Every schoolboy knows St Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth, but not all know that the saint whose name that hospital bears is not the Apostle, but England’s Martyr.  Now, until 1868 St Thomas’s Hospital stood not in Lambeth but in Southwark, upon the site of London Bridge Station. [Footnote:  The fact is still remembered in the name of St Thomas Street, leading out of the Borough High Street on the east.] It seems that within the precincts of St Mary Overy a house of Austin Canons, now the Anglican Cathedral of St Saviour, Southwark, was a hospital for the sick and poor founded by St Thomas, which after his beatification was dedicated in his honour.  But in the first years of the thirteenth century, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, rebuilt the little house in a healthier situation—­ubi aqua est uberior et aer est melior—­where the water was purer and the air better, and this new house, finished in 1215, of course also bore the name of St Thomas of Canterbury.  That the hospital fulfilled its useful purpose we know from a petition which it presented to Pope Innocent VI., in 1357, wherein it was stated that so many sick and poor resorted to it that it could not support its charges.  Not quite two hundred years later, in 1539, a few days before the feast of St Thomas upon December 29, it was surrendered to King Henry VIII., the infamous Layton having been its visitor.  From the king it was bought by the City of London, a rare comment upon its suppression, and so notoriously useful was it that Edward VI. was compelled to refound it, and therefore in some sort it still remains to us.  It is curious to note that, ages before the hospital came to Lambeth, St Thomas was at home there, for he had a statue upon the Lollards’ Tower, and it was the custom of the watermen to doff their caps to it as they rowed by.

It is meet and right that this pilgrimage should be begun with thoughts of St Thomas, and especially of what we owe to him, for the first few miles of the way upon what we need not doubt was of old the Pilgrims’ road, is anything but uplifting, crowded though it be with memories, most of them of course far later than the Canterbury pilgrimage.  As you go down the Borough High Street, for Southwark is of course the old borgo of London, and all the depressing ugliness of modern life, it is not of anything so serene as that great poet of the fourteenth century, the father of English poetry, that you think, but of one who nevertheless, in the characteristic nationalism of his art, in his humanity and love of his fellow-men, was only second to Chaucer, and in his compassion for the poor and lowly only second to St Thomas:  I mean Charles Dickens.  No one certainly can pass the site of the Marshalsea Prison without recalling that solemn and haunting description in the preface to “Little Dorrit”:  “Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years.”