...
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.
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