We are reminded of all this history by the fine altar tomb in the north chapel where lie William Goldwell and Alice his wife (d. 1485).  Their son James was Vicar of Great Chart in 1458, and became Bishop of Norwich in 1472, when he obtained from the Pope “an indulgence in aid of the restoration of Great Chart church which had been damaged by fire.”  Here is the cause and the source of the fifteenth century alterations and the church we see.  The brasses in the church are also interesting.  Many of them commemorate the Tokes of Godinton, who founded the almshouse in the village, which, rebuilt more than once I think, we still see.  All these things and more than these the great yew in the churchyard has seen as its shadow grew over the graves.

From Great Chart I went on through the spring sunshine across the Weald to Bethersden, whose quarries have supplied so much of the grey marble one finds in Kentish churches, in the monuments and effigies and in the old manor houses in the carved chimney-pieces fair to see.  These quarries are now all but deserted, but of old they were the most famous in Kent, which is poor in such things.  Most of the stone for the cathedrals and greater religious houses in the county came from Caen, whence it was easily transported by water; but this stone not only weathered badly, but was too friable for monumental effigies or sculpture.  For these harder stone was needed, resembling marble, and this Bethersden supplied, as we may see, in the Cathedrals of Canterbury and Rochester and especially at Hythe where the chancel arcade is entirely built of it.

Something too we may learn at Bethersden of the true nature of the Weald.  I shall have something to say of this later, but here at any rate the curiously difficult character of this country in regard to the going may be understood, though of course less easily now than of old.  It is said that before, at the end of the eighteenth century, the excellent system of roads we still use was built up, the ways hereabouts were so bad—­they are still far from good—­that when spring came it was customary to plough them up in order that they might dry off.  We hear of great ladies going to church in carriages drawn by teams of oxen.  Hardly passable after rain, the roads, says Hasted, were “so miry that the traveller’s horse frequently plunged through them up to the girths of the saddle; and the waggons sank so deep in the ruts as to slide along on the nave of the wheels and axle of them.  In some few of the principal roads, as from Tenterden hither, there was a stone causeway, about three feet wide, for the accommodation of horse and foot passengers; but there was none further on till near Bethersden, to the great distress of travellers.  When these roads became tolerably dry in summer, they were ploughed up, and laid in a half circle to dry, the only amendment they ever had.  In extreme dry weather in summer, they became exceedingly hard, and, by traffic, so smooth as to seem glazed, like a potter’s vessel, though a single hour’s rain rendered them so slippery as to be very dangerous to travellers.”  The roads in fact were and are, little more than lanes between the isolated woods across the low scrub of the old Weald.