptford; but it is there that we begin to be free
of the mean streets. For Deptford, which the pilgrims reached, after
their early start, at "half-way pryme"--any hour, I suppose, between
six and nine--lies at the foot of Blackheath Hill above Greenwich:

Lo, Greenwich, ther many a shrewe is inne.

Deptford Bridge, the only remaining landmark of old time, by which
we cross Deptford Creek, had in the fourteenth century a hermitage at
its eastern end dedicated in honour of St Catherine of Alexandria, and
Mass was said there continually from Chaucer's day down to the
suppression in 1531, the king, Henry VIII., having previously helped
to repair the chapel.

It is at Deptford, as I say, that we begin to leave the mean streets,
for at the cross-roads we turn up Blackheath Hill, and though this is
not in all probability the ancient way, it is as near it as modern
conditions have allowed us. The old road, as far as can be made out,
ran farther to the east, quite alongside Greenwich Park, and not over
the middle of the Heath, as the modern road does. Blackheath is not
alluded to in Chaucer's poem, though it must have been famous at the
time he was writing, for in 1381 Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and their
company were there gathered. Perhaps the most famous spectacle,
however, that Blackheath has witne