The Hospital of the Forest or Wood of Blean, dedicated in honour of St Nicholas, lies upon the southern and western side of the last hill before the western gate of the city. It was founded in 1084 by Archbishop Lanfranc, and no doubt for a time served as a hospital for Lepers, but it was soon appropriated for the use of the sick and wayfarers generally, and though nothing save the chapel remains to us from Lanfranc's day, the whole place is so full of interest that no one should pass it by. The chapel became in time the parish church of this little place on the hillside which grew up about the hospital which itself was probably placed here on account of the spring of water known as St Thomas's or the Black Prince's well, south and west of the building. Most of the chapel is of Norman building, the western doorway for instance, the pillars and round arches on the north of the nave dating from Lanfranc's time. But the south side is later, of the thirteenth century, and the font and choir are later still, being Perpendicular fifteenth century work. The hospital, however, as we see it, is a rebuilding of the seventeenth century, but it was fundamentally restored in the nineteenth. In the "Frater Hall," however, are some interesting remains of the old house, among them a fine collection of mazers and two bowls of maple wood, in one of which lies perhaps the very crystal which Erasmus saw, and which was set in the upper leather of the shoe of St Thomas. Below the hospital in the orchard is the old well known as St Thomas's. Above it grows an elder, surely a relic of the days of the Pilgrimage. For the elder was known as the wayfaring tree and was sacred to pilgrims and travellers. It is not strange then, that it should cool with its shade the spring of St Thomas; it is only strange that the vandal has spared it for us to bless. But why the elder was sacred to travellers I do not know. Wayfaring Tree! What ancient claim Hast thou to that right pleasant name? Was it that some faint pilgrim came Unhopedly to thee In the brown desert's weary way 'Midst thirst and toils consuming sway, And there, as 'neath thy shade he lay, Blessed the Wayfaring Tree? But doggerel never solved anything. In truth a very different story is told of the elder and on good authority too. For if we may not trust Sir John Maundeville who tells us that, "Fast by the Pool of Siloe is the elder tree on which Judas hanged himself ... when he sold and betrayed our Lord," Shakespeare says that, "Judas was hanged on an elder," and Piers Plowman records: Judas he japed With Jewish siller And sithen on an elder tree Hanged himsel. It is from the quietness and neglected beauty of this well of St Thomas that under the evening I turned back into the road and, climbing a little, looked down upon what was once the holiest city of fair England.