Dunken tells us that "the steep ascent of the Dover road leading towards Brent was in ancient times called St Edmunde's Weye from its leading to a Chapel dedicated to that saint situated near the middle of the upper churchyard." This chapel, of which nothing remains, Edward III. bestowed upon the Priory of Our Lady and St Margaret. On its site, such is the irony of time, a "martyr's memorial" has been erected to the unhappy and unfortunate folk burnt here in the time of Queen Mary.
But Dartford is too pleasant a place to be left with such a merely archaeological survey as this. It is a town in which one may be happy; historically, however, it has not much claim upon our notice, its chief boast being that it was here the first act of violence in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 occurred, when Wat Tyler broke the head of the poll-tax collector who had brutally assaulted his daughter. Wat or Walter--Tyler, because of his trade, which was that of covering roofs with tiles--would seem, however, not to have been a Dartford man at all. The very proper murder of the tax-collector would appear to have been the work of a certain John "Tyler" of the same profession, here in Dartford.
The Peasants' Revolt, which, alas! came to nothing, brings us indeed quite into Chaucer's day, but it would have had little sympathy from him, nor indeed has it really anything specially to do with this town. The true fame of Dartford, which is its paper-making, dates from the end of the sixteenth century, when one Sir John Speelman, jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, is said to have established the first paper-mill.
If Dartford is poor in history, nevertheless it is worth a visit of more than an hour or so for its own sake, as I have said. It boasts of a good inn also, and the country and villages round about are delicious. All that upper valley of the Darent, for instance, in which lie Darenth, Sutton-at-Hone, Horton Kirby, and, a little way off Fawkham, Eynsford, and Lullingstone, is worth the trouble of seeing for its own beauty and delight.
There is Darenth for instance, Darne, as the people used to call it, only two miles from the Pilgrims' Road, it is as old as England, and doubtless saw the Romans at work straightening, paving, and building that great Way which has remained to us through so many ages, and which the Middle Age hallowed into a Via Sacra. What can be more worthy and right than that a modern pilgrim should visit this little Roman village to see the foundations of the Roman buildings, to speculate on what they may have been, and generally to contemplate those origins out of which we are come?