Elsewhere we had found very much of what men had done before they began to write down their deeds. We had passed the barrows and the entrenchments, and the pits from whence coins with names, but without a history or a date, had been dug, and we had trodden on hard ground laid down at fords by men who had left no memory. We had seen also a very great many battlefields of which record exists. We had marched where Sweyn marched; Cheriton had been but a little way upon our right; we had seen Alton; the Roman station near Farnham had stood above us; the great rout of Ockley had lain not far off below our passage of the Mole; and we had recalled the double or treble memory of Otford, and of the Medway valley, where the invader perpetually met the armies of the island. But in all these there were two clean divisions: either the thing was archaic--a subject for mere guess-work; or it was clear history, with no prehistoric base that we knew of behind it. On this hill the two categories mingled, and a bridge was thrown between them. For it was here that the Roman first conquered. This was that defence which the Tenth Legion stormed: the entrenchment which was the refuge for Canterbury; and the river which names the battle was that dignified little stream the Stour, rolling an even tide below. The common people, who have been thought to be vacant of history, or at the best to distort it, have preserved a memory of this fight for two thousand years. I remembered as I sat there how a boy, a half-wit, had told me on a pass in Cumberland that a great battle had been fought there between two kings; he did not know how long ago, but it had been a famous fight. I did not believe him then, but I know now that he had hold of a tradition, and the king who fought there was not a George or a James, but Rufus, eight hundred years before. As I considered these things and other memories halting at this place, I came to wish that all history should be based upon legend. For the history of learned men is like a number of separate points set down very rare upon a great empty space, but the historic memories of the people are like a picture. They are one body whose distortion one can correct, but the mass of which is usually sound in stuff, and always in spirit. Thinking these things I went down the hill with my companions, and I reoccupied my mind with the influence of that great and particular story of St. Thomas, whose shadow had lain over the whole of this road, until in these last few miles it had come to absorb it altogether. The way was clear and straight like the flight of a bolt; it spanned a steep valley, passed a windmill on the height beyond, fell into the Watling Street (which here took on its alignment), and within a mile turned sharp to the south, crossed the bridge, and through the Westgate led us into Canterbury.