Show L England's Earliest Monument api fi ti r i iTo To American eyes Aylesford a quiet Kentish village lying under the chalk bIlls near Maidstone is venerable enough The church chuich with Its square em em- cd tower the gabled houses more particularly the gray stone b bridge idge nar nar- cow iC of arch and low of parapet all these are eloquent of the days when the P from southern England crossed the Medway hero on their Journey ado cb o Deckel's Becket's shrine Beyond the river a mile nearer Canterbury stands a memorial of times more remote by a thousand years than the last of the pilgrimages Three slabs of pf sandstone capp capped d by a fourth which measures twelve t In ba length le a space of some eight feet square The country people call It Kits Coty House It Is an empty tomb of ancient British date AllI All I II Celtic peoples Interred their chiefs In such chambers of stone ver r which they heaped huge mounds of earth arth In modern times these hll till Docks f Goe Im nr covered with grass and marking perhaps the site of forgotten battle- battle gilds came to be called barrows After having remained undisturbed for centuries some of these barrows were opened In this Inquiring age In the interests of f science The stone chamber within the grave which antiquarians tail a dolmen was found to contain human remains along with the ornaments orna orna- ornaments ments and weapons of a chief The dolmen In a perfect condition Is a closed I chamber shamber Kits lilts Coty House Is a dolmen which has been partly dilapidated The sepulcher has been opened when hen or by whom nobody knows and Its con con- con contents tents ts hays have disappeared There is no inscription on any of the stones atones But Buts Buti i s authority supports the established tradition that here was buried burled Catl Catl- fell against Hengist the invader at the r gern ern t the e British chief who fighting tle of Hof Aylesford in A. A D. D The names of Ho Horsa sa Hengist's kinsman and leader fellow who was killed in em the fight figh survives In Horstead where perhaps he was burled buried The white whitehorse horse which was Hengist's totem is now the heraldic emblem of the English Eng lish Ush county of Kent Whatever monuments of the battle of Aylesford once existed all have now disappeared but Kits Kit's Coty House So the British princes prince's tomb iamb has become the sole memorial of the first triumph of the Its It 3 s the earliest of English monuments I |