Saints Crispin and Crispianus, who have a public-house dedicated to them at Strood, had an altar here in the Abbey Church, and were supposed to have lived a while at Preston, earning their living as cobblers in a cottage that stood where the "Swan" inn is now. Long after the Reformation had done sway with the shrine of Saint Thomas, pious bootmakers made pilgrimages to the place; and St. Crispin's Day was for centuries the principal holiday in Faversham. I would rather make pilgrimage to the place where they earned their living than to the shrines of all the sanctified humbugs who contended for pride of place in this world, and becoming worsted in the struggle for supremacy, received their Canonization as a matter of course. Faversham in the fifteenth century was not less well-furnished with religious cranks than the holy road to Canterbury. There was an anchorite in one corner of Faversham churchyard, and an anchoress in another, and in their cells they sat and sulked their lives away, and never did any work. William Thornbury was rector here for twenty-two years, when he resigned his living especially to become an _inclusus_; and for eight years he occupied a damp and most uncomfortable cell amid the tombs, until he died, most likely of rheumatic fever, in 1481. There is a most beautiful brass to him in the church, with a long Latin verse, recounting how he was one of the elect, and how for long years he sat lonely in his cell. Why he should have lived such a life is a question which we, who are so far removed from that age, both by lapse of time and in change of thought, cannot readily answer. That he was a man of good birth, good position, and considerable wealth, would appear from his will, and these circumstances make his reclusion only the more extraordinary. He probably suffered either from religious mania, or else from a guilty conscience which led him thus to compound with Heaven for some undiscovered crime that made his life a misery. But the traveller who keeps strictly to his Dover Road only passes through Faversham suburbs. Preston is the oldest of them, and lies directly on the road. To the left rises Faversham's fantastic spire, conspicuous above the flats; immediately in front goes the railway in a cutting underneath the road; and straight ahead, in the far distance, rises up a long thin white line amid hillsides clothed heavily with forests. It is long before the stranger discovers what is that singular white streak upon the dark trees, but it reveals itself, as he goes, as the famous Boughton Hill, and the woodlands as the extensive remains of Blean Forest.