Somewhere at this end of the town stood the Chantry of St. Edmund the Martyr, a halting-place at which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury stopped to pray and to kiss the usual relics. The site was probably where the Dartford Cemetery now stands beside the road, on the border of what is now called Dartford Brent, a wide expanse of common land known in other times as Brent, or Burnt Heath. This place came very near to being the site of a battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, for here it was that the rival armies first confronted one another; but, instead of coming to blows, their leaders held a parley; and so, fair words on their lips, but with deceit in their hearts, they went up to London. Many years later, on July 19, 1555, to be precise, Dartford Brent reappears in history as the place on which three Protestant martyrs, Christopher Wade, Margaret Pollen, and Nicholas Hall, were burnt at the stake, and since then the annals of the place have been quite uninteresting. The gilt-crested spire of the memorial to them peers up on the skyline of the road-cutting, on the way up to the Brent. It stands in the old cemetery, on the left. Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:--"On the Brent are the outlines of the 'Deserter's Grave,' cut in the turf, formerly frequented by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown, traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit." Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens' accounts:-- 1679. Payed the coroner for setling on a soldier that hanged himself 13_s._ 0_d._ Payd for a stake to drive through him 0_s._ 6_d._ Drink for the Jury 1_s._ 6_d._ Here the road branches--the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in mediaeval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.