| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Holyhead Road Vol 1 - The Mail-coach road to Dublin
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Holyhead Road Vol 1 - The Mail-coach road to Dublin" ***
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
[Illustration: THE “WONDER,” LONDON AND SHREWSBURY COACH. _From a
Print after J. Pollard._]
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD:/ THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN
By CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of “_The Brighton Road_,” “_The Portsmouth Road_,” “_The Dover
Road_,” “_The Bath Road_,” “_The Exeter Road_,” “_The Great North
Road_,” and “_The Norwich Road_”
[Illustration]
_Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures_
_Vol. I. LONDON TO BIRMINGHAM_
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL
LTD. 1902
[_All rights reserved_]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: PREFACE]
_“The olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance
could not be vanquished without toil_”—_those are the days mourned by
Ruskin, who had little better acquaintance with them than afforded by
his childish journeys, when his father, a prosperous wine-merchant,
travelled the country in a carriage with a certain degree of style.
Regrets are, under such circumstances, easily to be understood, just as
were those of the old coach-proprietors, innkeepers, coachmen, postboys,
and all who depended upon road-travel for their existence; but few among
travellers who lived in the days when the change was made from road to
rail had feelings of that kind, else railways would not have proved so
immediately successful. It has been left for a later era to discover the
charm and rosy glamour of old road-faring days, a charm not greatly
insisted upon in the literature of those times, which, instead of being
rich in praise of the road, is fruitful in accounts of the miseries of
travel. Pepys, on the Portsmouth Road in 1668, fearful of losing his way
at night, as had often happened to him before; Thoresby, in 1714 and
later years, on the Great North Road, thanking God that he had reached
home safely; Horace Walpole, on the Brighton Road in 1749, finding the
roads almost impassable, therefore, and reasonably enough, “a great
damper of curiosity”; Arthur Young for years exhausting the vocabulary
of abuse on roads in general; and Jeffrey in 1831, at Grantham, looking
dismally forward to being snowed up at Alconbury Hill—these are a few
instances, among many, which go to prove, if proof were necessary, that
travelling was regarded then as a wholly unmitigated evil._
_But, quite apart from such considerations, there is a charm clinging
about the bygone and the out-of-date wholly lacking in things
contemporary. The Romans who constructed and travelled along their roads
could not find in them the interest we discover, and the old
posting-houses and inns frequented by our grandfathers must have seemed
to them as matter-of-fact as we now think our own railway hotels. It is,
indeed, just_ BECAUSE _the old roads and the wayside inns are superseded
by the rail and the modern hotel, and because they are altogether
removed from the everyday vulgarity of use and competition, that they
have assumed their romantic aspect, together with that which now
surrounds the slow and inconvenient coaches and the harmful unnecessary
highwayman, long since become genuine antiques and puppets for the
historical novelist to play with._
_The_ HOLYHEAD ROAD, _in its long course towards the Irish Sea, holds
much of this old romance, and not a little of a newer sort. Cities whose
history goes back to the era of the Saxons who first gave this highway
the name of “Watling Street,” lie along these many miles; and other
cities and towns there are whose fame and fortunes are of entirely
modern growth. Some have decayed, more have sprung into vigorous life,
and, in answer to the demand that arose, a hundred years ago, for
improved roads, the old highway itself was remodelled, in the days that
are already become distant._
_But better than the cities and towns and villages along these two
hundred and sixty miles is the scenery, ranging from the quiet pastoral
beauties of the Home Counties to the rocks and torrents, the mountains
and valleys of North Wales. This road and its story are a very epitome
of our island’s scenery and history. History of the larger sort—that
tells of the setting up and the putting down of Kings and Princes—has
marched in footprints of blood down the road, and left a trail of fire
and ashes; but it may well be thought, with one who has written the
history of the English people, that the doings of such are not all the
story: that the village church, the mill by the riverside, the drowsy
old town, “the tolls of the market-place, the brasses of its burghers in
the church, the names of its streets, the lingering memory of its
guilds, the mace of its mayor, tell us more of the past of England than
the spire of Sarum or the martyrdom of Canterbury.”_
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM,
SURREY,
_April 1902_.
[Illustration]
LIST _of_ ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
PAGE
THE “WONDER,” LONDON AND SHREWSBURY COACH. (_From a
Print after J. Pollard_) _Frontispiece_
SKETCH-MAP OF THE HOLYHEAD ROAD AND THE WATLING
STREET xix
YARD OF THE “BULL AND MOUTH,” ST. MARTIN’S-LE-GRAND.
(_From an old Print_) 13
“TALLY-HO” AND “INDEPENDENT TALLY-HO,” LONDON AND
BIRMINGHAM COACHES, NEARING LONDON, 1828. (_From a
Print after J. Pollard_) 25
THE “ANGEL,” ISLINGTON. MAIL COACHES AND
ILLUMINATIONS ON NIGHT OF THE KING’S BIRTHDAY,
1812. (_From a Print after J. Pollard_) 41
HIGHGATE ARCHWAY AND THE TURNPIKE GATE, 1823. (_From
an Old Print_) 45
HIGHGATE ARCHWAY: MAIL COACH NEARING LONDON. (_From
a Print after J. Pollard_) 51
THE “WOODMAN,” FINCHLEY, 1834: COVENTRY AND
BIRMINGHAM COACH PASSING. (_From a Print after J.
Pollard_) 55
HIGHGATE VILLAGE, 1826. (_From an Old Print_) 59
THE OLD ROAD, BARNET 67
THE OLD ROAD, RIDGE HILL 99
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE LIVERPOOL
MAIL PASSING TWO LADIES SNOWED UP ON RIDGE HILL IN
THEIR CHARIOT, WITHOUT HORSES, THE POSTBOY HAVING
RIDDEN TO ST. ALBANS FOR FRESH ONES. (_From a
Print after J. Pollard_) 103
ST. ALBANS CATHEDRAL 109
ST. PETER’S STREET AND TOWN HALL, ST. ALBANS, 1826.
(_From an Old Print_) 117
DUNSTABLE DOWNS 147
THE “WHITE HORSE,” HOCKLIFFE 153
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE BIRMINGHAM
MAIL FAST IN THE SNOW, WITH LITTLE CHANCE OF A
SPEEDY RELEASE: THE GUARD PROCEEDING TO LONDON
WITH THE LETTER-BAGS. (_From a Print after J.
Pollard_) 159
STONY STRATFORD 173
DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE 235
DUNCHURCH 255
FORD’S HOSPITAL 275
THE OLD “KING’S HEAD,” COVENTRY. (_From a Print
after Rowlandson_) 295
COVENTRY, FROM WINDMILL HILL. (_After J. M. W.
Turner, R.A._) 299
THE LIVERPOOL MAIL, 1836. (From a Print after J.
Pollard) 309
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Vignette: Ogilby’s Dimensurator _Title Page_
Preface vii
List of Illustrations xi
The Holyhead Road: Ogilby’s Survey 1
Clark’s Steam Carriage, 1832. (_From an Old Print_) 33
The New Highgate Archway 48
James Ripley, Ostler of the “Red Lion” 76
Hadley Green: Winter 80
South Minims 92
London Colney 101
Entrance to St. Albans 105
Market-place, St. Albans 114
The “George” 120
The “Fighting Cocks” 123
St. Michael’s 129
Mad Tom in Bedlam 132
Mad Tom at Liberty 133
Redbourne Church 134
Redbourne 135
Dunstable Priory Church 144
Little Brickhill 165
Yard of the “George” 166
Queen’s Oak 176
Market-place, Stony Stratford 181
The “Blue Ball” 183
Lilbourne 206
Cross-in-hand 209
High Cross Monument 210
The Watling Street, near Hammerwich 219
The “Four Crosses,” near Hatherton 222
Boscobel and the “Royal Oak” 227
Town Seal, Daventry 238
Braunston Hill 239
Braunston 240
Ashby St. Ledgers 243
The “Four Crosses,” Willoughby (Demolished 1898) 245
Lord John Scott’s Statue 257
Dunsmore Avenue 260
Knightlow Cross 264
The Three Spires 269
Peeping Tom 273
The “Old Ordinary” 285
The old “Bull’s Head,” Meriden 304
Meriden Cross 306
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
LONDON TO BIRMINGHAM
MILES
London (General Post Office) to—
Islington (the “Angel”) 1¼
Highgate Archway 4¼
East End, Finchley 5¾
Brown’s Wells, Finchley Common (“Green Man”) 7
North Finchley: “Tally-ho Corner” 7½
Whetstone 9¼
Greenhill Cross 10¼
Barnet 11¼
South Mimms 14½
Ridge Hill 16
London Colney
(Cross River Colne.) 17½
St. Albans (“Peahen”) 20¾
Redbourne 25
Friar’s Wash 27½
Markyate 29
Dunstable 33½
Hockliffe 37½
Sheep Lane 41
Little Brickhill 45
Fenny Stratford
(Cross River Ousel.) 48
Stony Stratford 52¼
Old Stratford
(Cross River Ouse.) 52¾
Potterspury 55
Havencote Houses 59
Towcester (“Pomfret Arms”)
(Cross River Towe.) 60¼
Foster’s Booth
(Cross River Nen.) 64
Weedon Beck
(Watling Street branches off from Holyhead Road.) 68
Dodford 68¾
Daventry 72½
Braunston 75¾
Willoughby 77
Dunchurch 80¼
Ryton-on-Dunsmore
(Cross River Avon.) 84½
Willenhall
(Cross River Sow.) 88¾
Coventry (“King’s Head”) 91¼
Allesley 93¾
Meriden 97
Stonebridge
(Cross River Tame.) 100
Bickenhill 101½
Elmdon 102¼
Wells Green 104
Yardley 105¼
Hay Mills 106¼
Small Heath 106¾
Bordesley 108
Deritend 108½
Birmingham (General Post Office) 109¼
THE WATLING STREET, FROM WEEDON BECK TO OAKENGATES AND KETLEY
MILES
Weedon Beck to—
Watford Gap 5½
Crick Railway Station 9
Lilbourne 12½
Catthorpe Five Houses 12¾
Cave’s Inn 14¼
Gibbet
(Cross River Swift.) 15
Cross-in-Hand 17¼
Willey Railway-crossing 18
Wibtoft 20
High Cross 21
Smockington 22
Caldecote 30
Witherley
(Cross River Anker.) 31½
Mancetter 32
Atherstone 32½
Baddesley Ensor 36
Dordon 36½
Stony Delph 39
Wilnecote
(Cross River Tame.) 39½
Fazeley 40¼
Hints 42¾
Weeford 44½
(Cross-road, Lichfield to Coleshill) 44¾
(Cross-road, Lichfield to Birmingham) 46¼
Wall 47¼
Muckley Corner 48¼
Hammerwich 49½
Brownhills 51
Wyrley Bank 54¾
“Four Crosses,” Hatherton 57
Gailey Railway Station (L. & N. W. R.)
(Cross River Penk.) 59¾
Horsebrook and Stretton 61½
Ivetsey Bank (“Bradford Arms”) 65
Weston-under-Lizard 67
Crackley Bank 69½
St. George’s (Pain’s Lane Chapel) 72½
Oakengates 73¾
Ketley Railway Station 75¼
[Click anywhere on map for high resolution image.]
[Illustration:
SKETCH MAP OF THE HOLYHEAD ROAD, SHOWING ALSO THE ROMAN WATLING STREET
FROM DOVER AND THE ROMAN STATIONS ON THE WAY.
HOLYHEAD ROAD ━━━━━━━━ WATLING STREET ────────
TELFORD’S NEW ROAD THROUGH ANGLESEY ╸╸╸╸╸╸╸╸
]
[Illustration: THE HOLYHEAD ROAD.]
I
“Peace hath its victories, no less renowned than war;” and there is
nothing more remarkable than the engineering triumphs that land the
Irish Member of Parliament, fresh from the Division Lobby at
Westminster, at North Wall, Dublin, spouting treason, in nine hours and
a quarter, or bring the Irish peasant, with the reek of the peat-smoke
still in his clothes, and the mud of his native bogs not yet dried on
his boots, to Euston in the same space of time.
But a hundred years ago, when the peaceful labours of the engineer had
not begun to annihilate space and time, and the Union of Great Britain
and Ireland had only just been effected, no such ready transit was
possible, and our great-grandfathers reckoned their journeys between the
two capitals in days instead of hours. The Holyhead Road, known to our
fathers and ourselves, was not in existence; and Liverpool (and even
Parkgate, near Chester) was as often the point of embarkation for
Ireland as Holyhead. The journey from London to Dublin was then of
uncertain length, determined by such fluctuating conditions as the
season of the year, the condition of the roads, and the winds of St.
George’s Channel—sometimes smooth, but more often stormy.
What the road was, and what it became, shall be the business of these
pages to relate.
* * * * *
Close upon two hundred years ago, then, when Queen Anne was just dead,
and the Elector of Hanover had ascended the throne of England as George
I., the way to Holyhead was, in great measure, an affair of individual
taste and fancy. Some travellers went by way of Oxford and Worcester,
others by Woburn, Northampton, Lutterworth, Stafford, Nantwich, and
Chester; some kept the route now known as the Holyhead Road as far as
Stonebridge, on the other side of Coventry, and thence by Castle
Bromwich and Aldridge Heath; others followed it past Shrewsbury and
turned off at Chirk for Wrexham; while others yet had their own
preferences, and reached Holyhead goodness knows how—themselves,
perhaps, least of all. Those were the times when, as Pennant tells us,
the hardy country gentlemen rode horseback. Thickly wrapped in riding
cloaks, and with jack-boots up to their hips, they splashed through mud
and mire, making light of occasional falls, and so journeyed between
London and Holyhead in perhaps six days, if they were both active and
fortunate. Those travellers commonly rode post-horses, changing their
mounts at well-known stages on the way. The system took its origin from
the establishment of postmasters by the Post Office in 1635, when the
charge for an able horse was 2½_d._ a mile. None but duly authorised
persons were then permitted to supply horses. In 1658, according to an
advertisement in the _Mercurius Politicus_, the mileage had become 3_d._
As time went on this monopoly was abolished, and most innkeepers
supplied horses for those hardy riders who despised the newfangled
coaches. The earliest mention of a coach on this road is found in the
above-named paper, under date of April 9th, 1657: “For the convenient
accommodation of passengers from and betwixt London and West Chester,
there is provided several stage-coaches, which go from the George Inn,
without Aldersgate, upon every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—to Coventry
in two days, for twenty-five shillings; to Stone in three days, for
thirty shillings; and to Chester in four days, for thirty-five
shillings; and from thence do return upon the same days, which is
performed with much ease to the passengers, having fresh horses once a
day.”
It may shrewdly be surmised that, as the Chester coach of 1739,
mentioned by Pennant, did not succeed in performing the journey under
six days, the coach of 1657 did not find it possible to do it in four;
and this suspicion seems warranted by an advertisement in the _Mercurius
Politicus_ of March 24th, 1659, probably emanating from the same
persons:—
“These are to give notice, that from the George Inn, without
Aldersgate, goes every Monday and Thursday a coach and four able
horses, to carry passengers to Chester in five days, likewise to
Coventry, Cosell (Coleshill), Cank, Litchfield, Stone, or to
Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Newport, Whitchurch, and
Holywell, at reasonable rates, by us, who have performed it two
years.
“WILLIAM DUNSTAN.
“HENRY EARLE.
“WILLIAM FOWLER.”
It will be observed that an alternative route, through Birmingham, is
announced, probably to suit the wishes of those who might chance to book
seats. The travelling was by no means comfortable, and in 1663 a young
gentleman is found writing to his father: “I got to London on Saturday
last; my journey was noe way pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote
all the way. The company that came up with me were persons of greate
qualitie, as knightes and ladyes. This travell hath soe indisposed mee,
that I am resolved never to ride up again in the coatch.” He probably
rode post ever afterwards.
In 1681 a coach was running (or crawling) between London and Shrewsbury,
by way of Newport Pagnell. Sir William Dugdale, travelling by it from
London to Coleshill, says: “The first night we stopped at Woburn, the
second at Hill Morton, near Rugby, and on the third we proceeded to
Coleshill.” Thence it went along the old Chester Road to Aldridge Heath
and Brownhills, and by the Watling Street from that point to Wellington.
This Shrewsbury stage was robbed on January 30th, 1703, in the
neighbourhood of Brownhills, by a gang of men and women, who, after they
had plundered the passengers, met three county attorneys, whom they also
robbed. One of the attorneys had what is described as a “porte mantel.”
In it, among other things, was a pair of shoes, in which the owner had
hidden twenty guineas. The thieves threw the shoes away, and when they
had departed he happily regained this most valuable portion of his
luggage. Other wayfarers were not so fortunate on encountering this
hybrid gang of desperadoes; for, ten days later, when two drovers, fresh
from Newcastle Fair, with bags of money in their pockets, came jogging
along the road, they were set upon and robbed. One was killed and the
other dangerously wounded. Two days after this exploit, growing bolder,
the gang attacked the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, with his lady and
servants, coming from Lichfield Fair, took sixty guineas, and cut off
one of the servants’ hands. This was too impudent: the country was
scoured, and these murderous ruffians seized. They numbered nine in all,
and of them three were women dressed in men’s clothes.
In 1702 the “Wolverhampton and Birmingham Flying Stage Coach” was
announced, to go once a week to London, in three days, and set out on
the return from the “Rose,” in Smithfield, every Thursday; but this
enterprise seems to have been short-lived. Meanwhile, the Chester stage
of 1657 and 1659 was still pursuing its steady way; proposing to go the
journey in five days, but taking six. The difference between promise and
performance is neatly illustrated by Pennant. “In March 1739,” he says,
“I changed my Welsh school for one nearer the capital, and travelled in
the Chester stage, then no despicable vehicle for country gentlemen. The
first day, with much labour, we got from Chester to Whitchurch, 20
miles; the second day to the ‘Welsh Harp’; the third, to Coventry; the
fourth, to Northampton; the fifth, to Dunstable; and, as a wondrous
effort, on the last to London, before the commencement of night. The
strain and labour of six good horses, sometimes eight, drew us through
the sloughs of Mireden and other places. We were constantly out two
hours before day, and as late at night; and in the depth of winter
proportionally later. Families which travelled in their own carriages
contracted with Benson & Co., and were dragged up in the same number of
days by three sets of able horses.”
“The single gentlemen, then a hardy race, equipped in jack-boots and
trousers up to their middle, rode post through thick and thin, and,
guarded against the mire, defying the frequent stumble and fall, arose
and pursued their journey with alacrity: while in these days their
enervated posterity sleep away their rapid journeys in easy chaises,
fitted for the conveyance of the soft inhabitants of Sybaris.”
The roads at this time were incredibly bad, no matter the route, and
indeed these several ways had their differences originated and
continually multiplied by certain lengths of road being impassable at
one season, and others equally so on some other occasion. When they were
_all_ impassable at one and the same time—a not unusual occurrence—the
traveller was indeed in evil case, and the highwayman suffered from
great depression of trade. The chief fount of information for travellers
at that time was Ogilby’s _Britannia_, first printed in 1675; a work of
which much more will presently be said. This was a thick folio volume
containing engraved plates and descriptions of every road in England.
Every considerable inn kept a copy of “Ogilby” in those days, for the
information of travellers; just as in the modern hotel one finds railway
time-tables and county directories as a matter of course. Ogilby was in
great request as a work of reference; so greatly indeed, that the early
road travellers who thumbed his pages at meal-times and upset their wine
over him, or now and again stole a particularly useful map, have
rendered clean and perfect copies of early editions not a little
difficult to come by. He was much too bulky for carrying about, and so
the careful traveller made notes and extracts for use from day to day.
Such an excerpt is the yellow and tattered sheet before the present
writer, giving manuscript details of how to reach Coventry. But besides
copied matter there is a good deal else drawn doubtless from first-hand
observation. Coming for instance, to “ffinchley Comon, att y^e galowes
keep to y^e right hande” is the direction, and the whole distance is
punctuated with the remarks “bad waye,” “a slowe,” and other signs
indicating depths of mud and ruggedness of road. “Galowes,” too, recurs
with dreadful frequency, probably not because the person who wrote this
wanted (like the Fat Boy in _Pickwick_) to “make yer flesh creep,” or
because he was morbidly minded, but for the commonplace reason that
gallows made excellent landmarks, and were as common objects of the road
then as sign-posts are now.
Dean Swift is the great classic figure on the Holyhead Road at this
period; although, to be sure, a very elusive and shadowy one, so far as
records of his journeys are concerned. He, too, like Pennant’s hardy
single gentlemen, commonly rode horseback, and has left traces of his
presence here and there along the road, generally in witty and biting
epigrams, written with a diamond ring on the windows of wayside inns.
There could scarce, at this time, be anything more naïvely amusing than
the pleased surprise he exhibits in a letter written to Pope in 1726, at
“the quick change” he made in seven days from London to Dublin “through
many nations and languages unknown to the civilised world,” when he had
expected the enterprise, “with moderate fortune,” to occupy ten or
eleven. “I have often reflected,” he adds, “in how few hours with a
swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown
to him as the antipodes.”
II
The question, “How far to Holyhead?” had in old days been a difficult
one to answer. It was not only in the uncertainty and variety of routes
that the difficulty of accurately measuring the number of miles lay, but
in the wild and conflicting ideas as to what really constituted a mile.
This uncertainty lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century, when
the first milestones since the days of the Romans were erected. It was,
in fact, not before 1750, when, as part of their statutory obligations,
the numerous Turnpike Trusts began to erect their milestones, that
distances began to be publicly and correctly measured. It had already
long been known that the mileages computed by the Post Office, in
dealing with postmasters and the mails, were very inaccurate throughout
the country, and for many years previously compilers of road-books had
been accustomed to print two tables of distances; one the “computed” and
Post Office mile, and the other the measured mile.
The first of English makers of road-books, John Ogilby, mentioned this
discrepancy, so early as 1675, when he published his great work,
_Britannia_. Ogilby who had been commissioned by Charles II. to survey
the roads and measure them, did his work thoroughly. He claims to have
travelled 40,000 miles in compiling his book, a folio volume of great
typographical beauty and exquisitely engraved plans of the roads. In
making his survey, he used what he calls a “wheel dimensurator.” Exactly
what this was is shown in the beautifully etched title-page by Hollar,
to his first edition, where Ogilby himself is seen on horseback,
directing the course of two men; one wheeling the instrument, the other
checking its measurements. It apparently was a wheel fitted with a
handle and wound with a ten-mile length of tape. Trundled along, it
unwound the tape, the intermediate distances being noted down by the
assistant. Ogilby very soon discovered that although the Post Office
gave the mileage to Birmingham and Holyhead respectively as 89 and 208
miles, it was then really 116 and 269 miles. The Post Office mile, which
he calls the “vulgar computation,” was therefore practically a third
larger than our so-called Statute Mile, dating from 1593 and constituted
by a statute of the 35th year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, not so much
for the purpose of creating a standard of measurement for the kingdom,
as for defining certain limits. That Statute was passed by a Legislature
dismayed by the rapid growth of London, and was an enactment forbidding
persons to build within three miles of the capital. When it came to the
point of defining a mile, it was found that no such measure had ever
been officially fixed, and that English, Irish, Scottish, and local
miles were of variable lengths. The mile was then taken to be eight
“forty-longs,” or furlongs, of forty perches each; a perch to consist of
5½ yards.
That this extraordinary difference between actual distances and those
computed by the Post Office should have arisen on all roads is
inexplicable, and that it should have remained after Ogilby’s official
measurements had proved the “computed” miles utterly wrong is an
astonishing proof of the vitality of error. But the real trouble arose
with the appearance of milestones along the turnpike roads. They were
the cause of much bitterness and contention between postmasters and the
Post Office, and between keepers of posting-houses and travellers.
Those who did business for the Post Office claimed extra mileage, and
travellers posting to or from Birmingham and Holyhead found themselves
charged in the aggregate for 27 or 62 miles extra, as the case might be;
which, say at 1_s._ 3_d._ a mile for chaise and four horses, was a
consideration. Travellers resented this difference and pointed out that,
if posting establishments could always have afforded to do certain
stages at certain prices, they could continue so to do; to which those
men of horses and carriages replied by pointing out that the milestones
were official and that they themselves paid more carriage duty on the
extra mileage; a generally conclusive retort.
III
The earliest coaches made no pretence of taking the traveller to
Holyhead. Chester was the _ultima thule_ of wheeled conveyance when Sir
William Dugdale and Pennant kept diaries, or when Swift wrote. We have
already seen that the Chester stage took six days, and therefore the
horrors of the journey described by Swift about the year 1700, were
protracted as well as acute. Whether or not he ever really made the
journey by coach is uncertain, but if so, he certainly for ever after
rode horseback. But here is his picture of such an experience:—
Resolv’d to visit a far-distant-friend,
A Porter to the Bull and Gate I send,
And bid the man, at all events, engage
_Some_ place or other in the Chester stage.
The man returns—“’Tis done as soon as said;
Your Honour’s sure when once the money’s paid.
My brother whip, impatient of delay,
Puts to at three and swears he cannot stay.”
(Four dismal hours before the break of day.)
Rous’d from sound sleep—thrice call’d—at length I rise,
Yawning, stretch out my arm, half-closed my eyes;
By steps and lanthorn enter the machine,
And take my place—how cordially!—between
Two aged matrons of excessive bulk,
To mend the matter, too, of meaner folk;
While in like mood, jamm’d in on t’other side,
A bullying captain and a fair one ride,
Foolish as fair, and in whose lap a boy—
_Our_ plague eternal, but _her_ only joy.
At last, the glorious number to complete,
Steps in my landlord for that bodkin seat;
When soon, by ev’ry hillock, rut, and stone,
Into each other’s face by turns we’re thrown.
_This_ grandam scolds, _that_ coughs, the captain swears,
The fair one screams and has a thousand fears;
While our plump landlord, train’d in other lore,
Slumbers at ease, nor yet asham’d to snore;
And Master Dicky, in his mother’s lap,
Squalling, at once brings up three meals of pap.
Sweet company! Next time, I do protest, Sir,
I’d walk to Dublin, ere I’d ride to Chester!
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “BULL AND MOUTH,” ST. MARTIN’S-LE-GRAND.
_From an old Print._]
This engine of torture was, however, well patronised.
The first stage-coach to ply between London and Holyhead was the
conveyance promoted chiefly by that enterprising Shrewsbury innkeeper,
Robert Lawrence. It started in 1780, and went through Coventry, Castle
Bromwich, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Llangollen,
Corwen, and Conway, thus keeping pretty closely to the course taken by
the modern Holyhead Road. It lay the first night at Castle Bromwich, the
second at Oswestry, and the third (if God permitted) at Holyhead. Five
years later (in the summer of 1785) the first mail-coach to Chester and
Holyhead was established, going by Northampton, Welford, Lutterworth,
Hinckley, Atherstone, Tamworth, Lichfield, Wolseley Bridge, Stafford,
Eccleshall, Woore, Nantwich, Tarporley, Chester, and St. Asaph. This,
the only mail route to Holyhead until 1808, measured 278 miles 7
furlongs, and was the longest of all ways. Other roads for many years
led by Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon, and were used by some of the
smartest coaches to the end of the coaching age; but the shortest route,
the great “Parliamentary” road to Holyhead, measures 260½ miles. In 1808
the London, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, through Oxford, was
extended to Holyhead, going by Llangollen, Corwen, and Capel Curig. It
ran thus until 1817, when it was transferred to the direct Coventry
route. The Holyhead Road had then begun to be reformed, and the direct
Mail took precedence over the old “Holyhead and Chester Mail,” still
going by its old course.
The “New Holyhead Mail,” as it was officially named, then started from
the “Swan with Two Necks,” in Lad Lane, every evening at 7.30, and took
38 hours about the business. In 1826, the year when the Menai Bridge was
opened, the time was cut down to 32¾ hours, and in 1830 to 29 hours 17
minutes, the mail arriving at Holyhead at 1.17 on the second morning
after it had left London. In 1836 and the last two years of its
existence, the journey was performed in 26 hours 55 minutes; the arrival
timed for 10.55 p.m.
Here is the time-bill for that last and best achievement:—
MILES.
LONDON dep. 8.0 P.M.
15 South Mimms arr. 9.40 „
25 Redbourne „ 10.44 „
45 Little Brickhill „ 12.32 A.M.
52¼ Stony Stratford „ 1.26 „
60¼ Towcester „ 2.12 „
72½ Daventry „ 3.25 „
80¼ Dunchurch „ 4.11 „
91¼ Coventry „ 5.18 „
100 Stonebridge „ 6.8 „
109¼ Birmingham { arr. 7.8 „
{ dep. 7.43 „
117¼ Wednesbury arr. 8.28 „
122¼ Wolverhampton „ 9.1 „
137½ Shiffnal „ 10.14 „
141½ Haygate „ 10.59 „
152 Shrewsbury { arr. 11.59 „
{ dep. 12.4 P.M.
160½ Nesscliff arr. 12.53 „
170 Oswestry „ 1.46 „
182½ Llangollen „ 2.58 „
192½ Corwen { arr. 3.55 „
{ dep. 4.0 „
198¼ Tynant arr. 5.1 „
205¾ Cernioge „ 5.39 „
220 Capel Curig „ 7.2 „
228 Tyn-y-Maes „ 7.46 „
234 Bangor { arr. 8.20 „
{ dep. 8.25 „
237 Menai Bridge arr. 8.43 „
247½ Mona Inn „ 9.43 „
260½ HOLYHEAD „ 10.55 „
The man who made that achievement possible was Thomas Telford. Long
before his aid was sought, the question of improving the communications
between the two countries had become a burning one. The Irish members,
meeting no longer on St. Stephen’s Green, had a grievance in the
circumstance of their journeys to the Imperial Parliament at Westminster
being both tedious and hazardous, and this question of road-reform was
the first raised by them. The Government, in reply, appointed a
Commission; Rennie, the foremost engineer of his day, was called in to
advise upon the harbours of Holyhead and Howth, and Telford in 1810 to
plan the road improvements.
Exactly what the road was like before it was improved under Telford, let
the Report of the Commissioners on Holyhead Roads and Harbours
tell:—“Many parts are extremely dangerous for a coach to travel upon.
From Llangollen to Corwen the road is very narrow, long, and steep; has
no side fence, except about a foot and a half of mould or dirt, thrown
up to prevent carriages falling down three or four hundred feet into the
river Dee. Stage-coaches have been frequently overturned and broken down
from the badness of the road, and the mails have been overturned.
Between Maerdy, Pont-y-Glyn, and Dinas Hill, there are a number of
dangerous precipices, steep hills, and difficult narrow turnings. At
Dinas Hill the width of the road is not more than twelve feet at the
steepest part of the hill, and with a deep precipice on one side; two
carriages cannot pass without the greatest danger. At Ogwen Pool there
is a very dangerous place, where the water runs over the road; extremely
difficult to pass at flooded times.” Arrived at Bangor there were the
dangers of the ferry to be braved, and, after these, 26 miles of the
perilous old road across Anglesey, even now to be traced by those
curious in these things. What travelling to Holyhead and Dublin was like
in those old times may best be shown by quoting an old diary of 1787, of
an expedition from Grosvenor Square, London. The party consisted of a
coach and four, a post-chaise and pair, and five outriders. They reached
Holyhead in four days (expenses, so far, £77 1_s._ 3_d._), and crossed
St. George’s Channel at a further cost of £37 2_s._ 1_d._; and cheap,
too, as times then were.
The first idea of the Government towards improving the road was to
indict twenty-one townships between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. It would
have been an excellent notion, only for the fact that those places were
quite unable to find the penalties actually recoverable at law, much
less to reconstruct the road. A larger view of the necessities of the
case had to be taken. The nation was already pledged to the construction
of two harbours, and to the nation now fell the duty of making access to
Holyhead Harbour moderately safe. The first practical result was the
selection of Telford as engineer, to survey and report upon the 109
miles between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. Telford had already carried out
many improvements for the Government in the Highlands, and had, years
before, as Surveyor to the County of Salop and Engineer of the Ellesmere
Canal, acquired a thorough knowledge of the road through North Wales. He
made a survey in 1811, but it was not until 1815 that the Government
finally adopted his report and that of the Commissioners, and the
Treasury found the money for the work. It was then decided that
improvements should be made along the whole length of road between
London and Holyhead, but that the Shrewsbury to Holyhead portion being
incomparably the worst, it should have the first attention. In the
course of five years this first part of the work was completed. The
general line of the old road was followed, along the valley of the Dee,
and thence from Corwen, across the watershed to the Vale of Conway and
to the summit-level at Ogwen Pool; descending from that point by the
valley of Nant Ffrancon to Bangor and the Menai Straits. There a quarter
of a mile of stormy water still separated the Isle of Anglesey from the
mainland, and it was not until the January of 1826 that it was bridged.
From the Anglesey side of the Straits an entirely new and direct road
was made across the island to Holyhead, saving three miles, and giving a
level route, instead of the precipitous old way.
In the result, the Holyhead Road through North Wales may, without
hesitation, be pronounced the finest in the land. Passing though it does
through the wildest scenery, nowhere is the gradient steeper than 1 in
20, while its width, from 28 to 34 feet, and its splendid surface render
it safe and convenient. The old road, frequently as steep as 1 in 6½,
and with its sides unprotected from the cliffs and torrents that
terrified bygone generations, has almost wholly vanished under the new;
but in those places where Telford did not merely remodel it, and took an
entirely new line, its character may still be seen.
In 1820 the London to Shrewsbury portion of the work was begun, and the
greater part completed by 1828. Minor improvements were made on it from
time to time in after years, but it does not nearly compare with the
more thorough work undertaken through North Wales. Parts remain rich in
very steep hills, and powerful interests situated in the larger towns
vetoed the cutting of new routes through crooked and awkward approaches,
and so have left much to be desired. Telford himself died, in his
seventy-seventh year, in 1834, but the Holyhead Road Commissioners were
in existence for years afterwards, and continued to send forth Reports
until 1851. For a long period, however, before that time those
documents, containing as they do only the surveyors’ reports as to the
condition of the road and bridges, have nothing of interest. The last
paper of importance is the Parliamentary Return of 1839, giving the sum
of the expenses incurred on the whole length of road, including
improvement of the road from Bangor to Chester, and cost of building the
Menai and Conway bridges. The total amount was £697,963 14_s._ 9_d._, of
that sum £164,489 7_s._ 9_d._ was granted by Parliament towards the work
as a national undertaking: the remaining £533,474 7_s._ 0_d._ lent by
the Treasury, to be repaid by the Commissioners out of the tolls. In
1839, according to a return made to Parliament by the Office of Woods
and Forests, £250,880 5_s._ 9¼_d._ had been thus repaid. That very
little of the balance found its way back to the Treasury may confidently
be asserted. But, however that matter stands, certainly the work was
done with rigid economy and, considering its nature and extent, at a
very small cost.
Some part of the cost of the improved road fell upon the letter writers
of that day. The postage of a letter to Ireland was sixteen pence, made
up of the following items:—
_s._ _d._
Inland postage to Holyhead 1 0
Conway Bridge 0 1
Menai Bridge 0 1
Sea postage 0 2
— —
1 4
== ==
It made no difference that the direct Holyhead Mail went nowhere near
the Conway Bridge: letters for Ireland were still charged that penny,
until Penny Postage came in 1841 and treated all places in the United
Kingdom alike.
IV
Meanwhile, stage-coaching had also been revolutionised. The growth of
Birmingham and the great commercial industries of the Midlands had
rendered the old methods too slow and cumbrous; and the ancient coaches,
supported on leather straps, and with curtained windows, starting once,
twice or thrice a week, according to distance travelled, performing
their slow and toilsome pilgrimages by daylight and resting at sundown,
gave place to the well-appointed vehicles, hung on steel springs, and
with glazed windows, that ran from either end, every day, and continued
their journeys throughout the night. No longer was it possible to drive
the same wretched animals the whole length of the weary day, but changes
at every ten or twelve miles came into vogue, and speed consequently
increased. The greatest period of coaching on the Holyhead Road dawned
in 1823, when the London and Birmingham “Tally-Ho” began to run. This
was often called “Mountain’s Tally-Ho,” being horsed out of London by
Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, of the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill. It was a
day coach, and one of the first to run “double,” that is to say, with up
and down coaches every day. It left London at 7.45 a.m. and Birmingham
at 7 a.m. Its popularity was very soon challenged by eager competitors,
for in the following year the “Independent Tally-Ho” was put on the road
by Horne, of the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, starting an hour and a
quarter earlier from London, and a quarter of an hour earlier from
Birmingham, with the idea of securing the “Tally-Ho’s” custom. From this
time, coaches of this popular name multiplied until their number was
quite bewildering. In 1830, the “Original Tally-Ho” was started, and in
1832, the “Real” and the “Patent Tally-Hoes.” A picture by J. Pollard of
the “Tally-Ho” and “Independent” nearing London on a summer afternoon,
about 1828, shows that if one did actually start before the other, they
both reached London together. The scene is the “Crown,” Holloway Road, a
house now numbered 622 in that thoroughfare, and rebuilt about 1865, but
still bearing the same name, situated at the corner of Landseer Road.
