The nave is
also beautiful and the crypt is undoubtedly one of the most
interesting monuments left in England. Of the Priory practically
nothing remains but a few fragments.
[Illustration: ROCHESTER]
Doubtless Chaucer and his company did not leave the great church
unvisited nor fail to look curiously, nor perhaps to pray, at the
shrine of St William, for they, too, were travellers and pilgrims. But
the spectacle in the little city which it might seem most filled their
imagination, as it does ours, was not the Cathedral at all, but the
great Keep which stands above it, frowning across the busy Medway.
Nothing more imposing of its kind than this great Norman Castle remains
in England. Having a base of seventy feet square, and consisting of
walls twelve feet thick and one hundred and twenty feet high, it still
seems what in fact it was, almost impregnable by any arms but those of
the modern world. Its great weakness lay always in the matter of
provision, but it was perfectly supplied with water, by means of a well
sixty feet under ground, in which stood always ten feet of water.
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