That Strood stood on the ancient way its name assures us, since it is but another form of Street or Strada, as they say in Italy.  From Strood we cross the great iron bridge, the successor of that at the Strood end of which Bishop Glanville built a small chapel.  The story of the bridge is interesting.  We do not know that there was a bridge at all in Roman times, but certainly a wooden bridge was supplemented in the time of Richard ii. by a new one of stone, consisting of twenty-one arches of different spans.  This bridge stood higher up the river than that of to-day, nearer indeed to the Castle, and as at its western end there was a chapel, so at its eastern under the Castle, John de Cobham founded, in Chaucer’s time, in 1399, a Chantry for all Christian souls, of which some ruins remain.  This bridge, patched, altered, and constantly repaired, lasted till the existing bridge was built in our own time on the site of the old one of wood.

From the bridge we enter the High Street, almost certainly lying over the old Roman road.  Here are the old Inns, the Crown, the Bull, and the King’s Head.  It is even probable that Chaucer may have stayed at the Crown, the oldest of the three, not of course in the present house, but in that which stood on the same site till 1863, and which was said to date from the fourteenth century. [Footnote:  The old house was famous at least as the scene of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.,” pt. i. act ii. sc. i., as the resting-place of Queen Elizabeth in 1573, and as the inn honoured by Mr Pickwick.  It should never have been destroyed.]

In Rochester, serene and yet active, the very ancient seat of a bishopric, we have something essentially Roman, the fortress on the Watling Street guarding the passage of the Medway, precisely as Piacenza was and is a Roman fortress upon the Emilian Way guarding the passage of the Po.  The Romans called the place Durobrivae, and though we know little of it during the Roman occupation of Britain, we may be sure it was a place of very considerable importance, as indeed it has remained ever since, twice in fact in our history the possession of Rochester has decided a whole campaign.

Rochester, indeed, could not have escaped the military eye of the Romans.  It must be remembered that the natural entry into England is by the Straits of Dover, and that for a man entering by that gate there is only one way up into England and that the line of the Watling Street, for he must cross the Thames, even though he be going only to London.  The lowest ford upon the Thames is that at Lambeth, which the Watling Street used.  Now there is but one really formidable obstacle in the whole length of the Watling Street south of the Thames.  That obstacle is the estuary of the Medway, which Rochester guarded and possessed.  Rochester then was first and foremost a great fortress, just as Piacenza was and is.