Similar institutions existed at others of the chief ports. At Portsmouth was the Hospital of St. Nicholas, or “God’s House,” founded in the reign of Henry the Third by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester. It is now the Garrison Church. At Southampton the “Domus Dei” was dedicated to St. Julian, patron of travellers, and now, as St. Julian’s Hospital and Church, is in part an almshouse, sheltering eight poor persons, and partly a French Huguenot place of worship. The Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury from Southampton and Winchester was never a road for wheeled traffic, and remained in all those centuries when pilgrimage was popular, as a track for pedestrians, along the hillsides. It avoided all towns, and thus precisely what those pilgrims who wearifully hoofed it all the way did for shelter remains a little obscure: although it seems probable that wayside shelters, with or without oratories attached to them, were established at intervals. Such, traditionally, was the origin of the picturesque timbered house at Compton, now locally known as “Noah’s Ark.” Colchester was a place of import to pilgrims in old wayfaring times, for it lay along the line of the pilgrims’ trail to Walsingham. Among the inns of this town, and older than any of its fellows, but coyly hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from sight, behind modern alterations, is the “Angel” in West Stockwell Street, whose origin as a pilgrims’ inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants, on the way to, or returning from, the road of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here, and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would, as already hinted, be the gravest mistake to assume pilgrims to have been, _quâ_ pilgrims, necessarily decorous; and, indeed, modern Bank Holiday folks, compared with them, would shine as true examples of monkish austerity. [Illustration: HOUSE FORMERLY A PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, COMPTON.] The shrine at Walsingham, very highly esteemed in East Anglia, drew crowds from every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St. John of Colchester sheltered some of the greatest of them, while others inned at such hostelries as the “Angel,” and the vulgar, or the merely impecunious, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods. Pilgrims would boggle at nothing, as was well known at the time. That they could not be trusted is evident enough in the custom of horse-masters, who let out horses on hire to such travellers, at the rate of twelvepence from Southwark to Rochester, and a further twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury. They knew, those early keepers of livery-stables, that little chance existed of ever seeing their horses again unless they took sufficient precautions. They therefore branded their animals in a prominent and unmistakeable way, so that all should know such, found in strange parts of the country, to be stolen.