[Illustration:
“TALLY-HO” AND “INDEPENDENT TALLY-HO,” LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM COACHES,
NEARING LONDON, 1828.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
In 1825 all previous efforts were eclipsed by the “Wonder” coach,
between London and Shrewsbury, established in that year. It was the
first to perform much over a hundred miles a day, and, starting from the
“Bull and Mouth,” St. Martin’s-le-Grand, at 6.30 a.m., was in
Shrewsbury, 154 miles distant, at 10.30 the same night. It aroused
extraordinary competition. A “No Wonder,” running three days a week from
Birmingham lasted a season, and is heard of no more; but a more
thoroughgoing rival was the “Nimrod,” from Shrewsbury, put on the road
in 1834. How the proprietors of the “Wonder” started the “Stag,” and
successfully “nursed” the “Nimrod,” will be found recorded under
Shrewsbury. There were at this competitive time more coaches on the
Holyhead Road than on any other. So far as Barnet, there were eighteen
mails and one hundred and seventy-six other coaches, besides
road-waggons, post-chaises, and other vehicles. Some of them turned off
at Hockliffe for Manchester and Liverpool, but the greater number
continued to Birmingham. The London and Birmingham “Greyhound” was
started in 1829, and ran light, with an imperial on the roof, to prevent
luggage being placed there. Passengers’ luggage must be sent to the
office in time to be forwarded by the “Economist.” So ran the notice.
Both the “Greyhound” and the “Economist” were night coaches: the latter,
the luggage-carrier, starting an hour earlier. It was at one time
proposed to light the “Greyhound” with gas, but when it was found that
the gas-tank would take up the space in the fore-boot wanted for
parcels, the idea was relinquished. The down “Greyhound” was ingeniously
robbed in March 1835 by a gang who set to work very cleverly. Two inside
places were booked by the thieves at the “Swan with Two Necks,” and the
two remaining places at the “Angel,” Islington. When the coach reached
Hockliffe, two of the confederates alighted, and the other two left at
Stony Stratford. Nothing was discovered until Coventry was reached, when
the guard, feeling about inside, found that one of the parcels gave way.
On his leaning against it, away it went into the boot, which had been
cut open, and a bank parcel, containing 300 sovereigns and a bill of
exchange for £120 extracted. There is no record of the thieves ever
having been discovered. They disappeared, just as did those who walked
with bank-notes to the value of £4002 from the Birmingham “Balloon Post
Coach,” when standing in the yard of the “Swan with Two Necks,” December
12th, 1822. £1000 was offered for the discovery of the thieves, and the
notes were stopped, but the results do not appear.
Horrified horse-owners, and old-fashioned persons with prejudices
against invention and progress, raise outcries against the pace of
motor-cars, and have succeeded in reducing the legal speed on roads from
the original 14 miles an hour allowed by Act of Parliament to the 12
miles permitted by an order of the Local Government Board; but the pace
attained toward the close of the coaching era by some of the crack
coaches was much higher. The rival “Tally-Ho” and “Independent Tally-Ho”
coaches, for instance, ran certain stages up to 18¾ miles an hour, and
only on one stage did they drop down to 12 miles. “Furious driving,”
indeed, and vouched for by the contemporary _Coventry Chronicle_, May
8th, 1830, which well heads its report, “Extraordinary Travelling”:—
“Saturday se’night, being May-day, the usual competition took place
between the London Coaches. The “Independent Tally-ho,” running
between Birmingham and London, performed a feat altogether
unparalleled in the annals of Coaching, having travelled the distance
of one-hundred-and-nine miles in seven hours and thirty-nine minutes.
“The following is a correct account of the time it took to perform the
distance, horsed by the various proprietors:—Mr. Horne, from London to
Colney, seventeen-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-six minutes;—Mr.
Bowman, from Colney to Redbourne (where the passengers, stopped six
minutes for breakfast), seven-and-half miles, in twenty-six minutes;—Mr.
Morris, from Redbourne to Hockliffe, twelve-and-quarter miles, in
one-hour-and-four minutes;—Mr. Warden, from Hockliffe to Shenley, eleven
miles, in forty-seven minutes;—Mr. May, from Shenley to Daventry,
twenty-four miles, in one-hour-and-forty-nine minutes;—Mr. Garner,
from Daventry to Coventry, nineteen-and-quarter miles, in
one-hour-and-twelve minutes;—Mr. Radenhurst, from Coventry to
Birmingham, seventeen-and-three quarter miles, in one-hour-and-fifteen
minutes.
“The ‘Original Tally-ho’ performed the same distance in
seven-hours-and-fifty minutes.”
The extraordinary feat of the “Independent-Tally-ho” recorded above,
excelled the performances of that famous coach, the “Quicksilver” Exeter
mail; but that is nothing compared with the passengers’ feat of
swallowing a breakfast in the six minutes allowed for that meal at
Redbourne. It is probably no great hazard to guess that those unhappy
passengers had no breakfast at all on that historic occasion.
It is not to be supposed that coaching was an altogether safe method of
travelling, especially when feats of this kind were indulged in; but it
must be acknowledged that comparatively few of the accidents happened
when racing. Among the disasters that now and again occurred, besides
those recorded elsewhere in these pages, the following specimens, from
October 1834 to the close of 1837, are typical:—
1834, October.—Shrewsbury “Union” overturned at Overley Hill, near
Wellington. The coach was heavily laden and one of the hind
wheels collapsed. One of the outsides, a Mr. Newey, of
Halesowen, jumped off, but not far enough, and the coach and
luggage fell on him, killing him. He died the next morning, at
the Haygate inn.
1834, October.—“Nimrod.” Coachman thrown off near Haygate, and killed
on the spot.
1834, October.—Lichfield and Wolverhampton coach. A jockey, named
Calloway, had his leg broken by being thrown off in an upset.
In August 1835 he was awarded £210 damages.
1835, September.—“Emerald,” London and Birmingham coach, upset at 2
a.m. near Little Brickhill, owing to axle-tree of near
fore-wheel breaking. The five outsides were pitched into a
hedge, and not seriously hurt, but the coachman, John Webb,
was entangled with the apron, and was crushed to death by the
coach falling on him. His body was found to be terribly
mangled when carried into the “Peacock and Sandhill Tavern.”
1836.—Sawyer, the beadle of Apothecaries’ Hall, returning from
Birmingham on outside of coach (name not specified) fell
asleep. A jerk flung him off, and he was killed.
1837, August.—“Emerald,” London and Birmingham coach. Horses dashed
away up Plumb Park Hill, near Stony Stratford, and coach upset
in the succeeding valley. Outside passengers thrown a distance
of twenty feet, and two of them killed.
1837, October.—Birmingham and Shrewsbury Mail upset on entering
Wolverhampton, and coach smashed to pieces. All passengers
severely injured.
1837, December.—Holyhead Mail upset at Willenhall, owing to
obstructions in the road during alterations. Coachman’s skull
fractured, and one outside passenger injured. The “Swallow”
coach had been upset on the same spot the day before.
Besides these instances, there was the sad case of Yates, a guard on the
“Wonder,” who at Christmas time, in one year not particularised, was
thrown off the coach at Wolverhampton. The coach was overloaded with
game and Christmas hampers, and he occupied a makeshift perch over one
of the hind wheels. The vehicle gave a lurch, and he fell out; his feet
catching in the straps, he was dragged some distance on his head until
the hind wheel caught him and crushed his thigh. He died the next day.
The very names of the coaches that ran in the last years of the road
breathe an air of competition. The old “Gee-hoes,” “Caravans,” and
“Diligences”; the “Originals” and their like, made way for the “Prince
Regent,” “Royal Union,” “Sovereign,” and “John Bull”; and to them
succeeded such suggestions of speed as the “Celerity,” “Antelope,”
“Greyhound,” “Express,” “Rocket,” and “Swallow.” Moderate charges were
hinted at in the names of the “Economist” and the “Liberal”; and a high
courage, calculated to daunt opponents, in those of the “Triumph,”
“Retaliator,” “Defiance,” and “Tartar.” The public largely benefited in
those ultimate years by the competition, as also did the turnpike tolls;
but it may be doubted whether many coach-proprietors then made much
profit. For one thing, a stage-coach running every day throughout the
year on the road as far as Birmingham paid in tolls alone £3 11_s._
9_d._ a day, in addition to the duty of a penny a mile paid by all
coaches for every four passengers they were licensed to carry,
irrespective of the places being occupied or not. Turnpike gates
encouraged Sabbatarian feeling by charging double on Sundays; so, on the
assumption that a Birmingham coach ran 365 days in the year, it would
have to pay something like £1400 in tolls alone, or to Holyhead £3400.
[Illustration: CLARK’S STEAM CARRIAGE, 1832. _From an Old Print._]
Long before railways seriously threatened to drive coaches off the road,
the steam carriages of the early motor-car period entered into a
fleeting rivalry with horses. Of these, William Clark’s steam carriage
was the most notable. It was put upon the road between London and
Birmingham in June 1832, and was a huge three-wheeled conveyance,
carrying 50 passengers, 28 inside. Little is known of this conveyance
beyond the claims made for it, which included the statements that it
could develop 100 horse-power and that the pace could be regulated at
pleasure from 1 to 50 miles an hour. Another contrivance of this kind
was Heaton’s steam carriage, of 1833, which is recorded to have made
several journeys between Birmingham and Coventry, at a speed of 8 miles
an hour, but soon faded into obscurity; probably crushed out of
commercial existence by the extravagant tolls levied on all these
mechanical inventions by road trustees, highly prejudiced against
anything of the kind.
V
Such were the conditions of coaching when rumours of a projected London
and Birmingham Railway began to be noised about in 1825, and then in
1830. “London and Birmingham” that railway was first named, although, if
the original project be closely followed, it will be seen that not
London, but Birmingham, took the initiative. London has ever lagged in
the rear. When the early Birmingham, Shrewsbury, and Chester coaches
plied between those towns and the metropolis, it was not from London
that they originated, but from the provinces; and, just in same way, it
was the Birmingham merchants to whom the idea of a railway to London
occurred, as not merely a cheaper and more expeditious way of travelling
to the capital, but an excellent means by which goods might be conveyed,
and London, as a great market for them, duly exploited. The original
organising committee was eventually joined by a body of London bankers
and financiers, and a line of country surveyed by George and Robert
Stephenson in face of a most determined opposition offered by landowners
on the way. Robert Stephenson has left an account of his difficulties,
and stated that he walked the whole distance between London and
Birmingham no fewer than twenty times. The long story of the fight in
Parliament for the Bill in 1832, of its first defeat, and of its
eventual success in 1833, is not a matter for these pages. Only let it
be noted that the opposition of the landed proprietors was bought off by
the addition of half a million sterling to the estimates for the
purchase of land along the route.
How enormous was the road and canal traffic at that time may be judged
from the statement prepared by the projectors of the railway, who put
the sum paid annually for travelling and conveyance of goods between
London and Birmingham at £800,000.
The construction of the railway was begun in June, 1834. On July 20th,
1837, the first portion was opened to Boxmoor, a distance of 24½ miles,
and on October 16th following to Tring. On April 9th, 1838, the railhead
had reached a point just beyond Bletchley, and there it stopped for some
months, owing to engineering difficulties at Roade and Kilsby. Meanwhile
the works had been pushed on from the Birmingham end, and between that
town and Rugby the line was complete. A temporary station, known as
“Denbigh Hall,” was provided near Bletchley, where the railway crossed
the Holyhead Road, and between this and Rugby the 38 miles break in the
line was traversed by a service of coaches until the following
September, when the London and Birmingham Railway was opened along its
entire length.
No one was more pleased at this than Dr. Arnold, the great Headmaster of
Rugby School, whose attitude was in strong contrast with that generally
adopted by the classes. “I rejoice to see it,” he said, “and to think
that feudality has gone for ever. It is so great a blessing to think
that any one evil is really extinct.”
This event, of course, sounded the death-knell of coaching along the
first half of the Holyhead Road, but there were those who thought the
railway must soon show its inability to beat a well-appointed coach, and
so they held on a little while longer, encouraged by some of the more
irreconcileable among travellers. The “Greyhound” and the “Albion” were
the last to go, in the early weeks of 1839, basely deserted even by
those who had egged their proprietors to such foredoomed opposition.
Edward Sherman, the great coach proprietor of the “Bull and Mouth,” who
had nine coaches on this road, was a fanatical opponent of railways, and
struggled to the last against them, losing thereby the important
carrying and van business of the London and Birmingham, secured by the
far-seeing policy of Chaplin and Horne, of the “Swan with Two Necks,”
who abandoned coaching and threw in their interest with the new order of
things. Sherman eventually saved himself by joining his interests with
the Great Western Railway.
The opening of the London and Birmingham had a great effect upon the
Irish mails and passenger traffic; for the Grand Junction Railway,
between Birmingham and Liverpool, had already been in existence since
July 1837, and thus a continuous route between London and Liverpool was
available to Post Office and public, saving many hours and much expense.
Both seized the opportunity, and everything went by train to the
Lancashire port. It seemed as though not only the Holyhead Road but
Holyhead itself was a thing of the past.
In 1846 the London and Birmingham and the Grand Junction Railways
amalgamated, under the title of the London and North-Western Railway,
and the Liverpool route might thus have been thought settled for all
time; but in the meanwhile two separate lines had been authorised—one
from Crewe to Chester, and another from Chester to Holyhead. By the
completion of the second of these (in March 1850) Holyhead was brought
back to its old importance, and is once more on the mail route between
London and Dublin. Alterations on the main line have long since left
Birmingham on one side, and the “Wild Irishman” now goes from Rugby by
way of Nuneaton and Tamworth to Stafford, Crewe, and Chester.
VI
The Holyhead and the Great North Roads are identical as far as Barnet,
and the first landmark on the way is the “Angel.” Every one knows the
“Angel,” Islington. It is a great deal more than a public-house, and has
attained the dignity of a geographical expression. Any teetotaller can
afford to know the “Angel,” and the acquaintance is no more a stigma
than an intimacy with the English Channel or the North Foreland. Five
roads meet at this spot—for seventy years or so the meeting and starting
point of omnibuses to and from all parts of North London. Nothing
strikes the foreigner with greater astonishment than that our omnibus
routes start from or end at some public-house, and that the “Angel,” the
“Elephant and Castle,” the “Eyre Arms,” and the “Horns,” should be
household names in different parts of London. The intelligent foreigner
goes away and writes scathingly upon what he considers an evidence of
drunkenness rampant in all classes of English society, and does not stop
to enquire the origin of the custom, to be found far back in omnibus
history, when many public-houses had convenient stables, and omnibus
proprietors had none.
The “Angel” is not in Islington at all, but just within the parish of
Clerkenwell. How it came to be just inside the Clerkenwell boundary is
told in the legend of a pauper being found dead in what was then called
Back Road, now the Liverpool Road, at that time in the great parish of
St. Mary, Islington (which by the way, is the largest and most populous
parish in England, numbering over 350,000 souls), but now, with the
“Angel” in that of St. John’s, Clerkenwell. Islington refused to bury
the pauper and Clerkenwell performed that duty, afterwards claiming the
land.
The modern “Angel,” built somewhere about 1870, before public-houses
became Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Queen Annean, is frankly a public-house
in appearance, like the rebuilt “Elephant and Castle” and others, and
carries in its aspect no reminiscence of coaching times. It has been
left for the proprietors in recent years to grow somewhat ashamed of
that fact, for, painted on tiles, there now appears on the wall of its
entrance lobby one of those quasi-historical pictures, that have of late
begun to decorate the entrance walls of our otherwise unredeemed gin
palaces. By means of these tile-pictures those patrons who are not too
far gone in intoxication may learn something of local or national
history and topography. In the case of the “Angel,” the subject selected
is that of the starting of the Holyhead Mail from the old house, whose
frontage, pictured from old prints, bears the inscription, “For
Gentlemen and Families,” and at whose windows the gentlemen and families
are accordingly observed to be sitting, enjoying the scene. It is not
conceivable that any one should now hope to find pleasure in doing the
like at these modern windows that nowadays light billiard-rooms, and
look down upon a busy scene of omnibuses and tramcars; but perhaps even
what we rightly consider to be a sordid confluence of traffic may come
to have a retrospective romance of its own in, say, the twenty-first
century. Exactly what the “Angel” was like in 1812 may be seen from the
accompanying illustration by Pollard, of the illuminations on the night
of the King’s birthday in that year. The Holyhead Mail is prominent in
front of two others drawn up before the house.
[Illustration:
THE “ANGEL,” ISLINGTON. MAIL COACHES AND ILLUMINATIONS ON NIGHT OF THE
KING’S BIRTHDAY, 1812.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
A few paces north stood the at one time equally famous “Peacock,” and
the not altogether obscure “White Lion”; coaching inns both, but long
since rebuilt as mere “publics.” “All coaches going anywhere north
called at the ‘Peacock,’” says Colonel Birch-Reynardson. “As they came
up, the old hostler, or a man, whoever he was, called out their names as
they arrived on the scene. Up they come through the fog, but our old
friend knows them all. Now ‘York Highflier,’ now ‘Leeds Union,’ now
‘York Express,’ now ‘Rockingham,’ now ‘Stamford Regent,’ now ‘Truth and
Daylight,’ and others which I forget, all with their lamps lit, and all
smoking and steaming, so that you could hardly see the horses. Off they
go. One by one as they get their vacant places filled up, the guard on
one playing ‘Off she goes!’ on another, ‘Oh, dear, what can the matter
be?’ on another, ‘When from great Londonderry’; on another, ‘The
flaxen-headed ploughboy’; in fact, all playing different tunes almost at
the same time. The coaches rattling over the stones, or rather
pavement—for there was little or no macadam in those days; the horses’
feet clattering along to the sound of the merry-keyed bugles, upon which
many of the guards played remarkably well, altogether made such a noise
as could be heard nowhere except at the ‘Peacock’ at Islington, at
half-past six in the morning. All this it was curious to hear and see,
though not over pleasant in a dense fog, particularly if it were very
cold into the bargain, with heavy rain or snow falling.”
Half-past six in the morning! Yes; but that was not by any means an
early hour in coaching days. If we turn to _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_, we
shall find that Tom, with his father, come to see him off to Rugby by
the “Tally-Ho,” stayed at the “Peacock” overnight, to make sure of
catching that conveyance, and that in order to do so they were actually
up and breakfasting at ten minutes to three on a winter’s morning. And
none too early, either; for just as Tom was swallowing the last mouthful
of breakfast, winding his comforter round his throat, and tucking the
ends into the breast of his overcoat, the horn sounded, Boots looked in,
with the fateful cry of “Tally-Ho, sir,” and the “Tally-Ho” itself
appeared on the instant outside. But what “Tally-Ho” this could have
been that passed through Rugby does not appear. “Tell the young gent to
look alive,” said the guard; “now then sir, jump up behind,” and they
were off. “Good-bye, father—my love at home”; and the coach whirls away
in the darkness.
London then ended at Islington. Where does it now end? At Highgate; at
Whetstone, where the boundary of the Metropolitan Postal District is
crossed; or beyond South Mimms, where the frontiers of the Metropolitan
Police march with those of the Hertfordshire Constabulary? Highgate
Archway was wont to be regarded as the northern gate into London, and
may now be taken as dividing the far suburbs and the near. Seventy years
ago it was quite rural.
[Illustration:
_THE_ HIGHGATE ARCHWAY _FROM THE_ TURNPIKE GATE _AT_ HOLLOWAY.
_Published Nov. 9, 1813 by_ James Whittle & Rich^d. Holmes Laurie, _53
Fleet Street, London_.
Published, 20th March 1823, by RICH. HOLMES LAURIE 3 Fleet Street,
London
]
VII
It is curious to look upon an old print like that of the Archway road
and its toll-gate, reproduced here, and then, with a knowledge of that
busy spot, with its thronging omnibuses and tramcars, to compare the old
view with the present-day aspect of the place. An Archway Tavern is seen
standing at the junction of the roads, but it is quite unlike the
flaunting gin-palace of to-day. What, also, has become of the horse and
cattle pond in front? The toll-gate, we know, finally disappeared in
1876, but long before then the ascending roadway had been lined with
buildings on either side. Only recently the old and ugly archway has
been removed, to make way for the new and handsome iron and steel
viaduct, which bears the misleading date of 1897, although the structure
was not opened until the summer of 1900. It, may be as well to put upon
record that it is situated a hundred yards to the north of where the old
Archway stood. Of late years, since the government of London has been
taken over by the London County Council, the Archway has been more than
ever a landmark, showing to where the frontier of London extended, for
the London County Council’s boundary ran half-way through the structure,
whose northern moiety lay within the territory of the Middlesex Council.
[Illustration: THE NEW HIGHGATE ARCHWAY.]
The new viaduct, wholly in Middlesex, cost £25,000. Its date, “1897,”
prominent in cast iron on the southern approach, together with the fact
that the work was not completed until midway through 1900, perpetuates
the sinister memory of the great engineering strike in progress during
that interval. Five authorities—the London County Council, the Middlesex
County Council, the Islington Vestry, Hornsey District Council, and the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners (who are administrators of the Bishop of
London’s estates here)—contributed in varying proportions to the cost.
They may look with satisfaction at the result: a light and handsome
bridge, that, vaulting across the roadway with a clear flight of three
times the span of the old arch, renders it possible to widen the road to
any conceivable width, against that time which Mother Shipton foresaw,
when “England shall be undone and Highgate Hill stand in the middle of
London.”
Let us look back, on passing beneath this triumph of engineering skill,
and, seeing with what grace the huddled mass of London is framed by it,
conceive the welcome it may seem to extend to the wayfarer (if such
there be) coming to the capital to seek his fortunes. It may, however,
be readily supposed that the days when ambitious youth resorting by road
to London, there to win fortune with the customary half-crown, are done.
The roads nowadays have lost all possibilities of that endearing romance
of high ambition and courage, coupled with slender resources and an
uninstructed belief that London’s streets are paved with gold. The
precociously worldly-wise youngsters of to-day, who resort to the
Metropolis by rail, have no such illusions.
On the fortune-seekers of old, who tramped the weary miles to this
gateway of their ambition, the forbidding old Archway must needs have
exercised a dispiriting influence. It looked, from its outer side, so
like a fortress gate, and was alas! too often a prison-gate when once
within. London, lying down below them, vast and unknown; how, they might
have thought, would it be possible to conquer _that_; to win a place
_there_? Little blame to such of them as may have trembled at the
prospect and retraced their steps; and better perhaps had it been for
many of those who went forward that their courage had thus failed them
at the threshold; rather than that they had gone down into that human
whirlpool, to return broken in after days, to leap to death from the
footpath above the lofty arch, into that roadway they had trod so
hopefully years before.
For old Highgate Archway was a veritable Bridge of Sighs; a favourite
resort of London suicides to whom a leap from Waterloo Bridge into the
river did not offer great attractions. It was not until the Archway was
opened toll-free that the iron railings fencing the upper roadway were
erected. They were 7 feet in height, cost £700, and were the cause of
great disappointment to would-be suicides by leaping, who have an
illogical objection to falling one yard more than necessary for the
purpose of breaking their necks. This explains the comparative disfavour
with which suicides regard the Golden Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral
and other high places.
[Illustration:
HIGHGATE ARCHWAY: MAIL COACH NEARING LONDON.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
It remains uncertain whether those protective railings were erected for
the sake of the suicides, or for that of the increased number of persons
who used the Archway Road when tolls were abolished, some of whom might
have been injured by those too anxious to shuffle off their mortal coil,
to first ascertain whether or not the road was clear. Certain, however,
it is that it mattered very much to the local authorities from which
side the suicides came down: the territory of the Islington Vestry
having been on one side and that of the Hornsey Local Board on the
other. It is even related that one authority proposing to the other that
railings should be erected, and meeting with a refusal to share the
cost, fenced in its own side and thus left the self-murderers no choice.
The expense and trouble of the necessary inquests falling on the other
authority speedily brought about the railing-in of that side also.
VIII
The roadway of Highgate Archway is on a level with the cross upon the
dome of St. Paul’s. From what the perfervid preachers of our own
time—the Solomon Eagles of our day—call that “sink of iniquity,” the
voice of London, inarticulate, like the growl of a fierce beast, rises
continually, save for some sleepy hours between midnight and the dawn.
Frank Osbaldistone, in _Rob Roy_, journeying north, heard the hum of
London die away on his ear when he reached Highgate, the distant peal of
her steeples sounding their admonitory “turn again,” just as they did to
Whittington. Looking back from the Hill upon the dusky magnificence of
the Metropolis, he felt as if he were leaving behind comfort, opulence,
the charms of society, and all pleasures of cultivated life. The modern
wayfarer is not so easily rid of the Great City, whose low-pitched roar
not only follows him to these northern heights, but pursues him,
clamant, onwards through Finchley, and whose rising tide of houses now
laps the crest of Highgate Hill and spills over the brim, in driblets of
new suburban streets, like a brick and mortar Deluge.
Just half a mile past the Archway, which of old was the _ultima thule_,
the Hercules Pillars of London in this direction, still stands the
“Woodman” inn, pictured in the coaching print of the thirties, shown
over page. It is the original building that still stands here, but
carved and cut about and greatly altered, and stands converted into an
ordinary public-house. The curious little summer-house, or look-out,
remains, little changed, but no visitors ascend to it to admire the view
with telescopes, as we see them doing in the picture; for the spreading
hill and dale towards London are covered with houses—objects not so rare
in the neighbourhood of London that one needs to seek them with a
spy-glass.
[Illustration:
THE “WOODMAN,” FINCHLEY, 1834: COVENTRY AND BIRMINGHAM COACH PASSING.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
Southwood Lane, opposite this old inn, leads across from this branch of
the high road to Highgate village, which should be noticed before the
modern spirit seizes upon and transforms it.
“When Highgate Archway and the Archway Road were completed, in 1813, and
traffic, notwithstanding the heavy tolls, began to come and go this way,
Highgate village was ruined. Few cared to painfully toil up Highgate
Hill and go through the once busy village down the corresponding descent
of North Hill. Ever since then, while the suburbs round about have
grown, Highgate village has gradually decayed. Little alteration has
been made here in the broad street—empty now, that was once so busy—and
Highgate remains preserved like a fly in amber, testifying to the
old-world appearance of a typical coaching village near London. True it
is that its fine old houses are a thought shabby, while the “Red Lion,”
though still standing, has long been closed, and its elaborate sign-post
innocent these many years of its swinging sign. The “Gatehouse Tavern,”
too, was rebuilt in 1896; but, for the rest, Highgate is the Highgate of
old.
“Established over five hundred years” was the legend displayed by the
old “Gatehouse Tavern” pictured here. Many old clubs held high revel in
it—literary clubs and others making their several ostensible objects the
excuse for holding high revel. _Punch_ itself was founded in a
pot-house. Among the clubs that foregathered here were the “Ash Sticks,”
the “Aged Pilgrims,” and the “Ben Jonson”; while in the old
low-ceilinged rooms the Sunday ordinary that was long a favourite
institution, combined with some deservedly renowned port, attracted
George Cruickshank (before he found grace and became a total abstainer)
and his brother Robert; Archibald Hemming, _Punch’s_ first cartoonist;
and many an Early Victorian.
The steep descent of North Hill brings the explorer from old Highgate to
East Finchley, where a modern suburb struggles bravely, but with
indifferent success, to live down the depressing circumstance of being
set in midst of some half-dozen huge cemeteries, and on a road along
which every day and all day a continual stream of funeral processions
passes dismally along. The chief gainer from this traffic appears to be
the “Old White Lion,” where the mourners halt and refresh on their
return. Mourning should seem, judging from the assemblage outside the
“Old White Lion” (which should surely, in complimentary mourning, be the
“Old _Black_ Lion”), to be a thirsty business.
Beyond the cemeteries lies Brown’s Wells, in midst of what was once
Finchley Common. At Brown’s Wells, if anywhere, memories of that
ill-omened waste should be most easily recalled; for here, beside the
road, in the grounds of Hilton House, stands the massive trunk of
“Turpin’s Oak,” still putting forth leaves with every recurrent spring.
Did the conscience-stricken spirits of the dead revisit the scenes of
their crimes, then the garden of Hilton House might well be peopled o’
nights with remorseful spooks; for many another beside Turpin lurked
here and snatched purses, or held up coaches and horsemen crossing this
one-time lonely waste.
[Illustration:
HIGHGATE VILLAGE, 1826.
_From an Old Print._
]
Pennant, the antiquary, writing at the close of the eighteenth century,
talks of the great Common not as an antiquity but as a place he was
perfectly well acquainted with, travelling as he did the Holyhead Road
between Chester and London. “Infamous for robberies,” he calls it, “and
often planted with gibbets, the penalty of murderers.”
This aspect of Finchley Common was then no new thing, and if Pennant had
been minded to write an antiquarian exercise on its evil associations,
he would have found much material to his hand. But the most sinister
period of the Common’s unsavoury history began at the close of the long
struggle between King and Parliament in the mid-seventeenth century, and
for long years afterwards robbery and murder were to be feared by
travellers in these wilds.
William Cady was early among the highwaymen who made this a place of
dread. His was a short and bloody career of four years on the King’s
highway, ending in 1687, when he was hanged at Tyburn for the last of
his exploits, the murder of a groom on this then lonely expanse. He had
overtaken a lady riding for the benefit of the air, and, ignoring the
groom, tore the diamond ring from her finger, snatched a gold watch from
her pocket, and, threatening her with a pistol, secured a purse
containing eighty guineas. The groom, unarmed, could do nothing but
abuse the highwayman, who shot him dead with two bullets through the
brain and was just about making off when two gentlemen rode up with
pistols in their hands. Cady at once opened fire on them, and a lively
pistolling began, ending with the highwayman’s horse being shot and
himself seized and bound, and in due course taken to Newgate, whence he
only emerged for that last ride to Tyburn, which was the usual ending of
his kind. He did not make an edifying exit but cursed, drank, and
scoffed to the last, dying with profanity on his lips, at the early age
of twenty-five.
From the unrelieved vulgarity and brutality of Cady’s exploit it is a
relief to turn to that of a man of humour. Would that we knew his name,
so that it might be ranged with those of Du Vall and Captain Hind,
themselves spiced with an airy wit that occasionally eased the loss of a
watch or a purse to those suddenly bereft of them. This unknown worthy,
whose exploit is recorded in a contemporary newspaper, was a humorist,
if ever there was one. It was one evening in 1732, when he was
patrolling the Common, that a chariot and four horses approached from
the direction of London. Hopeful of a rich quarry, he spurred up and
thrust a pistol through the carriage window, demanding money and
jewellery. Now, unhappily for the highwayman’s hope of plunder, this was
the carriage of a Yorkshire squire returning home without him, and the
person sitting within was but a countryman to whom the coachman had
given a lift.
“I am very poor,” exclaimed the rustic, terrified at sight of the
pistol, “but here are two shillings; all I have got in the world.”
Cady, doubtless, in his disappointment, would have shot the yokel; but
this was a “highway lawyer” of a different stamp. “Poor devil!” said
that true Knight of the Road, withdrawing his pistol and waving the
proffered money aside; “here, take a shilling and drink my health!” And
so, tossing him a coin, he disappeared.
For accounts of other happenings upon this sombre Common, let the
curious refer to the pages of the GREAT NORTH ROAD, where they will be
found, duly set forth.
Not until the first few years of the nineteenth century had passed was
the place safe. It was an Alsatia wherein the most craven of footpads
might rob with impunity. Strange to say, there were those who did not
think it right to shoot highwaymen, and many of those who did so, lost
their nerve at the supreme moment and fired wildly into space. The
robbers’ risks were therefore not overwhelming. Dr. Johnson was
undecided about this matter of right, as we learn from one of those
semi-philosophical discussions into which Boswell led him; discussions
the indefatigable “Bozzy” has recorded at length. Three of them—Johnson,
Boswell, and Taylor—were disputing the question. “For myself,” said
Taylor, “I would rather be robbed than shoot highwaymen.”
Johnson—perhaps because he generally took the opposite view, from
“cussedness” or a love of disputation—argued that he would rather shoot
the man on the instant of his attempt than afterwards give such evidence
against him as would result in his execution. “I may be mistaken,” said
the great man, “as to him when I swear; I cannot be mistaken if I shoot
him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s
life when we are heated by the injury, than to do it at a distance of
time by an oath after we have cooled.”
This seemed to Boswell rather as acting from the motive of private
vengeance than of public advantage; but Johnson maintained that in
acting thus he would be satisfying both. He added, however, that it was
a difficult point: “one does not know what to say: one may hang one’s
self a year afterwards from uneasiness for having shot a highwayman. Few
minds are to be trusted with so great a thing.” And we may add, seeing
how many highwaymen were shot at, and how few hit, few hands either.
Half a mile beyond Turpin’s Oak is North Finchley, a recent suburb of
smart shops, risen on the site of those gibbets mentioned by Pennant.
Those who affect to be more genteel and individualistic, name it
Torrington Park, and thus hope to be exquisitely distinguished from the
ruck of Finchleys that take their names from the four points of the
compass. The Park Road Hotel, rising at the angle where the road from
Child’s Hill joins the highway we are travelling, actually stands on the
site of a gibbet. As “Tally-ho Corner,” this is a spot familiarly known
to cyclists. Maps, however, know it as “Tallow Corner.”
Whetstone succeeds to North Finchley. It once groaned under the
oppression of a toll-gate—a gate that spanned the road by the “Griffin”
inn, where the old “whetstone” still remains. This gate, abolished
November 1st, 1863, was associated with a story of George Morland, the
artist, who, having received an invitation to Barnet, was journeying to
that town in company with two friends, when he was stopped here by a
cart containing two men, who were disputing with the toll-keeper. One
was a chimney-sweep, and the other one Hooper, a tinsmith and
prize-fighter, scarcely higher in the social scale; but they knew
Morland, who had often caroused with them at the low wayside taverns he
affected. Now, however, he was not in a mood for his old companions;
recent success had turned him respectable for a time. Accordingly, he
endeavoured to pass, when the tinsmith called out, “What, Mr. Morland,
won’t you speak to a body?”
It was of no use trying to escape, for the man began to roar out after
him, so that he was obliged to turn back and shake hands with his old
crony; whereupon Hooper turned to the chimney-sweep and said, “Why,
Dick, don’t you know this here gentleman? ’Tis my friend, Mr. Morland.”
The man of soot, smiling a recognition, forced his unwelcome black hand
upon his brother of the brush; then they whipped the horse up and went
off, much to Morland’s relief. He used afterwards to declare that the
sweep was a stranger to him; but the dissolute artist’s habits made the
story generally believed, and “Sweeps, your honour,” was a joke that
followed him all his days.
IX
Barnet lies two miles ahead, crowning a ridge. Between this point and
that town the road goes sharply down Prickler’s Hill, and, passing under
a railway bridge, climbs upwards again, along an embanked road that,
steep though it be, takes the place of a very much steeper roadway. It
was constructed between 1823 and 1827, as a part of the general
remodelling of the Holyhead Road. The deserted old way, now leading
no-whither, may be seen meandering off to the left, immediately past the
railway bridge, down in the hollow. Passing the “Old Red Lion” and a row
of old houses that, fallen from their importance in facing the high
road, look dejectedly across one-half of the Fair Ground, it comes to an
end at the last house, whose projecting bay proclaims it to have once
been a toll-house.
[Illustration: THE OLD ROAD, BARNET.]
Barnet is famous for two things: for its Battle and for its Fair. The
Battle is a thing of the dim and distant past: the Fair belongs to the
present—the poignant present, as you think who venture within ear-shot
of its Michaelmas hurly-burly, what time the horse-copers are rending
the air with raucous cries, steam-organs bellowing, and, in fact, “all
the fun of the Fair” in progress. It is, according to your taste and to
the condition of your nerves, a pleasure or a martyrdom to be present at
the great Fair of Barnet: that three days’ Pandemonium to which come all
the lowest of the low, whom, paradoxically enough, that “noble animal,
the friend of man,” attracts to himself. For Barnet is, above all other
things, a Horse Fair. For love of the Horse, and with the hope of
selling horses—and incidentally swindling the purchasers of them—such
widely different characters as the horsey East-ender, the sly and crafty
Welshman, the blarneying Irishman, and Sandy from Scotland, come greater
or smaller distances with droves of cart-horses, cobs, hunters, and, in
fact, every known variety of the Noble Animal; and to this nucleus of a
Fair innumerable other trades attach themselves, like parasites. Barnet
Fair dates back to the time of Henry II. It is, therefore, of a very
respectable antiquity. This antiquity is, indeed, the only respectable
thing left to it. The rest is riot; and if the Barnet people had their
will, there is little doubt that it would, in common with many other
fairs, be abolished. When originally established, by Royal Charter, it
lasted three weeks. From three weeks it was successively whittled down,
in course of time, to sixteen days, and then to three days. From it, in
other times, the Lord of the Manor, the Earl of Stratford, derived a
splendid revenue; for his tolls, rigorously exacted by his stewards,
were eightpence for every bull or stallion entering the Fair; fourpence
for every horse, ass, or mule; and for every cow or calf, twopence.
