The cult of this peculiarly sainted person was extraordinary, and far transcended that of any other martyr. To his shrine, erected in a place of especial honour, and encrusted with gold and gems, the pilgrims of many nations and many centuries flocked, greatly to the enrichment of the Church. The miraculous cures wrought at his tomb, and the marvellous legends that clustered around the story of his life and death, were the theme of ages. But the gross superstitions, and the grosser scandals, tricks, and miscellaneous knaveries that were encouraged by that martyr-worship had discredited him by the time of Henry VIII., that less superstitious age when it was possible for the King and his advisers to declare "Thomas Becket" a traitor, to submit his relics to every indignity, to destroy them and his shrine, and to seize all the endowments and valuables connected with his worship. The great destruction wrought at the Reformation accounts for the scantiness of Becket's memorials. Here, in the "Martyrdom," only the Norman walls that looked down upon the scene, and some portions of the pavement, are left. A square piece of stone, inserted in the middle of a large slab, marks the exact spot where he fell, and tells how the original stone, regarded as of a peculiar sanctity, had been at some time or another removed. CHAPTER V TAPPINGTON HALL The central point of the Ingoldsby Country is, of course, the Ingoldsby manor house of Tappington Hall. To discover this we must leave Canterbury by the Dover Road, and, climbing up to the rise of Gutteridge Gate, where a gibbet stood in ancient times and a turnpike-gate until recent years, drop down into the village of Bridge, whose name derives from an arch thrown at an early period across the River Stour. At the summit of the corresponding rise out of Bridge, the road, running exactly on the site of the Roman Watling Street, comes to that bleak and elevated table-land known as Barham Downs, the scene of Cæsar's great battle with the Britons on July 23rd, A.D. 56. Twenty-seven thousand Roman soldiers, horse and foot, met the wild rush of the Britons, who, with the usual undisciplined and untaught courage of uncivilised races, flung themselves upon the invaders and were thrown back by the impenetrable wall of the serried phalanxes. Recoiling dismayed from this reception, they were instantly pursued by the Roman cavalry and cut up into isolated bands, who fought courageously all that fatal day in the dense woodlands. Protected by mounds and trenches defended with palisades of stakes cunningly interwoven with brushwood, they prolonged the hopeless contest until nightfall, and then fell back. Cæsar, describing these woodland forts as _oppida_, gives especial attention to one particularly troublesome stronghold. "Being repulsed," he writes, "they withdrew themselves into the woods and reached a place which they had prepared before, having closed all approaches to it by felled timber." This retreat