Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 1.djvu/437

Rh with pillars of chalk. Mr. Dunkin refers to a passage in Tacitus, which shews that these caverns were common to the German tribes. It runs thus: "They are accustomed also to dig subterraneous caves which they cover over with dung, thus rendering them suitable for a retreat in winter, and a storehouse for corn; for by this means they assuage the rigour of the cold: and should the country be invaded, they retreat into the caves and escape through the ignorance of the deceived enemy ." Mr. Dunkin has collected much curious information relative to St. Edmund's Chapel and the Priory. "The celebrity of the former in the middle ages gave name to the ancient road itself, which is called in many records St Edmund's Highway." The following extract from the testament of an inhabitant of Dartford, in the time of Henry VIII., shews something of its internal arrangement. "Hugh Serle, of Dertford, directs his body to be buried in the chapel of St. Edmund, before his image; he gives to the rode light, 12d.; to our lady light under the rode, 12d.; to St. John Baptist, St. Peter, and St. James, 12d.; for a taper before St. Edmund in the chapel, 12d., &c." The Priory founded by Edward III. for Sisters of the Order of Preachers, the successive prioresses, the grants and benefactions to the monastery, the privileges of the sisterhood, are consecutively and minutely described down to the visitation and eventual suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII., who conferred upon Joane Fane, the last prioress, a pension of one hundred marks per annum, and upon the sisters grants varying from six pounds to forty shillings per annum. The situation of the several conventual buildings, Mr. Dunkin states, may be tolerably well ascertained from the present remains, and a faint idea of the church of the convent, he thinks, may be gathered from a representation of the model borne in the hand of the founder, on an ancient seal, attached to a deed in the archives of the Leather Sellers' Company, in London; it is there represented as consisting of a nave, choir, and short transepts, intersected with a low tower surmounted with a spire. That ill-managed but just struggle of the people of Kent, under Wat Tyler, to free themselves from intolerable oppression and degraded vassalage, finds a prominent place in the annals of Dartford, and a painful interest is attached to Mr. Dunkin's faithful narrative of burnings at the stake for religious notions heretical in respect to those of the reigning sovereign and her clergy.