The Fair Ground extends to either side of the long embankment, on whose
steep slope the high road is carried up into Barnet Town; but the chief
part of it centres around High Barnet station, on the right hand. The
Fair begins on the first Monday in September, but at least a week before
that date Barnet town and the roads leading into it, usually so quiet,
are thronged with droves of horses and herds of cattle, and with the
caravans of the showmen who hope to “make a good thing” out of the
thousands of visitors to the Fair. Whatever private residents in Barnet
may think of it, and however much they would like to see it abolished,
its lasting success is assured as a popular holiday for certain classes
of Londoners. The typical ’Arry of Hendon or of Epping would no more
think of not visiting Barnet Fair than he would think of abstaining from
deep drinking when he reached the place. For, now that all other fairs
within reach of London have been suppressed, this is pre-eminently the
Cockney’s outing. To deprive him of it would savour not a little of
cruelty: it would certainly cut off from the travelling showmen and the
proprietors of the giddy steam roundabouts a goodly portion of their
incomes, while the pickpockets would miss one of the greatest chances in
the year.
Let those who know of fairs only from idyllic descriptions of such
things in the England of long ago, visit this of Barnet. Nothing in it
is poetic, unless indeed the language common to those who attend upon
the Noble Animal may be so considered; and certainly that is full of
imagery, of sorts. It is wonderful what a power of debauching mankind
the Horse possesses. Your ordinary cattle-drover is no saint, but he is
a Bayard and a carpet-knight beside these fellows with straws in their
mouths, and novel and vivid language on their tongues.
Here, as side-shows away from the horses, are the boxing-booths, the
swings, and the trumpet-tongued merry-go-rounds, roaring like Bulls of
Bashan and glittering with Dutch metal and cheap mirrors like
Haroun-al-Raschid’s palace just come out of pawn and much the worse for
wear. Ladies clad in purple velvet dresses, and with a yard and a half
of ostrich feather in their hats patronise these delights; and lunch
oleaginously on the fried fish cooking on a stall near by (which by the
way, you may scent a quarter of a mile off). For those with nicer
tastes, an itinerant confectioner makes sweets on the spot. For those
who are sportively inclined there are several methods of dissipating
their money: by shooting at bottles; shying at cocoanuts (all warranted
milky ones) or by guessing under which of three thimbles temporarily
resides the elusive pea. The furtive and nervous young man who presides
over this show is more than itinerant. Ghostlike, he flits from group to
group, harangues them with a phenomenal glibness and swiftness:
discloses the pea under the _other_ thimble; takes his gains, and so
departs: the tail of his eye seeking, and hoping not to find, any one
who may chance to be a detective. An ancient—a million times
exposed—fraud, and still a very remunerative one!
For the rest, a very vulgar and disheartening show to those who preach
culture to whom the cultured term “the masses.” How to leaven the lump
in that direction when you find it obstinately set upon such gross
things of earth as penny shows, including six-legged calves and
realistic scenes of the latest murders? Sons of Belial, indeed, are
those who find delight herein: and many are they who do so take their
pleasure.
X
On the crest of the steep ascent we come to Barnet, crowning its
“monticulus, or little hill,” as the county historian has it. With the
town we have already made some acquaintance, in the pages of the “GREAT
NORTH ROAD.”
It stands too well within the suburban radius of London for it to escape
modern influences, and although, as Dickens said, in _Oliver Twist_,
every other house was a tavern, inns are fewer nowadays and shops more
numerous; and many of the surviving inns have been rebuilt. The original
“Green Man,” a very much larger and altogether more important house than
the existing one, is no more. Sir Robert Peel—the great Sir Robert,
statesman and originator of “Peelers”—often stayed there from Saturday
to Monday, and it was beneath its roof that Lord Palmerston received the
news of his succession to the title. The “Mitre,” one of the most
important of Barnet’s inns at the close of the seventeenth century, has
wholly disappeared, and the little house of that name, at the London end
of the town, does but stand on a very small portion of its site; the
rest of the ground being occupied by a large and exceedingly hideous
building belonging to a firm of grocers. The disappearance of the
“Mitre” is the more to be regretted, because it was a house of historic
importance, General Monk, on his march up to London in 1660, having
rested there, while his army encamped about the town. The country was
tired of the Commonwealth, and Monk at the head of 14,000 men, was
master of the situation. No one knew his intentions. Appointed by
Parliament, and yet with a commission from the King in his pocket, his
advance from the north was the cause of the liveliest hopes and
apprehensions to both sides. Accompanying him were two “Councellors of
State and Abjurers of the King’s Family,” a worthy pair named Scot and
Robinson, who were really acting as the spies of the Parliament. Staying
with him at the “Mitre,” they secured a room adjoining his, and either
found or made a hole in the wainscot, to see and hear anything that
might pass. The imagination readily pictures them peeping through the
chinks and the secretive Monk, probably well aware of their doings,
smiling as he undressed and went to bed. How he marched to London and
thence, declaring for Charles II., to Dover, belongs to other than local
history.
The “Red Lion” remains the most prominent house. What has rightly been
called a “ghastly story” is that told of it in coaching days. An officer
and his daughter, on their way to London to attend a funeral, only
succeeded after a great deal of trouble in obtaining accommodation here.
On retiring to her room, the young lady chanced to turn the handle of a
cupboard, when to her horror the door burst open and a corpse toppled
out, almost felling her to the floor. The “accommodation” had been made
by hastily removing the body from the bed and placing it where it would
not have been found, except for that feminine mingled curiosity and
precautionary sense which impels our womenkind to peer agitatedly under
every bed, to leave no cupboard unexplored, and no drawer not
scrutinised.
This Bluebeard kind of a story was long a current anecdote in the
posting days, and implicitly believed. It is probably safe to assume
that it did the business of the “Red Lion” enormous damage, and that
those travellers who subsequently stayed there approached all cupboards
with dread.
The “Red Lion” possessed a queer character in the person of its ostler,
James Ripley, who in 1781 published a little book of _Select Letters on
Various Subjects_. On the title-page he states that he was then, and had
been “for thirty years past,” ostler, and in his dedication to “the Hon.
Col. Blaithwate and the rest of the officers of the Royal Regiment of
Horse Guards Blue,” after saying that this dedication is “a grateful
acknowledgement for the generous treatment always received for his
unmerited services in the stable,” proceeds to grovel in the most abject
manner. “I shall always esteem it an honour,” says he, “to rub down your
horses’ heels, so long as I am able to stoop to my feet.”
[Illustration: JAMES RIPLEY, OSTLER OF THE “RED LION.”]
This remarkable person, if we may judge from the curious frontispiece to
his _Select Letters_, appears to have doubled the parts of ostler at the
“Red Lion” and Postmaster of Barnet; while he would also seem to have
embarked in the newspaper trade, according to the little heaps of papers
seen in the pigeonholes in the background, labelled “Whitehall Evening
Post,” “Craftsman,” and “Gazetteer.” Here we perceive him, apparently
inditing his _Letters_, a man with a decidedly Johnsonian cast of
features, and clad in what looks more like a cast-off suit of an old
Tower of London headsman than an ostler’s everyday clothes. He is
evidently at a loss for a word, or is perhaps (and rightly) surprised at
the gigantic size of his quill, plucked from an ostrich, at the very
least of it. A sieve, a curry-comb, and other articles of stable
equipment, lie beside him, or are more or less artistically displayed in
the foreground. If it were not for the title, we might almost suppose
this to be a representation of some notorious criminal writing his last
dying speech and confession in the condemned hold of Newgate. The
picture appears to have been drawn from several points of view at once,
productive of results more curious than pleasing to professors of
perspective drawing.
Mr. James Ripley’s letters range from scathing denunciations of postboys
and advice to gentlemen how to treat such rascals, to the humane
treatment of horses, the construction of stage waggons, and the
villainous practice of writing more or less offensive remarks on
window-panes. We are, in fact, after perusing his improving literature,
led to the belief that he missed his vocation and ought to have been a
clergyman of evangelistic views, instead of an ostler. But to let him
speak for himself:—
“I can justly say that I am no mercenary writer, and that all my views
are centred in reforming the vices, follies, and errors of this depraved
age. At present I shall confine myself to those nimble-fingered
Gentlemen who leave specimens of their wit or folly, in trying the
goodness of their diamonds upon the glass windows of every place they
visit, or lodge at; curiosity often draws the fair sex to the window in
expectation of meeting with some innocent piece of wit, or quotation
from some eminent author; but how cruel the disappointment when she
finds some indecent allusion, or downright obscenity.”
Thus the ostler-moralist of the “Red Lion.” What added terrors the roads
would have acquired for giddy travellers had there been others like him!
Among other inns is the “Old Salisbury,” familiarly known to cyclists of
northern clubs as the “Old Sal.” It was originally a drovers’ and
teamsters’ house, and called the “Royal Wagon.” Many years ago, when the
grasping proprietors of the “Green Man” and the “Red Lion” charged 1_s._
6_d._ a mile for posting, the Lord Salisbury of that day, being a frugal
man, transferred his custom here and saved 3_d._ a mile. Pepper, the
then landlord, at once changed his sign to its present style.
XI
The modern Holyhead Road, made in the Twenties is seen midway in Barnet,
branching off to the left by what remains of the once-famous “Green
Man.” Broad and well-engineered though it be, it has little of interest
in the three miles between here and South Mimms; its sole features,
indeed, being a fine view of Wrotham Park, to the right, and a glimpse
of the gateway of Dyrham Park, on the left. It can scarce be said that
that heavy stone entrance—a classic arch flanked by Tuscan columns—is
beautiful, but it has an interest all its own, for it was originally the
triumphal arch erected in 1660 in London Streets, to celebrate the
“joyfull Restoracion” of Charles II.
Taking then, by preference, the old road, the way lies across Hadley
Green, where, among the ragged fir-trees that are scattered on its
western side, stand the remains of the old stocks. The stone obelisk,
famous in all the country round about as “Hadley Highstone,” is
presently seen ahead, at a parting of the ways. To the right hand goes
the Great North Road: to the left the old road to Holyhead. “Eight miles
to St. Albans” is the legend on the hither face of the monument, whose
other inscription we halt to read:—
“Here was fought the Famous Battle between Edward the Fourth and the
Earl of Warwick, April 14, Anno 1471, In which the Earl was defeated And
Slain. Stick no Bills.”
[Illustration: HADLEY GREEN: WINTER.]
Musing sadly on that unromantic injunction, modern, but deeply carved,
like the rest of the inscription, in the stone, we prepare to depart,
when one, who is probably the “oldest inhabitant,” approaches and
volunteers the information that the obelisk was formerly some thirty-two
yards forward, and opposite the inn called the “Two Brewers.” In 1842,
it seems, it was removed to its present position.
Leaving this elevated plateau, which Hall, the old chronicler, treating
of the Battle of Barnet, calls “a fair place for two armies to join
together”—as though that were the chief use for a plain—the old road
begins its three miles of fall and rise; down into pebbly dips and over
hunchbacked little rustic bridges spanning wandering watercourses; up
steep rises and swerving round sharp corners, alternately from left to
right; by the forgotten hamlet of Kitt’s End, down Dancer’s Hill, and
past the suggestively named Mimms Wash, where the old coachmen, when the
waters were out in wintertime (as they generally were, at this plashy
corner) usually drove into the ditch, which, concealed by the floods
that already covered the road and rose to the axle-trees, held a
dangerous depth of water.
This old road, in fact, and indeed the whole of the eight miles between
Barnet and St. Albans, pulses with stirring incidents of the old
coaching days. It was, for example, in 1820 that what was described as
an “accident” to the Holyhead Mail took place a mile short of St.
Albans. As a matter of plain fact, it was not so much an accident as the
almost inevitable conclusion of a road race between the Holyhead and the
Chester Mails. The coachmen had been driving furiously all the way from
Highgate, and striving to pass one another. Through Barnet they
clattered, and by some miracle avoiding a smash on the old road, came at
last within sight of St. Albans, to where the Old Mile House still
stands by the way. Here, with an inch or two to spare, the coachman of
the Holyhead Mail took the off side and was coming past the Chester
Mail, when the coachman pulled his horses across the road. In the
collision that followed, both coaches were overturned, and one
passenger, William Hunt by name, killed. At the inquest held at the
“Peahen,” St. Albans, both coachmen were, very properly, found guilty of
manslaughter, and were committed for trial at the next Hertford
sessions, which did not open till six months later. During the whole of
that period they were kept in irons at St. Albans. Eventually they
received a further term of twelve months imprisonment each.
With happenings such as these, becoming more alarmingly frequent as the
pace of coaches and the rivalry between them increased, travelling grew
exceedingly dangerous, and Lord Erskine, when counsel for a person who
had had the misfortune to be thrown off one of the coaches from the
“Swan with Two Necks,” and to receive a broken arm, was not altogether
unduly severe in his witty address to the jury:—
“Gentlemen of the jury,” he gravely began, “the plaintiff in this case
is Mr. Beverley, a respectable merchant of Liverpool, and the defendant
is Mr. Chaplin, proprietor of the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’ in Lad Lane,—a
sign emblematical, I suppose, of the number of necks people ought to
possess who ride in his vehicles.”
A further development of coaching dangers about 1820 was found in the
growing mania of the young bloods of that day for driving honours. Every
young man about town cherished an ambition to become an expert coachman,
but unhappily they took their lessons, not on the box-seats of empty
coaches, but laid inexperienced hands upon the reins of well-filled
conveyances.
This driving ambition was a fine thing for the sportively inclined, but
staid and elderly persons were apt to be greatly terrified by it. An
“Old Traveller,” writing to the _Sporting Magazine_ in 1822, after
having read the coaching articles by “Nimrod,” asks the Editor if he
will have the goodness to request his distinguished contributor to
inform the travelling public how they are to travel fifty miles by coach
without having their necks broken, or their limbs shattered and
amputated. “In my younger days,” says he, “when I was on the eve of
setting out on a journey, my wife was in the habit of giving me her
parting blessing, concluding with the words, ‘God bless you, my dear, I
hope you will not be robbed.’ But it is now changed to, ‘God bless you,
my dear, I hope you will not get your neck broke, and that you will
bring all your legs safe home again.’ Now, Mr. Editor, this
neck-breaking and leg-amputating is all because one daring rascal wishes
to show that he is a better coachman than another daring rascal; or
because one proprietor on the road is determined not to be outdone by
another.
“Neither can I think, sir, that such writers as Mr. Nimrod mend the
matter much. By a lively and technical description of these galloping
coaches, he makes many a young man fancy himself a coachman, from which
cause many an old man gets upset and hurt. For example: a friend of mine
coming up to town a short time since by one of these galloping coaches,
was upset and much injured. On going to sympathise with his misfortune,
he informed me that the accident was occasioned by the leaders taking
one road and the wheelers another; so between them both, over they went.
‘My God!’ said I, ‘what was the coachman about; was he asleep, or
drunk?’ ‘Neither,’ replied my friend, ‘_he had nothing to do with it_; a
young Oxonian was driving.’ Now, Mr. Editor, it is not at all improbable
but that this Oxonian had been reading your magazine the night before,
instead of his classics, and meant the next day to put his theory into
practice, by which my friend, a very worthy man, the father of a large
family, nearly lost his life.
“Whoever takes up a newspaper in these eventful times, it is even
betting whether an accident by coach, or a suicide, first meets the eye.
Now really, as the month of November is fast approaching, when, from
foggy weather and dark nights, both these calamities are likely to
increase, I merely suggest the propriety of any unfortunate gentleman,
resolved on self-destruction, trying to avoid the disgrace attached to
it, by first taking a few journeys by some of these Dreadnoughts,
Highflyer, or Tally-ho coaches; as in all probability he may meet with
as instant death as if he had let off one of Joe Manton’s pistols in his
mouth, or severed his head from his body with one of Mr. Palmer’s best
razors.”
It was all very well to complain of these sportsmen, but what about the
professionals? How, for instance, would he have relished being at the
mercy of a man like the driver of one of the Birmingham coaches on the
home stretch between London and Redbourne who, on one occasion, full of
port and claret, could just manage to keep his seat, and in this
condition started for London?
When “the drink was a-dying in him, like,” and he felt more alive, he
sprang his team at this dangerous part of the road known as Mimms Wash.
Here he met the Manchester “Coburg” coming round a corner at a terrific
pace. They met, with a resounding crash; the first coachman finding
himself in the ditch and his leaders charging over it into the gates of
a neighbouring park. The coach happily struck one of the posts and
stopped dead. No one was killed and the worst that happened to the
passengers was that one of them who had jumped off in alarm, sprained an
ankle. He, very naturally, objected to complete the journey on the coach
and had to be provided with a post-chaise at Barnet. Some of the other
passengers went with him. Only one of the horses received any injury,
and that was the off-leader of the “Coburg,” whose shoulder was smashed.
This affair cost the tippling coachman £20, and he thought himself lucky
(as indeed he was) that it was not worse. The same coachman, who by this
time had reformed, met the “Coburg” on another occasion on this stretch
of road. It was a moonlight night and the driver of the “Coburg” was on
the wrong side in order to avoid some heaps of gravel thrown down in
repairing the road. When he saw the other coach, the driver of the
“Coburg” tried to cross over to his proper side, and in doing so, the
heaped up gravel turned his coach over. The passengers were unhurt, and
when they had righted the vehicle and found a baby who had been flung
out of his mother’s arms off the roof into a field, they resumed their
journey.
XII
One shudders to think what would become of railway directors and
shareholders if the old Law of Deodand were still in existence. It was
an ancient enactment, going back to the days of the Saxon kings, by
which the object causing the death of a person was forfeited for the
benefit of his representatives. At least, that was originally the humane
intention of the law, which then really represented the etymology of its
name, making it a God-given compensation. Sometimes the death-dealing
object was valuable; occasionally it was practically valueless; just as
might happen. But, like many another originally just and equitable
thing, the Law of Deodand became perverted, and the inevitable Landowner
found his account in it. It is difficult to follow the reasoning that,
when the person killed left no representatives, made the offending
object forfeit to the Lord of the Manor on whose land the accident might
happen; but so it came about. Deodand became limited after a time, and
instead of those interested receiving the full value of the thing
causing death, a jury would sit to assess the damages due according to
circumstances. Thus, when the Holyhead Mail ran over and killed a boy on
the road near South Mimms, the deodand on the coach and horses was
assessed by the coroner’s jury at one sovereign. Rightly considered,
however, deodand should not in this case have been levied at all, for
the accident was entirely due to a group of three boys, of whom the
deceased was one, darting across the road under the horses’ heads to see
how nearly they could come to the coach without being run over: a common
feat with boys in those days, and one that ruined many a coachman’s
nerves. In this case the boy was killed, and clearly by his own fault.
Had the deodand not been limited, a curious legal point might have
arisen, as it had done before, in the case of a man being killed by a
horse and loaded waggon running over him; when, the value of the horse
and waggon being claimed, the lawyers successfully raised the point that
it was not the horse that killed the man but the waggon. In the result,
the deodand was lessened by the value of the horse. This law was finally
abolished before railways came into existence, or we might have seen
locomotives and whole trains forfeited to relatives of the accidentally
killed; or, failing these, to the Lord of the Manor in the particular
spot where the accident happened.
A perhaps less sporting practice than that of permitting amateurs to
handle the ribbons, but one certainly also less dangerous to the
travelling public, was the wholly unauthorised and altogether
illegitimate custom that began to obtain in later years of admitting a
third person upon the box of the mails.
There was properly but one box seat beside the coachman, and this proud
eminence was most ardently coveted by every man. In early coaching days
it was attainable by an early appearance upon the scene and by tipping
the yard porter; but when competition had rendered coach proprietors
keener in their scent for fares, this pride of place was valued by them
at a considerable advance upon the inglorious seats away from the bright
effulgent genius who handled the ribbons, and diffused a strong odour of
rum around “the bench.”
There was a heavy penalty—£50, it has been said—against admitting a
third person upon the box, the reason of this tremendous regulation
being that the driver, it was considered, could not have sufficient room
for doing his work properly when encumbered with more than one passenger
on the box.
This heavy penalty, or part of it, was recoverable by any informer, and
the result was that the roads were infested by such gentry, not only on
the look-out for a contravention of the rule, but practising all manner
of dodges to inveigle a good-natured or greedy coachman into letting a
third man get up for “just a few miles.”
But the game was so well known that such an application was apt to be
answered by a coil of thong winding itself round the thighs of the
applicant. There was one particularly active informer, Byers by name,
who is referred to in the _Ingoldsby legends_ as “the accusing Byers,
the Prince of Peripatetic Informers, and terror of Stage-coachmen, when
such things were. Alack! alack!” says Barham, “the Railroads have ruined
his ‘vested interest.’”
The interests, “vested” or not, of these informers, were large and
varied. Mail and stage-coachmen, postboys, travellers with their
tax-carts, and waggoners, all contributed to their income. Sometimes
these lynx-eyed fellows would find a coach carrying more passengers than
it was licensed for. The discrepancy could be seen at a glance, for all
stage-coaches were bound to carry a conspicuous plate stating these
particulars. Perhaps the guard would artfully hang a rug over it, and
then the common informer, hanging about at the changing place, would
lift it up and have a look; finding, after all, that the coach was only
carrying its legal complement. Whereupon, the coachman and guard, who
had been lying in wait for him, would duck him finely in the nearest
horse-trough for his pains.
Even the humble turnpike men were liable to be informed against for not
giving a ticket, for taking too much toll, or for not having their names
displayed over their doorways.
There were at one time no fewer than five turnpike-gates between London
and St. Albans, a distance of only just over twenty miles. The series
originally began with the gate on Islington Green, removed afterwards to
the Holloway Road, and was continued by the one at Highgate Archway, and
others at Whetstone, and South Mimms; the fifth being at the entrance to
St. Albans itself. These numerous gates within so comparatively short a
distance, gave excellent opportunities to the informing gentry, who were
wont to take little excursions into the country along this route,
returning with memoranda that brought them a goodly return on their
enterprise. They cast their nets wide and captured an astonishing
diversity of fish. But their memoranda had to be made with discretion.
It was a risky thing to be seen noting down the name of a “collector of
tolls,” as a turnpike-man was officially styled. The present writer has
held converse with an old man who once kept the toll-gate at South
Mimms. Age had withered him, but custom had not staled his
reminiscences. He had an especially favourite and Homeric story of an
encounter with one of these pests.
It was springtime, and our toll-keeping friend had a mind to whitewash
the exterior of his house. To this end he not only took down the
climbing roses, that rendered his official residence a fugitive glimpse
of beauty to those who fared the road by coach, but he also removed his
name-board. To him entered, while engaged in wielding the whitewash
brush, one of the informing species, who, thinking himself unobserved,
made to examine the board, lying face downwards, on the ground. Our
friend, however, was not so intent upon his whitewashing but that he saw
with the tail of his eye what was toward behind him. He must have been a
man of elemental passions, for he reached over, his brush fully charged,
and delivered a staggering sideways blow with it upon the face of the
unsuspecting note taker. “I gin him a good ’un,” he always used to say;
“but he come up for more, an’ I punched his head and kicked his ——” No
matter what he kicked. Suffice it to say that his language was forcible,
adjectival, and Saxon.
XIII
The old road regains Telford’s Holyhead Road of the Twenties a little
distance short of South Mimms, close by where the cast-iron plate of the
old milestone proclaims “Barnett” to be three miles distant. It crosses
the broad highway at an acute angle and goes in an ascent, and with many
curves behind the village; descending again and almost returning upon
itself through the village street, as though a circuitous course and the
mounting of every hill were things greatly to be desired by travellers
bound on a long and toilsome journey. South Mimms, village and church,
is completely islanded by these old and new roads.
[Illustration: SOUTH MIMMS.]
In the accompanying illustration, the church with the houses behind it
may be seen standing on a knoll. It is a hillocky and picturesque place,
with a church unspoiled by the restoration of 1868, and rustic cottages
that might well be fifty, instead of less than fifteen, miles from
London. The view is towards London, and the road in the foreground is
Telford’s; the old road coming steeply down and crossing again. There
was an excellent reason for that ancient way taking such high ground at
this point. It was for the accommodation of the village, and continued
to be the main road until the days of a mere local intercourse between
one parish and its next neighbour gave place to the more frequent and
extended travel of later times, when direct communication between
distant places became of much more importance than the convenience of
wayside hamlets. The black despair that overtook the innkeepers and
other frontagers relegated by Telford from a position in the midst of
the traffic to a stagnant backwater of life may readily be imagined, but
they received no compensation for this “worserment,” which must have
practically ruined many of them; nor did those more fortunate ones pay
for betterment who, in the making of new roads, found themselves, from
being in a bye-lane, suddenly placed in the best of situations, on the
main road.
Mimms was not only infamous for its floods. In days of yore it harboured
highwaymen and footpads in plenty, and for quite a long time. It seems
odd, nowadays, that a particular spot should have been of so evil a
repute, and yet that no efforts were made to secure the rascals. A
quaint document still preserved in the archives of the House of Lords
recounts what befell William Symonds here in 1647. It is a petition in
which he, as a prisoner in the King’s Bench prison, prays for a new
trial. It seems that he was entrusted by Henry Fitzhugh and Richard
Wells with a sealed packet of money, for him to carry from Bedford to
London, and that when he reached Mimms at break of day he was set upon
and robbed by three or four thieves and lost not only the money, but
almost all the rest of what he had to bring to London. He further says
that he was no common carrier, and that he had not negligently lost the
money. Yet Fitzhugh and Wells prosecuted him, and, obtaining judgment,
laid him prisoner in the King’s Bench. He concludes by praying for a new
trial; but whether or not he ever obtained it does not appear. In any
case, coming from Bedford to London, he had no business on this road.
The strange story of unfortunate William Symonds is followed by equally
strange happenings some forty years later; when, for example, on
November 9th. 1690, seven highwaymen not only robbed the Manchester
carrier near this spot of £15,000, tax-money being conveyed from the
Midlands to London, but also killed or hamstrung eighteen horses of the
escort, in order to prevent pursuit. It was a leisurely business and
thoroughly well carried out; all travellers who were unlucky enough to
be passing at the time being robbed first and then tied to wayside
trees, where they were left to be released by later wayfarers. Two Roman
Catholics were subsequently arrested on a charge of being concerned in
this affair, and committed for trial, but it does not appear what
happened to them. At any rate, whatever their fate may have been, it did
not stop these outrages on the Holyhead Road; for, two years later, the
most audacious bands were still at work in this district, reaping almost
incredible plunder. On the night of August 23rd, 1692, for instance, the
great Churchill, the terrible “Malbrouck,” scourge of the foreigner on
many a stricken field, tamely submitted to be robbed by the highwaymen
who lay wait for him near “Coney,” as Narcissus Luttrell calls London
Colney, and plundered him of 500 guineas; a loss “which,” says Macaulay,
alluding to that great captain’s miserly disposition, “he doubtless
never ceased to regret to the last moment of his long career of
prosperity and glory.”
The plunder reaped by these daring highwaymen must have been immense,
and inferior only to that bagged by modern company promoters. Three
months later than their little parley with Marlborough, a party of eight
or nine made a haul of between £1,500 and £2,000 out of a waggon “near
Barnet,” and might have long continued their career had it not been for
the King, who suspecting Roman Catholics and Jacobites in all these
marauding bands, took measures that for a time effectually cleared the
roads near London. Detachments of a regiment of Dragoons were posted
some ten miles out, along all the great roads, and formed patrols.
Captures were numerous, and executions almost as many. Among their
notable seizures was that of Captain James Whitney, at some unspecified
spot “at Barnet.” In this later Battle of Barnet, between the soldiers
and Whitney’s band, December 6th, 1692, in which one dragoon was killed
and several wounded, he was captured, and afterwards promptly hauled off
to Newgate, amid great rejoicings, for he had been a terror in many
widely separated districts of England. They hanged the “Captain,” not at
Tyburn but in Smithfield, in the beginning of 1693, and the roads knew
an interval of peace.
The parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts of South Mimms throw a
further and a sombre light upon the history of the road, with their
entries of “strangers” buried and “poor people” relieved. No fewer than
seven “strangers” were found dead on the road, within the limits of the
parish, in 1727, one of them having been drowned in Mimms Wash. Among
other items in the accounts is one of 1737, “To a man that had the
small-pox, to go forwards, 00 . 1 . 00_d._” Set down in this manner a
shilling looks a great deal, but what astonishes the reader of these
things more than anything else is the heartless way in which the poor
and the sick were given a trifle and hurried off to the next parish, to
die on the way, if they would, in order that some other community should
have the expense of them, or the infection, as the case might be.
XIV
The Holyhead Road goes broad and straight, and with a long perspective
of dust-clouds and telegraph-poles, up Ridge Hill, where the borders of
Middlesex are crossed and Hertfordshire entered; but the old way, after
passing the “White Hart,” crosses to the right hand and climbs up by
itself as a deserted track. Near the hill-top it crosses again, and so
descends on the left hand towards St. Albans. It is quite a narrow way,
measuring at the most twelve feet across, against the average twenty
feet of the modern road; and, sunk between deep banks as it is, giving
rise to astonishment that a road such as this was, until the first,
quarter of the nineteenth century had nearly passed away, the chief
means of communication between the capitals of England and Ireland.
Nature, left to herself, has long since resumed sway over the old road,
here and there scored with waggon-ruts through eighty years’ deposit of
leaf-mould, or, in other places, become a green ride through the
unchecked trees that grow along it and interlace overhead. It is a relic
of Old England of the days before railways: no museum specimen, but an
open-air survival, unnoted and untravelled; discovered by the few who,
haply realising what it is, thread its winding course and leave the
modern well worn road to the crowd.
Descending Ridge Hill, into the valley of the Colne, London Colney is
reached, skirting the road by that insignificant stream, spanned by a
picturesque old red-brick bridge, whose generous proportions seem to be
much too large for so unassuming a runlet. Such criticism, however, is
severely deprecated by those who know the Colne throughout the year.
They tell wondrous stories of the things it is capable of. London
Colney’s name is perhaps not a very attractive one, but the place itself
is exceedingly picturesque. Quaint village inns, timber-and-plaster
gabled cottages, and old brick houses with a certain air of refinement
that comes of chaste design and sound workmanship, are its constituent
features.
[Illustration: THE OLD ROAD, RIDGE HILL.]
[Illustration: LONDON COLNEY.]
The stretch of road between the northern face of Ridge Hill, London
Colney, and St. Albans was always dreaded by coachmen in winter, for
when snow fell in conjunction with a driving north or north-east wind,
huge drifts resulted in this district. Ridge Hill formed a barrier
against which the snow-charged wind battled, with the result that a
flurry of snow-wreaths gathered in the levels. The great storm that
began with startling suddenness on the Christmas Day of 1836 was a great
deal more widespread than any other experienced during the coaching age.
Curiously enough, it had its exact counterpart precisely half a century
later, when the terrible snowstorm of Christmas night, 1886, fell,
equally without warning, from what had been a blue and sunshiny sky. The
storm of 1836 buried many coaches all over the country, particularly in
the neighbourhood of St. Albans and Dunstable. The Manchester down mail
of the 26th reached St. Albans, and, getting off the road into a hollow,
was upset, and left where it fell, the guard returning to London with
the bags and the passengers in a post-chaise. A mile distant from this
accident, on the London side, a “chariot”—that is to say, a family
carriage—was seen the next day without horses, and nearly covered with
snow; two ladies making frantic appeals from its windows for help,
saying their postboy, having left them two hours before to go to St.
Albans for fresh horses, had not returned. They could not be helped; and
so, still wildly gesticulating, we leave them for ever, without the
means of knowing whether that postboy ever _did_ return.
The up Birmingham mail, _viâ_ Aylesbury, also on the 26th, just managed
to get beyond that town when it ran into a drift and thus suddenly
ceased its journey. All attempts to force a way through were fruitless.
Accordingly, Price, the guard, mounted one of the horses and, tying the
mailbags on another, set out in this fashion for London. Joined a little
later by two postboys on other horses, with the bye-bags, all three
pushed on together, discovering now and again that they had wandered far
from the road when the hoof of a horse chanced to strike on the top bar
of a field-gate or stick in the summit of a hedge buried in the drifts.
By great good fortune they reached London at last, exhausted, but safe.
The passengers, who were quite a secondary consideration, were left
behind to be dug out by the country folk, and taken back, somehow, to
Aylesbury. The Chester and the Holyhead mails were embedded at the same
time at Hockliffe.
[Illustration:
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE LIVERPOOL MAIL PASSING TWO
LADIES SNOWED UP ON RIDGE HILL IN THEIR CHARIOT, WITHOUT HORSES, THE
POSTBOY HAVING RIDDEN TO ST. ALBANS FOR FRESH ONES.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
On leaving the old-world village of London Colney behind, a distant view
of St. Albans opens out, the Abbey first disclosing itself, and then the
clock-tower in the market-place, followed by an indiscriminate grouping
of roofs and chimneys. The Abbey—in recent years ennobled as a Cathedral
and by consequence of that and the creation of the See conferring the
dignified style of “city” upon the town—very rightly dominates all else.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ST. ALBANS.]
XV
We must penetrate very deeply into the past to reach the event that gave
the City and Cathedral of St. Alban their name. So dim have records and
traditions become, by reason of lapse of time, that it is not quite
certain whether the year A.D. 285 or A.D. 305 witnessed the martyrdom of
that saint. By all accounts it would seem that the proto-martyr of
Britain was a citizen of Verulamium, and a pagan, when the Diocletian
persecution of Christians broke out; but a strange thing happened to
turn him towards the Faith that already had made converts steadfast
throughout many dangers and trials. To him came one Amphibalus, a
Christian, seeking shelter from the fury of the persecutors; and,
whether from innate nobility of character or from long friendship with
the fugitive, Alban offered him the protection of his house. Sheltered
thus, Amphibalus expounded to him the tenets of this new creed that had
made enemies so bitter and so powerful, with the result that Alban
himself became a Christian. It was not long before the fugitive’s
hiding-place was discovered, but Alban, filled with the newborn zeal
that distinguishes the convert, secretly allowed his guest to depart,
and then, acknowledging as much, cursed the gods and announced himself a
Christian and prepared to suffer in his stead. Imprisonment and torture
availed nothing to shake his resolution, and it was not long before the
day dawned when he was led out from the gates of Verulam and beheaded
upon that hill beyond the Roman city, now and for eleven hundred years
past, the site of a succession of great churches set up in memory of
him. Vague stories of a very early church erected upon the scene of the
martyrdom may be met with, but the relics of Saint Alban (as in the
meanwhile he had become) had long been lost when, four hundred and
eighty-seven years later, Offa, King of Mercia, penitent for having
compassed the murder of Ethelbert, King of the East Angles, proposed to
absolve his soul by founding a church over the scene of the martyr’s
agony. Divine light and a ray of fire are said by the legend to have
conducted him to a certain spot called Holmhurst (that is to say “Holly
wood”) where the relics lay, and they were removed to the church he then
built, or, as some accounts will have it, enlarged. Of that edifice only
some doubtful fragments remain, for not only did Ealdred and Eadmer
alter it about A.D. 950, but Paul de Caen, the first Norman Abbot after
the Conquest, set himself to entirely rebuild it on a grander scale,
little more than a hundred years later. Again, in A.D. 1195, rebuildings
and enlargements were undertaken, and throughout the centuries very few
decades have passed without something, good or ill, being done to the
huge fabric. Huge it is, for it measures from end to end 550 feet, and
is only surpassed in this particular by Winchester Cathedral, the
longest in England; but only by seven feet. How great is the rise of the
Holyhead road from London may be gathered from the fact that the ground
on which the Cathedral of St. Alban stands is on a level with the cross
on the dome of St. Paul’s. The long story of the Abbey; how those slain
in the two battles of St. Albans are buried here and at St. Peter’s; how
it was sold to the people for a parish church for £400 after the
dissolution of the monastery in 1539; how it in modern times became a
Cathedral; and how Sir Gilbert Scott and Lord Grimthorpe successively
have wrought havoc with their “restorations,” at a total cost of over
£166,000, are matters for ecclesiologists, and not for telling in a book
on the road.
