FAVERSHAM 171 



excepts such arch-traitors as Churchill, Danby, and the 

 poor oyster-dredgers of Faversham. 



Saints Crispin and Crispianus, who have a public- 

 house dedicated to them at Strood, had an altar here 

 in the Abbey Church, and were supposed to have lived 

 a while at Preston, earning their living as cobblers 

 in a cottage that stood where the " Swan " inn is now. 

 Long after the Reformation had done sway with the 

 shrine of Saint Thomas, pious bootmakers made 

 pilgrimages to the place ; and St. Crispin's Day was 

 for centuries the principal holiday in Faversham. 

 I would rather make pilgrimage to the place where 

 they earned their living than to the shrines of all the 

 sanctified humbugs who contended for pride of place 

 in this world, and becoming worsted in the struggle 

 for supremacy, received their Canonization as a matter 

 of course. 



Faversham in the fifteenth century was not less 

 well-furnished with religious cranks than the holy road 

 to Canterbury. There was an anchorite in one corner 

 of Faversham churchyard, and an anchoress in another, 

 and in their cells they sat and sulked their lives away, 

 and never did any work. William Thornbury was 

 rector here for twenty-two years, when he resigned his 

 living especially to become an inclusus ; and for eight 

 years he occupied a damp and most uncomfortable 

 cell amid the tombs, until he died, most likely of 

 rheumatic fever, in 1481. There is a most beautiful 

 brass to him in the church, with a long Latin verse, 

 recounting how he was one of the elect, and how for 

 long years he sat lonely in his cell. Why he should have 

 lived such a life is a question which we, who are so 

 far removed from that age, both by lapse of time and 

 in change of thought, cannot readily answer. That he 

 was a man of good birth, good position, and consider- 

 able wealth, would appear from his will, and these 

 circumstances make his reclusion only the more 

 extraordinary. He probably suffered either from 

 religious mania, or else from a guilty conscience which 



