But the most strenuous renunciator of the Kentish tradition, in favour of the Berkshire conjecture, was a learned and distinguished native of the Kentish locality itself: the Rev. John Johnson. He is usually reckoned among the learned and suffering body of the Nonjurors, but, by personal merits and some concessions, he appears to have escaped their political ordeal; having retained his preferments throughout a long life. He is commonly distinguished, from the other Johnsons of literature, as “Johnson of Cranbrook.” His remarks deserve all the more careful consideration, because he was born at Frindsbury, immediately adjoining Cliffe, and the intermediate parish between it and Rochester. At Frindsbury, in fact, was the “Aeslingham” of the Textus Roffensis, in one of the charters that concern the Hoo and the locality now in question. He printed a Collection of Canons of the English Church, in 1720.[56] In his preface and notes to the Synod at which was ratified the submission of the usurped primacy of Lichfield to that of Canterbury, A.D. 803, which is one of those held at “clofeshoas;”[57] he oddly brings it, as an argument that Abingdon was the place, that the triumphant Archbishop of Canterbury “was willing to meet” his reconciled insubordinant rival, half way between Lichfield and Canterbury. Converting what is a very strong presumption against Abingdon, into an act of extreme humility on the part of the Archbishop. The learned writer must have felt the difficulty, which he thus strove so hard to liquidate into a virtue. After this, he goes on to allege that “there is not a more unhealthy spot in the whole province, I may say in all Christendom,” than this district of the Hoo. With deference, however, to such a writer, and a native of the spot, this account of it does, to a mere visitor, seem to be exaggerated. The Gads-Hill, of Falstaff, will bring the neighbourhood to the remembrance of many; and it has become more widely known of late years, by the last residence of another great master of humour and fiction, which is less than four miles from the church of Cliffe, and the outlook from which would be about identical with that from any Mercian Villa Regia that may have existed here. An ungrateful remembrance of the inflictions of schoolmasters, or other childish griefs, is often observed to haunt the later career of those to whose distinguished position they may have contributed.