their carnivals. Midnight outrage and drunken brawls were anything but infrequent, and as the severity of punishment increased so did the number and nature of crimes. The civic records show that men literally carried their lives in their hands, for no one paraded the streets without a weapon, and daggers were used on the slightest provocation.

For the many pilgrims who in this latter half of the sixteenth century still thronged the thoroughfares, some merely to view, others to secretly worship at, England's holiest but desecrated shrine, what a vision was conjured up! Narrow streets overshadowed by lofty buildings already sombre with age; strange public edifices decorated with marvellous heraldic signs in colours more or less faded; ancient churches and quaint dwelling - places unfolded to view in confused, picturesque succession. Grotesque and gloomy as that city seemed to the stranger, it was still less darksome than many a contemporary city of even less antiquity, and was well cared for by its citizens. As early as 1474, in the thirteenth year of the fourth Edward's reign, an Act had been passed for paving the principal thoroughfares, in which it had been stipulated that they should be properly pitched with boulders and Folkestone stone and, in order to have the work properly carried out, it was enacted that every proprietor should pave that portion of the street upon which his burgage (tenement) abutted. Many other equally useful local regulations were made by the corpora

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tion, such as those for lighting the streets and alleys at night by means of lanterns, although it is feared they were not always complied with.

Numerous quaint roomy hostelries and thickly populated houses, of all kinds of curious architectural development, shouldered one another into the street and overhung the shadowy thoroughfares. The eaves of the more pretentious buildings were supported by grotesque figures called 'telamonies,' by goblins, and grinning monsters; whilst runic-knots, scrolls and zigzags were much in evidence amid what was intended to be considered ornamental. 'Here were lanes, odd nooks and corners, queer old buildings with some monster or elfin carved upon the massive beams, at which the pilgrim stared, hardly knowing whether to cross himself or not, whether it betokened a saint duly canonised, or a devil, or a punchinello who owed his existence to that comic spirit which the genius of ecclesiastical architecture and art invoked in the middle ages, in strange contrast to (sic) its devotional tendencies.'

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The citizens of this ancient metropolis, wealthy and long accustomed to the good things of this life, and well endowed with municipal privileges, nourished a love of independence and an attachment to liberty which rendered them sturdy in the maintenance of their civic rights and less amenable to the restrictions under which many of their classes lived elsewhere. All the bodies of Kentish men be free,' proclaims the Custumal of Kent, and although for

many centuries this was not a fact as regards the agriculturalist, it applied pretty generally to the burgher of proud Canterbury.5 The corporation

maintained its freedom, as well as its other privileges, and passed stringent decrees to deter any of its members from attaching themselves to, or becoming retainers of, any 'worshipful man' outside their own circle. At a court of Burghmote, as the civic governing body was designated, held in 1572, it was decreed: 'That if any Alderman or Common Councilman shall take any livery, or be retained as servant to any Nobleman or man of worship, then every such Alderman or Common Councilman shall be discharged from his office and from this Court.' And their records prove that the rules of these independent-minded burghers were duly enforced."

This high and mighty Canterbury, this revered shrine of the martyred A'Becket, had been for centuries the resort of the people of all Christian lands. Mighty princes and haughty prelates had journeyed thither, and had been jostled in its narrow thoroughfares by the superstitious and the needy; the rich and the poor, the halt, the maimed and the blind, all pilgrimaged to this miracle-pervaded city in the hope that their prayers might be granted or their wishes accomplished. Many resorted to it as the probable scene of living adventure, fashion, folly, and, peradventure, with a prospect of earning a penny more or less honestly. Wealth flowed into the city, and its citizens became men of importance,