Far or near, the Abbey dominates the city, whose clustered roofs rise
gradually toward where it stands on its elevated plateau, overlooking
the quiet Hertfordshire meadows. Indeed, it stands on higher ground than
any abbey or cathedral in England, the floor level at the crossing being
340 feet above mean sea-level. Lichfield is next highest, standing at
286 feet, and Durham, placed though it be on a craggy cliff beside the
river Wear, comes only third, at 212 feet. St. Albans’ very bulk is
impressive, and, to the distant view, softened as it is by the smoke of
the town chimneys, not unlovely, despite that long outline which rivals
Winchester’s great span; and though the crudities of the wealthy
architectural amateur are insistent at close quarters they are
fortunately lost in great measure from a distance. For where bygone
abbots strove so greatly to build in ages past, it is happily difficult
for one man to largely alter the outline of their work.
[Illustration: ST. ALBANS CATHEDRAL.]
A cheerful old place is St. Albans, crowning its hill proudly with a
mural crown, and rich in all the traditional attributes of a cathedral
city—darkling nooks, quaint alleys, and ancient churches—satellites
attendant upon the central fane. Before the present main road from
London came into existence in 1794, the entrance was by Sopwell Lane,
still in use, branching off to the left at something more than half a
mile from the city. It is a steep and rugged way, leading down into the
meadows where Sopwell ruins stand, and so to Holywell Hill, where an
acute right-angle turn and a formidable climb used to bring the early
coaches staggering into the market-place by the aid of an extra pair of
horses. The Roman way, the famous “Watling Street,” avoided the site of
St. Albans altogether, and went considerably to the left of the Holyhead
Road, to the valley of the Ver, where the ruins of Verulamium may yet be
found below the hilly site of the monastery of St. Alban, founded by
King Offa of Mercia in 793. It was the monks who in mediæval times
diverted the Watling Street from its straight course to Verulam, and
made the road from St. Stephens into St. Albans, by the tremendous
descent and ascent of Holywell Hill. The travellers of those times came
from London chiefly by the Watling Street, _viâ_ Stanmore, Brockley
Hill, and Elstree, and it was not until later that the present route
came greatly into vogue.
This monkish interference with the road was by no means on behalf of
travellers, but rather from a highly developed sense of
self-preservation. Before they laid hands upon it, traffic went by in
the valley, and the town and monastery suffered from neglect. St. Albans
Monastery, like other religious houses, did not exist by grants of land
alone, but owned tolls and market-rights, and it was to increase the
value of these that this drastic plan was adopted. Drastic, indeed, it
was, for the paved Roman way was grubbed up and utterly destroyed from
St. Stephens to Verulam, so that it became impossible to travel by it,
and every one was then compelled to come into St. Albans by the
mountainous Holywell Hill.
Verulamium had from the earliest times of the Roman settlement of
Britain been the wealthiest of all the towns in this island. It
possessed a theatre and all the graces of civilisation, but no walls or
defences of any kind. Thus it was that when Boadicea, Queen of the
Iceni, revolted under oppression in A.D. 61, it became the easiest, as
well as the earliest prey of her avenging hosts. Verulamium and
Londinium fell before their onslaughts, and in the massacres following,
70,000 persons are said to have perished, in addition to those who fell
at Camulodunum.
Verulamium, in common with those other towns, was afterwards rebuilt,
and grew more prosperous than before; but it met a similar fate some 400
years later, when the Roman troops left Britain, and barbaric hordes
overwhelmed it in some obscure foray. The very obscurity that clings
about its end adds to the horror of those times. Those were wars of
extermination, and none were left to tell the tale of how the great town
and its people perished by fire and sword. Only when, in course of time,
civilisation touched the Saxons, and historians were produced, do we
hear anything of these long-ruined places, by that time become tinged
with mystery and regarded with shrinking aversion. Bede, writing about
A.D. 720, calls this “Waetlinga-ceaster,” the city of the Watlings. In
his time vast ruined walls and houses remained. Offa, when founding St.
Albans Abbey, some seventy years later, was probably dissuaded by fears
of the supernatural from drawing upon the ruins for building material.
It was not so with those who rebuilt and enlarged his Abbey from time to
time. They found and worked the ready mine of bricks and tiles, doubly
valuable in that district innocent of stone, and thus it is that so
little of ruined Verulam is left; but, gazing upon the Abbey, we see, in
the immense quantities of Roman brick and tile that have gone towards
its construction, that ancient Roman town in a manner re-incarnated.
[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE, ST. ALBANS.]
Towards the middle of the tenth century, those ruins in the valley were
a source of terror to the good folks of the rising town of St. Albans.
In them lurked those outlaws—robbers, murderers, and general
offscourings of society—for whom it would have been dangerous to appear
in the town, and who rendered it equally dangerous for law-abiding
burgesses to wander far from their domestic hearths when the sun had set
and darkness gathered. It was partly for this reason, perhaps quite as
much as for the use of the materials for building purposes, that so much
of the ruins was removed by Ealdred, the eighth Abbot. He warred with
the Verulam vagabonds, carting much of their harbourage away, and
explored a cave supposed to be inhabited by a dragon—who was not at home
on that occasion. The good Abbot, however, is said to have found traces
of the monster! His successor, Eadmer, was of the fiery sort. He, too,
removed much building material, but the “pagan altars” found during his
explorations he ground to powder—and so earns the maledictions of all
antiquaries.
And so it went on for centuries. Stukeley, about 1690, noticed a good
part of the walls standing, but, as he rode along, saw hundreds of loads
of Roman bricks being carted off, to mend the highway.
XVI
The old entrance by Holywell Hill is the most charming part of St.
Albans, with fine old red-brick mansions and old inns where the coaches
and the post-chaises used to come. Many of the inns are either mere
shadows of their former selves, or have been entirely altered to other
uses, but their coach-entrances and yards remain to toll of what they
once were. There stands a building now a girls’ school, but once the
“Old Crown,” and close by the “White Hart,” with “Saracen’s Head Yard”
beyond, but the “Saracen’s Head” itself is now divided into shops. In a
continuous line uphill were the “Angel,” “Horsehead,” “Dolphin,” “Seven
Stars,” “Woolpack,” “Peahen,” and “Key”; which last house stood squarely
on the site where the London road now enters the city. It was from the
“Keyfield,” at the back of this house, that the Yorkists burst into the
streets and fell upon the Lancastrians in the first Battle of St.
Albans, 1455. Another long-vanished inn was the “Castle,” made famous by
Shakespeare in a scene of _Henry VI._, where Richard Plantagenet kills
the Duke of Somerset, in this fight:—
So, lie thou there:—
For underneath an alehouse’ paltry sign,
The Castle in St. Albans, Somerset
Hath made the wizard famous in his death.
Somerset had been warned by a witch to “shun castles”:—
Let him shun castles;
Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains,
Than where castles mounted stand.
He could scarce have interpreted the prophecy in the crooked way it was
verified.
[Illustration: ST. PETER’S STREET AND TOWN HALL, ST. ALBANS, 1826.
_From an Old Print._]
Holywell Hill still echoes to the sound of the coach-horn, as the modern
“Wonder,” with an extra pair of horses, dashes up from the hollow to the
“Peahen.” The “Wonder,” however, does not journey to and from St. Albans
by the Holyhead road. Leaving London from the Hotel Victoria,
Northumberland Avenue, at 10.50 a.m., it follows somewhat the line of
the Watling Street by Hendon, the “Welsh Harp,” Edgware, Great Stanmore,
Bushey, and Watford; reaching its destination at 1.50, and setting out
on the return journey at 3.45. The “Wonder” has run daily to and from
St. Albans, sometimes through the winter as well as summer, since 1882;
owned by that consistent amateur of coaching, Mr. P. J. Rumney,
familiarly known down the road and at Brighton as “Dr. Ridge,” from his
proprietorship of a certain world-famed “Food for Infants.” But, before
the “Wonder” came upon the scene, the modern coaching revival had
provided St. Albans with summer coaches from about 1872. The now famous
“Old Times” began to run, November 4th, 1878, and continued to St.
Albans until the following spring, when it was transferred to Virginia
Water.
The “Peahen,” standing at the meeting of Holywell Hill and the London
Road, has of late been rebuilt in a somewhat gorgeous and baronial
style, but is the lineal descendant of a house of the same name in
existence so far back as 1556. The name of the “Peahen” is thought to be
unique.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE.”]
Continuing the line of hostelries past the “Peahen” and the “Key,” into
Chequer Street, there were the “Chequers,” the “Half Moon,” and the
“Bell”; and in French Row the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and the “Old Christopher,”
still remaining. The “Great Red Lion” in the market-place, has been
rebuilt. Near it, in George Street, on the old road out of St. Albans,
is the “George,” one of the pleasantest old places still left, with an
old red-brick front and a picturesque courtyard. There was an inn on
this site certainly as early as 1448, when it was mentioned as the
“George upon the Hupe”—whatever that may mean. In those times it was a
pilgrim’s inn, and had an oratory chapel. Nothing so interesting as that
survives, but the old house has its features. The room to the right of
the archway, used in old times, when a coach plied from the “George” to
London and back every day, as a booking-office and waiting-room, remains
in use as a parlour and rendezvous for the country-folk on market days,
and all the summer the courtyard is like a bower with flowers and vines.
Under the gable can be seen a spoil snatched from the destruction of old
Holywell House in 1837—the decorative carving from the pediment, a work
representing Ceres, surrounded with emblems of agriculture its products,
and attended by Cupids and shameless creatures of that sort.
To and from the “George” went daily the “Favourite” London coach, until
the first of the railways came in May 1858, and ran it off the road.
William Seymour, who used to drive it, then descended to the position of
driver of an omnibus plying between St. Albans and Hatfield, but even
that humble occupation was soon swept away by railway extension. He then
became landlord of the “King Harry” inn at St. Stephens, and died at
last, May 30th, 1869, in the Marlborough almshouses, St. Albans. Two
other coaches in those days plied between St. Albans and London,
generally taking three and a half hours. One came and went from the
“Woolpack,” and the other, the “Accommodation,” from the “Fleur-de-Lis,”
French Row.
A particularly haughty and exclusive establishment was the “Verulam
Arms.” No common fellow who travelled by public conveyances was
encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who came in their own
family coaches, or posted, ever sheltered beneath that condescending
roof. The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford’s new road leaving
St. Albans, but had, as an hotel and posting-house, the shortest of
careers. Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years saw the coming
of the railway. With that event vanished the trade of the “Verulam
Arms.” The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years past been a
private residence. It is an extremely plain and uncompromisingly formal
building in pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semicircular
drive. It is said that the Princess Victoria stayed here once. Some
portions of the once extensive stable-yards and coach-houses remain, but
the greater part of the grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the
site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate building discontinued
and sold before completion, and finally purchased and finished as a
Church of England place of worship, as it still remains, with the title
of Christ Church. It would be difficult to find a more hideous building.
[Illustration: THE “FIGHTING COCKS.”]
But a far higher antiquity than can be shown by any other house in St.
Albans belongs to a little inn called the “Fighting Cocks,” standing by
the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin goes back to early monastic
days, when the lower part of this curious little octagonal building was
a water-gate to the monastery, and known as St. Germain’s Gate. Here the
monks kept their nets, using the upper part as a fortification. That
embattled upper stage disappeared six hundred years ago, and in its
place the upper storey of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon
the stone substructure. The inn claims to be the oldest inhabited house
in the kingdom, and exhibited until recently the inscription:—
The Old Round House,
Rebuilt after the Flood.
Obviously, judging from that old sign, the distinction between an
eight-sided and a round house was too subtle to be noticed. The “Rebuilt
after the Flood” does not (seeing where the house stands, beside the
river Ver) necessarily mean the Deluge.
The hanging sign has of late years become pictorial. On one side the
Cocks are to be seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the other
the victor stands proudly over the prostrate body of the vanquished, and
indulges in a triumphant crow.
XVII
We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who
were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down
as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there
were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were
the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host
of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and
another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London,
in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not
specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.
To this inn came one evening a gentleman travelling to London on
horseback. The landlord himself helped him up to his bedroom with a
weighty portmanteau which promised good plunder, and while his guest was
preparing for supper, took the good news of a likely haul to Garrett and
his partner, who were staying in the house. A pretty scheme was arranged
on the instant, and the landlord, when his guest came downstairs,
introduced his two confederates to him in the guise of travellers, also
on their way to London the following morning, who would be glad of his
company. The unsuspecting stranger, nothing loth to spend an evening in
pleasant company, instead of sitting in solitary state, joined the other
“travellers” with a good will, and they had a convivial night; setting
out the next morning together. When they had reached a lonely part of
the road near London Colney, the one covered him with a pistol while the
other ransacked his portmanteau, taking all its contents, including a
hundred guineas from his person. Then they disappeared down a bye-road.
Our traveller sat mournfully by the roadside for a while, contemplating
his empty pack and the reins of his horse, which had been cut by the two
partners in crime. It was not long before he arrived at the very just
conclusion that the landlord of the inn was a party to this business,
and a very pretty little scheme occurred to him by which he saw the
possibility of getting his own again. He carefully refilled his
portmanteau with stones, and retracing his way to St. Albans, called
first at a saddler’s to have his reins mended, and then leaving the
horse behind him, went back to the inn. When the rascally landlord saw
him return with his baggage as heavy as before, he came to the natural
conclusion that his confederates had not robbed the stranger, and cursed
them under his breath for a pair of bungling fools. The returned
traveller himself confirmed this impression, accounting for his
reappearance by telling how an accident had happened to his nag. In the
meantime, he said, before starting out again, he must have dinner, and
only wished he could have had the pleasure of the company at that meal
of the good fellows his host had introduced him to the night before.
With much extravagant praise of their good and sociable qualities, he
declared that he must really not lose sight of such fine fellows. Did
mine host know where they lived in London?
That villainous tapster was quite deceived. He _did_ know the addresses,
and gave them. In due course, then, imagine our traveller once more on
his way, and finally arriving in town. The next morning he called upon
Garrett, in the guise of a “gentleman on important business.” Garrett
was still in bed, and could not be seen, having “just returned from a
journey in the country.”
To this he replied that it was urgent and important business, and this
message brought the highwayman down. The traveller had not come without
very potent persuaders to support his demand for his property. The one
was a threat to have both highwaymen arrested; the other was a pistol.
These inducements were successful, and his hundred guineas found their
way back to his pockets, together with a portion of his other property.
Then he made a similar call upon the other malefactor, who yielded up
the other moiety of the contents of the portmanteau, and (as we are told
by the contemporary historian of these things) another hundred guineas.
We need not believe in this epic completeness and overflowing measure of
justice and retribution. _There_ lurks the eighteenth-century moralist,
eager to cross the t’s and dot the i’s of every situation. But there is
no reason why, up to that point, the story should not be true.
Before the road was remodelled by Telford, in 1826, the way out of St.
Albans was past the “George” and down the steep descent of Romeland and
Fishpool Street, through the village of St. Michael’s, and diagonally
across a portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river Ver at Bow
Bridge, at a point one and a half miles from the city, just short of
Prae Mill. The present Holyhead Road, starting from the “Red Lion” in
the Market Place, was in 1828 an entirely new work. It is described by
Telford as a two miles’ length, extending from the “Red Lion” to “Pond
Yards,” a spot probably identical with Shefford Mill, half a mile beyond
Prae House, the site of the ancient hospital of St. Mary de la Pré, or
de Pratis (“St. Mary of the Meadows”) originally a retreat for women
lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory of Benedictine nuns,
suppressed by Wolsey in 1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae
House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed by the embankment with
which the roadway is raised securely above danger of flooding from the
river Ver.
When the new road was completed, the old route through Gorhambury became
private, and the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village of St.
Michael’s, by lodge gates. St. Michael’s, now lying on the road to
nowhere in particular, remains a sweetly old-world place, and the
breakneck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners of St. Albans.
Here old houses and quaint signs are the rule, and modern buildings the
exception. The “Jackdaw,” the “Cock and Flower Pot,” and many other old
names attract attention. Curiosities of the geological sort at St.
Michael’s are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or “pudding-stone,”
found here and there in prominent positions, having been dug up at
different periods in the neighbourhood. The name of “pudding-stone” is
excellently descriptive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles welded
together by some prehistoric force, and resembling, to the imaginative
mind, Cyclopean fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-pudding,
extraordinarily rich in plums.
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL’S.]
St. Michael’s Church, standing as it does almost in the centre of the
site of old Verulamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is of many
periods, from Saxon to Scottian and Grimthorpian, and of an
extraordinary interest, somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir
Gilbert Scott, who “thoroughly restored” it in 1867, and the
inconceivably heavier hand of Lord Grimthorpe, who pulled it about
shamefully in 1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-cast tower,
and building a new one from his own amateur-architect design. The odd
architectural details would be ridiculous if they were not pitiful, in
view of the really interesting work they replace. One device, in
especial, resembles a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything
known in the whole range of Gothic design.
But greater than any other conceivable interest is the association of
the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with
Gorhambury and St. Michael’s. Bacon, who in his sixty-five years of life
studied law, and rose to be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently
remarkable man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and a diligent
courtier, a philosopher, and the industrious author of essays,
historical works, and the _Advancement of Learning_, but wrote all the
plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and Christopher Marlowe, as we
are asked by ingenious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to believe.
Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus on the stormy sea of cryptogamic
discovery has even found that Francis was not the son of Nicholas Bacon,
but the unacknowledged offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of
Leicester! This is startling, and lends an altogether novel interest to
the statue of Bacon in the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury House
in the park. “Thus he sat,” runs the inscription beneath the statue,
seated in philosophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly he looks
wise enough for anything; but it was not serious wisdom alone that went
towards the construction of Shakespeare’s plays.
XVIII
Leaving the city of St. Alban, the river Ver is crossed at Prae House,
and continues companionable as far as Redbourne, where it disappears in
another direction, in deference to the rise on which Redbourne is built.
That old coaching village is a veritable jewel of quaintness in the
Queen Anne and Georgian sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and
wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of wrought iron that seem to
await the coming of the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne’s
architectural features. Very conspicuous, although but the sign of a
humble beer-house, is the pictorial sign of the “Mad Tom.” Painted on a
large circular plate of copper, it hangs out from the frontage,
displaying a different picture on each of its two sides:—the first
showing “Mad Tom in Bedlam,” the second, “Mad Tom at Liberty.” A very
old sign, it represents one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages,
were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who, when sufficiently recovered
to be released, were provided with “briefs,” or licences to beg a
livelihood. These “Mad Toms,” as they were called, were once familiar
figures upon the roads.
[Illustration: MAD TOM IN BEDLAM]
In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred cell, madly clutching his
hair: fetters load his arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt)
stands on a bracket, and looks anything but appetising. The second scene
shows him, gaily attired in white stockings and blue knee-breeches, with
a gorgeous red coat and a still more gorgeous turban, walking the road
and blowing a trumpet.
The more rural part of Redbourne is quite away from the road, across a
wide common traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this, and in a
hollow where a quite unsuspected street of ancient cottages is found,
the exquisitely picturesque church stands. One may look in vain in the
guide-books for any mention of its beauties of colour and quaintness of
detail that instantly capture the affections of the artist. Long may the
restorer be kept at a proper distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues
of the old plastered tower, the crumbling “clunch” stone, the patches of
black flint and Roman tile and the unconventional beauty of the
sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain untouched.
[Illustration: TOM AT LIBERTY]
[Illustration: REDBOURNE CHURCH.]
Redbourne seems to have found favour in the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but
rather on negative than positive grounds, and on account of what it did
not possess. “No villainous things of the fir tribe here,” he observes,
looking upon the landscape with approval. He missed a point though, at
Friar’s Wash, where the recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the
road again, by the “Chequers” inn, where a hilly bye-lane goes off in a
north-easterly direction to Flamstead. But doubtless Cobbett missed the
name, else we might well have heard him characteristically lashing out,
something in this sort: “Friars’ Wash! indeed. Good God, when _did_
friars _wash_? Everybody knows, or _ought_ to know that they did nothing
of the sort, and counted personal uncleanliness as not merely next to
godliness, but a constituent part of it. They were as dirty physically
as Mr. Pitt and his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and slavering
creatures are morally. Aye! and I tell you, poor down-trodden victims of
an arbitrary government,” etc., etc. Something of that kind Cobbett
would have written in his _Rural Rides_. Indeed, the “friars austere,
unwashed and unpleasantly yellow,” as they were, by all accounts, might
well have resented that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable aspersion
upon their well-earned reputation for an ancient and invincible
dirtiness.
[Illustration: REDBOURNE.]
Flamstead, let it be noted, having originally been Verlamstead, owes its
name directly to the river whose valley it overlooks from its hill-top.
Its church-tower and characteristic Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher
spire may be glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded ridge. The
succeeding mile on to Markyate Street—the “River Hill improvement,” as
it was called—was one of the last pieces of work undertaken in the long
series of Holyhead Road alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old
road, still visible on the right, goes for the length of a mile as a
steep and narrow lane, almost parallel with the improved highway, and
falls into it at the beginning of the village of Markyate, as it is
shortly named nowadays. The “street” has only of late years been
officially dropped by the General Post Office, in response to the
request of the inhabitants, to whom, and to strangers having business
here, the old address caused considerable trouble and misunderstanding;
those not familiar with the place not unnaturally thinking “Markyate
Street, Dunstable,” to be a thoroughfare in that town, instead of, as a
matter of fact, 4½ miles distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street of
houses fringing either side of the road, and what the old coachmen
called a “thoroughfare village”; a long street certainly, but nothing
else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a line, “length without
breadth.” It is an old-world place, drowsily conducting from
Hertfordshire into Beds, with too many inns for its present needs, and
one—the original “Sun” of coaching days—converted into a laundry and
looking with severity upon the house directly opposite, that has assumed
its old style and title.
Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves steeply down from the road on
the right hand, is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine old
Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced, and with noble clusters of
carved brick chimneys, once the site of a nunnery; and in a hollow—the
roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick tower below the road
level—the toy-like church of this beautiful domain. The rest of the way
to Dunstable is lonely, Kensworth village hidden somewhere in the folds
of the hills, and its Post Office only visible. At one mile from
Dunstable remains an old toll-house, the first now met with on the
journey from London.
It was on this stretch of road, between St. Albans and Hockliffe, that
the gay and mercurial highwayman, “Gentleman Harry,” did his last stroke
of business, in the spring of 1747. Harry Simms had been highwayman,
rover, soldier, sailor on board a man o’ war, and, deserting and setting
foot ashore at Bristol, became highwayman again. Having, as himself
might have said, thus boxed the compass, his career was fully rounded
off, and the only things necessary to complete it were a rope and a
hangman. They were nearer than he thought, poor butterfly!
He had been a successful ruffler along the road in all his brief but
varied career, and although a man of peace, and never known to enforce
his demands for the turning out of pockets with anything worse than an
oath and a well-assumed air of truculence, had always enjoyed
exceptional fortune. It is scarce necessary to add that his gains were
spent as freely as they were made: few highwaymen ever put anything by
for a rainy day. On his return home, he amassed so great a store of gold
watches, diamonds, and guineas, in so short a time that, had they grown
wild in the hedges, he could scarce have gleaned more, or more speedily.
“_Jam satis_,” he exclaimed (for he had been a Cambridge undergrad in
his time, and loved a Latin tag) when coming out of Essex into Aldgate
with his pockets bursting with gold rings and chains; and, putting up at
the “Saracen’s Head,” determined to forswear the road and live cleanly
on his accumulated wealth. An incident he had witnessed in the dusk,
coming from Snaresbrook to Aldgate, had probably been the inducement to
“the quiet life” thus contemplated. At the turnpike gate he had observed
a gentleman arrested in mistake for himself!
So, leaving the “Saracen’s Head” early the next morning, he set out on
horseback on the long journey to Holyhead, proposing to voyage over to
Dublin and there dispose of his plunder. Good resolutions filled his
heart: he carolled as he went, in rivalry with the hedge-side warblers,
and in this manner left St. Albans behind, and so came into this broad
reach of the road near Redbourne. Unhappily for him, he had taken a
little too much port at St. Albans, and the port disguised his prudence
to that extent that, seeing three horsemen slowly ambling along the
highway, he must needs resume his old trade and bid them “stand and
deliver!”
“Gentleman Harry” had never been distinguished for his personal courage,
and those who dared to disregard him generally found themselves safe
enough. The first of the travellers said he would not be robbed, and
rode on; the second gave our friend a slash over the head with his
riding-whip; and all three went their way. “Blood and wounds!” thought
Simms, the wine fermenting in his brain; “shall I be scorned thus?
Never!” And, in a drunken fury, he titupped after them, and really did
secure a delivery. From one he received nine shillings, from another an
old watch and seven shillings, and from the third two guineas and
seventeen shillings.
Other spoil fell to him on the way, and when the Warrington stage hove
in sight, he held it up with dramatic completeness and much financial
success, spurring on to Dunstable in a tumult of port and professional
pride. At the “Bull” he called for brandy, and had but raised the glass
to his lips when the robbed coach came lumbering in, and the passengers
entered the room where he was. How he rushed out, and, mounting his
horse, dashed away, he never knew; but presently found himself at
Hockliffe, where, in the kitchen of the “Star,” with more brandy at his
elbow, he fell into a drunken stupor by the fire.
The whole district was, however, aroused, and the road being searched
while he lay in that condition. Three soldiers traced him to the “Star,”
and he awoke to find himself covered by their pistols. To them he
yielded all his varied wealth, with the exception of a few trifles
hidden in his neckcloth, and then staggered up to bed with the troopers
at his heels. There they watched him all night.
He was, as he says in his last account and confession of a wild career,
“a good deal chagrined” at this. How to escape? He thought of a plan.
Throwing the few remaining trinkets suddenly in the fire, the soldiers,
as he had expected, made a dash to save them, while he pounced upon the
pistols. He seized a couple, and, standing at the door, desperately
pulled the triggers. The soldiers would probably have been sent to
Kingdom Come but for the trifling circumstance that the weapons missed
fire. It was a mishap that cost Simms his life, for he was quickly
seized and more vigilantly guarded, and, when morning dawned, taken up
to London on the road he had so blithely travelled the day before. One
more journey followed—to Tyburn, where they hanged him in the following
June.
The pilgrim of the roads who looks for the “Bull” at Dunstable, or the
“Star” at Hockliffe, will not find those signs: the shrines of the
saints and the haunts of the highwaymen are alike the food of ravenous
Time.
XIX
Who shall say certainly how or when the phrase “Downright Dunstahle”
first arose, or what it originally meant. Not the present historian, who
merely sucks his wisdom from local legends as he goes. And when it
happens, as not infrequently is the case, they have no agreement, but
lead the questing toiler after truth into _culs-de-sac_ of falsehoods
and blind-alleys and mazes of contradictions, the labour were surely as
profitless as the mediæval search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Briefly,
then, “Downright Dunstable” is a figurative expression for either or
both of two things: a state of helpless intoxication, or for that kind
of candid speech often called “brutal frankness.” At any rate, it is ill
questing at Dunstable for light on the subject, and it is quite within
the usual run of things to find the old saying unknown nowadays in the
place that gave it birth.
There is no evidence in the long broad street of Dunstable town of the
age and ancient importance of the place. It looks entirely modern, and
the Priory church is hidden away on the right. When—in the course of a
century or so—the young limes, sycamores, and chestnuts, planted on
either side of that main thoroughfare, have grown to maturity, the view
coming into Dunstable from London will be a noble one. At present it is
merely neat and cheerful.
No mention is made of Dunstable in Doomsday Book. When that work was
compiled, the old Roman station of Durocobrivæ, occupied in turn by the
Saxons and burnt to the ground by marauding Danes, lay in a heap of
blackened ruins, the only living creatures in the neighbourhood the
fierce robbers who lay wait for travellers at this ancient crossing of
the Watling and the Icknield Streets. If any of the surveyors who took
notes for the making of Doomsday Book were so rash as to come here for
that purpose, certainly they must have perished in the doing. At that
period and until the beginning of Henry I.’s reign the road was bordered
by dense woodlands, affording a safe hiding-place for malefactors, chief
among whom, according to an absurd monkish legend, purporting to account
for the place-name, was a robber named Dun. The ruined town and the
impenetrable thickets were known, they said, as “Dun’s Stable.”
The first step towards reclaiming the road and the ruins from anarchy
and violence was the clearing of these woods. This was followed by the
building of a house—probably a hunting-lodge—for the King, and the
founding of the once powerful and stately Priory of Dunstable, portions
of whose noble church remain to day as the parish church of the town. To
the Augustine priors the town and its market rights were given, and the
place, new-risen from its ashes, throve under the combined patronage of
Church and State. Whatever the religious merits of those old monks may
have been, certainly they were business men, stock-raisers, and
wool-growers of the first order. Their flocks and herds covered those
downs that remain much the same now as eight hundred years ago, and
their Dunstable wool was prized as the best in the kingdom. But these
business-like monks were not altogether loved by the townsfolk, who
resented the taxes laid upon them by the Church, all-powerful here in
those days. It seemed to men unjust that fat priors and their crew
should command the best of both worlds: should wield the keys of heaven
and take heavy toll of goods in the market. The townsfolk, indeed, in
1229 made a bold stand, and protesting that they “would sooner go to
hell than be taxed,” vainly attempted to form a new settlement outside
the town. The sole results were that they were taxed rather more heavily
than before, and ecclesiastically cursed. To detail here the grandeur
and the pride of that great Priory would be to halt too long on the way.
All who had, in those ancient times, any business along this great road
were entertained by the Prior. The common herd in those early days were
entertained at the guest house, a building facing the main road, on a
site now occupied by a house called “The Priory.” King John in 1202 had
given his hunting-lodge to the Priory, and from that time onward Kings
and Queens were lodged in the Priory itself. Here rested—the next
halting-place from Stony Stratford the body of Queen Eleanor on the way
to Westminster, in 1290; and one of the long series of Eleanor crosses
remained in the market-place until 1643, when it was destroyed by the
Parliamentary troops. In the Lady Chapel (long since swept away) of the
Priory Church, Cranmer promulgated the divorce of Henry VIII. and
Katherine of Arragon. Two years later, the Priory itself was dissolved.
At first it seemed likely that Dunstable would be made the seat of a
Bishop and the great church erected to the dignity of a Cathedral, but
the project came to nothing, and the sole remaining portions of the old
buildings are the nave and the west front. Presbytery, choir, transepts,
lady chapel, and aisles were torn down. The aisles and east end of the
church are modern, the nave a majestic example of Norman architecture,
and the west front a curiously picturesque mass of Transitional Norman,
Early English, and Perpendicular, worthy the dexterous pencil of a
Prout.
[Illustration: DUNSTABLE PRIORY CHURCH.]
The spoliation of the Priory Church was a long but thorough process.
Many of its carved stones are worked into houses and walls in and around
the town, but it was left for modern times to complete the vandalism;
when, for example, great numbers of decorative pillars and capitals were
discovered, some put to use to form an “ornamental rockery” in a
neighbouring garden, the remaining cartloads taken to a secluded spot in
the downs and buried; when the stone coffin of a prior was sold for use
as a horse-trough and afterwards broken up for road-metal; when a rector
could find it possible to destroy a holy-water stoup, the old font could
be thrown away, and the pulpit sold to a publican for the decoration of
a tea-garden. Among other objects that have disappeared in modern times
is the life-size effigy of St. Fredemund, the sole remaining portion of
his shrine. Fredemund was a son of King Offa. His body had been brought
hither in ancient times, on the way to Canterbury, but was, by some
miraculous interposition, prevented from leaving Dunstable. No miracle
saved his statue. The ancient sanctus bell of the church, inscribed “Ave
Maria, gracia plena,” hangs on the wall of the modern town-hall.
“Dunstable,” says Ogilby, writing in 1675, “is full of Inns for
Accommodation, and noted for good Larks.” This would seem to hint at an
unwonted sprightliness in the hostelries and town of Dunstable, were it
not that larks bore but one signification in Ogilby’s day. Slang had not
then stepped in to give the word a double meaning. Of the notable old
inns of Dunstable the “Sugarloaf” remains, roomy and staid, reprobating
unseemliness. Larks, like Dunstable wool in still older days, and
straw-plaiting in more recent times, no longer render the town notable.
Straw-plaiting and hat-making are, it is true, yet carried on, but the
industry is a depressed one. A greater feature, perhaps, is seen in the
extensive printing works established here in recent years by the great
London firm of Waterlow & Sons.
XX
From Dunstable the road enters a deep chalk cutting through the
Downs—similar to, but not so great a work as, the chalky gash through
Butser Hill, on the Portsmouth Road. In this mile-length of cutting the
traveller stews on still summer days, blinded by the chalky glare; or,
when it blows great autumnal guns and snow-laden winter gales, whistling
and roaring through this exposed gullet with the sound of a railway
train, freezes to his very marrow. Before this cutting was made, and the
“spoil” from it used in the making of the great embankment that carries
the road above the deep succeeding valley, this was a precipitous ascent
and descent, and a cruel tax upon horses. Looking backwards, the
embankment is impressive, even in these days of great engineering feats,
and proves to the eye how vigorously the question of road reform was
being grappled with just before the introduction of railways. From this
point the famous Dunstable Downs are well seen, rising in bold terraces
and swelling hills from the hollow, and receding in fold upon fold of
treeless wastes where the prehistoric Icknield Way runs and the stone
implements and flint arrows dropped by primitive man for lack of
reliable pockets, are found.
[Illustration: DUNSTABLE DOWNS.]
The neolithic ancestor seems to have been particularly fond of these
windy hillsides, and has left a great earthwork on them, ten acres in
extent. Maiden Bower they call it nowadays—as grotesquely unsuitable a
corruption of the original “Maghdune-burh” as may well be imagined. Its
wind-swept terraces, distinctly seen from this embankment, scarce give
the idea of a boudoir. Neolithic man was fond of these hillsides in a
purely negative way. He would have preferred the warmer valleys, only in
those remote times they were filled with dense and almost impenetrable
forests, and abounded in the fiercest and wildest of wild animals, that
came at night and preyed upon his family circle when the camp-fires
burnt low. And when those wild creatures were not to be dreaded, there
were always hostile tribes prowling in the thickets. So, on all counts,
the Downs were safest. Where that remote ancestor built his bee-hive
huts and banded together with his fellows to raise a fortified post,
others—Britons, Romans, and Saxons—came and added more and taller
earthworks, so that the tallest of them are sixteen feet high even now.
Shortly after leaving the embankment behind, a sign-post marks a lane to
the left, leading to Tilsworth, a dejected village, looking as though
agricultural depression had hit it hard. A deserted schoolhouse, by the
church, is falling to pieces. Just within the churchyard is a headstone,
standing remotely apart from the others. Its isolation invites scrutiny;
an attention rewarded by this epitaph:—
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED
BY SUBSCRIPTION
TO THE MEMORY OF
A FEMALE UNKNOWN
FOUND MURDER’D IN BLACKGROVE WOOD
AUG. 15^{th} 1821
Oh pause my friends and drop the silent tear
Attend and learn why I was buried here;
Perchance some distant earth had hid my clay
If I’d outliv’d the sad, the fatal day:
To you unknown, my case not understood;
From whence I came, or why in Blackgrove Wood.
This truth’s too clear; and nearly all that’s known—
I there was murder’d, and the villain’s flown.
May God, whose piercing eye pursues his flight,
Pardon the crime, but bring the deed to light.
That the deed was “brought to light” is obvious enough, but that is not
what the author of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the deed was
never discovered. Blackgrove Wood, a dark mass in a little hollow, is
easily seen from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe is reached.
XXI
“A dirty way leads you to Hockley, _alias_ Hockley-in-the-Hole,” said
Ogilby, in 1675; and it seems to have gradually become worse during the
next few years, for Celia Fiennes, confiding her adventures to her
diary, about 1695, tells of “seven mile over a sad road. Called Hockley
in y^e Hole, as full of deep slows in y^e winter it must be Empasable.”
It received, in fact, all the surface-water draining from Dunstable
Downs to the south and Brickhills to the north. It is not, however,
until he has left Hockliffe behind and started to climb out of it that,
the amateur of roads discovers how deeply in a hole Hockliffe is, for it
is approached from the Dunstable side by a level stretch that dims the
memory of the downs, and makes all those old tales of sloughs appear
like fantastic inventions. It is at this time perhaps the most perfectly
preserved example of Telford’s road-making. Surface, cross-drains,
ditches, and hedges are maintained in as good condition as when first
made. And why so more than in other places? For this very reason; that
it _is_ in a hole, and if not properly drained, would again become as
“empasable” as it was over two hundred years ago.
Hockliffe, originally a very small village, grew to great importance in
coaching times, for here is the junction of the Holyhead and Manchester
and Liverpool roads, both in those times of the greatest vogue and
highest importance. An after-glow of those radiant glories of the road
is seen in the long street. Hockliffe was in Pennant’s time, when
coaching had grown enormously in importance, “a long range of houses,
mostly inns.” It is so now, with the difference that the houses mostly
_have been_ inns, and are so no longer. In his day he observed “the
English rage for novelty” to be “strongly tempted by one sagacious
publican, who informs us, on his sign, of newspapers being to be seen at
his house _every day_ in the week.”
