Later, in the legends concerning St. Thomas a Becket, another form of the same fable appears. The men of Strood are said to have docked the tail of his horse and to have been punished in the same way as St. Augustine's persecutors. In the story Rochester sometimes appears instead of Strood, and this is our excuse for alluding to the variation here. It seems to be due to a confusion of the old story with a new fact, as we have a contemporary statement that St. Thomas, on the Christmas Day before his death, excommunicated a certain Robert de Broc, because the latter had, to insult and shame him, cut off the tail of a mare in his service. In the Middle Ages the matter was of national concern, for the disgrace said to have befallen the inhabitants of one or other of the small towns mentioned became "a scandal to their unoffending country." When the story spread, as it did, nearly all over Europe, foreigners did not particularize, but offensively alluded to all Englishmen as _caudati_, or tailed. Such allusions often occur in narratives of the Crusades, and the French and Scotch were especially keen to hurl the epithet at their hereditary foes. Even in the sixteenth century John Bale says, "that an Englyshman now can not travayle in an other land by waye of merchandyce or any other honest occupyenge, but yt ys most contumelyouslye throwne in his tethe that all Englishmen have tayles." The name "Kentish Longtails" seems to have been early current, and in Drayton's "Polyolbion" we find "Longtails and Liberty" given almost as a motto for the county. We are not told whether it was due to this miracle of the "tails," but it is certain that the conversion of the townspeople of Rochester must have been rapid, for we know that a see was founded here as early as 604. The diocese placed under its bishop's care was a small one, including no more than the western part of the ancient kingdom of Kent, the dividing line being roughly the course of the Medway, or, more precisely, that of its tributary, the Teise. The whole diocese formed only a single archdeaconry, which was divided into four deaneries, and of this small number one was subject, as a peculiar, to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, "who holdeth his prerogative wheresoever his lands do lye."