R IV.

THE DIOCESE AND BISHOPS.

According to a curious legend,[15] widely circulated in the Middle Ages,
the men of Rochester did not accord a patient hearing to St. Augustine
when he first came thither to preach the Gospel. They, instead, used him
rudely, and in mockery threw at him and hung on his dress a lot of
fish-tails. In anger the saint prayed to God to avenge him on his
persecutors and "the Lord smote them _in posteriora_ to their
everlasting ignominy, so that not only on their own but on their
successors' persons similar tails grew ever after." A way of escape was,
however, according to the fourteenth century prose version of the
"Brut," soon provided, for "whenne the kyng herde and wiste of this
vengeance that was falle thurghe saynt Austines powere he lette make one
howse in honour of God ... at the brugges end," children born in which
would not be afflicted with the dreaded appendage. Other versions of the
story give Dorchester as the place where the saint was thus ill-used and
his assailants were thus punished, but both Kent and Dorset have been
zealous to repudiate any concern with it, and Lambarde in his
"Perambulation" has written an indignant diatribe in defence of the
former county.

[15] This account of it is chiefly taken from a paper by G. Neilson,
first published in "Transactions of the Glasgow Archaeological Society,"
1896.

Later, in the legends concerning St. Thomas a Becket, another form of
the same fable appears. The men of Strood are said to have docked the
tail of his horse and to have been punished in the same way as St.
Augustine's persecutors. In the story Rochester sometimes appears
instead of Strood, and this is our excuse for alluding to the variation
here. It seems to be due to a confusion of the old story with a new
fact, as we have a contemporary statement that St. Thomas, on the
Christmas Day before his death, excommunicated a certain Robert de
Broc, because the latter had, to insult and shame him, cut off the tail
of a mare in his service.

In the Middle Ages the matter was of national concern, for the disgrace
said to have befallen the inhabitants of one or other of the small towns
mentioned became "a scandal to their unoffending country." When the
story spread, as it did, nearly all over Europe, foreigners did not
particularize, but offensively alluded to all Englishmen as _caudati_,
or tailed. Such allusions often occur in narratives of the Crusades, and
the Fr