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HORSE,” HOCKLIFFE.]
At which of the two principal inns, the “White Hart” or the “White
Horse,” this enterprising publican carried on business he does not tell
us. Perhaps it was the “White Horse”; now certainly one of the most
interesting of inns, and then the chiefest in Hockliffe. Before its
hospitable door the “Holyhead Mail,” the Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” the
Manchester “Telegraph,” the Liverpool “Royal Umpire,” and many another
drew up, together with some of the many “Tally-Hoes” that spread a
fierce rivalry down the road. It was probably at Hockliffe and at the
hospitable door of the “White Horse,” that the “Birmingham Tally-Ho”
conveying Tom Brown to Rugby drew up at dawn “at the end of the fourth
stage.” We need not look for exact coaching data in that story; else,
among other things, we might cavil at the description of it as a
“little” roadside inn.
A bright fire gleaming through the red curtains of the bar window gave
promise of good refreshment, and so while the horses were changed, the
guard took Tom in to give him “a drop of something to keep the cold
out,” or rather to drive it out, for poor Tom’s feet were already so
cold that they might have been in the next world, for all he could feel
of them, and the guard had to pick him off the coach-top and set him in
the road. “Early purl” set that right, and warmed the cockles of his
heart.
There is no nonsense of the plate-glass and electric-bell kind about the
“White Horse.” If the old coachmen were to come back, and the passengers
they drove, they would find the old house much the same—the stables
docked perhaps of some of their old extent and a trifle ruinous, and the
house in these less palmy days crying out for some fresh paint and a few
minor repairs; but still the same well-remembered place. Even the
windows in the gables, blocked up over a century ago to escape Mr.
Pitt’s window-tax, have not been re-opened. There are low-browed old
rooms at the inn, with a cosy kitchen that is as much parlour; with
undisguised oaken beams running overhead, rich in pendant hams that by
due hanging have acquired artistic old-masterish tones, like mellow
Morlands and rich Gainsboroughs. There is a capacious hearth, there are
settles to sit easily in, and warming pans that have warmed many a bed
for old-time travellers; and there are memories, too, for them that care
to summon them. Will they come? Yes, I warrant you. They are memories
chiefly of moving accidents by flood and fell, for Hockliffe has had
more than its due share of coaching accidents. They happened chiefly on
the hills a mile out, where Battlesden Park skirts the road, and where,
although Telford did some embanking of the hollows and cutting of the
crests, they remain formidable to this day. Battlesden became an ominous
name in those days, and the “White Horse” and many another Hockliffe inn
very like hospitals. The year 1835 was an especially disastrous one. In
May, the “Hope” Halifax coach, on the way to London, was being driven
down hill at a furious pace, when the horses became unmanageable, and
the coach, overloaded with luggage piled up on the roof, after reeling
in several directions, fell on the off side. All the passengers were
injured more or less severely. The next happening was when the
Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” coming towards London, was overturned at a point
almost opposite Battlesden House. Again most of the passengers were
seriously injured, and the coachman had a leg broken. Two of the horses
suffered similar injuries. This accident was caused by the near-side
wheeler kicking over the pole and thus upsetting the coach while it was
running at high speed down hill. Of course, when the great Christmas
snowstorm of 1836 blocked nearly all the roads in England, Hockliffe was
a very special place for drifts, and the Birmingham, Manchester,
Holyhead, Chester and Holyhead, and Halifax mails were all snowed up. An
attempt made to drag the Chester mail out resulted in the fore-axle
giving way and the coach being abandoned. The boys went forward on
horseback. The Holyhead mail, with the Irish bags, was more fortunate.
When the horses suddenly floundered up to their necks in the snow, the
coachman dived off headlong, and was nearly suffocated; but with the aid
of the guard and the passengers he was pulled out by the legs, and, a
team of cart-horses being requisitioned, the coach itself dragged
through. These are examples of the perils His Majesty’s Mails
encountered in those times, and of the discomforts endured by the men
who carried them for little wage.
The Post Office has never been generous to the rank and file of its
staff. The secretarial staff, whose business it is to receive complaints
and to scientifically fob off the public with tardy promises of
enquiries never intended to be made, draw handsome salaries, but those
who do the actual work have always been paid something less than they
could obtain from other walks of life. The guards in Post Office
employment received half a guinea a week salary in the old mail-coach
days—as, in fact, a retaining fee—it being estimated by the Department
that they could make a good thing of it by the “tips” they would be
receiving from passengers. That they did make a good thing of it we
know, but the principle was a shabby one for a Government Department to
adopt, and really created a kind of indirect taxation. No traveller
could refuse to “tip” the guard as well as the coachman, unless very
hard-hearted or possessed of a moral courage quite beyond the ordinary.
Beyond his half-guinea a week, an annual suit of clothes, and a
superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail guard had no
official prospects. Occasionally some crusty passenger, whom the guard,
being extra busy with his letters and parcels, had perhaps no time to
humour, would refuse to tip, and would write to the Post Office to
complain; whereupon the Secretary would indite some humbug of this
kind:—
[Illustration:
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE BIRMINGHAM MAIL FAST IN THE
SNOW, WITH LITTLE CHANCE OF A SPEEDY RELEASE: THE GUARD PROCEEDING
TO LONDON WITH THE LETTER-BAGS.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
“SIR,—I have the honour of your letter of the ——, to which I beg leave
to observe that neither coachman nor guard should claim anything of
‘vails’ as a right, having ten and sixpence per week each; but the
custom too much prevails of giving generally a shilling each at the end
of the ground, but as a courtesy, not a right; and it is the absolute
order of the office that they shall not use a word beyond solicitation.
This is particularly strong in respect of the guard—for, indeed, over
the coachman we have not much power; but if he drives less than thirty
miles, as your first did, they should think themselves well content with
sixpence from each passenger.”
In those times sixpence might have been enough, but when, in later days,
the coachman or the guard at the end of their respective journeys would
come round with the significant remark, “I leaves you here, gentlemen!”
he who offered sixpence would have been as daring as one who gave
nothing at all. The sixpence would have been returned with a sarcastic
courtesy, and a shilling not received with any remarks of gratitude.
This custom was known as “kicking the passengers.”
Very occasionally, and under pressure, the Post Office doled out an
extra half-guinea in seasons of extraordinary severity, when passengers
were few and tips scarce, and on occasions when the mails were so heavy
that the seats generally occupied by passengers were given up to the
bags, the guards had an allowance made them. Their zeal under
difficulties also received rare and grudging recognition, as when Thomas
Sweatman, guard of the Chester mail in the early part of 1795, was
awarded half a guinea for his labours at Hockliffe, where, in the middle
of the night and up to his waist in water, he helped to put on new
traces, travelling to town on his box with his wet clothes freezing to
him.
XXII
The red-brick face of the “White Horse” is set off and embellished by a
very wealth of elaborate old Renaissance wood-carving that decorates the
coach-entrance. It was obviously never intended for its present
position, and is said to have come from an old manor-house at Chalgrave,
demolished many years ago. Long exposure to the weather and generations
of neglect have wrought sad havoc with this old work. A fragment in the
kitchen gives the date 1566, and some strips under the archway, with the
inscription “John Havil dwiling in cars,” present a mystery not easy to
solve.
The ominous Battlesden Park, belonging to the Dukes of Bedford, with
jealously locked lodge-gates that hinder the harmless tourist from
inspecting the church within the demesne, is one of a vast chain of
Russell properties stretching for miles across country, from here to
Woburn and away to the Great North Road at Wansford. Battlesden is
without a tenant, except for those who tenant family vaults and
resting-places in the little churchyard: Duncombes within and nobodies
in particular without. It was one of these Duncombes of Battlesden—Sir
Samuel—who in 1624 introduced Sedan-chairs into England. Weeping marble
cherubs on Duncombe monuments, rubbing marble knuckles into marble eyes,
testify to grief overpast, but Nature, indifferent as ever, keeps a
cheerful face. It here becomes evident that we are on the borders of a
stone country, for the little church tower is partly built of that
ferruginous sandstone whose rusty red and yellow is for the next thirty
miles to become very noticeable.
Gaining the summit of Sandhill, a house lying back from the road, on the
left, is seen, with traces of a slip-road to it and through its
grass-grown stable-yard. It is a noticeable red-brick house, with a
steep tiled roof crowned by a weather-vane. Once the “Peacock” inn, it
has for many years been a private residence. A short distance beyond,
past the cross-roads known as Sheep Lane, Bedfordshire is left behind
for the county of Buckingham, through which for the next twelve miles,
to the end of Stony Stratford, the Holyhead Road takes its way.
Buckinghamshire, on the map, is a quaintly shaped county, standing as it
were on end, washing its feet in the Thames at Staines, and with its
head in the Ouse, in the neighbourhood of Olney. Wags have compared it
with a cattle-goad, “because it sticks into Oxon and Herts.” The
glimmerings of possible similar verbal atrocities are apparent in the
fact that it is also bordered by Beds and Berks. Northants and Middlesex
also march with its frontiers. Its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
word “bucken,” alluding to the beech woods that spread over it, but more
particularly in the south, on the densely wooded Chiltern Hills. The
Welsh language, innocent of any word for the beech, bears out the
statement of Cæsar, that this tree was unknown in Britain at the time of
his invasion.
Little Brickhill is the first place that Buckinghamshire has to show,
and a charming old-world place it is, despite its name, which, together
with those of its brothers Great and Bow Brickhills near by, prepares
the traveller for—of course—bricks. But the greater number of houses
here are stone. It is difficult to imagine this little hillside village
an assize town; but so it once was, and the “Sessions House,” a small
Tudor building, one of the few in red brick, still stands as a memento
of the time when this was the scene of the General Gaol Delivery for the
county of Bucks, from 1433 to 1638. The chief reason for this old-time
judicial distinction appears in the fact that Aylesbury, the county
town, was practically unapproachable during three parts of the year,
owing to the infamously bad bye-roads.
[Illustration: LITTLE BRICKHILL.]
The old “George” inn, that stands directly opposite the Sessions House,
is not the only inn at Brickhill against whose name “_fuit_” must be
written. Others, now vanished, were the “White Lion,” now the Post
Office, with some delicate decorative carving on its front (the old sign
is still preserved upstairs); the “Swan,” the “Shoulder of Mutton,” and
the “Waggon.” The class of each one of these old houses may still be
traced. The “George” was beyond comparison the chief, and legends still
linger of how the old fighting Marquis of Anglesey came up and stayed
here as Lord Uxbridge with two legs, and returned after Waterloo as Lord
Anglesey with one. They say, too, that the Princess Victoria once halted
here the night. In the churchyard, that so steeply overlooks the road at
the hither end of the village, you may see stones to the memory of
William Ratcliffe, the last host of the “George,” his wife, his
relatives, and his servants. He died, aged eighty-two, in 1856; his wife
in 1842. Many years before, a servant, Charlotte Osborne, had died, aged
thirty-eight; the stone “erected by three sisters, as a tribute of their
regard for a faithful servant, and as a testimony to one who anxiously
endeavoured to alleviate the sufferings of a beloved and lamented parent
upon a dying bed.” Here also is the epitaph of Isaac Webb, “for more
than forty years a good and faithful servant to Mr. Ratcliffe of the
‘George Inn,’ during which he gained the esteem of all who knew him.” He
died, aged fifty-eight, in 1854.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE.”]
The old “George” is now occupied—or partly occupied, for it is a very
large house—by a farm bailiff. Just what it and its old coach-yard are
like let these sketches tell.
Within the church a curious wooden-framed tablet records the death at
Little Brickhill of an old-time traveller when journeying from London to
Chester. This was “William Bennett, son of the Mayor of Chester. He died
March 19th, 1658.
But most curious of all is the stone in the churchyard to a certain
“True Blue,” who died in 1725, aged fifty-seven. Time has lost all count
of “True Blue,” who or what he was, and speculation is futile. If only
the vicar who entered his burial in the register had noted some
particulars of him, how grateful we should be for the unveiling of this
mystery! Those registers have, indeed, no little interest, containing as
they do the gruesome records of many criminals executed in the old gaol
deliveries, as well as of a woman who was wounded at the battle of Edge
Hill and died of her hurts.
XXIII
A long and steep descent into the valley of the Ouse conducts from
Little Brickhill into Fenny Stratford, seen in the distance, its roofs
glimmering redly amid foliage. The river, a canal, and the low-lying
flats illustrate very eloquently the “fenny” adjective in the
place-name, and it is in truth a very amphibious, bargee, wharfingery,
and mudlarky little town. Agriculture and canal-life mix oddly here.
Wharves, the “Navigation” inn, and hunchbacked canal-bridges admit into
the town; and the lazy, willow-fringed Ouzel, with pastures and
spreading cornfields on either side, bows one out of it at the other
end. The arms of Fenny Stratford, to be seen carved above the church
door, allude in their wavy lines to its riverain character, but, just as
Ipswich and some other ancient ports bear curiously dimidiated arms
showing monsters, half lions and half boats, so “Fenny” (as its
inhabitants shortly and fondly call it) should bear for arms half a
barge and half a plough, conjoined, with, for supporters, a bargee and a
ploughman.
The church just mentioned is exceedingly ugly, and of the
glorified-factory type common at the period when it was built. It owes
its present form to Browne Willis, the antiquary, who built it in 1726,
and, as an antiquary, ought to have known better. He dedicated it to St.
Martin, in memory of his father, who was born in St. Martin’s Lane, and
died on St. Martin’s Day. A kindly growth of ivy now screens the greater
part of Browne Willis’s egregious architecture. He lies buried beneath
the altar, but his memory is kept green by celebration of St. Martin’s
Day, November 11th, when the half-dozen small carronades he presented to
the town and now known as the “Fenny Poppers,” fire a _feu-de-joie_,
followed by morning service in the church and a dinner in the evening at
the “Bull” inn.
Bletchley and its important railway junction have caused much building
here in recent years, and bid fair to presently link up with “Fenny,”
just as Wolverton with “Stony.” The distance between the two Stratfords
is a little over four miles, the villages of Loughton and Shenley, away
from the road, in between, and the main line of the London and
North-Western Railway crossing the road on the skew-bridge described in
a rapturous railway-guide of 1838 as a “stupendous iron bridge, which
has a most noble appearance from below.” At the cross-roads between
these two retiring villages stands the “Talbot,” a red-brick coaching
inn, mournful in these days and descended to the lower status of a
wayside public. It lost its trade at the close of 1838, when the London
and Birmingham Railway was completed, but, with other neighbouring inns,
did a brisk business at the last, when the line was opened for traffic
only as far as “Denbigh Hall,” in the April of that year. The temporary
station of that name was situated at the spot where the railway touches
the road, at the skew-bridge just passed. Between this point and Rugby,
while Stephenson’s contractors were wrestling with the difficulties of
the great Roade cutting and the long drawn perils of Kilsby Tunnel,
coaches and conveyances of all kinds were run by the railway company, or
by William Chaplin, for meeting the trains and conveying passengers the
thirty-eight miles across the gap in the rail. From Rugby to Birmingham
the railway journey was resumed.
“Denbigh Hall” no longer figures in the time-tables, for the idea of a
“secondary station,” once proposed to be established here was abandoned.
But while the break in the line continued this was a busy place. It is
best described in the words of one who saw it then:—
“Denbigh Hall, _alias hovel_, bears much the appearance of a
race-course, where tents are in the place of horses—lots of horses, but
not much stabling; coachmen, postboys, post-horses, and a grand stand!
Here the trains must stop, for the very excellent reason that _they
can’t go any further_. On my arrival I was rather surprised to find all
the buildings belonging to the Railway Company of such a temporary
description; but this Station will become only a secondary one when the
line is opened to Wolverton. There is but one solitary public-house,
once rejoicing in the name of the ‘Pig and Whistle,’ but now dignified
by the title of ‘Denbigh Hall Inn,’ newly named by Mr. Calcraft, the
brewer, who has lately bought the house. Brewers are very fond of buying
up inns, to prevent, I suppose, other people supplying the public with
bad beer, wishing to have that privilege themselves. The unexpected
demands for accommodation at this now famed place obliged the
industrious landlord to immediately convert his parlour into a
coffee-room, the bar into a parlour, the kitchen into a bar, the stable
into a kitchen, the pig-sty into a stable, and tents into straw bedrooms
by night, and dining-rooms by day.”
Another contemporary says: “The building called ‘Denbigh Hall,’
respecting which, the reader may have formed the same conception as
ourselves, and imagined it to be the august mansion of some illustrious
grandee, is nothing but a miserable hostelry of the lowest order, a
paltry public-house, or ‘Tom and Jerry shop,’ as we heard an indignant
fellow-traveller contemptuously style it, which has taken the liberty of
assuming this magnificent appellation.” Tradition described how this
house, once called the “Marquis of Granby,” had been resorted to by the
Earl of Denbigh on one occasion when his carriage had broken down, and
that he stayed the night under its roof, and was so grateful for the
attentions of the host that he left some property to that fortunate man,
who thereupon changed the name of his sign to the “Denbigh Hall.” This,
at any rate, was the story told when the London and Birmingham Railway
was first opened. There were those who looked upon it as a myth invented
for the amusement of travellers, and perhaps those sceptics were right,
but let others who are not unwilling to believe the story, hug the apt
reflection that so unusual a sign must have had an unusual origin; and,
so much being granted, let them go a little further and accept the
legend as it is told. The little inn still stands by the wayside.
XXIV
Stony Stratford, a hundred years ago “principally inhabited by
lace-makers, with women and children at almost every door, industriously
employed in this manufacture,” is now perhaps best known for the famous
_non sequitur_ associated with it. “You may well call it Stony
Stratford,” said the tormented traveller, “I was never so bitten with
fleas in my life!” It would be ill questing among the old inns of
“Stony” to discover which of them could claim the doubtful honour of
giving rise to that ancient jest. There are many inns—the “Cock,” the
“Bull,” “George,” “White Swan,” and numerous others—but among them the
“Cock” is easily first in size and architectural dignity. The explorer,
entering the mile-long street of Stony Stratford at “Tram-end,” whence a
hideous steam-tramcar plies to Wolverton, a mile and a half away,
discovers no focus of interest in the long thoroughfare stretching out
before him, excepting in the old red-brick frontage of the “Cock,” with
its handsome wrought-iron sign and beautiful late seventeenth-century
oak doorway, brought, according to tradition, from some old manor-house
near Olney; or “Ony,” as they choose to call it in the neighbourhood. It
was not always so undistinguished a street, for in it stood one of the
twelve crosses erected to mark where the body of Queen Eleanor had
rested on the way from Harby in Northants, to Westminster. It was
wrecked, with others, in 1646.
[Illustration: STONY STRATFORD.]
Stony Stratford and its immediate neighbourhood are intimately concerned
in the events leading up to the tragedy of young King Edward V. and his
brother, murdered in the Tower of London, in 1483. Scarce three miles
beyond the town, and distinctly seen from the Holyhead Road, there
stands an ancient and historic house known as Potterspury Lodge, at the
end of a long and majestic avenue of limes. This was at one time a
hunting-lodge, and borders upon what is left of the sylvan glades of
Whittlebury Forest, once a Royal Chase of the enormous extent of
thirty-two square miles, but shrunken for centuries past into woodlands
of not one quarter the original area. In times long gone by, the Forest
began at the very end of Stony Stratford, and the timorous wayfarer
plunged at once, after crossing the river Ouse, into its dim and tangled
alleys of oaks and thick undergrowth.
[Illustration: QUEEN’S OAK.]
It was when hunting in this wild resort of deer in the short January
days of 1464, that Edward IV. met Elizabeth Woodville, not more than two
hundred yards to the rear of the spot where the old hunting-lodge
stands. The place of meeting is still marked by the ancient and gigantic
tree known far and wide as the “Queen’s Oak,” a gnarled and hollowed
giant, whose trunk measures thirty-one feet round and whose cavernous
interior can, and constantly does in summer-time, seat a tea-party of
three or four persons. It must have been a notable tree when, four
hundred and forty years ago, Edward, a king peculiarly susceptible to
female loveliness, found here the beautiful young widow of Sir John Grey
of Groby, a knight who had been killed in the second battle of St.
Albans, little more than two years before, on the Lancastrian side, and
whose estates had since been confiscated by the Yorkists. The story
tells that the beautiful and distressed lady, anxious to see the King
and to obtain from him the restoration of her lands, was waiting at the
oak when he rode by, and that, not recognising him, she asked where his
Majesty could be found. The probabilities are, however, that she knew
perfectly well to whom she spoke. Edward declared himself to be the one
she sought, and, when she fell upon her knees, raised her up and
escorted her to her home at Grafton. It is a historic instance of
calculating ambition and of love at first sight. On May 1st, then,
Edward was privately married to the fair stranger at Grafton, the only
others present being her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, two
gentlemen, and “a young man to help the priest sing.” Not until the
Michaelmas following was the marriage disclosed.
The new-made Queen came of the old family of Wydvil, Widville, or
Woodville, as it is variously spelled, settled at Grafton certainly
three hundred years before. They now rose at once into favour, and her
father, already Baron, was then created Earl Rivers. It was, however, a
bloody and fatal alliance. Securing the allegiance of the family to the
Yorkists, its firstfruits were the capture and execution of her father
and brother at the obscure battle on Danesmoor, when the King’s
adherents were defeated by a rabble insurrection out of the north. Taken
to Northampton, Earl Rivers and his son, Sir John Woodville, were
beheaded August 12th, 1469.
Edward IV. died early in 1483. His Queen survived him, with two sons and
five daughters. The eldest, Edward, now become Edward V., was but twelve
years of age, and he and his brother, Richard, Duke of York, were under
the guardianship of their maternal uncle, the second Earl Rivers. The
news of his father’s death brought the young King, with an escort of two
thousand horse, from Ludlow Castle towards London. That was the proudest
moment in the history of the Woodvilles. Disliked and feared as they had
been for nearly twenty years, of family aggrandisement they had now
secured supreme power. But they reckoned without the sinister figure of
Richard of Gloucester, the late King’s brother, at that moment hasting
southward from warring with the Scots. The hurried journeys of both
parties toward London read like moves in some bloody game of chess.
Richard of Gloucester, reaching York, had been the first to swear
allegiance to his nephew. That done, he continued southward, receiving
as he went tidings of popular discontent with the Woodville faction. The
news strengthened him in the design, already forming in his mind, of
seizing the Crown for himself. He reached Northampton simultaneously
with the arrival of the young King at Stony Stratford, sixteen miles
away. The next day saw him here, professing loyalty on bended knee, and
at the same time dismissing the King’s attendants and disarming his
escort. It was a clever and a daring move, that, if bungled in the
doing, might have led to another battle, to be counted among the many
fought on English soil.
Everything was now in the usurper’s hands. The boy-King, in tears, and
virtually a prisoner, was taken by him to Northampton, and thence to
London, where all might yet have been well had public opinion
disapproved of what had already been done. But the past insolence and
selfishness of the Woodvilles had earned them a bitter hatred.
The young King’s maternal uncle and guardian had in the meanwhile been
seized and hurried to Pontefract, where he was beheaded, no one raising
a voice in protest. The King himself and his young brother, Richard,
Duke of York, were in custody in the Tower, and it was not until
Gloucester had been offered the Crown by his creatures, and had with
feigned reluctance accepted it, that the nation woke up to an
understanding of the crafty conspiracy in which it had taken a passive
hand. It was then too late, and the horror with which the country soon
learnt that the young King and his brother had been murdered in the
Tower was without avail to overthrow the sanguinary hunchback who now
ruled as Richard III.
Such was the tragedy that overwhelmed the ambition of the Woodvilles,
springing from that May-day marriage of 1464. The Queen, sorrowing in
the Sanctuary at Westminster, had seen her father, her two brothers, and
her two sons cruelly put to death, as a direct consequence of that
alliance. She retired, forlorn, to the seclusion of Bermondsey Abbey;
seeing, it is true, a gleam of happiness in the overthrow of Richard two
years later, and the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York,
to Henry VII., but dying broken and disappointed, leaving in her will to
her daughters, “my blessing, for worldly goods I have none to bestow.”
XXV
From “Stony’s” mild annals the two fires that in 1736 and 1742 destroyed
great parts of the town stand forth with appropriate luridity. The
second was the more destructive, and was caused by the carelessness of a
servant, who accidentally set some sheets ablaze. The flaming linen,
alighting on a thatched roof, brought about, not only the destruction of
many houses, but also of one of the two churches. The tower, the sole
relic of that unfortunate building, yet remains in the rear of the High
Street, and was for some years rendered conspicuous by an elder-tree
taking root and flourishing on the battlements. The remaining church,
rebuilt, with the exception of the tower in 1776, is a weird and
wonderful eighteenth-century attempt at Gothic. It is the tower of this
church that looks so picturesque from the Market Place, an obscure
square, hidden from those who hurry along the High Street and so through
the town and out at the other end, looking neither to right nor left.
[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE, STONY STRATFORD.]
The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning
the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through
it. Once across the river and the canal that runs parallel, and so
uphill into the not unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the
frontiers of Buckinghamshire—“the historic county of Bucks,” as
Disraeli, posing as a Buckinghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner
political speeches called it—are crossed and Northamptonshire entered.
Northants is traditionally the “county of squires and spires”; but the
squire as a political force and a great social figure is extinct
nowadays, and let it be said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles
of Northants through which the Holyhead Road takes its way, only one
spire—that of Braunston—is visible: the rest of the churches on the way
have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical church of Daventry,
rejoicing in a steeple.
Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is a kind of brother village,
as it were, to Paulerspury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing its
name to an ancient pottery trade in common ware of the kitchen utensil
and flower-pot sort, stands partly facing the old coach-road and partly
down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world and delightful. One comes into
it under the thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow elms that
conspire to cheer the traveller with a perpetual triumphal arch of
welcome. Through this leafy bower one perceives the roadside cottages
dwindling away in perspective along a gentle rise. Graceless the village
looks awhile, for no church meets the gaze. _That_, however, is a long
distance down the bye-lane, and in the neighbourhood of a little inn
with the odd name of the “Blue Ball,” and the still more odd sign
pictured in the accompanying sketch. The blue ball, apparently
representing the world, is placed below a brown heart, the whole
mystical composition semi-circled by the motto “_Cor supra mundum_.” It
is a representation of the triumph of sentiment that would have caused
the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. “Heart above the world.” How
idyllic!
[Illustration: THE “BLUE BALL.”]
It would be as vain to seek the old potteries that gave its name to
Potterspury as it would be to enquire for any living representatives of
the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with style and title. The
potteries vanished in times beyond the memory of man, and the sole
relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth-century wooden effigies of Sir
Laurence de Paveley and his dame in Paulerspury Church.
At some little distance beyond Potterspury, Potterspury Lodge and its
lime avenue come in sight, on the right side of the road. A wonderfully
picturesque old mansion it is, recently restored by the retired
tradesman who has purchased the property. At the rear of the house
stands the historic “Queen’s Oak,” whose story has already been told.
The remaining four miles into Towcester, though hilly, had much of their
difficulties disposed of when Telford came this way with theodolite,
chain, and spirit-level. Plumb Park Hill is not what it was, thanks to
this fifteen-foot cutting and the forty-four high embankment in the
hollow of Cuttle Mill, where the road goes nowadays on a level with the
chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.
At the crest of one of these rises stand Havencote Houses, which it
pleased the compilers of old road-books to name “Heathencott,” and
beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s domain—Easton Neston
Park, an originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade of classical
stone columns forming an open screen, with stone stags couchant, and a
central display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-looking lions. The
motto, “_Hora e Semper_”—“Now and Always”—bids a futile defiance to
irresistible change.
The lodges on either side are deserted, and their windows boarded up.
Somewhere within the park stand the “great house” and the manorial
church, with monuments of the Fermors, successively Barons Lempster and
Earls of Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago as 1527. Those
titles, duly engrossed on their original patents in that manner of
spelling, derive from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract, and prove
the local pronunciation to have been the same then as now. They prove,
in addition, that there was no person then at the Heralds’ College who
could correctly spell the names of those places; but my Lords Lempster
and Pomfret had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as the Earl
of Arlington, whose title, conferred in 1663, came from Harlington in
Middlesex, was made by those ’eralds to write himself with every
signature an ’Arry.
XXVI
Where the park-wall of Easton Neston ends, Towcester—“_vulgo_ Tosseter,”
as Ogilby says, on the Towe, and once the _Lactodorum_ of the
Romans—begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one calculated to
favourably impress the stranger with the town. On the left hand rises a
terrace of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified by the
inscription, “Jubilee Row, 1809”; their height masked by the raising of
the road in front, in Telford’s improvements of 1820, their social
status evident in the notice on their frontages, “Lodgings for
Travellers”—tramping travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester
unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and plaster, with roofs,
tiled, slated, and thatched: a very miscellaneous street. Among the
houses, ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the few dignified old
stone mansions of golden russet stone, and the older, but more familiar,
gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they could tell a thing or
two worth the hearing; among these and the less interesting brick
dwellings stand the Bickerstaff Almshouses, “rebuilt in the year 1815,”
brick themselves and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet
preserved from the older buildings:—
Hee that earneth Wages By labour and
care By the Blessing of god may
Have Something to Spare. T. B.
1689.
Only when the Town Hall is reached, at a considerable distance along
this street, may we fairly claim to have entered Towcester. All this
hitherward part is outside the pale, as it were, and looked down upon,
contemned, and sniffed at. It can only be looked down upon in a social,
ungeographical sense, for Towcester from end to end is flat; but those
who would sniff corporeally as well as mentally will not go unrewarded,
considering that the gas-works occupy a very prominent position here.
The Town Hall, built in 1866, when the flighty and Mansard-roofy French
Renaissance was the architectural craze of the moment, turns its back to
this quarter and shoulders the broad street into the semblance of a
narrow lane, emphasising the difference between these social strata.
Emerging from this narrow way, a broad street of inns and shops expands.
On the left is the “Talbot,” an old inn with modern front, and with a
long perspective of stables vanishing down its yard into the dim
distance. The “Talbot,” it is thought, owes its present name to that
Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought and died in the Battle of
Northampton, eight miles away, in 1460. As the “Tabard,” it was
purchased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charitable Rector of
Towcester, who gave it to the town, its rent to go in relief of
taxation, toward paving, “or for other uses.” The good Archdeacon lies,
under a gorgeous monument, in the church, and a fragment of stained
glass bearing his shield of arms, with his name, “William Sponne”
underneath, still remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot.” In what
was once, in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store for empty boxes
and such lumber, a relic of old times is left, in the wide stone
chimney-piece carved with the figure of that old English hound,
something between a foxhound and blood-hound—the talbot. Beside it is
the date, 1707, together with the initials, “T.O.” and “G.S.” The story
that Dean Swift halted often at the old house on his many journeys is
likely enough, and a chair, said to have been used by him, is still a
cherished relic.
But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims attention. The “Pomfret
Arms,” as it is now named, is the old coaching inn once known as the
“Saracen’s Head,” the inn where Mr. Pickwick stayed the night after the
wet post-chaise journey from Birmingham. “Dry postboys” and fresh horses
had been procured on the way, at the usual stages at Dunchurch and
Daventry; but as, “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had
done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt at
Towcester, together with those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer
and Ben Allen.
“There’s beds here,” said Sam Weller, “everything clean and comfortable.
Very good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour—pair of
fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and
tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.”
At the moment when this conference was proceeding in the rain, the
landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” himself appeared, “to confirm Mr.
Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment,
and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures
regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be
had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the
equally moral certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other
topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”
When the decision to stay was arrived at, “the landlord smiled his
delight,” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John;
make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet,” he cried anxiously; although
doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward, they might have been
drowned for all he cared.
“This way, gentlemen,” he continued; “don’t trouble yourselves about the
postboy”—who, poor devil, must have been wet through several times
over—“I’ll send him to you when you ring for him, sir.”
And so the scene changes, from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with
a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the
tallies lit with wax candles; “everything looked (as everything always
does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected,
and their comforts prepared for, days beforehand.”
Upon this picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival
editors of the _Eatanswill Gazette_ and the _Eatanswill Independent_,
the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political
opinion. Both Pott of the _Gazette_, and Slurk of the _Independent_
found the rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of
the editors, or their newspapers, were doing in Northamptonshire
(Eatanswill being an East Anglian town generally identified as Ipswich)
is not clearly specified. Even in these days Suffolk newspapers are not
found at Towcester.
Slurk retired to the kitchen when the inn was closed for the night, to
drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet
luxury of sneering at the rival print; but as it happened, Mr.
Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to that culinary
shrine, to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How the rival editors—the
“unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”—met and presently
came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to
blows, let the pages of the _Pickwick Papers_ tell.
The inn itself stands the same as ever, at the end of Towcester’s long
street; but the sign, long since changed, owes its present style to the
Earls of Pomfret, of whom the fifth and last died in 1867. The somewhat
severe frontage, in the golden-brown ferruginous local stone, is the
same as when Dickens knew it, and if the kitchen of that time has now
become the bar and the room called the “Sun” cannot with certainty be
identified, the old coach-archway through the centre of the building
into the stable-yard remains, as do the alcoves above, containing white
plaster statuettes of two very scantily draped classic deities—Venus and
Mars perhaps. They still tell at Towcester the tale of an old
landlady—Mrs. Popple—coming new to the house, and asking the old ostler
what “those disgraceful things” were.
“They carls ’em Junus and Wenus,” he said, “but I don’t rightly knaw the
history on ’em; but there, mum, you’ll find arl about ’em in the Bible.”
XXVII
We shall not be far wrong if we identify Towcester with the town at
which the coach with Tom Brown on board stopped for breakfast, and the
“well-known sporting house,” famous for its breakfasts, with the
“Saracen’s Head.” A half-past seven breakfast, in a low, dark,
wainscoted room, hung with sporting prints; a blazing fire, and a card
of hunting fixtures stuck in the mantel-glass. Twenty minutes for
breakfast, with such a spread as pigeon-pie, ham, cold boiled beef,
kidneys and steak, bacon and eggs, buttered toast and muffins, coffee
and tea, smoking hot—why, an irresolute man would waste some of those
precious minutes in considering where to begin. But the hungry are not
at such a loss, and certainly little Tom Brown could not have been, for
he ate kidney and pigeon-pie and drank coffee till his skin was as tight
as a drum, and then had sufficient time to pay the head waiter in
leisurely manner and to stroll calmly to the door, to see the horses put
to.
And then, all being ready, they are off again. “Let ’em go, Dick!” says
the coachman, and the ostlers fly back, drawing off the horse-cloths
like lightning. Along the High Street goes the “Tally-Ho,” with passing
glimpses into first-floor windows, where the burgesses are seen shaving;
past shops and private houses, where shopboys are cleaning windows and
housemaids doing the steps, and out of the town as the clock strikes
eight.
A very pretty glimpse, this, of the “good old times,” but the coaches
did not always hark away so triumphantly; as, for example, when, on a
day in March, 1829, an axle of the celebrated “Wonder” coach broke in
Towcester street, and the unfortunate coachman was killed in the
inevitable upset. The hilly eight miles or so between Towcester and
Weedon Beck witnessed many thrilling escapades in the coaching sort. One
eminence, rejoicing in the name of Dirt House Hill, was the scene of a
violent collision, in which the Holyhead Mail and the Manchester Mail
came into disastrous contact, June 29th, 1838. It was one of the closing
smashes of the Coaching Age. Here is the official account:—
“Both coaches were in fault. The Holyhead coach had no lamps, and the
explanation of their absence was that the 28th June was the Coronation
Day of our beloved Queen, and the crowd was so great in Birmingham that,
in paying attention to getting the horses through the streets, and
having lost considerable time in so doing, in the hurry to get the coach
off again the guard did not ascertain if the lamps were with the coach,
or not. The Manchester coach, at the time of the accident, was
attempting, when climbing the hill, to pass the Carlisle Mail, and was
ascending on the wrong side of the road. The horses dashed into each
other, with the result that one of the wheelers of the Holyhead Mail,
belonging to Mr. Wilson, of Daventry, was killed, and the others
injured, one seriously. The harness was old and snapped like chips, or
more serious would have been the consequences; and had not the horse
killed been old and worn out, the sudden concussion would have been more
violent, and might have deprived the passengers of life. As it was
difficult to decide which of the two coachmen was most in the wrong, it
was left to the two coachmasters to arrange affairs between themselves.”
In Telford’s reports mention is made of no fewer than seven hills cut
down and hollows filled on this stretch of road, with an aggregate
length of cutting and embanking of two and a half miles. Yet, even so,
this remains the most trying part of the route; so much so, that the two
hillsides past Foster’s Booth are laid with granite kerbs for the
purpose of easing the pull-up for horses drawing heavy-laden waggons.
