Writing more than a century after this notable meeting so typical of the time at which it occurred, the ubiquitous Pepys, who seems to have been here, there, and everywhere, tells how in a journey from Stratford to London he and his wife's maid rode under a dead body hanging on Shooters Hill, and that the reputation of the famous height was not much improved in Byron's time is proved by the fact that the poet makes his Don Juan shoot a man on it who had accosted him with the trite demand, 'your money or your life.' Now, however, all is changed: no longer is the Bull Inn--where, according to local tradition, Dick Turpin nearly roasted the landlady on her own kitchen fire, to make her confess where she kept her savings--the stopping-place of coaches; the ancient woods are replaced by the Military Hospital, the largest in Great Britain, named after Lord Herbert of Lea, who was Secretary of State for War when it was erected; trim villas and a modern church, that is already too small for its congregation. The one remaining relic of days gone by is the ugly Severndoorg Castle, a massive three-storied tower on the top of the hill, built by the wife of Sir William Jones, to commemorate his taking of the stronghold, after which it is named, on the coast of Malabar. [Sidenote: Plumstead] Less than a century ago, Plumstead, which with Burrage Town now forms the eastern suburb of Woolwich, was a mere isolated hamlet of the marshes, a dependency of the manor given in 960 {92} by King Edgar to the abbot of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, which after changing hands many times became the property of Queen's College, Oxford. The ancient manor-house, now a farm, still stands near the parish church--which is dedicated to St. Nicolas, the patron saint of fishermen--that, though greatly modernised, retains some few traces of the original building. Of the seat of the noble De Burghesh family, who once owned the site of Burrage Town, nothing now remains, though its memory is preserved in the name of Burrage Place, a row of uninteresting modern houses.