Burgate

Burgate takes its name from the gate on the eastern side of Canterbury's walls, one of those by which the city reckons itself, and the street within runs along the edge of the cathedral precinct. In a town where nobody gives directions by street but only by the nearest gate, Burgate people belong to Burgate first and to a parish second. From it Pardon Lane drops away down to the Pardon Gate, the south entrance of the precinct, with the strangest public house in Kent waiting at its foot.

The line between city and precinct runs along the backs of the Burgate houses, and that line governs everything here. The Mitred Hare, kept by Widow Joan Seaborne, is one of three buildings that straddle it, its street door opening into the city while its yard lies on precinct ground, hard against the almshouse orchard. A gate in the wall between them is the subject of a long and loud quarrel: the almoner complains that drinkers from the Hare slip through it onto precinct ground once dusk falls, and wants it walled shut, and the widow says the gate stands on her side and is hers. It has gone to referral twice and been settled never. The front of the house, the street will tell you, is entirely respectable.

The city watch has an old story about the same line. A constable of the watch once chased a thief into Burgate and then stood an hour on the step, unable to go further, while the man ate his supper a yard away on precinct ground. The thief wished him good night, and the constable, having no leave to do otherwise, wished him the same.

A few doors along is the Bellringers, the house of the cathedral's ringers. Ringer Samuel Rugge, forty years on the same peal, drinks his pint there once practice is done and will talk anyone through the changes for the price of a second. Canterbury's own advice to a newcomer is to be noticed in the Bellringers and not in the house at the foot of Pardon Lane, and the ringers practise often enough that on most evenings the street has its bells to drink by.