The place oddly named Foster’s or Forster’s Booth is said, on the
authority of Pennant, to have derived that title from a wayside booth
established by “one Forster, a poor countryman.” It grew at length into
a scattered street of houses and carrier’s inns, and so remains.
Stowe Hill, the last of this hunchbacked company leading to Weedon,
acquires its name from the village of Stowe-Nine-Churches, whose
scattered houses and _one_ church lie on the hill-top, hid from the road
by lanes and windy coppices. The title of “Nine Churches” is rather
lamely said to arise from nine benefices having been included in the
lordship of the manor in ancient times, but a much more picturesque
origin is found in the legend of the triumphant diabolism that foiled
eight previous attempts to erect the church on other sites. Every night,
the stones of the eight ill-fated buildings set up in the daytime were
removed by a mysterious shape “summat bigger nor a hog,” but the
existing church, the ninth, was suffered to grow to completion. As it is
of Saxon origin, this fearful legend itself perhaps goes back to that
superstitious time.
Stowe Church is remarkable for the fine monuments it contains: those of
Sir Gerald de l’Isle, about 1250; Lady Carey, 1630; and Dr. Turner,
1714. The first is the Purbeck marble effigy of a cross-legged knight,
shield on arm, and clad in chain-mail. That of Lady Carey, “the most
elegant,” says Pennant, “that this or any other kingdom can boast of,”
is a white marble sleeping figure raised on a black and white marble
altar-tomb. This beautiful work of Renaissance art was by the “Master
Mason” of James I. and Charles I.—Nicholas Stone, who executed it and
set it up here “for my Lady,” as he says in his still-existing
correspondence, ten years before her death; “for the which,” he adds, “I
had £220.” Although of the most delicate workmanship, it remains,
strange to say, in perfect preservation; even the sharp beak of the very
savage-looking griffin at the foot of the effigy quite uninjured.
The monument to Dr. Turner, who does not lie here, but at Oxford, where
he was President of Corpus Christi College, is a huge mass, occupying a
great wall space. He was a non-juring pluralist, who, unlike his brother
non-jurors, held successfully to what he had gotten. An effigy of him,
very wiggy and gowny, stands in midst of alcoves, scrolls, and volutes,
representing him, like some reverend acrobat, standing on a globe and
holding a book in his hand. Religion, beside him, offers a cross and a
temple, which he seems disinclined to take, and an all-seeing eye—like
that blood-freezing eye in Martin’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”—radiates down
upon the group.
XXVIII
One mile from Weedon and half-way down Stowe Hill, a broad vale opens to
the view, the London and North-Western Railway shooting out below from
Stowe Hill Tunnel, with the Grand Junction Canal and the river Nen in
close company. Weedon Beck is seen while yet a great way off, its
neighbourhood fixed by an immense ugly block of yellow brick buildings
on a distant hillside. Nearing the place, these are found to be the
officers’ quarters of Weedon Barracks; but before that fact is
ascertained the stranger occupies the time between first glimpsing them
and arriving at the spot in speculating whether the hideous pile forms a
lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an infirmary, or a prison. Weedon, in fact,
is a large military depôt, originally established for the Ordnance
Department in 1803. Its situation here is due to one of the periodical
scares with which the fear of foreign invasion afflicts nervous
Governments once in every half-century or so. The scare that produced
Weedon Barracks, among other odd things, was a particularly severe and
craven one, for it assumed our being unable to hold our own upon the
sea-coast and in the capital, and selected this site as being as nearly
as possible in the centre of England, and the safest place for retiring
to in the event of a sudden descent upon our shores. So great was the
national terror of “Boney” a hundred years ago! Even the needs of the
Court were not forgotten, and a pavilion was provided for the use of
George III. over against the time when it should be necessary to flee
from Windsor Castle!
The name of Weedon “Beck” might not unreasonably be supposed to derive
its second half from the river Nen, that ripples not unpicturesquely
through the village, were it not that it has clearly been proved an
ancient manor of the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy. When Leland was pursuing
his antiquarian studies through England, in the time of Henry VIII., he
found it “a praty thoroughfare, sette on a playne grounde, and much
celebrated by cariars, bycause it stondeth hard by the famose way there
comunely caullid of the people Watheling Street.” It became a very busy
place in coaching times, and was then chiefly a street of inns. What
would have become of Weedon had the military depôt not been placed here
to keep it alive before the railway came, with the thoroughness of a new
besom, to sweep the long road clear of traffic from end to end, goodness
only knows. There is a Providence that shapes the ends of even old
thoroughfare villages; and undoubtedly Weedon believes in the
beneficence of that Providence, because, taking away with one hand, it
has given double with the other: that is to say, it has a railway
junction and a canal, so that when the officers become bored to death in
their ugly quarters they can either drown themselves in the canal, or
take leave of absence and train to some more lively spot. A third course
is to enjoy the billiards and society that the hotels of Weedon afford,
or the pleasures of the Grafton Hunt. Those hotels, chiefly of the old
coaching type, have all been restored and added to of recent years, and
a very large modern one, the “Globe,” taking the name of the old and
extinct “Globe” half a mile onward, has been built at that spot where
the Holyhead Road and the Watling Street part company for some
seventy-three miles: a spot quaintly called by Ogilby, in 1675, “Cross
o’ th’ Hand.” The “White Hart” stands next door, and opposite glares the
“Red Lion”; while the “New” inn—new in 1740, as a tablet over its
doorway tells—is trebled in size by two modern wings. “Cash Stores”
spell modernity, and the imposing branch of a Northamptonshire bank
speaks of business. In contrast with all this, the old “Bull” inn,
situated on the left hand, at the entrance to the village, is now a
farmhouse, and the road by which the carriages and post-chaises came to
it off the turnpike, though still traceable, has long been stopped at
either end.
There is a great deal more of Weedon than the hurried traveller along
the Holyhead Road would suspect. It lies down the turning by this same
old house and on the other side of the parallel embankments of railway
and canal; embankments so tall that they succeed in completely hiding
all but the upper stage of Weedon Church tower. “Here,” says that tower,
“is Weedon”; and there it is; barracks like model lodging-houses, with
children playing and clothes drying upon tier over tier of balconies;
women fresh from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-up sleeves,
voluble in the entries; and soldiers “married on the strength,”
slatternly and listless, at the windows: all very domestic and
inglorious. The everyday aspect of the barracks is not inspiring. Only
occasionally, when on the neighbouring hillsides a sabre-scabbard
flashes by chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled discovers some
leisurely horseman scouting, visible to all the world, is the military
view of Weedon productive of a thrill.
Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard round the ugly church,
jammed in an angle between railway and canal: the trains rushing by on a
lofty viaduct that looks down upon the damp, sunless and melancholy
wedge of land. Among those soldiers lies “Charles Lockitt, who died
August 27th, 1877, in the fifty-third year of his age. Deceased was
formerly a sergeant in the 97th Regiment, and was present at the
storming of the Redan before Sebastopol, September 8th, 1855, where he
was severely wounded, from the effects of which he died.”
A much older, and somewhat curious epitaph, is that to “Alice Old,
widow, who lived in ye reigne of Queen Elizabeth, in ye reigne of Kinge
James ye 1st, in ye reigne of Kinge Charles ye 1st and Kinge Charles ye
2nd, and Kinge James ye 2nd, and deseased ye Second Day of Jany., ye 3rd
year of ye reigne of Kinge William and Queen Mary, 1691.”
XXIX
No wild geese, according to an ancient fable, ever again spoiled the
cornfields of Weedon after they had once been banished by the
miraculously successful prayers of the Princess Werburgh, a holy
daughter of Wulfere, King of Mercia, somewhere about A.D. 780. That
pious lady, afterwards raised to the hierarchy of saints, was abbess of
a religious house here. Her steward assembled the birds: the abbess
commanded them to depart, and they immediately took wing, but refused to
leave the neighbourhood until a missing one of the flock (killed, cooked
and eaten, as it happened) was restored to them. Nothing easier than
this to a Saxon saint, and the bird was restored alive to his friends
and relations! “The vulgar superstition,” says an old writer, “now
observes that no wild geese are ever seen to settle and graze in Weedon
field.” Nor in any other field nowadays, it may be added, in this modern
England of ours.
At Weedon the old Watling Street bids good-bye to the Holyhead Road for
71½ miles, and goes by itself in a route 75¼ miles long, rejoining the
modern road at Ketley, near Wellington.
The meaning of the name “Watling Street” is sought under many
difficulties, so many and so hazy are the derivations of it advanced.
The Britons, it is said, knew the rough track crossing the island before
the Romans came as the Sarn Gwyddelin, or Foreigners’ Road, along whose
uncertain course came and went the Phœnician merchants who traded with
Britain long before Cæsar had heard of this lonely isle; long, indeed,
before he was born. According to Stewkeley, the name “Gwyddelin” stood
for “wild men,” and this therefore was the Wild Men’s Road; the savages
so named being the wild Irishmen from across St. George’s Channel.
Camden and others boldly say the Romans named the road Via Vitellianus,
or Vitelliana, an easy Latin modification of “Gwyddelin,” the name by
which they heard the Britons call it. At any rate, it is to the Romans
that its transformation from a mere forest track to a broad,
well-engineered, and well-paved road was due. The work was not soon
done, but when completed it took rank among the greatest of military
ways.
The Romans engineered the road and did the skilled work; the Britons
performed the carrying and the hard labour, forced to it by a thousand
stripes and indignities. To them fell the clearing of the woods along
the route, and the digging of earth and stone, and to Roman workmen the
staking out of the way and the weaving together of those brushwood
wattles that compacted the foundations in moist and boggy places. Some
fanciful commentators find in those wattles the source of the name given
to the road. Completed at length as a military necessity, and with much
pagan ceremony committed to the care of the Lares Viales and the less
supernatural custody of the road-surveyors, the Via Vitelliana was for
over three hundred years a crowded highway, with busy towns and villages
along its course; the palatial villas of wealthy Roman citizens peeping
out from sheltered nooks. Then came disaster. The Roman garrisons
withdrawn, successive waves of savage invasions wrecked the civilisation
of that time, and only the burnt walls of towns and settlements remained
to tell of what had been. It was not until another four hundred years
had passed that the fierce Saxons, becoming tamed, began to rear a
civilisation of their own. To this great road they gave, according to
that monkish chronicler, Roger de Hoveden, the name “Waetlinga-street,”
the Way of the Sons of Waetla, a legendary king; and the Celtic British
whom they found in the country, talking what was to them a strange and
uncouth tongue, they called, with all the arrogance imaginable,
“Wealas,” or strangers, forgetting that they themselves were the
strangers and the others upon their native soil. But as “Wealas” they
remained, and as such they are still, for from that word sprang the name
of the Welsh people, who as a matter of fact, style themselves “Cymru.”
A curious point to be noted is that this is by no means the only
“Watling Street.” The name is found repeatedly in this country, applied
locally to ancient Roman roads; but _the_ Watling Street prominent above
all others is this great way, which traversed Britain from its extreme
south-eastern verge, over against Gaul, diagonally in a north-westerly
direction for 340 miles, until it touched the sea at Carnarvon and
Chester. From the three great fortified starting-points at _Dubris_,
_Portus Lemanis_, and _Portus Rutupis_—severally identified with Dover,
Lympne, and Richborough—it ran in triplicate to Canterbury, and thence,
chiefly along the existing Dover Road, to London. By way of that
thoroughfare still known as Watling Street, it traversed the City and
emerged at Newgate through the city wall, and so into what were then
swampy wildernesses on the line of the present Holborn and Oxford
Street. At the Marble Arch it turned abruptly to the right, and thence
went in a straight line along the course of the Edgware Road to the
great city of _Verulamium_, adjoining the St. Albans of our own day.
From this point the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road are practically
identical so far as Weedon Beck. Dunstable marks the site of the Roman
market-town of _Forum Dianæ_, or _Durocobrivæ_, as it was also named;
and Stony Stratford by its name proclaims its situation on the old
route. It was the Roman “_Magiovintum_.” Towcester was the
“_Lactodorum_” of the Itinerary. At Weedon the ancient road and the
modern part company for 71½ miles, to meet again at Ketley
railway-station, between Oakengates and Wellington.
XXX
It is this stretch of 75¼ miles that will now be explored. Bid farewell,
traveller who would trace the Roman way, to the company of your
fellow-men, for this is no frequented route, and towns and villages are
few along its course. It begins by climbing out of Weedon and up to a
gate, where those who will may trace it across a field. For those others
who will not, an ancient divergence, forming a kind of elbow, preserves
the continuity of roadway and brings the route over the Grand Junction
Canal to Welford Station and Watford Gap, where the old route of the
London and Coventry coach from Northampton to Hillmorton and Coventry,
travelled by Dugdale in the seventeenth century, crosses this Roman way.
The “New Inn” mentioned by him still stands here, but is now a
farmhouse. The name of “Gap,” as applied to cross-roads, is very
ancient. Curiously enough, a “Watford Gap” is to be found in
Staffordshire, on the Birmingham and Lichfield Road.
Few houses are glimpsed in these first nine miles of the Watling Street.
At a grim crossing of two high roads near Crick station, but with an
appearance as solitary as though many miles remote from villages or
railways, it suddenly ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged,
grass-grown track. Here the explorer either finds himself daunted, or
proves his mettle by plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may
betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are faithful to the track,
and where they lead who shall fear to follow? They conduct, in fact,
steadily downhill along this green alley, and in a mile and a half,
crossing two fields, bring one out to a flat and low-lying country, and
to what the country-folk call the “hard road” again. Three miles of
this, and a rise, with a cross-road to the right, leads to Dove Bridge,
spanning the Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there, and
everywhere—at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and Cave’s Inn—are speculative sites
of the Roman station of _Tripontium_. For the last three miles the
Watling Street has formed the boundary between Northants and
Warwickshire, and henceforward, for eighteen miles more, it performs the
same office for Warwickshire and Leicestershire. On the Leicestershire
side, where the ground rises steeply beyond the little river, is a
mysterious mound, called by the villagers of Lilbourne “Castle Hill”—an
odd, evidently artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on its
summit. Whether it be a Roman _speculum_, or look-out hill, or the
grave-mound of some tribal king, ancient even when the Romans came, who
shall say? “Tripontium” was named from three bridges that then crossed
the Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites have vanished.
Lilbourne itself lies down the right-hand lane, and is a village on the
hither hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the little river, and
a great huddled mass of grass-grown mounds in the water-meadows
opposite. Within sight is the wayside railway station of Lilbourne,
incongruous amid these forlorn relics of the past in this out-of-the-way
corner of the country. Let no one think these mounds „to be the remains
of a Roman camp: they are the only vestiges now left of the once proud
Norman castle of Lilbourne.
[Illustration: LILBOURNE.]
Uphill, steep and rugged, goes the road to the outlying fringe of
Catthorpe, that still continues to be known as “Catthorpe Five Houses,”
even though they are now, and have long been, but three. From this
hill-top the spires and roofs of Rugby are plainly visible by day, and
by night the great junction spreads its station and signal-lights in a
gorgeous illumination of white, red, and green.
Beyond, in the deep hollow where that latest of great trunk lines, the
Great Central Railway, crosses over the road on a blue-brick archway, is
“Cave’s Inn,” an inn no longer. “Cave’s Hole” they used to call it in
old times, from its situation in this hollow. The lone house was kept in
the long ago (that is to say, about 1680) by Edward Cave, grandfather of
that Edward who founded the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and was the friend
of Johnson. His father, Joseph, was a younger son of the inn-keeping
Edward, and, the entail of the family estate being cut off, was reduced
to plying the cobbler’s trade at Rugby. The literary Edward was born in
1691 at the hamlet of Newton, a short distance off the Watling Street,
between this and Catthorpe Five Houses.
It is an obviously Roman way—straight and uncompromising—that leads
onward from Cave’s Inn to the cross-roads, at the suggestively lonely
spot called “Gibbet,” the site in the “good old days” of a gallows-tree
originally set up in 1687 for a certain Loseby who had “barbarously
murdered” a man named Bunbury, and, being caught almost red-handed, was
promptly executed. Nothing is left of “Loseby’s Gibbet,” as it is marked
on old Warwickshire maps. The remains of it, together with the
prehistoric tumulus on which it was erected, were swept away when the
cross-road from Banbury and Daventry to Lutterworth was made, in 1730. A
dense grove of trees at the fork of the roads to Lutterworth and Shawell
marks the neighbourhood of the spot.
Beyond this Golgotha, the road dips to the reedy river “Swift”; a lazy
little stream and not answerable to its name, as the traveller may see
for himself by halting and leaning over Brunsford Bridge. Another
solitary stretch conducts to Cross-in-Hand, where there are five roads,
two old toll-houses, a modern red-brick cottage, a very fine distant
view of Lutterworth church-tower—and not a mortal or immortal body or
soul in sight. Ordnance maps mark a “Blackenhall” off to the right, a
name that seems to fix the site of the deserted “aula,” or country seat,
of some Roman notable, whose notability, in the passing of fifteen
centuries, has vanished as though he had never been. “Willey Crossing,”
where a branch of the Midland Railway bars the cyclist’s progress, only
serves to emphasise the solitude, and the country girl, who in answer to
the summons of the bell, opens the gates, stares at the strange
spectacle of a wayfarer. Willey lies somewhere off to the left, but, so
far as it affects the road, might be non-existent.
[Illustration: CROSS-IN-HAND.]
Up the steep road that now lies before the explorer, with the little
church of Wibtoft peering over a shoulder of the hill on the left, and
suddenly you are at High Cross, the famous crossing of the Watling
Street and the Fosse Way—the great north-western road of the Romans and
their not quite so great way that led out of Somerset through
Gloucestershire, the shires of Worcester and Warwick, to Leicestershire
and Lincoln.
XXXI
[Illustration: HIGH CROSS MONUMENT.]
High Cross is among the oddest and most perplexing of places. A
multiplicity of roads and sign-posts are gathered together on the
hill-top and the traveller, bedevilled with their number, and the
shrubberies and the farmyards that mask them, is fain to halt and
unravel the tangled skein. The Watling Street here slightly changes
direction, so that its continuation to Atherstone, ten miles distant, is
hidden round an angle. Other roads all round the compass lead, according
to the testimony of the sign-posts, to Rugby, 10 miles; Coventry, 12;
Daventry, 18; Lutterworth, 6; and lastly, Leicester, 13 miles. The road
to Leicester—the Roman city of _Ratæ_—lies along the Fosse Way, and
_that_ is now not a road at all, but a meadow, with meadows beyond it;
traces of the old way only discoverable by the diligent antiquary.
Moreover, the field-gate, padlocked and bristling with the most barbaric
of barbed wire, emphasises “no road” and gives the sign-post the lie.
High Cross is no misnomer, so far as the adjective goes. It _is_ high:
very high. Illimitable vales, shading off from green foreground to
indigo distance, are unfolded below. Fifty-seven churches are said to be
visible from this vantage-point, and goodness only knows how many
counties. Fifty-seven churches! Say a hundred and fifty-seven, or more,
_if you knew on what particular pin-points in that view to look_.
There is a monument at High Cross, erected in 1712, both to direct
travellers in the way they should go and to mark this supposed site of
the Roman station of _Vennonæ_. Nowadays the pillar is so completely
screened by a little groove of hollies, sycamores, firs, beeches, and
laburnums that, although it stands at an angle of the junction, none but
those who know exactly where to look are likely to find it. A little
wicket-gate leads up to it, in the centre of the grove—a nondescript
pile of moulded stones and red-brick, surmounted with what look like
fragments of Roman columns. The whole structure bears the appearance of
having been built of architectural fragments retrieved from some early
eighteenth-century rubbish heap. It is not improved, nor its Latin
inscriptions rendered any clearer, by the countless pocket-knives that
have been set to work upon it. High Cross is a lonely place, but its
loneliness is belied by this multitude of names and initials, some
dating back to 1733.
The story of how this pillar came to be erected here is told in the
Proceedings of the Warwickshire justices in the Easter Sessions of 1711.
As the Watling Street divides that county and Leicestershire, a
conference of the justices of the two shires was called, when it was
resolved to “build something memorable in stone” on this site, not only
to mark the whereabouts of _Vennonæ_ and to direct travellers, but “also
for that it was esteemed the centre of England.” The cost of this
“something memorable” was £83, contributed in equal shares by the two
shires. The inscriptions were composed by a Mr. Greenway, a schoolmaster
of Coventry. Englished, the principal one runs:—
Traveller, if you seek the footsteps of the ancient Romans, here you
may find them. Hence their most famous military ways, crossing one
another, proceed to the utmost limits of Britain. Here the Vennones
had their settlement, and at the first mile hence along the street,
Claudius, the commander of a cohort, had his camp, and at the same
distance along the Fosse, his tomb.
“Cleycester” the Saxons named the deserted Roman camp of _Vennonæ_, that
stretched along the road towards Wibtoft. Even yet the whistling
ploughman occasionally turns up relics of it, in the form of broken
pottery and defaced coins. The tomb of Claudius remained, until quite
modern times, along the Fosse Way. It was a tumulus, overgrown with
brambles, and known as “Cloudsley Bush.” No traces of it are now left.
Ahead, rather more than a mile off the road, the smoky chimneys of
Hinckley and Burbage make inky and fantastical wreaths in the sky.
Smockington is the name of a hamlet in a bottom, with some reminiscences
of a coaching age. Beyond is the “Three Pots” public-house; and again,
beyond that, a deserted Primitive Methodist Chapel, standing woe-begone
by a canal. Caldecote lies off to the left in another few miles,
opposite to the “Royal Red Gate” inn; its name inviting an exploration
of the place, for there are those who explain the frequently recurring
name of “Caldecote” along the line of Roman roads to mean “cold cot”—a
variant of “Coldharbour,” that equally common place-name in such
situations. The cold cots and the cold harbours had once been, according
to this theory, ruined and deserted Roman villas, in whose rootless and
chilly recesses the first people who dared to travel after Roman Britain
was ravaged by savage tribes took such cold comfort as they might; not
daring to light a warming fire, lest its blaze should bring lurking
bandits and murderers to their cheerless refuge.
From this point of view Caldecote is disappointing, for nothing Roman is
visible there. It is just a tiny village, with a modernised Hall, and in
the Park, less than a stone’s throw from the house, the little church.
But it is a place with a story; for it was here, on August 28th, 1642,
that an attack was made upon the Hall, then the residence of Colonel
Purefoy, a noted Republican. The Colonel was at Coventry, and the house
in charge of his wife, Dame Joan, and his son-in-law, Master George
Abbott, when a raiding-party, said to have been under the command of
Prince Rupert, appeared and demanded its surrender. Fortunately the
inmates had warning of their approach, and when they would have forced
an entrance, the soldiers found doors and windows barred. In the affray
that followed, Dame Joan fired first, bringing down her man, and the
garrison of men and women servants, headed by Master George, gave so
good an account of themselves that the Royalists drew off with a loss of
three officers and fifteen soldiers killed. Caldecote Hall was not
molested again. Memorials of Dame Joan and Master George still remain in
the little church.
XXXII
Beyond Caldecote comes Mancetter—the Roman Manduessedum—on the
Warwickshire side, and Witherley, in Leicestershire. Between the two, an
earthwork named “Castle Bank,” a rectangle measuring six hundred by four
hundred feet, seems to have been the site of the Roman camp. Across the
road flows the pretty river Anker, with trees densely overhanging it,
and framing with their boughs a charming view of Witherley’s graceful
crocketed spire. Mancetter—how nearly it escaped from being another
“Manchester”!—is thought to have derived the first syllable of its name
in Roman times from some historic or remarkable stone, “maen,” in the
British tongue; but, however that may be, no such stone has ever been
found. It is now a pretty village, a little distance retired from the
road, with a very fine old church, and a churchyard remarkable for its
illiterate tombstones and odd epitaphs, from the merely misspelt to the
quaintly conceived:—
Here lies the Wife of Joseph Grew, a Tender Parerent And a Vertious
Wife. She died February 1782.
Another, weirdly ungrammatical and savagely cynical, hides the identity
of those who lie beneath by initials, and by the omission of any date:—
HERE LIETH INTERR’D
THE BODY’S OF
H. I. M.
What E’re we was or am
it Matters not
To whome related,
or by whome begott.
We was but amnot:
Ask no more of me
’Tis all we are
And all that you must be.
Another, to Sarah and Mary Everitt, 1720, and others of that family,
puts a truth in a quaint guise:—
The World is a Caty Full of Crooked Streets Death is ye Markett
plass Whereall must meet if life Was merchandise That men Could Buy
ye Rich Would Allways live ye poor must Die.
Purchasable immortality would be a much more potent inducement to become
a multi-millionaire than any now existing. But what a terrible thing
that would be for the Diamond Kings, the Railway, Oil, Steel, and other
monarchs to become immortal. As it is, however, a live tramp has the
laugh of a dead millionaire—and a better chance of the Elysian Fields
than Dives.
The town of Atherstone, a mile long, breaks the loneliness of Watling
Street, half a mile beyond Mancetter. It is chiefly one long street, of
the miscellaneous character common to the small country town: not
unpleasing, nor highly interesting. The exit from the town is marked by
a railway level crossing, become famous of late years as a source of
contention between the local governing body and the London and
North-Western Railway. Beyond, the villages of Merevale and Baddesley
Ensor are seen to the left; and Dordon, a mushroom growth called into
unlovely existence by the new pits of the Hall End Colliery.
“Stony Delph” is the odd name of a village two miles onward, adjoining
Wilnecote. It is a name alluding to some quarry, or “stony digging,” now
forgotten. (Compare, “When Adam _delved_ and Eve span.”) Wilnecote, down
into whose street the road dips from Stony Delph, is a place of brick,
tile, and pottery kilns, with a railway-station, formerly called “Two
Gates.” Where Wilnecote ends and Fazeley begins is not easy to tell,
save perhaps by reference to the river Tame, here dividing Warwickshire
and Staffordshire. Fazeley has that maritime and Dutch-like appearance
belonging to all places settled beside some old canal, and the canal
here is one of the oldest, with long rows of wharves and equally long
rows of cottages opposite. Both have seen their best days.
Now, good-bye for awhile to level roads, for the Watling Street on
entering Staffordshire goes straight for the steepest hill in the
neighbourhood, and thereby proves its Roman ancestry. This is the hill
leading to Hints. When you have reached the top, another hill, abrupt
and entrenched, with gloomy woods on its brow, scowls down upon it from
the left hand. It had a history, without possibility of a doubt, but it
has not come down to us; and those who defended and those others who
attacked are alike gone to the shores of the Styx, without leaving any
other traces save those dumb and reticent earthworks that loom so
provokingly mysterious against the sky.
Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for
three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end,
where it is crossed by the Lichfield and Birmingham road. A hedge and a
ploughed field forbid further progress, and it is only when armed with
large-scale maps, and by comparing antiquarian authorities, that the
course of the Watling Street can be traced, straight on to Wall. That
village is found by following the road to Lichfield until the first
left-hand turning is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill for a
mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and the Watling Street regained.
The tiny village is built over the site of _Etocetum_, of whose ruins
some fragments were yet to be seen in Pennant’s time, including portions
of the ancient Roman wall giving a name to the place. These have long
since disappeared, but in 1887 some excavations here laid bare many
foundations heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation, among whose
oddments were found roofing-slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If
thorough search were made, much more might be brought to light, for this
was an important station in those times, situated at the intersection of
the Icknield Street with Watling Street. Below the hill, and on the line
of the Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called Chesterfield—a
significant name, telling of Roman relics.
[Illustration: THE WATLING STREET, NEAR HAMMERWICH.]
Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-place of roads from Walsall
to Lichfield and Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes
unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts of Hammerwich, uphill. At
that nail-making and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat confused,
but is well-known locally to every man, woman, and child as the “Watling
Street Road.” Here it has reached a very high-lying tract, that
abomination of desolation called Brownhills. Words are ineffectually
employed to describe the hateful, blighted scene; but imagine a wide,
dreary stretch of common land, surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and
decrepit cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers and pitmen,
with here and there a school, a woe-begone brick chapel, a tin
tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further,
imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common to be as brown, wiry,
and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and with an
extraordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings, broken glass, and
brickbats deposited over every square yard, and all around it the
ghastly refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally, clap a railway
embankment and station midway across the common, and there you have a
dim adumbration of what Brownhills is like.
The Roman road makes a sudden change of direction here, at a point
opposite the “Rising Sun,” where the old Chester road falls in. It is a
change that would be inexplicable, were it not for a strange relic that
by chance has survived for sixteen hundred years to explain it. This is
a mile’s length of deserted road that continues the straight line of
Watling Street, and then abruptly ends, as though the Romans had
abandoned some contemplated work. It is, as a matter of fact, a monument
to the incompetence of the surveyor who had the construction of this
division of the Watling Street in his charge. The several changes of
direction taken here and there along the whole length of this great
military way—as, for example, at High Cross and Gailey—are explained by
the work having been in progress from both ends at once, and the surveys
being somewhat inaccurate; but the official entrusted with the road from
_Etocetum_ seems to have lost his bearings very badly indeed, and to
have been road-making at a wide angle from the correct line, when his
chief appeared and plotted out the direction afresh from Brownhills.
The road now goes downhill again, past a fine old inn, the
“Fleur-de-Lis,” and comes to Wyrley Bank, a busy colliery district on
the verge of Cannock Chase. Bridgetown, Great Wyrley, and Churchbridge
are lumped together in this coal-getting neighbourhood, and the crash of
waggons, the shrieking of engines, and coal-dust everywhere bedevil the
scene. But, with all these unlovely details, it is far preferable to the
stark and hopeless barrennesss of Brownhills.
In little more than two miles this coalfield is quite out of sight and
sound, and the road approaches the beautiful old “Four Crosses” inn at
Hatherton. Dean Swift is commonly said to have visited this old house on
his journeys, and it is quite likely he did, but it could not—for
reasons shown elsewhere in those pages[1]—have been the house where he
wrote his famous epigram on the landlady. But most accounts continue to
give this as the scene, and locally it is firmly believed in.
Footnote 1:
Page 245.
[Illustration: THE “FOUR CROSSES,” NEAR HATHERTON.]
The old house is of two distinct periods: one dating back to the
sixteenth century and exquisite in black oak and white plastered and
gabled front; the other probably built about 1710, in a handsome “Queen
Anne” style. A curious feature is the Latin couplet carved in 1636, on
an oak beam outside the older portion of the house:—
Fleres si scires unum tua tempora me’sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies,
which has been translated:
Brief is your time: a month, perchance,
Nor even but a day,
Yet ignorant, poor foolish wight,
You laughing go your way.
Adjoining is a disused toll-house, and opposite stands another old inn,
the “Green Dragon,” the group forming a little oasis of settlement in
the surrounding desert of lonely road. It was between this and the
“Welsh Harp” inn at Stonnal, on the Castle Bromwich road, that the
“Shrewsbury Caravan” was halted and robbed on April 30th, 1751, by “a
single Highwayman, who behaved very civilly to the Passengers, told them
he was a Tradesman in Distress, and hoped they would contribute to his
assistance.” Whereupon, he handed round his hat and each passenger gave
him something, making an involuntary contribution of about £4, “with
which he was mighty well satisfied,” as indeed he had every reason to
be. But he was not so distressed a tradesman that he could condescend to
accept coppers, and so “returned some Halfpence to one of them, saying
he never took Copper.” After this, informing his victims that there were
two other “collectors” on the road (were they also Distressed
Tradesmen?) he rode with the Caravan for some distance, until it was out
of danger and he almost in it, when he left with much courtesy, begging
the passengers that they would not at their next inn mention the affair,
nor appear against him should he afterwards be arrested.
XXXIII
The gently undulating stretch of country from “Four Crosses” to “Spread
Eagle,” once dreaded by the name of Calf Heath, is now under
cultivation, and the Watling Street, crossing it, broad and well-kept,
wears more the look of a high-road. The spreading lakes seen here and
there, known as “Gailey Pools,” are reservoirs of the old Staffordshire
and Worcestershire Canal that presently crosses the road under a
hunchbacked bridge and by an old round-house, whose tower stands out
prominently for a long distance down the straight perspective. The
“Spread Eagle,” an old coaching-inn, once gave a name to the adjoining
railway station of Gailey, but where the village hides that now serves
sponsor to it is not readily discovered. A mile beyond comes the river
Penk, crossed at a pretty spot by a substantial stone bridge, and across
the meadows by a red-brick one, where a mill-cut froths and foams, and a
cheerful old mill and farmhouse stand. On the other side of the river is
the hamlet of Horsebrook, with Stretton down a side lane, supposed to
have been the _Pennocrucium_—the crossing of the Penk—of Roman times.
The ubiquitous Thomas Telford is recalled to mind at a little distance
onward by his name in cast-iron on the aqueduct of the Birmingham and
Liverpool Canal. Near by is another reservoir, rejoicing in the name of
“Stinking Lake.” At that fine old inn, the “Bradford Arms,” Ivetsey
Bank, the left-hand road leads in less than two miles to Boscobel, one
of the most famous places in our history, for to that hunting-lodge in
the forests then thickly overspreading this part of the country came
Charles II. in 1651, as a hunted fugitive, after the disastrous defeat
at Worcester. Boscobel had been built seventy years before, by the
Giffards of Chillington, ostensibly as a hunting-lodge where their
guests might rest in the intervals of the chase, and in a sense it was
so used, with officers of the law for hunters, and fleeting Papists as
quarry; but in the other sense it was a very transparent pretence, when
we consider that the family residence at Chillington Hall stands not
more than a mile away. For many years it had been used as a refuge for
recusant Roman Catholic priests, at a time when that religion was
proscribed; for the Giffards were then, as they are still, of that
faith, and so were the yeomen Penderels who occupied the house. It was
built, too, under the direction of a Jesuit lay-brother, one Nicholas
Owen, or “Little John” as his intimates called him, a skilful deviser of
priest’s-holes and such like hiding-places under stairways or in the
recesses of panellings. No Roman Catholic gentleman’s house was at that
time considered to be complete without some of “Little John’s” darkling
hutches and inconveniently cramped nooks secreted somewhere between
foundation and roof. Truth to tell, however, these supposedly “secret”
places are fairly obvious, and, given a search-party convinced that the
fugitive was somewhere near, they must have been dull-witted fellows who
did not light upon them.
When Worcester Fight ended so badly for “the man Charles Stuart, that
Son of Belial,” as the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II., he
made at once for Boscobel, the place where, only a few days before, the
Earl of Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by Colonel Carless, he
threw himself upon the assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers and
their widowed mother, Dame Joan, who then lived here and at ruined
Whiteladies Priory, half a mile away. “Will Jones,” for that was the
name he adopted, could have found no more loyal hearts had he searched
the realm, and the Penderels had already found the transition from
secreting priests to Royalist fugitives an easy one. But Boscobel had
become suspect, and the quarry was now so important that rigorous search
was made, and Charles and Carless, although hid respectively in the
secret recess behind the panelling in the Squire’s room, and in the pit
beneath the cheese-loft during the night, were in daytime for greater
security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard oak growing in a meadow
near the house: the tree afterwards famous as the “Royal Oak.” In that
leafy refuge Charles slept, with his head in the faithful Colonel’s lap,
and beneath them quested the search-party of Cromwell’s dragoons. The
story is well known, how that tree effectually concealed them, and how,
after many wanderings, the King fled the country from the sea shore at
Brighthelmstone.
[Illustration: BOSCOBEL AND THE “ROYAL OAK.”]
The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to pieces for mementoes in a very
short while after the Restoration, and the youthful oak that stands
solitary in a field does but mark the spot. But the house stands still,
with its old hiding-places, and many are those who come to see; so that
the pile of visitors’ books, all closely filled, is a mighty and a
growing one. Of the “bosco bello,” the Fair Wood that gave the old house
its name, not a trace remains.
Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling Street presently crosses into
Shropshire, and comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—or
“Weston-subter-Liziard” as it was formerly named—a cheerful little
place, clinging like some feudal dependant to the park and Hall, the
seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church and mansion stand adjoining, at
the end of a short drive: in the church the cross-legged effigies of Sir
Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston, who flourished six or seven hundred years
ago; and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel memorials of that
family.
Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right hand, is now passed, and
Crackley Bank, leading downhill towards another scene of industry and
coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its smoky skies. Close by, at
the place called Red Hill, the Roman station of _Uxaconium_ was placed.
Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilleshall, Oakengates, and Ketley
coal and iron mines are reached, the long street of St. George’s has to
be passed through. There was a time, not so long since, when this was
merely the hamlet of “Pain’s Lane,” and its local makeshift place of
worship simply “Pain’s Lane Chapel.” All this is changed, and though its
old prosperity has abated, the place now possesses a fine Gothic church
dedicated to St. George, and has changed its name to match. Oakengates
also has seen its best days, for many of the mines are exhausted. In
these latter circumstances, the neat little houses of “Perseverance
Place, 1848,” and others with similarly virtuous titles, look not a
little pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually, has stripped the
district of its mineral wealth, and the miners, living like maggots in a
cheese, have eaten their home away. The township, at the very bottom of
a steep descent, is busy, but dirty and slatternly, with a railway
station and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps, likening it to some
domestic dustbin in Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is reached,
and with it the junction of Watling Street with the Holyhead Road.
