It is still of Dickens most of us will think in passing St George’s Church, for was it not there that Little Dorrit was christened and married, and was it not in the vestry there she slept with the burial-book for a pillow?  But St George’s has other memories too, for it was there that Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who staunchly refused the oath of supremacy to Elizabeth, was buried at midnight after his death in the Marshalsea, on September 5th, 1569.  There too General Monk was married to Anne Clarges.

These memories, for the most part so unhappy, have, however, nothing to do with the Pilgrims’ Way.  No memory of that remains at all amid all the dismal wretchedness of to-day, until one comes to the “Thomas a Becket” public-house at the corner of Albany Road.  This was the site of the “watering of Saint Thomas”: 

A-morwe, whan that day bigan to springe,
Up roes our host, and was our aller cok,
And gadrede us togirde, alle in a flok,
And forth we riden, a litel more than 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.