XXXIV
And now to resume, at Weedon, the modern road. It is a tiring pull up
out of Weedon, on the way to Daventry, and anything that may excuse a
rest is welcome. That excuse is found in the contemplation of a
substantial stone-built farmhouse, with nine windows in a row, half a
mile out of the village, on the right of the road, and fronted at this
day with a pleasant garden. This, now called the “Grange,” was formerly
the “Globe” coaching and posting inn. Beyond it, opposite a group of
Georgian red-brick wayside houses, the old road goes over what used to
be a water-splash in the deep hollow; but Telford’s road proceeds
inflexibly onward. The church in the meads to the right is that of
Dodford, the name of the water-splash aforesaid. As for the derivation
of that name, Fuller, with some hesitancy, gives “‘Dods,’ water-weeds,
commonly called by children ‘cat’s-tails,’ growing thereabouts.”
The rough cart-track by which alone Dodford Church is reached, and the
unusual jealousy that keeps the building locked, combine to hide much of
interest from all wayfarers, save those of the most determined type. The
enterprising and energetic who prevail have their reward, for the
interior—good Early English and Decorated—has an unusually interesting
collection of monuments. Here, cross-legged and mail-clad, lies the
effigy of Sir William Keynes, one of the last of his family, settled
here—no, _not_ settled, because they were continually away, warring for
kings or against kings; rather let us say, who owned this manor—from the
Conqueror’s time until that of Edward III., when the name was
extinguished in the marriage of an heiress, the last representative. The
true significance of the crossed legs of these old knights is still in
dispute, but the commonly received idea is that the attitude proclaims a
Crusader. But it is scarce possible that Sir William de Keynes (who died
in 1344) ever fought for the Cross in Palestine. Had he done so, he must
have been, in two senses, an infant in arms, for the Crusades were over
and done with, and the Soldan had got his own again (or what was as good
as his own) before William could have relinquished his coral and bells
and taken to mace and broadsword. The fact seems to be that the early
Crusaders, who adopted this mortuary symbolism, were followed in it by
many who had never warred against the Infidel at all, and debased the
original significance into a mere fashion.
Two others of the family are represented here in effigies of women,
thought to be Hawisa de Keynes (1330) and her great-granddaughter,
Wentiliana (1376). The earliest of the two is wooden, and is represented
in the nun-like headdress of her time.
But the finest monument is that of Sir John Cressy, who died in 1444,
across the seas in Lorraine, in the service of Henry VI. He is
represented in plate-armour, and wears the Lancastrian badge, the Collar
of SS. On the breastplate of the effigy is carved, very bold and deep,
“Iohn Newell 1601.” Who John Newell was, except that he thus proves
himself of the great ’Arry family, it is hopeless to inquire. “I.A.
1776” has also proved on the alabaster the barbarism of his nature and
the mettle of his penknife.
Besides these memorials, the church has numerous brasses and tablets,
while in the churchyard a stone tells of a Major Campbell, commanding
the Royal Artillery at Weedon, who died in 1809, after having lived
“strictly fulfilling the duties of the Soldier, Gentleman, and
Christian: not less lamented in death than valued in life.” In
conclusion, an odd custom prevailing here and in surrounding villages
may be noticed: epitaphs on stones erected by widows over their husbands
giving the relationship, “the husband of.” So complete a reversal of the
usual practice, placing the man in the subsidiary place, is a novelty.
The remainder of the way to Daventry, or “Daintry,” as old travellers
always called it, is hilly, but beautifully shaded by hedgerow trees.
Hills and vales in constant alternation are seen on either hand; the
frowning bulk of Borough Hill on the right, crowned with British
earthworks, converted by the Romans into a military camp, probably
identical with the lost station of _Beneventa_. Roman remains have been
discovered up there in great numbers in days before the hill became
enclosed, cultivated, and hedged about with difficulties in the way of
exploring antiquaries. Down below, and near the road, is the ruin-strewn
field called “Burnt Walls,” known by that name at least six hundred and
fifty years ago, when it is mentioned as “ad brende walles” in a deed
relating to property. On the eastern side of Borough Hill, near the
village of Norton, and adjoining the Watling Street, another field,
oddly named “Great Shawney,” has yielded many traces of old Rome. The
name, indeed, is thought to be a faint and far echo of _Isannavaria_,
another vanished Roman camp.
It was on Borough Hill that Charles I.’s army of ten thousand men, on a
night in June, 1645, set a seventeenth-century example to the
eighteenth-century ten thousand under the “brave old Duke of York,” who
were marched to the top of a hill and then marched down again, as a
well-known rhyme tells us. Nothing happened on either occasion.
Charles’s troops, occupying Daventry and the surrounding villages for
some days before, were frightened to that night’s hill-top vigil by some
skirmishing exploits on the part of Fairfax. Before morning came, they
descended and went off in retreat to Naseby, the King with them,
reluctant to leave the comfortable lodgings he had enjoyed for six
nights past at the “Wheatsheaf.”
XXXV
The first prominent object on approaching the town is the “Wheatsheaf”
itself, boasting of being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the
coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-fronted building with a
courtyard and a general Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air.
Opposite stands an “Independent Chapel, erected 1722,” which, with its
secular air and big gates, looks like a converted inn. Continuing along
the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus entered, the unwary
pilgrim, unobservant on wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of
the town in the proverbial “jiffy,” or the not less proverbial
“two-twos.” But Sheaf Street, lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a
delusion. _That_ does not form the sum and substance of Daventry,
sprawling largely down a street to the right and developing itself
astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped market-place, continued
to the left hand again as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had
long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select from the throng that
once went up and down the Holyhead Road; and very quiet and empty the
market-place looks to this day, with a church rebuilt in 1752 and
supposed to be Doric: the exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly
crumbling away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The eye lights
upon only one memorable thing, and that an epitaph to a certain Susanna
Pritchett Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:—
She was——
But room won’t let me tell you what.
Name what a Wife should be,
And She was that.
[Illustration: DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE.]
Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many years have passed since its
last fragments were cleared away to provide a site for the town gaol in
front of this ugly church. The Priory itself was, with others,
suppressed by Wolsey, that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of
seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his colleges at Oxford and
Ipswich. He is charged with having sent five of his creatures to pick a
quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute to be referred to
himself, of having dissolved it by fraud. The story of what happened to
his five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn from their fate,
are quite in keeping with the superstitious spirit of those times. Thus,
one learns that two of the five quarrelled, and one slew the other, the
survivor being hanged; that a third drowned himself in a well; that a
fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and begged till his dying
day; and that the remaining one “was cruelly maimed in Ireland.” This
series of “judgments” is then carried on to the Cardinal, whose
miserable end is historic; to his colleges, of which one was immediately
pulled down, and the other finished under other patronage; and to the
Pope who permitted Wolsey’s high-handed doings, and who was besieged and
long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of a poetic completeness of
vengeance, Henry VIII.—who dissolved more religious houses than any one,
and, moreover, appropriated their revenues and lands to his own
uses—flourished amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked whoso
good fortunes are bitterly lamented by the Psalmist, his eyes swelled
out with fatness, and he was well filled.
[Illustration: TOWN SEAL, DAVENTRY.]
The old pronunciation of “Daintry” goes back certainly to the sixteenth
century, when it was probably responsible for the device of the old town
seal, adopted at that time, representing a figure intended to picture a
Dane at odds with an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant, on the other
hand, derives the name from “Dwy—avon—tre,” “the dwelling of the two
Avons”: and indeed the town is placed, as it were, at the fork of the
Nen, sometimes called the Avon, and another insignificant stream; but
this is looked upon with an almost equal contempt, and mystery still
enshrouds the real origin and the significance of the name.
Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a
boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort.
Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the “Peacock,” the “Dun Cow,” the
“Bear,” and the “Saracen’s Head”—all old; but the palm must be given to
the last, containing much black oak, and altogether a great deal more
interesting than a casual glance at its commonplace plastered front
would disclose. Its courtyard is especially quaint; in red brick, with a
large building to one side, now practically disused, but once the busy
dining-room of the coaches. It was built probably about 1780: the upper
part ornamented with grotesque wooden figures of Jacobean date,
evidently the spoils of some demolished building. The whole, overhung
with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.
[Illustration: BRAUNSTON HILL.]
One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through a trampish,
out-at-elbows,
dirty-children-wallowing-in-the-dust-in-the-middle-of-the-road quarter.
Hills again rise to left and right: on the left Catesby Abbey; ahead,
the exceedingly steep descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with
Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated windmill, and leagues upon
leagues of distant country, unfolded to the startled eye. The “steep and
dangerous descent” was to have been improved by Telford, but the design
was never put into execution, and the hill still owns those defects, and
hurtling motor-cars and cycles descending at extravagant speeds alarm
the propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow, 197 feet below the
hill-top, stands Braunston Station, the “Old Ship” inn nestling beneath
the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge crossing over the road; and
on the next rise over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and the
“Castle” inn, as old as Queen Elizabeth’s day. Here the rising road
forks, presenting a puzzle to the stranger, for either has the
appearance of a high road. The Holyhead Road, however, bears to the
left, that to the right leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to
the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston village.
[Illustration: BRAUNSTON.]
The tower and spire of the fine Decorated church are imposing, but the
interior is of little interest—the body of the building, reconstructed
some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and cleared of everything but
one old relic: the mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading knight,
in the act of violently drawing his sword, thrust in an unobtrusive
corner.
XXXVI
Two-and-a-half miles from this point, across country and in the angle
formed by the branching of the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road from
Weedon, lie the village and the romantic manor-house of Ashby St.
Ledgers, the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator in the Gunpowder
Plot. From Braunston is by no means the best way to Ashby: reached by a
long, steep lane, and across six fields and two cross-roads. The only
guides on this solitary way are the traveller’s bump of location and a
battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of whose decrepit arms,
pointing vaguely through an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field,
the words, “To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick Station,” can, under
favouring circumstances of sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative
rook, perching on a deserted harrow, typical of solitude, seemed, when
the present historian came this way, to hold and keep the secret of the
route, only discovered by diligent scouting at the next field-gate.
But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort. At the end of the rather
uninteresting village, and closing the view, there suddenly comes the
beautiful grouping of old church, gatehouse, and ancient trees, leading
to the manor-house itself, glimpsed through the gate—a fine old
Elizabethan house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows and
gables, weather-stained and delightfully picturing the orthodox
character of a conspirator’s home.
[Illustration: ASHBY ST. LEDGERS.]
They still show the “Gunpowder Plot Room” over the gateway, and the
memorials of Catesby’s ancestors can even now be seen in the church—that
Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the place derives its name. There
they lie on the floor; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with their
cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where the fury of centuries ago
has not hacked the workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir William
Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William, taken prisoner at Bosworth
Field fifteen years later, _ex parte_ Richard III., and beheaded at
Leicester; great-great-great-grandfather of the conspirator, Robert, and
a warning, had he lent an ear to the history of his family, against too
rashly entering into the bloody politics of those times. That remote
ancestor’s fate carried with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon
restored to his son; but when Robert Catesby fell in his attempt to
destroy King and Parliament, and to subvert the Protestant religion, the
property, forfeited again, was never restored.
XXXVII
Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of
Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long
Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just
before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great
Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and
a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for
Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked,
ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half
distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the
innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his
bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would
be?
Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway
company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing
close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the
bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The
junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original
sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received
story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller
along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one
attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce
a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift
delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it
may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses
at Daventry and Dunchurch.
[Illustration: THE “FOUR CROSSES,” WILLOUGHBY (DEMOLISHED 1898).]
The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to
be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must
wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time
in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:—
There are three
Crosses at your door:
Hang up your Wife
And you’l count Four.
Swift, D., 1730.[2]
The landlord probably did not hang up his wife, but he certainly seems
to have altered his sign.
Footnote 2:
The date is worth notice. All who have ever written on Swift give his
last visit to England as 1727. But this flatly contradicts them. Nor
is it in order to suppose this inscription a forgery, for it exhibits
the characteristic handwriting of the Dean, as seen in his manuscript
diary at South Kensington.
The window-pane disappeared from the old inn very soon afterwards, and
it is not at all unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it being
removed. Certainly it had disappeared in 1819, when some verses in the
_Gentlemen’s Magazine_ gave the misquotation of those lines that has
been the basis of every incorrect rendering since then. Many years ago
the late Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of Willoughby, and
whose father had kept the “Four Crosses,” purchased the pane of a
cottager in the village. It is of the old diamond shape, of green glass,
and bears the words quoted above, scratched in a line, bold style.
The distinction is wrongly claimed for the “Four Crosses” Inn at
Hatherton, near Cannock, on the Watling Street; a very fine old coaching
inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often have stayed; but as the
roads at that point form a complete cross of four arms, the sign must
always have been what it is now, and certainly all the evidence points
to the Willoughby claim being justified.
Willoughby may on some old maps be found marked as a “spa,” and a little
handbook, published in 1828, dealing with the merits of the “New
Sulphureous and Saline Baths” that stood opposite the “Four Crosses,”
assured all likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the waters were
just as unpleasing to taste and smell, and inferentially as efficacious,
as those of Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor of the new
baths and keeper of the inn, somewhat grandiloquently described as the
“principal house for the reception of company.” The little shop seen
built out from the old “Four Crosses” was a chemist’s, added at that
hopeful time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so conveniently situated
on the great road, never attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot.
The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop was in use as a bar-parlour
at the last: the old drug drawers, with their abbreviated Latin labels,
remaining until the house was pulled down.
Willoughby legends still linger. They tell even yet, of the cross that
stood here in the seventeenth century, and of Cromwell’s soldiery,
retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round the shaft to pull it down,
only being dissuaded by the vicar, who diverted their attention with a
foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however, but the date of its
disappearance is uncertain. Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of
common land that once belonged to the parish; but their fate is a matter
of precise information. They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder
divided, as by law enacted.
There was once a “New Inn” between Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no
longer tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-gate at Woolscot,
not far beyond, that no longer takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as
do certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with the pikeman; boys and
man alike long since ferried across the inky Styx by the grim boatmen.
Pikemen acquired a preternaturally acute memory for faces. It is an
acquirement that, with the smile of recognition which costs nothing,
makes princes more popular and beloved than the exercise of the most
austere virtues. Not that pikemen commonly smiled. Suspicion and
malevolence sat squarely on their countenances, and when a something
that might by an effort be construed as a smile contorted their
countenances, it was like that of an alligator who perceives a fine fat
nigger within reach of his jaws. A pikeman who took toll of even a
thousand persons in the course of a day, might safely be counted upon to
recognise each on his return and to pass him without the formality of
halting to show the ticket issued in the morning; but let one who had
not already paid toll that day attempt to pass with the customary nod of
the returning traveller, franked through by his morning’s payment, and
he was certain to be stopped and asked for his ticket. Those were the
occasions when the pikeman smiled in his most hateful manner. The only
places where this cold-blooded grin of triumph may nowadays be seen off
the melodramatic stage, are the Old Bailey and other criminal courts;
when prosecuting counsel have forged the last link in a chain of
conviction.
It was at Woolscot toll-gate that the pikeman on one occasion was paid
twice in one day for a gig. Tom Pinner, a well-known coachman who
afterwards kept the “Five Ways” tavern at Birmingham, was once visited
at Dunchurch by some friends who set out early from Daventry. They had a
pleasant day and wound up with dinner. The feast was good, the wines
potent, and the guests slept heavily. As they lay thus, the jocular
Pinner blacked their faces, and when they had revived a little started
them home. When the gig drew up in the flickering light of the
toll-gate, they of course could not find their tickets, and the pikeman
insisted on toll being paid: he was quite sure no black men had passed
that day!
Passing over the streamlet spanned by Rains Bridge, which is probably
the “stone bridge” referred to by Ogilby in 1675, as situated at the end
of the twelve furlongs’ length of “Dunchurch Lane, bad way,” the
exquisite half-mile avenue of majestic elms leading along a gently
curving road into Dunchurch is entered. Branches and thick foliage meet
overhead and realise the oft-met similitude drawn between cathedral
aisles and avenues such as this.
XXXVIII
Dunchurch and the surrounding Dunsmore—at this time tamed somewhat from
its ancient wildness and tickled into productiveness and smiling
fertility by plough and harrow—were associated, close upon three hundred
years ago, with a conspiracy that might well, had it been successful,
have added such a page to England’s story whose likeness for horror and
ferocity it would perhaps be impossible to match. Dunchurch, in short,
has a scenic part in the “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” that came near to
blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, on the
famous Fifth of November, 1605. “To blow the Scottish beggars back to
their native mountains” was Guy Fawkes’ savagely humorous explanation of
the plot, when asked its object by a Scottish nobleman; but its real aim
was the avenging of Roman Catholic wrongs and disabilities upon James
I., and the Protestants. We have already seen the home of Robert
Catesby, the true and original begetter of the plot: and here, at
Dunchurch, was to be assembled a great gathering of Roman Catholic
noblemen and gentlemen, to take part in a rising to follow upon the
success of the blow to be struck in London. Those were times when
assemblages of any kind were looked upon with suspicion, and so it was
given out that the great preparations being made along the road from
London, in providing relays of horses at every stage, were in connection
with an elaborate hunting-party on Dunsmore, to which the squire of
Ashby St. Ledgers had bidden the whole countryside. Never doubting the
success of their design to blow Parliament sky-high, Catesby with three
of his fellow-conspirators, Percy, and John and Christopher Wright, left
London for Dunchurch on the eve of the fatal Fifth. Fawkes, fanatically
courageous, was in his cellar, under the Parliament House: the sinister
figure that close upon three hundred anniversary “Guy Fawkes Days” and
innumerable ludicrous “guys” have not wholly succeeded in robbing of its
dramatic force. There he lurked: booted and spurred, slouch-hatted and
cloaked; slow-matches in his pocket, and a dark-lantern behind the door.
Two others of the conspirators remained in town, to watch the success of
the dark design. They were Ambrose Rookwood and Thomas Winter. But as
the midnight of November 4th, sounded from the clocks of London and
ushered in the opening hour of the Fifth, Fawkes was arrested in his
hiding-place, and the scheme wrecked. Instantly, as though by magic, the
rumours of some calamity narrowly averted, pervaded London, and warned
Rookwood and Winter to fly. Had they trusted to the staunchness of
Fawkes they and the others would have been safe enough, for that
unwilling sponsor of all subsequent “guys” was as secret as the grave,
and even under torture made no disclosures until by their own later acts
the conspirators had rendered concealment useless. But, panic-stricken,
Rookwood and Winter left London behind in the forenoon; Winter for
hiding in Worcestershire, Rookwood to overtake and warn Catesby and his
companions on the Holyhead Road. He came up with them at Little
Brickhill and with laboured breath—for he had ridden headlong—told the
tale of how the plot had been discovered. They wasted no time in
discussion. If they had hasted before, they journeyed frantically now.
By six o’clock, riding through a day of November rain, they had gained
Ashby St. Ledgers, casting away their heavy cloaks as they went,
together with aught else that might hinder their mad flight.
Seventy-eight miles in seven hours was a marvellous ride in those times,
and under such conditions. Perhaps some modern cyclist, eager to draw a
parallel, will essay the feat under like meteorological conditions.
That evening, after wild and gloomy conference at Ashby, they set out
for Dunchurch, making for the “Lion” inn, the head-quarters of the
pretended hunting-party, where the young and handsome Sir Everard Digby
was in expectation of hearing other news than that which burst upon him
when the exhausted and dispirited band drew rein before the old gabled
house in the stormy night. The story of their further flight, of how
Catesby and Percy died together in the fighting at Holbeach House, does
not concern us here, but the old house does. An inn no longer, it still
stands, as a farmhouse, in midst of Dunchurch village: a long, low,
gabled building, with casement windows and timbered and plastered front;
low-ceiled and heavily raftered rooms within. In the rear, beyond the
farm-yard, may even yet be seen the remains of a moat, enclosing a
wooded patch of ground whose story is vague and formless: relics, these,
of times much more ancient than those of the Gunpowder Plot. The “Lion”
was an old “pack-horse” inn for many generations afterwards.
Dunchurch, in the old coaching days, was a place of many and good inns:
all of them, however, excelled by the “Dun Cow,” almost the sole
remaining member of the herd of “White Lions,” “Red Lions,” “Blue
Boars,” “Green Men,” and such-like zoological curiosities that once
thronged it. There was an excellent reason for such wealth of
accommodation, for the village was situated not only on the Holyhead
Road, but at the intersection of it by the Oxford and Leicester Road,
along which plied a goodly throng of traffic. On that road lies Rugby,
three miles away, and along it went, among other forgotten conveyances,
the “Regulator”—“young gents calls it the ‘Pig and Whistle,’” remarked
the guard of the coach that conveyed young Tom Brown from London to
Dunchurch.
Rugby and its famous school have made a vast difference to this village,
now postally “Dunchurch, near Rugby,” but formerly the post-town whence
the once insignificant village of Rugby—Rugby-under-Dunchurch was
served.
The “Dun Cow,” survivor and representative of the jolly days of old,
takes its name from the mythical monster of a cow slain, according to
confused and contradictory legends, upon Dunsmore by the almost equally
mythical Guy of Warwick.
[Illustration: DUNCHURCH.]
Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with its back turned upon the
church, the white marble effigy of “the Right Honble. Lord John Douglas
Montagu Douglas Scott” cuts a ludicrous figure in the centre of the
village. The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy, it simply serves
to point to what depths the art of sculpture had descended in the early
Sixties, when it was wrought. The inscription states that Lord Douglas
Scott died in 1860, and that the statue “was erected by his tenantry in
affectionate memory of him.” The clothes worn at that period give, of
course, their own element of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy
mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is represented to be carrying
under his arm has occasioned the derisive query, “Who stole the
altar-cloth?”
[Illustration: LORD JOHN SCOTT’S STATUE.]
Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty place, rejoices in a number of
minor curiosities. The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric
monument of Thomas Newcombe, King’s Printer in the reigns of Charles
II., James II., and William III. It is in the shape of folding-doors of
white marble. In the churchyard, too, he who searches in the right place
will discover the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 1751, “A Ged year
25.” The advice given is better than the jingle to which it is set:—
To all young men
That me survive
Who dyed at less
Than twenty-five,
I do this Good
Advice declare:
That they live in
God’s faith and fear.
Other relics are grouped well in sight of one another. The battered
village cross, for instance, with a little marble slab fixed on its
shaft, bearing the arms of that Duchess of Buccleuch, who in 1810
restored it; and the village “cage,” or lock-up, under a spreading elm,
with the stocks close adjoining, for the accommodation or discomfort of
two. The lock-up was for the detention of such malefactors as might
trouble Dunchurch—the stocks for misdemeanants only. An Act of 1606
imposed six hours of the stocks and a fine of five shillings for
drunkenness; and from that time forward and until the opening years of
the nineteenth century this peculiar form of punishment was common
throughout England. His personal popularity, or the want of it, made all
the difference between misery and comparative comfort to the
misdemeanant undergoing six hours in the stocks. The jolly toper,
overcome in his cups and sent to penance by some Puritan maw-worm of a
justice, had both the moral and bodily support of his boon companions,
and left durance probably more drunken than he had been on the occasion
that led to his conviction: the sturdy vagrant, smiter, rapscallion, or
casual rogue who happened to be in ill-odour with the village endured
bitter things. Jibes, stones, cabbage-stalks, ancient eggs, and dead
dogs and cats, deceased weeks before, were hurled at the wretch, who was
lucky if he had not received severe personal injuries before his time
was up, and the beadle or the parish constable came to release him.
XXXIX
It would be difficult nowadays to discover any one to agree with
Pennant, the antiquary, who in 1782 could find it possible to write of
the superbly wooded road across Dunsmore Heath as a “tedious avenue of
elms and firs.” The adjective is altogether indefensible. Six miles of
smooth and level highway, bordered here by noble pines, and there by
equally noble elms, invite the traveller to linger by the roadside from
Dunchurch to Ryton-on-Dunsmore. It is a stretch of country not only
beautiful but interesting, alike for its history and traditions. The
Heath, long since enclosed and under cultivation, but once the haunt of
fabled monsters, and, at a later period, of desperate highwaymen, is a
level tract of land dotted with villages that all add to their names the
title of “upon-Dunsmore,” as a kind of terrific dignity. Through the
midst of this sometime wilderness goes the high-road, beautiful always,
but singularly lovely in the eyes of the traveller who, advancing in a
north-westerly direction, sees the setting sun glaring redly between the
wizard arms of the pines. Many of those exquisite trees are of great
age. The avenue, in fact—the Ong Avenue, as it was originally called—was
planted in 1740, by John, second Duke of Montague. Some of the firs have
decayed, but happily their places will be taken in due course by the
saplings planted of late years. The elms are, most of them, in worse
case, and are being generally cut down to half their height by cautious
road surveyors. The elm, that, without warning, rots at the heart and
collapses in a moment, is the most treacherous of trees; and, some day,
those that are left here will suddenly fall and be the death of the
unhappy cyclist, farmer, or tramp who happens to be passing at the time.
[Illustration: DUNSMORE AVENUE.]
It was here, in 1686, that Jonathan Simpson robbed Lord Delamere of 350
guineas, and “innumerable drovers, pedlars, and market-people,” all the
way to Barnet. Jonathan was executed the followed September, aged
thirty-two.
Two famous posting-houses once stood beside this lonely road: the “Blue
Boar” and the “Black Dog.” Both have retired into private life. The old
“Blue Boar,” still giving the name of “Blue Boar Corner” to the
cross-roads, two miles out from Dunchurch, is a square building of
white-painted brick, and stands on the left hand, with a garden where
the coach-drive used to be. It must have been especially welcome to
travellers in the dreadful snowstorm of December, 1836, when no fewer
than seventeen coaches were snowed up on the Heath, near a spot named,
appropriately enough, “Cold Comfort.”
This also was the “lonely spot, with trees on either side for six
miles,” where the “Eclipse” coach, on its way from Birmingham to London,
was overpowered by convicts on a day in November, 1820. It seems that,
on the day before this occurrence, the deputy-governor of Chester Gaol
and two warders, in charge of twelve convicts, chained and locked
together in twos by padlocks, had set out from Birkenhead for London by
the “Albion” coach, and that during the confusion of an accident at
Walsall, when the deputy-governor was killed and the coachman and one of
the warders seriously injured, one of the prisoners, more enterprising
than his fellows, managed to steal the master-key from the dead
official’s body, and, with his fellows, plotted an escape from the long
journey to Botany Bay. Brought from Walsall to Birmingham by another
coach, they were lodged for the night in Moor Street prison, and the
following morning, still chained together, placed on the “Eclipse” coach
for London, in charge of the remaining warder and another from
Birmingham. This consignment of gaolbirds, together with their
guardians, formed the sole passengers by the “Eclipse.” In the “lonely
spot” aforesaid four of the convicts, having unlocked their fetters,
rose suddenly up, seized the coachman and guard, and stopped the coach,
while others overpowered their custodians. They explained that they had
no wish to harm any one, but were determined at all costs to make a dash
for liberty; and, securing coachman, guard, and the bewildered warders
with ropes and straps, unharnessed the horses, and, mounting them,
galloped across country. Coming upon a roadside blacksmith’s forge, they
compelled the smith to unloose the remaining portion of their fetters,
and then disappeared. All are said to have afterwards been recaptured,
with the exception of two “gentlemen” forgers, who were never again
heard of.
A grossly incorrect account of this happening is to be found in the
pages of Colonel Birch-Reynardson’s _Down the Road_. The coachman and
guard of the “Eclipse” were Robert Hassall and Peck. Hassall ended his
days as a hopeless lunatic. His affliction was caused by witnessing the
sudden death of his colleague and friend at Coventry. While the horses
were being changed at that city, Peck busied himself on the roof of the
coach, in unstrapping some luggage. The strap broke, and the unfortunate
man fell backwards on to the pavement, dashing his skull to pieces.
Hassall, who was seated on the box, fainted, and, on regaining
consciousness, became a raving lunatic.
A curious feature of the milestones across Dunsmore, a feature not met
with elsewhere, is their being cut into the shape of two or more steps,
resembling “louping-on” stones, or “upping-blocks,” for the convenience
of horsemen.
XL
It is here, five miles and a half from Dunchurch, that the famous
“Knightlow Cross” stands. Just past a group of cottages, and an inn
called Frog Hall, that mark the neighbourhood of Stretton-upon-Dunsmore,
and where Knightlow Hill begins to tip downwards, this mysterious relic
is found, in a meadow. The so-called “Knightlow Cross” is a square block
of red sandstone, standing on the summit of a prehistoric grassy
tumulus. It measures thirty inches square, and has a deep square cavity
sunk in it. From its appearance, the stone may once have been the socket
of a wayside or boundary cross, possibly marking the limits of the
parish of Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, extending thus far. Here, from time
immemorial, on the morning of St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, has been
collected the “wroth-money” annually due to the Lord of the Manor of
Knightlow Hundred: a district comprising some twenty-eight villages.
These tributary communities pay sums ranging from one penny to two
shillings and threepence-halfpenny each, with the exception of Ryton,
which pays nothing. The whole amounts to nine shillings and
threepence-halfpenny, the forfeit for non-payment in each case being
either one pound for every penny not forthcoming, or “a white bull with
pink nose and ears.” This tribute is said to be paid for the privilege
of using certain roads, but it probably was originally “rother money,”
or fees payable in very ancient days to the Lord of Manor for the
privilege of grazing cattle and swine in the great forests that then
overspread the district, and for having all such animals officially
branded by the Lord’s verderer; strange and unmarked beasts being liable
to confiscation.
[Illustration: KNIGHTLOW CROSS.]
At the beginning of last century the “Wroth Money” custom was
discontinued, but revived after some years. The Duke of Buccleuch, the
present Lord of the Manor, upholds what the villagers call “the old
charter”; and still with every recurring Martinmas, at the shivery hour
of sunrise, the Steward of the Manor attends and duly checks the coins
thrown into the hollow by the representatives of the subject parishes.
The tribute, and perhaps a good deal more, is expended in drinks of rum
and milk for the party, and breakfast at the “Oak,” at Stretton. The
“initiation of the colts” is a humorous contribution levied upon those
who have never before been present.
Of the four fir-trees that once guarded the tumulus, locally supposed to
mark the spot where four knights were buried, only one now remains;
sycamore saplings have taken the places of the others.
Through Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, and past pretty Willenhall, with the
Warwickshire Avon crossing under the road and seven tall poplars
fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley Common, once a lonely
spot, horrific by reason of being Coventry’s place of execution. Old
maps give the picture of a structure like a football goal at this point,
ominously permanent, and labelled “Gallows.” It was not until shortly
after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was hanged here for poisoning her
uncle, that “Whitley Common” lost its old notoriety. Even so, the
present directions to the stranger enquiring the way into Coventry are
scarcely cheerful, the cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond that
evidence of the populous nature of Coventry, commence the outskirts of
that city; the road still with a kind of a furtive back door approach,
with many twists and turns and narrow passes through picturesque slums
as far as the very centre of the place. The entrance from London, in
fact, remains the most difficult and crooked of any town all the way to
Holyhead, and this although it stands as an improvement upon what had
been before 1827, when Telford cut a new length of road here. The only
good entrance to Coventry is from the railway station and along Hertford
Street, an improvement made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane; a
steep, narrow, and cobble-stoned way that was once the only road in that
direction.
Coventry’s lanes possessing every possible disability and inconvenience
from the coachman’s point of view, it was, when the question of
reforming the Holyhead Road was being debated, seriously proposed that a
new route should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether. The
proposition failed, and resulted in a compromise that did little real
good, even though it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of that period
remarks: “Individual interest was allowed to have its weight, and the
traveller is still jolted through the long and narrow streets, uttering
imprecations at every yard of his progress.” It is a thrilling picture
thus presented to the imagination, the traveller cursing as he goes, and
recalls Swift’s proposition for a Swearers’ Bank, enriched by funded
damns. If he could have estimated a good income from the number of good,
hearty oaths uttered in one day at a little Connaught fair, riches
surely beyond the dreams of avarice would have accrued to a branch of
the Bank at Coventry.
These “private interests” were, of course. those of the innkeepers and
the tradesmen, and they secured the continuance of the old route into
the city, while permitting the not so urgent alteration of the exit
toward Birmingham, where no trade would be disturbed by making what is
now the so-called “Holyhead Road,” and deserting the “Old Allesley
Road.”
The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street, and High Street, brings one
to the centre of Coventry at the intersection of that last-named
thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate, and Smithford Street, and
directly opposite the “King’s Head,” once a famous old coaching inn, but
rebuilt these later years. The great Duke of Wellington breakfasted in
the old house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from a shooting party
at Beaudesert, the Staffordshire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with
whom he had been at shooting parties of a very different character, in
the Peninsula and at Waterloo.
XLI
One sees the city perhaps to best advantage from the Warwick road, or
from the rising ground at Stivichall, close by. There below lies
Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes the familiar name of the City
of the Three Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening sky. The view
recalls that eloquent passage where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of
the old coaching age that he had known, paints the joy of the traveller
who from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the
causeway, saw for the first time the towers of some famed city, faint in
the rays of sunset, and came to his appointed inn after “hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent.”
[Illustration: THE THREE SPIRES.]
Those three spires still advise the stranger, to whose ears by some
strange chance the fame of ancient Coventry has not come, that he is
indeed about to enter, not merely the great home of the cycle-making
industry, but a city that has for centuries been famous for its
religious houses, and was indeed a place notable in this wise before
ever the Battle of Hastings was fought, to bring England under a Norman
domination. Its very name, whence the present form has been evolved, is
held by some to have been originally “Conventre,” or Convent Town, and
it came in after years to own, not three, but seven spires. The other
four went down in the days of spoliation that came in with Harry VIII.
Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original Greyfriars monastery
around whose religious buildings secular Coventry first arose, must have
been a hard man, if legends tell truth, for his grinding taxation
aroused the pity of his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must have
been no slight hardships that could have earned the compassion of a
Saxon gentlewoman, whose times and training alike could only have made
her look upon the miseries of the lower orders as incidental to their
lot. They were chiefly churls; men and women of bondage, and mere
chattels, who had, it is true the accidental advantages of speech and a
modicum of understanding; but, for the rest, were of no account.
Tennyson has “shaped the city’s ancient legend” into verse, and reveals
the circumstances that led to his doing so, in the opening lines:—
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge.
Waiting for a railway train is so unpromising a prelude to a mediæval
legend that at the first blush a processional “train” is understood, and
certainly a practical man would wait on the platform, rather than the
bridge, for the train to London or Birmingham. But Tennyson actually
_did_ allude to the railway, and if he shaped the legend while he
waited, the train must have been very late, for the poem is a long one.
These unpromising circumstances perhaps account for its unequal merit,
and for the figure of fun that Leofric, “the grim Earl,” is
unintentionally made to represent, with “his beard a foot before him and
his hair a yard behind.” It is a tripping music-hall line, and the words
those of a comic song. Not even a Duke—nay, nor a King—in these days of
vulgar boys and popular songs, could dare defy the current prejudice in
favour of a close crop, and so the Tennysonian Leofric suffers
accordingly.
Leofric, so says the ancient legend, consented to remove the tax if his
Countess would ride unclothed through the streets of Coventry. This, as
he thought it a thing impossible for her to do, was his grimly humorous
way of refusing to satisfy her compassionate pleadings. But she took him
at his word, and thus, “clothed on with chastity,” rode the length of
the town, her hair, we are told, in competition with Leofric’s own
yard-length, falling about her in golden masses, shielding her person
from the shameless sun.
Coventry that day was a city of the dead. None stirred, or might stir,
out of doors while the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrimage,
and all faces were turned from curtained and shuttered windows. All,
that is to say, save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has been handed
down to us as “Peeping Tom,” looked out from a hole he had bored in a
shutter, and we are asked to believe that he was blinded by the wrath of
Heaven for his presumption. “The story of Peeping Tom is well known,”
says Wigstead, writing in 1797; adding, “This effigy is now to be seen
next door to the ‘King’s Head’ inn, said to be the very house from
whence he attempted to gratify his curiosity.” Peeping Tom, in fact, is
a personage whom Coventry will not willingly resign to oblivion.
Representations of that “low churl, compact of thankless earth,” have
been numerous in the city. Not so long since there were three, all
spying from their several positions down upon the streets, and certainly
the one Wigstead mentions is still in evidence, not now “next door” to
the “King’s Head,” but built into a blank window of that rebuilt
hostelry. If tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must have been
gorgeous persons. But the effigy, looking like that of an Admiral from
some comic opera, is not older than a century and a half, and is perhaps
a portion of a figure carried in the Godiva processions that at
intervals have paraded Coventry’s streets for many years past. They do
so now, but whether the obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the
music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend themselves as realising
the old legend, is a matter of individual taste.
[Illustration: PEEPING TOM.]
To tell Coventry’s long story is not the purport of these pages. Much of
it is inseparable from the history of England. History in that more
spacious sort was making when, in the reign of Richard II., the Dukes of
Hereford and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford Green, in 1398.
Richard banished both: Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years; but
Hereford was back within a year and proclaimed King, and Richard deposed
and murdered in the dungeons of Pontefract.
A hundred years later, Coventry’s beautiful hospitals and the noble St.
Mary’s Hall, the home of the great trading guilds, began to rise. They
remain, in greater or less preservation, until the present time; and
perhaps there is nothing in the kingdom to surpass the exquisite beauty
of Ford’s Hospital—an almshouse built in 1529, whose tiny courtyard of
traceried woodwork should for its delicacy be under the protection of a
glass case. Six years after Ford’s beautiful almshouse was built, the
dissolution of the monasteries took place throughout the land; and
Coventry, fostered by the great religious houses of the Whitefriars and
the Greyfriars in its midst, shared in the ruin that befel them. Its
population fell from 15,000 to 3,000 in a few years. Yet it was in this
melancholy period that the great “Coventry Cross” arose. It was,
however, not a building erected by the city, but the gift of one of its
sons, who could find no other way of employing his superfluous wealth.
It rose in all the majesty of carved pinnacles, tabernacled statuary,
and gilded bannerets, in the market-place of Cross Cheaping: a sight to
dazzle the eyes of all who beheld it. The Cross was repaired and
re-gilded in 1669; but from that time, although the city was prosperous
again, it fell into decay and was removed in 1771.
[Illustration: FORD’S HOSPITAL.]
Coventry is a city by ancient right of the time when there were Bishops
of Coventry and Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards reversed,
and the scanty ruins of Coventry’s Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell
of that ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of Coventry are
gone. They kept out many unwelcome visitors in their existence of three
hundred years, and behind them the citizens withstood the Royalists of
1642 with such effect that the memory of it rankled twenty years later,
when the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again, and Charles II.
ordered the fortifications to be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that
the expression of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person owes
its origin. Every one knows that this means the social ostracism—the
“cutting”—of those thus punished; but its original meaning is not so
commonly understood. It derives from Birmingham, where the townspeople
took up a hostile attitude towards the Royalists, overwhelming scattered
parties and sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very excellent reason
for not keeping them at Birmingham was that, the town had no defences
and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city and had both.
“True as Coventry blue” would, in view of this old attitude, seem a
saying ill-applied to a place of Puritan politics; but it referred to a
dye then used here. When Ogilby came to Coventry in the compilation of
his great road-book, he noted its position “on the little river
Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue Dye.” Even then, it will
be seen, the city was beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred
years before.
XLII
Romance did not leave Coventry with the passing of mediæval days. It
merely changed its aspect; doffed the “armour bright” the romancists
love to tell of, and went clad instead in russet; put away helm and pike
and broadsword, and sat the livelong day at the loom; changed indeed the
Romance of Warfare for that of Industry, so that it was possible for old
travellers to remark “the noise of the looms assails the passengers’
ears in every direction.” Coming in later years upon its discarded old
warlike panoply of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the form of
bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.
Tennyson, in _Godiva_, writing—
We, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past,
seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early period at which that poem
was produced forbids any such allusion. We must needs, therefore, look
upon those lines as prophetic, especially since, regarded in any other
way, the phrase “the flying of a wheel” appears meaningless. But, even
in the light of a prophetic inspiration, is not the cut at the “new men”
who “cry down the past” an ill description of the typical cyclist, who
uses his flying wheel as a means of communing with Nature and antiquity?
Coventry became earnestly industrial when jousts ceased; and its
industries, in their rise and fall, have had their own romance. There
were, of course, Coventry makers of woollens; pinners and needlers;
girdlers, loriners, and many other tradespeople in the days of chivalry;
but it was only in modern times that the industries of silk-weaving and
dyeing, ribbon-making and watch-making arose, to give a fugitive
prosperity to the place before the cycle industry came to confer upon it
a greater boon. Those trades have gone elsewhere; but ask even the most
ignorant for what Coventry is famous nowadays, and you get for answer
“cycle manufacturing.” Yet before 1869 that industry was unborn, and the
trade of Coventry at the lowest ebb. Silk-weaving and ribbon-making had
then been dealt a deadly blow by the removal of the duty from foreign
goods of that nature, and French ribbons and silks of new designs, and
at low prices, poured in. Coventry weavers and dyers were ruined. At the
same time, cheap Swiss watches had cut out the local watch-making trade,
so that work grew scarce and starvation presently began to stalk the
streets. That was a dark hour in Coventry’s modern chapter of romance,
an hour brightened by the efforts of one man in particular—James
Marriott—to establish a new industry. Those were the first days of a new
invention—the sewing machine—and Marriott thought he saw means of
setting afoot a great manufacture of that labour-saving device. He
contributed £500 to the formation of a business, and was joined by
others, and together they established the Coventry Sewing Machine
Company, an enterprise that failed to realise the hopes centred in it.
But in that failure, unknown to those gallant pioneers, lay the seed of
success. Their plant was lying idle, and might have been dispersed but
for a happy providence: the appearance in France of the velocipede.
The velocipede was by no means the first attempt of the kind to aid
locomotion on highways. Indeed, in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ there may
be found a reference, under date of 1769, to a “new-invented machine”
that went without horses. A man sat in it and turned a handle, which
worked a spring, which drove the machine forward. The criticism Johnson
levelled against this device was one that will probably appeal
powerfully to all cyclists who have stored up in their memories horrid
experiences of hill-climbing and head-winds. “What is gained,” said the
learned Doctor, “is the man has the choice whether he will move himself
alone, or himself and the machine too.” Nothing came of that invention,
and it was not until 1810 that the “Hobby Horse,” as it afterwards
became known, was devised in Paris by a M. Niepce. He named it a
“Celeripede.” This machine, improved by a Baron von Drais, of Mannheim,
does not appear to have found its way to England until the autumn of
1818, when a coach-maker of Long Acre, one Dennis Johnson by name,
introduced it as a “Pedestrian Curricle.” From 1819 to 1830 this
machine—the popularly-named “Hobby Horse”—enjoyed a certain favour,
although on country roads it could but seldom have been seen, for no one
could ride it twenty miles and remain in an able-bodied condition. Its
mere weight was appalling, constructed as it was of two heavy wooden
wheels shod with iron, and held together by a stout bar of timber. For
saddle, the rider had a cushion, and leant his chest against another
cushion, supported by ironwork. Bestriding this fearsome contrivance,
the adventurous rider’s feet easily reached the ground. As the Hobby
Horse had no cranks or pedals, the method of propulsion was that of
running in this straddling position until a sufficient impetus had been
gained, when the lumbering machine would carry its owner a short
distance on the flat. It was, of course, impossible to ride up even the
slightest rise; but, considering the momentum likely to be accumulated
by a mass of iron and wood, scaling considerably over a hundredweight,
the pace down hill must have been furious enough.
By 1830 the Hobby Horse had disappeared, and it was not until 1839–40
that the first machine with cranks was invented by a Scots blacksmith,
Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who produced a rear-driving dwarf bicycle that
foreshadowed the type now popular. Several machines of this kind were
made and sold by Macmillan, but they did not attain a lasting vogue; and
it was not until a French mechanic—one Pierre Lallemont—in 1865 or 1866
designed the front-driving velocipede in the workshops of Michaux & Cie,
of Paris, that the second era of cycling began. It was this machine that
Michaux exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was seen either
then or the following year in Paris by Mr. R. B. Turner, agent in that
city for the Coventry Sewing Machine Company. He, together with Charles
Spencer and John Mayall, junior, became a pioneer of cycling in this
country. In the pages of the BRIGHTON ROAD, details of their first
long-distance ride, February 17th, 1869, may be found.
But Turner not only became an enthusiastic cyclist: he drew the
attention of his firm to what at once proved „to be a profitable
manufacture, supplementing, and eventually taking the place of, the
declining sewing-machine business. The style of the firm was altered to
the “Coventry Machinists Company,” and “bone-shakers,” as Velocipedes
were speedily nicknamed, began to be turned out in considerable numbers.
The “boneshaker” was well named. It had a solid iron frame, and wooden
wheels with iron tyres, and was only a degree less weighty than the
Hobby Horse itself, of ponderous memory. Its front wheel was the larger,
and was the driving-wheel, fitted with “treadles,” as pedals were then
named. The machine turned the scale at 93 lb.
Thus, in 1869, the pastime of cycling and the industry of cycle
manufacture found a beginning on these shores. In that year the actual
word “bicycle” was first introduced, to eventually render “Velocipede”
obsolete. When the first syllable of “bicycle” and “bicycling” was
dropped is a more difficult matter to determine. The present use grew
gradually, as one by one the different bicycling and tricycling clubs
sloughed off those cumbrous prefatory distinctions, as unnecessary and
unwieldy; but certainly the modern use was known by 1879, when the
_’Cyclist_ was established, with the half-apologetic ’ that may even yet
be seen on its engraved title-page. Two years earlier, when the
_Bicycling News_ was founded, the elision of the distinguishing syllable
was evidently not foreseen.
In the years following the introduction of the “boneshaker,” this new
industry prospered and increased in an eminently solid way. Bone-shaking
was not a pastime for the many, and it was not until the old “ordinary,”
as it is still called, was introduced that the youth of that period went
bicycling in any great numbers. The “ordinary,” or high bicycle, long
since become extraordinary by supersession in favour of the dwarf
“safety,” was gradually evolved through the middle Seventies to 1880. It
was probably an early example of this build that so terribly frightened
the rustic in _Punch_, who, going home in the dark, was scared by an
“awful summat” he declared to be “a man a-ridin’ on nawthin’.”
It was a graceful, albeit exceedingly dangerous type, and from its
height of fifty-eight inches a rider surveyed the world as he went at a
lordly altitude. The reverse of that commanding eminence was found when
he was thrown: a happening that recurred with remarkable frequency and a
nerve-shaking unexpectedness. Little in the shape of ruts or stones was
required to upset the “ordinary,” and few long rides were ever made
without a “spill.” To be shot off suddenly in mid-air was in fact so to
be looked for, that riders studied how to fall, and practised the art so
well that, although involuntary flights were many, serious injuries were
few. The height of this art or science was to fall clear of the
machine—an object attained, down hill, by riding with the legs over the
handlebars, when, in the event of an accident, one fell a greater or
shorter distance, according to the speed or the force of the shock.
[Illustration: THE “OLD ORDINARY.”]
The “ordinary” was at its height, in measurement and popularity, in
1880, a year that also marked the palmiest period of cycling clubs. The
cyclist of that era made a brave show. Arrayed in a tight-fitting
uniform, that in its frogged patrol-jacket and gauntlet gloves aped
military costume, and in its tight breeches made the sudden strain of a
fall the utter dissolution of those garments, his was a wonderful figure
as he wended his uncertain way, gazing from his point of vantage over
the countryside.
But as his first youth waned, and his agility with it, rendering the
exercise of vaulting into the saddle increasingly more of an enterprise,
the cyclist yearned for a less giddy height than that of the “ordinary,”
and his growing infirmities, more than any other consideration,
eventually brought about the modern geared-up, rear-driving, dwarf
bicycle the “safety”; but Time, the cynic, that has robbed the term
“ordinary” of its meaning, has brought about many more fatal cycling
accidents in these “safety” days than occurred in the era of the high
bicycle.
XLIII
It was the late J. K. Starley’s “Rover” of 1885 that opened the way for
cycling’s modern development. It was a design rightly claimed to have
“set the fashion to the world,” and the difference between it and
patterns of the current season is only in detail. Already, before
Starley, attempts had been made to produce a “safety,” as shown by
Lawson’s patent of 1876 and his “bicyclette” of 1880, together with the
designs by Shergold and Bate in 1876 and later, in which 26- to 30-inch
wheels, provided with gear, were to do the work of the 56- and 58-inch
ungeared wheel. But none of these designs attained any commercial
success.
The “Rover” brought many thousands more into the ranks of cyclists, and
gave an added prosperity to Coventry, but what has been called the
“great boom” was yet to come. A contributory cause of that event,
although antedating it by some six years, was the introduction of the
pneumatic tyre. So long ago as 1815 a pneumatic rubber tyre for
carriages had been invented by Thompson, and forgotten, and it was not
until 1888 that Mr. J. R. Dunlop designed the first pattern of the tyre
bearing his name. Like many another epoch-making invention, its
importance was originally not so much as guessed at, and it was only as
a home-made device for securing the easy running of his children’s
cycles that it first came into being. It began to be manufactured in
1889, and certainly since 1891 pneumatic tyres for cycles have been
universal. They practically first rendered it possible for ladies to
adopt the pastime, and first made cycling luxurious, rather than
necessarily an athletic exercise. The result was the “boom” that began
in the early summer of 1895.
Suddenly, from being looked down upon by all who pretended to any
culture or social consideration, cycling became fashionable. Cyclists,
who had cycled ever since the days when Edmund Yates in the _World_,
speaking for Society, had bitterly called them “cads on castors,” smiled
sardonically when they saw all Mayfair and St. James’s cycling in Hyde
or Battersea Parks, and submitted to be knocked down by wobbling
novices—Earls and Countesses—upon the road with an ill grace. It is a
mad world, and time brings strange revenges in it.
No one, least of all the cycle manufacturers of Coventry, had any
prevision of the great “boom.” In former years business had eased off
with the coming of summer. “Previously to 1895,” said a representative
of the trade, “business was sound, and all the best houses did well, but
were more or less subject to a very dull period, lasting from the
beginning of August until the end of November. This period began slowly,
and, reaching its dullest point about the end of October, caused much
distress among the more improvident workers. There was no slack time in
1895, _and you know what ’96 was_.”
Toil how they might through the twenty-four hours, the factories of
Coventry could not keep pace with the demand. Orders came in quicker
than cycles were despatched, and every little metal-working firm went
into cycle-making, while thousands upon thousands of mechanics flocked
into the “city of the boom.” Any one could find work and good wages in
Coventry, but the rush was so great that many could find no lodgings,
and payment was frequently offered for shelter in the local workhouse,
offers that, of course, could not be entertained. In some cases cycle
manufacturers provided their new hands with temporary accommodation in
their works. The population, numbering in 1891 58,503, rose at once by
10,000. To meet this influx, building operations were feverishly begun,
and street upon street of entirely new suburbs began to rise.
And for a time the “boom” continued. Newer and immensely large factories
were built on the strength of it, and during 1897 the output of cycles
rose to an extraordinary height.
It was the Company Promoter who killed all this prosperity. Unscrupulous
men, versed in all the dark ways of the financial world, found their
opportunity in those palmy days, and, purchasing and amalgamating,
converted prosperous private firms into unwieldy and over-capitalised
public companies. In the thick of all this juggling with millions, and
snatching of commissions and vendors’ profits, the bubble burst, and an
honourable and highly prosperous industry was wrecked, and became a
bye-word and a reproach all the world over. The events of 1898 make a
painful retrospect. Noblemen who bore ancient and honourable titles were
publicly accused as common touts and commission agents engaged in
hoodwinking the public, and even ready, when opportunity offered, to
cheat one another. The scandal struck the heaviest blow to the House of
Lords and hereditary legislation that that House and that principle of
government have ever suffered.
The professional Company Promoter we have had with us ever since Limited
Liability brought him into being, and bitter experience during a
generation and a half has enabled the public to at last gain a just view
of him and his methods; but the public, at that time, still looked upon
a nobleman as, almost of necessity, a man of honour. The revelations
that followed this sudden crash dispelled that fond belief, and poisoned
confidence at its very spring-head. The Society “boom” had already
ended, and the bursting of the financial bubble left the once
flourishing industry disorganised. Ever since that unhappy year of 1898
Coventry has witnessed a melancholy succession of failures, and has seen
factory after factory closed. Only recently has cycle manufacturing
begun to recover from that staggering blow. Yet, apart from such
considerations as the waxing and waning fortunes of financiers, or of
manufacturers and their hirelings among professional racing cyclists,
cycling as a pastime has been steadily progressive. Where one person
rode a “boneshaker,” twenty bestrode the high bicycle; and, nowadays,
for every twenty who perched on the perilous eminence of the old
“ordinary,” two hundred are found upon the modern cycle. The industry is
thus endowed with elasticity and strong recuperative powers, so that in
this saner period Coventry is doing a great deal more than merely
holding its own, even though many other towns have secured a share in
the business of cycle production.
Here, then, for the present, ends Coventry’s romance. There be those who
look forward to a new and stirring chapter of it, in a wished-for
manufacture of motor-cars; but the future lies on the knees of the gods,
to order as they will.
XLIV
Coaching history at Coventry begins in 1658, with the establishment of a
stage-coach between London, Lichfield, and Chester. This pioneer,
starting from the “George” Inn, Holborn Bridge, reached Coventry in
three days, or professed to do so. Suspicions that this was only a
profession, not often put into practice, are aroused by the title of a
new coach, put on the road in 1739. This was the “London, Birmingham,
and Lichfield Flying Coach,” that took just the same time to reach
Coventry, and yet arrogated the term “flying” to itself, as a superior
recommendation above all earlier conveyances. The fare between London
and Coventry was 25_s._ In 1773 a wonderful thing happened, for in that
year the “Coventry Flying Machine” winged its way in one day. Later
coaches belong to the road in general, and Coventry was but an incident
on the way; but there were many short distances covered by local
coaches, such as the “Peeping Tom” and the “Manchester Hero,” between
this and Manchester, and numerous others to Birmingham, Lichfield,
Warwick, Leamington, Cheltenham, and Stratford-on-Avon. A “Little
Wonder” Coventry and Birmingham stage ran in the last years of coaching.
Tom Pinner, its driver, was an expert with the whip, and could snatch
the pipe out of a wayfarer’s mouth with it, and not touch him, as he
drove along. One quite expects, in reading Tom Pinner’s career, to light
upon the record of one of the victims of these little pleasantries
waiting for their author and pounding him into a jelly; but no one ever
seems to have had sufficient spirit.
Besides the “King’s Arms,” there were the “Queen’s Head,” the “Bull,”
and the “White Bear” prominent among Coventry inns. The “Bull” stood
where the Barracks are now situated, in Smithford Street. The “White
Bear,” in High Street, changed its sign in 1811 to the “Craven Arms”; a
name it still retains. The change was made out of compliment to the
third Earl of Craven, who had then returned to live at Combe Abbey, a
family seat near Coventry that had long been closed. His residence there
brought much custom to the city and to the house.
The old inn remains just as it was in coaching days. There are the long
yard, with stables of Elizabethan date, and the solid red-brick portions
of the house, rebuilt in the time when George III. was King, facing the
narrow passage. Fronting on the street, the building is of old
white-painted plaster. It was in front of the “Craven Arms” that the
fatal accident, already recounted, to Tom Peck, the guard of the
“Eclipse” coach, happened. Opposite was one of the many coach offices;
the scene, perhaps, of that story of the little girl being booked
overnight at half-price, as the custom was. Her elder sister took the
seat in the morning, when the book-keeper remarked to her mother, “Your
little girl has grown in the night.”
One of the last relics of old times went, unhonoured, in 1872, when the
turnpike-gates on either side of Coventry were abolished; and a
long-enduring link was broken when Thomas Clarke died, in Coventry
Hospital, April, 1899. Clarke was, according to the newspapers
chronicling the event, the “oldest postboy in England.” Not a few, also,
proclaimed him to be “the last”; but last postboys have been dying in
considerable numbers since then, and modest paragraphs in the daily
papers still appear, now and again, recording the passing of another.
The Last Postboy, indeed, is not yet, and those paragraphs are not
uncommonly followed by letters from survivors, who are always found to
write and claim the honour for themselves. They are as inexhaustible as
the widow’s cruise of oil, pieces of the True Cross, or relics of the
saints in Roman Catholic churches. When the traveller of experience has
seen the skull of St. Jerome in one place, he is not surprised „to be
shown another somewhere else, for he has already seen five thigh bones
of some other saint at different shrines, and knows that, if he
perseveres, he will probably find some more. Just in the same way, there
is always another postboy when the last has died. They were—or are, we
must perhaps say—a long-lived race, all bone and gristle; without a
spare ounce of flesh for disease to fasten upon, and, inured for long
years to hard work in all weathers, little affected in old age by the
chills and bitter winds that carry off the less hardy among elderly
folks. The coachman was of another kind. He sat on his box all the time,
and grew fat in fingering the ribbons; while the postboy bumped his
flesh away on horseback. Did any one ever see a fat postboy? And was it
not the exception for a coachman to be lean? His fatness long since
carried off the last coachman of the old days, but the
Three jolly postboys, drinking at the Dragon,
who, in the words of the old chorus, “determined to finish off the
flagon,” are probably still living, in a hale and lean old age, although
coaches, and chaises, and all the old life of the road have gone, and
the “Dragon” itself no longer looks down the dusty highway.
[Illustration: THE OLD “KING’S HEAD,” COVENTRY. _From a Print
after Rowlandson._]
Sixty years before, Clarke had seen the railway come to Coventry, and
bring many changes in its wake, among them the rebuilding of the
comfortable old inns. He was old enough to have driven Mr. Pickwick, or
Mr. Pickwick’s originator, on that remarkably wet journey from
Birmingham to Towcester. It was probably at the old “King’s Head” that
the post-chaise team was changed that night. When they stopped, the
steam ascended from the horses in such clouds as wholly to obscure the
ostler, whose voice was, however, heard to declare from the mist that he
expected the first Gold Medal from the Humane Society, on their next
distribution of awards, for taking the postboy’s hat off; the water
descending from the brim of which, the invisible gentleman declared,
must inevitably have drowned him (the postboy) but for his great
presence of mind in tearing it promptly from his head, and drying the
gasping man’s countenance with a wisp of straw.
Here it was that Sam Weller, “lowering his voice to a mysterious
whisper,” asked Bob Sawyer if he had ever “know’d a churchyard where
there was a postboy’s tombstone,” or “had ever seen a dead postboy.”
“No!” rejoined Bob, “I never did.”
“No!” rejoined Sam, triumphantly, “nor never will; and there’s another
thing that no man never see, and that’s a dead donkey. No man never see
a dead donkey”; adding that, “without goin’ so far as to as-sert, as
some wery sensible people do, that postboys and donkeys is both
immortal, wot I say is this; that wenever they feels theirselves gettin’
stiff and past their work, they just rides off together, wun postboy to
a pair in the usual way; wot becomes on ’em nobody knows, but its werry
probable as they starts away to take their pleasure in some other vorld,
for there ain’t a man alive as ever see either a donkey or a postboy
a-taking his pleasure in this!”
The “King’s Head,” as already hinted, has been rebuilt in the stained
glass and glitter style, and is quite uninteresting, save for the effigy
of “Peeping Tom,” moved from the frontage of a neighbouring old house,
peering curiously from an upper storey.
XLV
Crossing the intersection of Hertford Street and Broad Gate at this
point, the Holyhead Road leads out of Coventry by way of Smithford
Street and Fleet Street. Before the revolutionary time of Telford, it
continued through Spon End and Spon Gate and reached Allesley along the
winding route now known as the “Old Allesley Road,” passing two
toll-gates on the way. The “new” road branches off to the right
immediately after passing St. John’s church and, passing a long
factory-like row of old weavers’ houses, and climbing uphill at first,
goes afterwards flat and straight to Allesley, in two miles. “Windmill
Hill,” as it was called, was not a very exalted height, but from it in
the old days a quite panoramic view of Coventry was obtainable. It is
the view, now blotted out by intervening houses, seen in Turner’s noble
picture of the city. In it you see the hollow road, with St. John’s
tower at the bottom, and coaches toiling up, on the way to Birmingham;
in the distance the neighbouring spires of Trinity and St. Michael’s,
with Christ Church aloof, on the right. Turner took his stand on the
hill-crest, where Meriden Street branches off to the right; but where
the grassy banks then sloped steeply to the road, and the sheep roamed
free, suburban villas now cover the hillside, the retaining walls of
their gardens masking the rugged old earth-banks.
[Illustration: COVENTRY, FROM WINDMILL HILL. _After J. M. W.
Turner, R.A._]
A red-brick toll-gate marks the junction of old and new roads at the
entrance of Allesley, a pretty roadside village on a hillside. There
were at one time two very large and busy coaching inns here, the
“Windmill” and the “White Lion,” and here they stand even now; not as
inns, it is true, but structurally unaltered. Very handsome red-brick
buildings they are, belonging to the Georgian and Queen Anne periods:
the “White Lion,” once famed for its cheesecakes and home-brewed ale,
prominent as the largest building in the village street, and now divided
into two houses; the “Windmill” half a mile away, standing back in a
meadow and used as a farmhouse.
Meriden, the next item upon the way, is heralded by a steeply descending
hill; the village below, the church solitary upon the hill-top. Meriden
church is quite a little museum of antiquities, and a well-kept one,
with everything carefully labelled for the information of the chance
visitor—and the door unlocked. Here one finds the effigies of two worthy
Warwickshire knights of the fifteenth century, a chained Prayer Book,
and the processional staves of a bygone village club, together with a
curious old oak alms-chest, dated 1627 and inscribed:
This chest is God’s exchequer, paye in then
Your almes accepted both of God and men.
“Mireden,” as it was invariably called by old-time travellers, is
situated on an “uncommonly deep” bed of clay in the hole at the foot of
this hill. Pennant, the antiquary, is responsible for the statement that
the village was named Alspath until the time of Henry VI., “about which
time, becoming a great thoroughfare, it got the name of Myreden—‘den’
signifying a bottom, and ‘myre’ dirt; and I can well vouch for the
propriety of the appellation before the institution of turnpikes.”
In his time, between 1739 and 1782, the road at Meriden had been so far
improved that travellers no longer stuck in the clay. It had become a
turnpike, and, on the testimony of Pennant, “excellent.” But the crest
of the hill had still to be climbed, and the depth of the valley to be
descended into, before the advent of Telford, some forty years later,
when the cutting on the hill-top and the embankment in the hollow were
made. The old road—a steep and narrow track—is seen down below, on the
right hand, in descending Meriden Hill, and beside it the old “Queen’s
Head,” with frontage rebuilt in recent years. Meriden village lies in
the succeeding level, with rural cottages on one side of the road, and
the ponds and lilied watercourses of Meriden Park on the other; a
village green beyond. The houses are still, as in Pennant’s day
“pretty”; but in the course of a hundred and twenty years the
“magnificent inn, famed from time immemorial for its excellent malt
liquor,” has retired into private occupation, and the “various
embellishments made by the old innkeeper, Reynolds—little ponds,
statues, and other whims,” that used to enliven the spot, have been
swept away by Time, like old Reynolds himself.
[Illustration: THE OLD “BULL’S HEAD,” MERIDEN.]
There were in coaching days no fewer than eight inns and posting-houses
of different degrees in Meriden. There are now but two inns: the “Bull’s
Head,” formerly a farmhouse, and the “Queen’s Head,” already mentioned.
Among the vanished signs are the “Nag’s Head,” “Malt Shovel,” “Crown,”
and “Swan” (now a butcher’s shop). The magnificent inn spoken of by
Pennant was the old “Bull’s Head”; whence the licence was transferred to
the smaller house, now so named, at the time when coaching ceased to be.
The old house is seen on the right hand, a very large, white-plastered
building of good architectural character, now secluded from the road by
a wall and iron palisade, standing where the drive up to the inn was
formerly placed. One of the entrances to and exits from the house in
coaching and posting times was by the first-floor window, above where
the portico, a later addition, is seen. The “Bull’s Head” was an
exclusive and aristocratic house, and preferred the top-sawyers, who
posted in their own “chariots,” to those who travelled in hired chaises;
while for the mere passengers by mail or stage-coach it had, at the
best, but a contemptuous tolerance. And, indeed, it must have been a
lordly place, and, with its surrounding gardens, stables, and
picturesque turreted clock-tower, more like a private mansion than a
place of public resort. There is still in the turret a dilapidated set
of chimes that can, with care and patience, be induced to hammer out a
few scattered notes of a tune alleged to be that of “God Save the King,”
or Queen, as the case may be.
XLVI
Meriden is one of the many reputed “centres of England.” Measure a
straight line from the North Foreland to Holyhead, and another from the
Lizard to the mouth of the Humber, and their intersection will be at
Meriden. With an irregularly shaped country like England, this is a
somewhat empirical method, and the other reputed centres are evidently
obtained by measuring from various places dictated by individual taste
and fancy.
The very hub of the country is held to be the ancient cross standing
upon the village green—shattered now, and bound together by iron bands.
A modern legend that it was originally placed here to mark the centre
has grown up, and by consequence it is sketched and photographed times
without number throughout the year.
The “Forest of Arden Archers,” or the “Woodmen of Arden,” as they
sometimes style themselves, an ancient guild revived in 1785, and
holding meetings at Forest Hall, near by, remind the forgetful traveller
that, like Touchstone, he is in Arden, or, at any rate, on the outskirts
of it, in passing through Meriden. Henley-in-Arden lies to the left,
served by a station, bald of any poetic or romantic suggestion in the
title of “Henley Junction.”
[Illustration: MERIDEN CROSS.]
There remained, not so many years ago, an old inn called the “Up and
Down Post,” on the road between Meriden and Stonebridge. Its
picture-sign, showing two posts, one standing, the other fallen, quite
misrepresented the true meaning of the name, which referred to the old
system of posting along the roads. Probably the original sign was a
picture showing the up and the down postboys meeting.
The road now grows to a noble width; a quiet road too, at any time but
Saturdays and Sundays, when Birmingham and Coventry’s all sorts of the
cycling kind are let loose upon their eighteen miles between the two
cities, and motor cars from afar, whiten the hedgerows with dust. The
old “Stonebridge” inn, at the crossing of the Lichfield and Leamington
roads, has been gorgeously rebuilt, chiefly to meet the requirements of
these, and is now the “Stonebridge Hotel.” The “stone bridge” itself
carries the road across a little stream called the Tame. Another inn,
the “Malt Shovel,” stands with its old stables in refreshing contrast
with that ornate modern hostelry.
A very little exertion will suffice to put the quiet man out of sight
and hearing of the crowd. He has only to turn up the lane by the “Clock”
inn and make for Bickenhill spire, less than a quarter of a mile away,
and he will have the surroundings entirely to himself.
Bickenhill church is very beautiful, but perhaps the most memorable
thing connected with it is the notice exposed in the porch:—
It having been decided by the Court of Queen’s Bench, and by the
Court of Appeal, that artificial wreaths and glass cases placed upon
graves without sanction is an illegal act; notice is hereby given
that such must not be placed upon graves without first obtaining
permission, and such will be regarded as Memorial Tablets, and the
customary fees will be charged.
The vicar’s grammar would not have found favour with Lindley Murray; but
speculations as to how an artificial wreath or a glass case can be made
an act, illegal or otherwise, do not form the real interest of this
notice. _That_ is discovered in the spectacle of two judicial tribunals
assuming the rôle of arbiters of taste, and elevating the placing of
jampots, enamelled tin wreaths, and the like abominations on graves to
illegality. No one can, without mingled feelings of disgust and pity,
see the marmalade jars that have held water for flowers, or any
artificial things displayed in places with such sacred and melancholy
associations, but this would seem to be a question of taste, or the want
of it, alone. It would not be a much greater stride for courts of law to
determine in what kind of clothes parishioners should attend service.
And—another matter. Without defending artificial flowers, are the
decayed natural blossoms, shrivelled with heat, and soddened into an
obscene and hideous pulp by rains, a pleasing sight? Is it not possible,
after all, that the sense of permanency in a glass case or a glass
chaplet is a soothing feeling to many a poor mourner who lacks
“culture,” but whose instincts revolt from the rotting lilies and
stephanotis of the bereaved rich?
[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL MAIL, 1836. _From a Print after J.
Pollard._]
Returning to Stonebridge, the road to Coleshill, and to Castle Bromwich
and Lichfield will be seen branching off from the Holyhead Road. Here,
until the middle of the eighteenth century, the traffic for Shrewsbury
and Chester commonly turned off. After that date, not only were the
roads through Birmingham and Wolverhampton improved, but the places
themselves grew into greater importance, and the old Chester Road, by
consequence, decayed. By 1802 all the Chester coaches had deserted it,
but the Liverpool Mail came this way until the last. Up to 1761 this was
not the way to Coleshill at all. Until that year the road branched off
at a point half a mile from Meriden, and lay through Packington Park. It
was a straight and flat road, and convenient for Coleshill, but
offensive to Sir Clement Fisher, who then was the squire at Packington
Hall. It passed within sight of his windows, and he relaxed no effort
until an Act of Parliament was passed, stopping it up, and making the
present hilly and circuitous road in its stead. The preamble of the Act,
stating that the old road was inconvenient and dangerous, is one of the
most audacious falsehoods ever publicly stated. The old road can still
be traced in the Park, and standing beside it is an old tombstone,
recording the fate of a London tailor struck by lightning when
travelling this way.
XLVII
But enough of Packington. Let us on to Birmingham, now but nine miles
distant, by Elmdon, Wells Green, and Yardley.
Elmdon, were it not for that pretty roadside timber-framed inn, the
‘Cock,’ would be but a name and nothing else, so far as the road could
show. Passing it, bid a long farewell, O traveller along the Holyhead
Road, to the country, for in less than another two miles Wells Green is
reached and Birmingham within hail. Thereafter, in nothing less than
eighteen miles shall you see the hedgerows, the fields, and the quiet
road again. Birmingham and the Black Country intervene, and not until,
having gained and overpassed Wolverhampton, you ascend the heights of
Tettenhall, will the sun be seen shining in a clear sky once more.
Meanwhile, here is Wells Green, the last approach to the likeness of the
country on this side of Birmingham, and by consequence a place of great
half-holiday and Sunday resort. Midland cyclists are its chief patrons.
For them the “Old Original” tea-house caters, for their custom also the
“Ship,” the “Lighthouse,” and many more compete frantically among each
other, attracting attention by large and elaborate models of ships,
lighthouses, and other objects displayed beside the road. The two old
roadside inns—the “Wheatsheaf” and the “Crown”—have been ornately
rebuilt; the “Crown” vulgarly.
Beyond Wells Green the road enters an outlying portion of Worcestershire
and comes to Yardley, a new-built Birmingham suburb, whose shops, dotted
here and there by the wayside, alternate with barns, cow-houses and
hedges, presently to give place to suburban streets and so provide those
shops with customers. In the hollow succeeding Yardley, at Hay Mills,
where a little stream runs, not yet completely polluted and decently
buried from sight in a drain pipe, the mile’s length of Worcestershire
ends. Hay Mills now belies its idyllic name, for it is here that modern
Birmingham definitely begins, and the smoke-cloud and traffic of that
great city grow in density.
Small Heath, Bordesley, Deritend, and Digbeth, that are all comprised in
the next two and a half miles, are now but the various names
distinguishing what would otherwise be one long street, growing
gradually more grimy and crowded : a hilly street, where hideous steam
tramways, belching smoke and smuts, run noisily, like armoured trains,
and where the few old gabled cottages that are left, to tell of times
when this was a country road, are closely beset by modern houses,
already hung with soot, like the cobwebs on bottles of old port. A
dramatic change indeed from what Leland saw, when he journeyed to
Birmingham in 1538, and came “through as pretty a street as ever I
entred, into Bermingham towne. This street, as I remember, is called
Dirtey.” He meant Deritend, which, if called “Dirtey” to-day would by no
means be libelled. “Dirty End” would be an easy change from the real
name of the squalid street, and equally descriptive of it.
Wigstead in 1797 tells a tale very different from that of Leland.
Instead of a “pretty street,” he found an entrance “by no means
prepossessing the traveller in its favour—a confused mass of brick and
tile rubbish piled together.” Birmingham he thought to be an
objectionable place. “Enveloped in an almost impenetrable smoky
atmosphere,” he says, “it is by no means an agreeable object to a
picturesque eye.”
END OF VOL. 1
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., Lowloa and Aylesbury._
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
=The Brighton Road=: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway.
=The Portsmouth Road=: and its Tributaries, To-day and in Days of Old.
=The Dover Road=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an old Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. 2 Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Oxford Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road.=
[_In the Press._
=Cycle Rides Round London.=
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Moved advertisement from the second page to the end.
2. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
3. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
4. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers.
5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
6. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.
7. Superscripts are denoted by a caret before a single superscript
character or a series of superscripted characters enclosed in
curly braces, e.g. M^r. or M^{ister}.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Holyhead Road Vol 1 - The Mail-coach road to Dublin" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.